This entry is part 1 in the series Trade In Fantasy

Preliminaries:

A long time ago, I wrote “Trade In Traveler”. This week (and in the weeks to come) I’m starting a companion piece, “Trade In Fantasy”. Non-Fantasy GMs – I suggest either using the Trade in Traveler rules or updating them using this series as a guide.

Depending on how long winded I get in the 305 sections and subsections (!), this could be part 1 of 6 – or part 1 of 35.

Realistically: 12 major sections, one that should be split across 2 posts and one split across 3, but with two posts with double sections, gives a projection of 13 posts, but I’m not going to compromise the content for the sake of a deadline – I’ll just stop early and pick up where I left off. It will be as long as it is, that’s all I can promise!

And, if all goes according to plan, this will also be made available as a PDF download at the end of it all!

Refer text for credits

Series Title Image Credits:

The series title graphic (and the front cover of the eventual PDF) combines three images:

The Clipper Ship Image is by Brigitte Werner (ArtTower) from Pixabay

Dragon #1 is by Parker_West from Pixabay

Dragon #2 is by JL G from Pixabay.

First, a completely unrelated announcement

I’ve finally discovered where the setting that turns off those annoying “Subscribe now” pop-ups was hiding and turned it off.

It was indiscriminate, hitting you whether you were already a subscriber or not. And that made it annoying.

Making it doubly annoying was the promise of “access to the full archive” in each pop-up, since Campaign Mastery already gives every reader full access to our full archive.

So it’s gone. I’ve moved it to a block at the bottom of each post, instead – but if it’s still banging on about “full access to the archives”, it will be vanishing from there, as well. I’ll be watching it closely!

While I was in that vicinity, I changed the newsletter announcements to ‘excerpt’ instead of ‘full post’ but I’m not committing to this as a permanent change yet – I want to see just how long an “excerpt” is, first – and changed the email protocol from “do not reply” to “replies will be posted as public comments to the post” – at least on a trial basis. These changes are intended to stimulate and track readership, but if they prove too burdensome, they will revert without notice.

Second, another completely unrelated announcement

I’ve recently become aware that something has removed some of the images and links from some older posts on the site. I’m fixing these as I find them.

My chief suspect is the upgrade to https but it’s not the only potentially guilty party. There’s also the security / anti-spam plugin that was creating the pop-up mentioned above, and also the SEO plug-in that became so annoying that I ended up having to disable it after my maintenance requests went unacknowledged. Both of these are also capable of having had a site-wide impact..

Buy Low, Sell High: Trade In Traveler

A long time ago, I was a player in a Traveler campaign being run by my Pulp Co-GM, Blair. Long story short: it didn’t work as a campaign.

He set us up as a merchant trader but had no interest in letting us trade, because he thought it was / would be boring. Instead, he expected us to take sides in an all-or-nothing political situation degenerating towards a local war without knowing anything about the respective factions, and was quite put out when we did everything we possibly could to avoid doing so.

In the real world, we would at least have known the public faces of the different factions, and what they claimed to espouse. That would have at least permitted the taking of an initial stance, leading to us being increasingly sucked into the politics of the sector, letting us see the sausage being made behind the scenes, maybe discovering that the truth had little-to-nothing to do with the public face of our patron, big climax as the dispute comes to a head and we change sides (or a longer campaign of us subverting our patron) – it would have been a satisfactory campaign, at least.

Without that knowledge, we refused to back ourselves into a corner, and the campaign imploded after 3 or 4 sessions. The GM thought we were being unreasonable, we thought his demands were unreasonable, and that was the end of that.

Except that the claim that trade would have been “boring” nagged at me, until I wrote “Trade In Traveler” specifically to debunk the proposition. It’s since been shared in multiple locations, and downloaded thousands of times (presumably not all by the one person).

Trade In Fantasy is going to be the Big Brother to this 9-page free game supplement. So I thought I would start by once again offering it up for anyone who’s interested in having a copy. Two version are contained within the zip file – one for A4 users and one with Letter-sized pages. Just click on the link provided (the icon to the right) to download it.

Table Of Contents

The mere fact that I was able to discuss “12 major sections” and “305 section” should tell readers that I have a well-developed table of contents for this series. The question is, how and when to present it?

Option 1: Present it now, even though the post in which any given section will appear is still unknown. Effectively, this makes promises; it might encourage people to read the series, but the series might fail to live up to the hype. On top of that, I’m already making changes and inserting additional content, so it would go out-of-date very quickly.

Option 2: Present it in a final post, together with the download link for the compiled PDF. This gives me a completely free hand in terms of full coverage of the subject – I can add and subtract content to my heart’s content. But it does leave readers with no indication of the context of what they are reading. I seriously contemplated this, and was about to commit to it when Option 3 offered a compromise.

Option 3: Include, at the head of each post, a partial table of contents, describing the content of that specific post. This would actually be the last content created for that post, ensuring that it was completely up-to-date at all times, but it would no more constrain that content than option 2. Copy-and-paste would permit compilation at the end of the series for the PDF.

My choice is option 3. Why am I explaining this to you?

First, because it offers insight into the mental processes that I employ, which may be useful to someone out there, sometime.

And second, because I’m using this first post to figure out the format of the series. So, let’s go:

In Today’s Post

0. Introduction

    0.1 A Meta-perspective
    0.2 Enterprise & Competition

      0.2.1 Quality Of Goods
      0.2.2 Comparison Matrix

    0.3 Resources, Investment, & Diversification

      0.3.1 Resources = Deep Pockets
      0.3.2 Investment: Gambling for Pros
      0.3.3 Diversification

    0.4 Trade Routes
    0.5 Reversals Of Fortune
    0.6 A Gateway To Adventure

      0.6.1 Directly Trade-Related: Wheeling & Dealing
      0.6.2 Directly Trade-Related: Rivals & Enemies
      0.6.3 Directly Trade-Related: New Markets
      0.6.4 Directly Trade-Related: Demand & Marketing
      0.6.5 Directly Trade-Related: Costs & Labor
      0.6.6 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics At Home (General)
      0.6.7 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics At Home (Trade)
      0.6.8 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics Abroad
      0.6.9 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics En Route
      0.6.10 Indirectly Trade-related: Crime
      0.6.11 Tangentially Trade Related: From A to B with Handicaps

And, in future parts:

  1. Sponsors / Investors vs Entrepreneurs
  2. Trade Units
  3. Mode Of Transport
  4. Land Transport
  5. Waterborne Transport
  6. Spoilage
  7. Personnel
  8. The Journey
  9. Arrival
  10. Journey’s End
  11. Adventures En Route

0. Introduction

Trade has been part of the human experience for millennia.

It carries huge verisimilitude just by existing in the campaign world.

And, just like many people’s first jobs are working at a fast-food franchise or supermarket, or delivering newspapers by bicycle, it makes total sense for a young PC’s first paid employment to be involved in mercantile activities, aka trade.

The number of PCs who have been hired on as Caravan Guards is greater, I sometimes think, than dry leaves in Autumn.

There are those who will tell you that Trade is boring. That’s true, in my opinion, only if the GM does nothing with it.

Some GMs will tell you that the success of a trading venture is irrelevant, and trade is not about profits (or not just about that), and that money is just a way of keeping score. To be sure, once PCs have enough wealth, this is a reasonable assessment – but until then, it’s only partially true, and the percentage of truth starts at zero and only slowly rises to a peak of no more than 80%.

The term “enough” is also subjective and – in the case of PCs – highly irregular. In a world of magic buffs, too much is never enough.

But beyond these limits, beyond the verisimilitude, there is (or should be) a very good reason for using trade as your foundation of a starting point in a campaign.

    0.1 A Meta-perspective

    From the GMs chair, a Metagame perspective should guide him in the way he approaches and employs trade in his games: as a delivery vehicle that takes the PCs from the place of safety that they usually inhabit to adventure and to the foundation of a campaign.

    Amongst many other benefits, this perspective permits a proper appraisal of the degree of realism needed in the supporting game mechanics, encouraging a level of sophistication and abstraction that the GM would probably not aim to achieve without such prompting.

    So long as the GM maintains this perspective, Trade in his campaign ceases to be boring, ceases to matter as an end unto itself, and becomes something both more and less: a touchstone and means of delivering the campaign world to the players..

    0.2 Enterprise & Competition

    Trade naturally connects the participants with the world around them, with the societies and politics and economics, and how everything works. But the GM doesn’t have to hit the players with all of this at once; he can phase things in, one at a time, as they then become relevant. So long as the meta-perspective is maintained, each of these presents (at the very least) an adventure in its own right.

    It doesn’t matter if it’s a session 1 or a session 0, participating in trade makes a perfect foundation for characters who are still wet behind the ears.

    For example, let’s hire a new party of adventurers to transport a shipment of silver ore to the refinery where it will be transformed into ingots, and then to the city wherein will be found the artisans who work in this precious metal, where a load of foodstuffs, household items, and mining-related commodities can be obtained, ready for the caravan to return to the mines.

    This employment is for one round-trip only. It pays 1/2 a gold a day, plus a copper for every ounce of refined silver delivered to the waiting silversmiths, plus a silver for each outright danger faced by the caravan that has been successively overcome en route. In addition, any reasonable expenses incurred along the way will be reimbursed, provided that a verifiable tally can be presented at the end of the journey, bearing the signatures of the merchants and the amounts being claimed. And, to get the expedition underway, your employers is willing to advance you five gold each – enough (when pooled with the advances to the other PCs) to hire a cart and cover your accommodations and food along the way. If the PCs do a good job, they might get hired by the silver miner permanently.

    That sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? It’s also the sort of offer that might be posted on a public noticeboard and other suitable locations, ensuring a wide range of applicants.

    This naturally pulls a party of PCs together and welds them into a natural unit. I’d include a couple of NPCs to ensure variety – a fighter, a ranger/scout, and a cleric – but drop the cleric if a PC already covers that skillset.

    Throw in hiring a wagon and the mounts to pull it, a wilderness encounter or two, dealing with the people that would be met along the way, perhaps a natural challenge to be overcome, some bandits that can be avoided, and you have everything you need for a simple and easy little adventure that introduces the players to the game world. The pay won’t set the world on fire, but it’s a reasonable rate of pay for a very believable job – a session 0.

    From a business point of view, this is an existing enterprise (the silver mine) looking to create a low-cost limited partnership to provide it with a necessary service. One could reasonably ask why whoever they last used for the purpose can’t do it again, but this adventure plan already furnishes a ready answer – they fell foul of a party of bandits who made off with eight of the twelve ingots of silver (all they could carry) while seriously wounding the driver and killing three guards. In other words, the people who used to provide this service to the mine owner can’t do it any more – though one of them (another NPC) might form the nucleus of the new group, providing it with an experienced voice to lead them through the expedition.

      0.2.1 Quality Of Goods

      It doesn’t matter what type of goods you’re involved in, sooner or later you will have to deal with rivals. This could be because you are attempting to shove your way into their market, or because they are trying to shoulder their way into yours – that doesn’t much matter.

      Before you can evaluate how much trouble you’re in, before you can even evaluate how much they are charging, you need a comparison of perceived relative quality of goods.

      This is simply achieved: roll a d6+2 for the perceived quality of the goods being hawked by the PCs. That’s all you need.

      The results are relative to the last time this particular test was made – so it doesn’t matter if you were previously producing 8/8 goods, or barely-serviceable 3/8 goods, that’s still a 5.5 on the current measure. If you roll a 6+, your quality is perceived to have gone up, perhaps only by a little, perhaps by a lot. If you roll a 5 or less on your roll, the quality is perceived – rightly or wrongly – to have gone down.

      It’s when you compare your rivals’ offering to the same standard that things start to get interesting. They roll a d10 – so there’s room for their product to be seen as better, or worse.

      The scale of the difference is also relevant – I think of each plus-or-minus three as being a doubling or halving of relative quality. This is a compromise that permits the expression of a relatively small difference, or an extremely large one.

      Once the relative quality is known, it provides critical context for all the other factors.

      0.2.2 Comparison Matrix

      In particular, it becomes possible to place the rival’s products into a comparison matrix that assesses relative price. This shouldn’t be rolled; the GM should make an informed decision as to this value.

      At the same time, no-one wants to get bogged down in minutia, so this value should be abstracted as well, and – for convenience – on the same scale. If you define the PCs product as price 5.5, then you can decide if the rival offering is essentially the same price (5), a little cheaper (4), a lot cheaper (3), half the price (2), ore less than half the price(3) – or you have the same range of options in the other direction.

      There are essentially 3 possible evaluations on such a matrix:

      1. Price and Quality are roughly the same relative to the PC goods. Both Price and Quality are higher, or are lower, and the amounts are comparable. The newcomers will be competitive within the market.

      2. Price is higher but Quality is the same or worse. Expenses mean that the PCs will keep the majority of the trade – unless the NPCs do something underhanded. And the rivals would have known this, going in – so they will have already settled any qualms about using dirty tricks.

      3. Quality is higher but Price is the same or cheaper. The PCs are going to lose market share to the newcomers. And then they’ll lose a similar share of what’s left, And then a similar share of what’s left after that. Unless, of course, the PCs resort to dirty tricks. The GM will need to be able to justify the lower costs, no hand-waving. It’s very likely that the NPCs can take a brief profit-reduction to undercut the PCs no matter what they do.

    0.3 Resources, Investment, & Diversification

    Another critical evaluation is the cash reserves of each side. For how long can they afford to take a loss (that they will eventually recoup if they win the Trade War)?

    Reserves bring in three new concepts to be understood – resources, investments, and diversification.

      0.3.1 Resources = Deep Pockets

      Whatever cash each side have saved up, or can raise by selling assets, equals their resources. We don’t really care how much either side has on hand, in money terms – it’s the relative size of the reserves that determines how effectively they can use them as a weapon, and for how long they can keep it up.

      0.3.2 Investment: Gambling for Pros

      One side or the other may have sunk some of their resources into investments, buying shares in other businesses or trade opportunities. As with all investments, there’s no such thing as a sure thing, sometimes you’ll win and sometimes you”ll lose. In general, you write off the loses and hope that the wins are substantial enough to give you a net profit at the end of the day.

      It can therefore be assumed that any investments that are still operational are earning profits for the investors, income that tops up and replenishes the reserves on an ongoing basis.

      There is always a temptation to invest most, if not all, of your profits, because this not only spreads your investment around (reducing the overall risk) but it increases the returns on the investment. But it’s always a bad idea; it means that you don’t have the reserves to be able to cope with unexpected disasters or reverses. Over-investment is referred to as being Leveraged, because you don’t have any Leverage over the situation; the situation has Leverage over you, and you are at its mercy (of which it has zero to none).

      0.3.3 Diversification

      Diversification means that you have established or are establishing other product lines. This is usually a lot more expensive than external investment, but it comes with some pretty hefty advantages – you get to keep all the profits of the other product lines, instead of only a percentage of them, and have full control over the distribution and pricing (and profitability) of the other product line. In effect, you can use one to subsidize the other, reducing the amount that gets drained from your reserves either completely or in part.

    The combination of Resources and Matrix Outcome dictates who will win a trade war if there is no intervention to change the playing field, and how that trade war will proceed.

    One major reason for keeping it all as simple as possible is because ‘intervention’ by one side or the other, or (most commonly) both, entails such a wide range of activities that there can be no hard-and-fast rules for assessing its effectiveness. That’s going to be up to the GM to assess, on a case-by-case basis.

    0.4 Trade Routes

    Buy something, take it to somewhere where it is more valuable, sell it and use the money to (a) cover expenses, and (b) buy something else for trade. In the simplest possible model, the ‘something else’ will be of value back where you bought the first commodity, which creates a trade route with two ‘legs’ side-by-side.

    It’s more common to have three or more legs.

    Work a trade route in the right direction, make a small fortune. Work it in the wrong direction and you’ll lose your shirt.

    Additional complications are possible. Two trade routes can come together just long enough for an exchange of goods between the traders, swapping something you have for something that will be worth more where you are going, while the other party also obtains a cargo that will yield them more profits than if they had kept the original merchandise.

    Trade routes work on the premise that transportation is so low-cost that the economic model is all about the “value” of position, at least theoretically. The reality is slightly more complicated.

    The value of a cargo is the quantity of goods times the sales price. [V = Q x P(s)].

    The net profit to be realized from the sale of a cargo is the Gross Value – transport costs – Purchase price of the cargo. In other words, the process converts money into cargo and then cargo into more money than you started with, by virtue of having moved the commodity in question to it’s point of sale.

    If you put those two together, you get

                        Pnet = Q x (PrSale – [Ct / Q] – PrPurch).

    The messy bit in the middle is the transport costs divided by the quantity of goods being transported. In other words, the transport costs are spread evenly (amortized) over each piece of merchandise to be sold.

    The reason this is messy is because those transport costs are not so nice and neat to pigeonhole. Some of them will rise with the total volume of the goods, some with the total weight, some with the distance, some with the number of geographic features to be traversed, and some by number of goods being transported. Still others may be be a function of the classification of the type of goods – some (necessary) goods may be taxed at a different rate to other (luxury) goods.

    These all have to be correctly factored into the choice of merchandise at the time of (potential) purchase – if we want to be technically accurate.

    Me, i couldn’t be bothered with that level of minutia, except in terms of narrative patter. It’s far simpler to make a simple assumption (total costs will be $$$) and simply tally up the costs as they come up. Get to the end of the travel leg, add up all the costs, divide by the number of goods purchased, job done.

    In other words, all expenses should be treated as overheads, no matter how they accrue or are determined.

    The critical question is always, how many $$$ to assume in advance?

    Too many, and you will turn down a potentially lucrative contract / commodity. Too low, and you won’t just fail to turn a profit, you are likely to incur a loss. And it typically takes a trip or two before you can even start to get a reasonable estimate.

    0.5 Reversals Of Fortune

    In any endeavor, trade-related or not, there will always be setbacks and reverses of fortune. The adventure often comes from trying to overcome those setbacks as cheaply as possible.

    If you figure that there’s always going to be something that comes up, the best solution is to bake an allowance for that into your expected transport costs. Should fortune smile upon you, and your overheads be unexpectedly low, your profits will be more than expected; should things not go your way, and these costs be more than expected, it will eat into your profits – but those profits provide a cushion against actually turning a loss.

    Most traders will save a reserve to be used to cover individual loss-making trade legs for those occasions when the worst occurs. The law of averages says that the more trips you make, the more closely the vicissitudes of fortune will balance out.

    Two things that can turn a trader prematurely gray are social changes and politics.

    Social Changes cause a systematic change in the demand for a commodity. And Politics can cause government interference that amounts to the same thing. Because these are systemic changes, they won’t even out over time, they will always persist if they are present at all – and something of this sort is present more often than traders are ever happy or comfortable with.

    The canny trader immerses himself in society wherever he goes – not for any entertainment or social status value, but simply to keep his finger on the pulse of his marketplace. And he pays extremely close to the politics, everywhere he goes, even to the point of occasionally getting enmeshed within the grinding gears of the political machinery, simply to ‘grease the wheels’ and keep politics from overwhelming his business.

    0.6 A Gateway To Adventure

    Remember our Meta-perspective? It was what showed how strongly to abstract the various points of realism above, and it was never so important to the conduct in-game of a trade operation as in the preceding two paragraphs. This overview of trade “in general” is coming to a close – the messy work is all done – but I thought it worth taking the time to list all the activities and subjects that could become gateways to adventure under the general umbrella of “trade” before closing this introductory section out.

      0.6.1 Directly Trade-Related: Wheeling & Dealing

      Whenever there is a bargain to be struck, there’s the potential for one of the bargainers to throw a wooden shoe into negotiations. “I’ll do more than meet your price, I’ll pay you a small bonus, if you’ll do me one small favor…”

      0.6.2 Directly Trade-Related: Rivals & Enemies

      Any trade operation is going to attract the attention of rivals, real or potential. And, because they will usually behave predictably, they can be best friends or worst enemies or even both at the same time! Merchants’ guilds provide scope for two rivals to bury the hatchet – at least long enough to jointly tackle some problem that you have in common.

      In most such arrangements, there’s an “active partner” and a “passive partner” who does most of the thinking and arranging, the pulling of strings. Their risk is lower, and their rewards potentially greater, because they are the ones pulling the strings and making the decisions, but so long as the active partner also benefits, they have little cause for complaint.

      At least initially, the PCs won’t have the social and political connections to be a “passive partner”; they will have to be the “active partner” and have all the hair-raising adventures that result. As soon as some moderate level of competence gets displayed by them, “passive partners” should come sniffing around, offering deals and alliances. Obviously, the PCs will want to make the transition to “passive partner” as quickly as possible – and the only way to do so is to become enmeshed as deeply as possible into the social and political machinery of the campaign world. Even then, it’s not going to happen quickly or easily.

      Every such social and political connection, including entering into ‘partnerships’, comes with baggage, in the form of enemies. “The enemy of my ally will treat me as an enemy” is the mildest form of description of the natural development. The PCs may be seen as the weakest link in a long chain by other string-pullers and masterminds, to be molested because its the quickest route to an advantage. Oftentimes, they will be targeted before they even know an enemy exists, let alone who they are and what they want. Sometimes, their ‘allies’ will seek to test them before relying on them too heavily – ‘friendly fire’ burns just as hot as any other kind.

      0.6.3 Directly Trade-Related: New Markets

      It is often said that a business that is not trying to expand is a business that is stagnating, if not overtly contracting, because rivals will be seeking to expand into your territory.

      Opening new markets can be a fraught activity. It immediately earns the enmity of everyone who benefits from the status quo more than they will if the PCs succeed. Some will be openly hostile for this reason; others for loftier reasons of trying to prevent the locality from being ground zero of a trade war.

      Overcoming resistance often means greasing the wheels in the form of doing favors for influential people in the hopes that those people will at least remain neutral, if not become supportive. And any of those ‘favors’ can be an adventure unto itself.

      0.6.4 Directly Trade-Related: Demand & Marketing

      Marketing is the means by which demand for what you are selling is increased, or even created. It rarely comes without a price, and those marketing activities that don’t cost are rarely as effective as those that do. Marketing puts people (read ‘PCs’) at ground zero for getting mixed up in things that otherwise wouldn’t concern them. It therefore creates a direct connection to adventures that would otherwise have no point of connection to the campaign at all.

      0.6.5 Directly Trade-Related: Costs & Labor

      Anything that affects the costs, or the labor relationships, of doing business are of critical interest to the merchant and his suppliers. Take thirty seconds to appreciate that inter-guild relationships can be just as messy and just as political as any direct engagements with government agencies. Ripple effects are very real, and let he who thinks himself immune cast the first stone (because they will, anyway, so they may as well take the blame).

      Another source of fun can be the conflict between the modern values of the players and those of the world inhabited by their characters. For example, the Blacksmith’s Guild might lead its members out ‘on strike’ for an increase in the Guild Pay Scales sufficient that their members can retire a few years before their profession kills them from overwork. They do hot, hard labor, and that’s always prone to heart failures. Sounds utterly reasonable to a modern audience. But the society isn’t geared up to handle anything this disruptive – the issue will be deeply divisive, and allies who the PCs thought they could trust will see their attitudes as a betrayal of principle.

      0.6.6 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics At Home (General)

      I’ve already expounded on the topic of politics. The PCs will be required to take sides. The fun becomes inevitable when the people whose policies they most want to support are untrustworthy, while those they most want to oppose are at least honest and respectable.

      0.6.7 Directly Trade-related: Politics At Home (Trade)

      Of course, any politics directly affecting trade also directly affects any PCs involved in trade. And, more than perhaps any other human activity, politics always comes with baggage and fallout.

      0.6.8 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics Abroad

      It’s not just politics at home, though. If you are planning to sell in a foreign nation (for like, more profit), you are just as prone to being impacted by the politics there as anything else – but, because it’s more distant, it’s that much harder to keep your finger on the pulse. Things that might have easily been headed off, if you had known about them in time, will tend to grow beyond the scope of such intervention by the time you even know about them.

      Such political connections often interact in unexpected ways. The head of the local intelligence service (if rumors are to be believed) approaches you because he’s heard that you are going to be operating in Kingdom X. He’s all in favor of that – trade can bind nations together for mutual benefit and make wars less likely. He offers to smooth over a couple of local political problems that might get in the way (and this may be the first that the PCs know of such problems, the implication being that they will be manufactured to get in their way if they don’t accept his offer), and all they have to do in return is make room in their operation for a couple of sons of friends of his. Nothing more.

      Right away, the PCs should suspect that these will be spies, reporting directly to the intelligence agency. They can either go along with the proposal or not, but doing so is the lesser of two evils – if the spies don’t get caught. Seeing this as the big danger, they make it clear to the spymaster that if these sons of friends get caught doing anything that the PCs haven’t sanctioned, they will be cut loose immediately. He replies, “that seems prudent. Very well, we have an agreement.”

      And for a while, all goes well. All sorts of doors open unexpectedly for the PCs and the trade expedition gets off the ground surprisingly easily. Soon, they are boots on the ground in the capital of Kingdom X, and making all sorts of business connections and selling merchandise quite happily. The ‘sons of friends’ are intelligent and capable and pull their weight. It all looks like working out wonderfully.

      And then one of the PCs discovers that they aren’t spies at all – they are assassins, waiting for an opportunity to eliminate a firebrand adviser to the throne who is advocating going to war with their home Kingdom.

      Now, what do they do…?

      0.6.9 Indirectly Trade-related: Politics En Route

      To get to C, you usually have to travel through B. And that means that the politics of B can have their own profound effects on your trade with C. ‘Nuff said.

      0.6.10 Indirectly Trade-related: Crime

      Wherever you go, there will be crime. How much and of what kinds is often a function of the society that surrounds them. Those criminal elements will inevitably interact with anyone doing business in the vicinity, generally to the detriment of the business-people. Will the PCs pay the devil his (claimed) due? And, if not, how many ‘object lessons’ will they be subjected to?

      0.6.11 Tangentially Trade Related: From A to B with Handicaps

      And all that leaves out the natural challenges of getting a cargo, perhaps a fragile one, from point A to point B. These can be the most straightforward of all adventures, and a welcome anodyne to the politically-enmeshed usual adventures of a trader!

That brings the introduction to a close. In the next part, we start getting into the nitty-gritty of making trade practical in terms of the Meta-perspective, after a brief excursion into questions of business ownership.

And, for the record, I’m on track for 16-17 posts in the series…



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