[OOC] The Gate at Hinnom

[The General]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

A mutated thieves guild is close to what I was thinking. In war-torn areas, you could see criminal organizations filling the power gap. They would also function as a place for pirates, bandits, and looters to gather to trade and sell their 'wares' without threat of legal response.

It might be easy enough to manhandle (through extortion, bribes, etc) the rulers of one of the Urgu city-states. A ruler losing power through the wars might be willing to turn a blind eye to the seedy underbelly that has developed in his city if he's getting kickbacks.

I was thinking through what such a criminal organization could do if it had a few wizards at its disposal. A simple protection racket would be pretty easy there. You have a wizard specialized in fire (or earth) magic in a large city where the ruler isn't able to handle an uprising. Burn down one city block (or destroy it with earth magic) and then sit back as people pay you not to do it anymore. It could be cheaper to pay than to have a response from the legal authorities.

I guess you'd need to have this in a particularly prosperous area with a legal system either unwilling or unable to respond to these types of internal threats.

Or you could have neighboring areas with conducive laws (import tariffs maybe?), leading to smuggling.

Not that this has to operate inside a city. It's easy enough to threaten farmers. Poison some crops, then make them pay. I think it would be easier in a city, though. Concentrated wealth.

I imagine this sort of organization would set up in an area with lots of sorts of different opportunities.

These are mighty small cities, though, aren't they? We're looking at, what, fifty-thousand people? Sixty-thousand? I wasn't thinking this would be anything huge. You could have thirty or forty people supported through crime, though, I'm sure.

Well put, actually. The cities are definitely small and in the wake of war I'm sure some sort of criminal element might have arisen amidst all of the chaos. It'd definitely be an isolate feature of one city, though, less a "mafia" and more a "bandit ring". Unfortunately what you're looking at is a two-fold problem. The bandits would want to establish themselves in a prosperous place without much authority. That doesn't exist. As authority erodes so too does the prosperity.

If a crime syndicate managed to get its hands on a few wizards it'd be quite powerful indeed. The same could be said of virtually any organization, mind you. Most kingdoms have only one or two, however - and that's an important note. Wizards are very rare and are loathed and treated with disdain by the common people, the very people most likely to become bandits, thieves, and mercenaries.

There are perhaps thirty wizards in the whole of the Rift.

And yes, it begs the question of how well you'd work with the others in the party. We already have a player (Harry) expressing interest in playing a merchant smuggler, although admittedly that's far more innocuous than a "gangster thug".

This is decidedly "low fantasy" and so the idea isn't against the mold or anything like that.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by The General

Wizards are very rare and are loathed and treated with disdain by the common people, the very people most likely to become bandits, thieves, and mercenaries.

This gets me thinking.

What qualities does the leader of a mafia need? Why, the exact same skills that a political leader needs. Peasantry form groups of bandits. But the escaped prince of Wherever (escaped with some of his spies) just might be able to form them into something approaching a real criminal organization. Particularly if the ruling families are interrelated.

Say this guy is the prince of one of those city-states and his sister is the ruler of the next one over. This prince certainly could escape to live under her rule. This would explain why it's so easy for him to get laws passed in his favor, and why the authorities are so quick to look the other way. And if we wanted to go that route, we could say this is also why he has a wizard: as a ruler, he already had the wizard, and brought him along. If your mafia controls the city's only wizard, that's even more reason for the ruler to allow them to exist: that wizard could be extremely useful for defending the city, either directly or through providing access to resources through a siege. That would even be the kind of thing a ruler might want to advertise: I have a wizard here, and I cannot control him! Invade at your own risk!

I think that could give us something close to the situation we need to have them exist also. Their criminal organization leads directly to their being prosperous, since they're not getting invaded every other year. The cost of funding the mafia is waaay lower than the cost of fighting the wars which are avoided through having the mafia's wizard live in your city.

I need to refresh myself on TL 1 farming methods and then look over the available spells to figure out how having access to a wizard would change things. These guys mostly hid behind walls and tossed stones using slings, didn't they?

[The General]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

This gets me thinking.

What qualities does the leader of a mafia need? Why, the exact same skills that a political leader needs. Peasantry form groups of bandits. But the escaped prince of Wherever (escaped with some of his spies) just might be able to form them into something approaching a real criminal organization. Particularly if the ruling families are interrelated.

Say this guy is the prince of one of those city-states and his sister is the ruler of the next one over. This prince certainly could escape to live under her rule. This would explain why it's so easy for him to get laws passed in his favor, and why the authorities are so quick to look the other way. And if we wanted to go that route, we could say this is also why he has a wizard: as a ruler, he already had the wizard, and brought him along. If your mafia controls the city's only wizard, that's even more reason for the ruler to allow them to exist: that wizard could be extremely useful for defending the city, either directly or through providing access to resources through a siege. That would even be the kind of thing a ruler might want to advertise: I have a wizard here, and I cannot control him! Invade at your own risk!

I think that could give us something close to the situation we need to have them exist also. Their criminal organization leads directly to their being prosperous, since they're not getting invaded every other year. The cost of funding the mafia is waaay lower than the cost of fighting the wars which are avoided through having the mafia's wizard live in your city.

I need to refresh myself on TL 1 farming methods and then look over the available spells to figure out how having access to a wizard would change things. These guys mostly hid behind walls and tossed stones using slings, didn't they?

I like the idea in principle - especially the bit about the escaped prince - but I'm not really sure it'd work well as a background for a character, specifically for this setting.

If said 'mafia' existed, what would prompt them to send one of their members and said wizard, the apparent sole defense of their city, into Hizjah, a backwater town in the direct path of the approaching Imperial army?

I like the amount of thought you put into this - it speaks well of you as a player. I'm just not sure if this really meshes well with what I have planned for the campaign. I think the overall concept would work with some slight adjustment, though - scale things down a little. Harry already wants to play a smuggling merchant, and so one would think that working as a guard for his goods would be a good way to head into things, no?

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by The General

If said 'mafia' existed, what would prompt them to send one of their members and said wizard, the apparent sole defense of their city, into Hizjah, a backwater town in the direct path of the approaching Imperial army?

Hmm...

He's not their wizard. My character would be trying to talk this wizard into joining them. :)

Maybe the rulers of this city-state (the actual rulers and the criminal element start to blur together here) know they can't win actual fights. They have a big, scary empire out there who could crush them. So, rather than try to build an army (which they couldn't support economically--not even a small one), they're going after the wizards. Maybe they have operatives scouring the world for these wizards and my character just happens to have found Lamech's character.

Harry already wants to play a smuggling merchant, and so one would think that working as a guard for his goods would be a good way to head into things, no?

That works too. I just like to grab a 'what if?' and run with it.

Were I to take that idea further, I could say: in our travels in search of the elusive wizards, Harry's character and mine were operating under the guise of smugglers. We are either currently pursuing him, or have already convinced him to join us.

That would be an explanation for having the three characters together.

This is pretty easy for me, since I have so little information available... there's lots of room for me to make things up. You have actual constraints. Like story and plot already planned. I don't even have a rough outline of these various countries in my mind. These things could be a thousand miles apart for all I know.

It is somewhat difficult to come up with a reason to have people traveling at TL 1. Traveling is expensive. You're limited in who can afford to pay for food. These people don't have TL 3 or 4 riding horses, right? As I understand it, to move things around even a short distance, you'd have to have multiple horses or oxen, and a cart. Oxen are $1,500 each. An oxcart costs $340. Add in your other required equipment, and you're looking at $4,000 to get a traveling merchant going. Then you still have to have a place to live, probably want to support a family, maybe have a farm with some slaves. Our traveling merchant needs Very Wealthy or Filthy Rich. These people are just so incredibly poor.

I'm off on a tangent here, but I was looking at trying to get someone suited up in some plate armor (torso, shins, and forearms). $16,400 (if I remember correctly) for DR 5.

It is easy to understand why you see stories about heroes from this era. Armies just aren't able to be supported. One strong, skilled man in plate army can look pretty close to invincible. If you're looking to hire someone, would you rather have five or six of him, or a hundred (or however many it would be) clubmen or spearmen, or whatever it would be? Just the price of a shortsword.... 'Course, then we're looking at the potential price of a wizard. When your man in expensive armor dies, you keep the armor. To get a wizard requires a huge investment (if only feeding and housing them--I'm sure they'd require their own special infrastructure; no telling how much that would cost), and then you don't get to utilize them for very long. If the common folks hate them, my guess would be it's because they're jealous. I guess that would depend on how they lived. If it took them fifteen hours of study a day every day for sixty years, then maybe they're looked at as a sacrifice. That could be why they're viewed as 'unclean.'

Then I started thinking about pharaohs... what is that, Multimillionaire 6? 7? There's a huge gap here between being poor and being able to do anything at all. I guess to be a charioteer, you'd want to take Patron (Extremely Powerful Individual; 12 or less; Equipment, +100%) [60] or something like that? That's still a lot of points.

You really only end up with two options: exceptional individual or farmer. Big difference here between TL 1 and TL 2. At TL 2, you have large cities capable of supporting multiple people sitting around just because they don't want to do anything. I guess thousands of years of capital accumulation, iron, and improved farming techniques really goes a long way. These guys don't even have coins, do they? I guess they have so little wealth that there's really not much they would need to represent with them. This is the period where you get people making tons of grain, but there's nothing to do with a lot of it (can't sell it--the only people that live within shipping distance are more farmers), so rulers end up giving it out for free to gain favor, isn't that right?

[Skullcrusher]

Originally Posted by Harry O'Gane

Skullcrusher, how about I roll the merchant with you as his trusty guard and companion "in crime"?

Marko

Sounds good to me...Do I/Can I take him as a Patron?

[Lamech]

One more thing on the spells:
Pretty much the entire college of necromancy needs spells from the college of healing as pre-reqs. Zombie, the entire steal X line, every thing based on the Steal spells, ect. Either that whole area needs to be reworked, a bunch of spells need to have pre-reqs waived, or you could just say it doesn't need the healing per-reqs.

So my idea's are either
a) a sage from az-Qarratim. Was handed life magic. Not a particular fan of most of the empire in general, but DOES favor a few things 1) their religion, is quite about this. 2) the ban on slavery, although he realizes not much can be done about this with his current power set, and even if he DID have the strength he would need to copy the empire's tactics of invasion 3) the acceptance of magic. This he actually hopes to change.
Being a life mage he can do two incredibly useful things, healing and the creation of food*. Furthermore he hopes to find students and teach them, both the full fledged art of naming, and a much easier path to magic via herb lore.
If you'd allow it I was going to give him photographic memory and start owning/memorized whatever tablet he learned from in the first place...

*blossom specifically

b) an elemental mage looking to help fight the az-Qarratim. (Death mage works too.) Being part of a criminal organization would work nicely. Nothing is bad for an army like when someone starts hurling five hundred point ceremonially created elementals. I would have had this person learn his magic from finding a tablet and being self-taught. Again, if you'd allow it this person would start with the tablet he learned off of.

Also how long would chiseling a full tablet be? How big is a full tablet? And are new spells discoverable? Could for example I attempt and invent regeneration, or re-invent some of the arts of the Nephilim? And the process of becoming a archmage, how difficult is that? Could it be used as a manner of execution?

[zoncxs]

are you guys taking into account my character or did that escape your thought? here he is again:

The blacksmith started off as a farmer boy before he left that behind at the age of 16 and became a miner for a few years. he then started helping towns as a carpenter and local blacksmith. He would also do a few other things too. If we are all not going to be part of the imperial side then he would have gone to Hizjah to help it. thats the type of character I made.

[Skullcrusher]

I got a question if my character is a traveling merc and he bascially carries everything he owns why is he limited to the 20% equipment limitation. I see the 80% being for "Grounded" people. Would the GM alow me to spend the full $500 if he is a nomad? Read Page 26 of characters "If you are a wanderer (pioneer, Knight Errand, free Trader, etc) or Poor or Worse GM might allow you to spend all your wealth on moveable possesions." I don't see him or Harry's character staying in one place too long.

[Pesterfield]

I'm considering a caravan leader/camel trainer, and wonder where everyone else is from. Since everyone arriving traveling with him would make sense.

According to Campaigns camels get -4 to animal handling, does that include animal handling(camel)?

Considering the expense he can't have any camels of his own, so people probable hire him to lead theirs. That's another reason for him to come here, either more caravan's or tending the army's camels it's a chance for more work.

[Harry O'Gane]

All right, let's work on this idea. ErnhamDJ, I LIKE your proposition very much. The smuggling business may just be the guise for something bigger. I planned on playing a character who's got money, who's got connections and who has quite a reputation, both as a merchant on the surface and as a smuggler in the underground.

I was thinking of taking Very Wealthy, a level or two of Social Cham., some Charisma, Contacts and some Reputation.

Greed, I believe, is going to be my governing disadvantage.

Now, we need not to be mafia or anything like that, but the idea of "looking for elusive wizards" sounds magnificent. Let's work on that idea.

Skullcrusher, I don't think you need to take PCs as Patrons, but we need to work on the story. Are you up for teaming up with ErnhamDJ and his character, as well? We just might work out a story of how the trio of us met and what our goal actually is.

Marko