Bribes and Ransoms

At the end of every dungeon delved, mansion burgled, or wizard’s tower toppled, the players receive one parcel of treasure dubbed a “Filthy Bribe”. These can be spent for minor bonuses, and to fiat away certain encounters. Uses of the Filthy Bribe include, but are not limited to:

• Fiat away encounters with creatures more interested in cash than carnage, such as bribing away the ogre bandits.

• Getting an artificial background “Handy Adventuring Tools” +4. Players must specify how their tool helps them with their current skill check. The background is consumed after four uses.

• Exchange them for the treasure parcels that include potions, runes, and oils.

• The old adventurer hallmark of wine, women, and song. In combat the players can retroactively spend a Filthy Bribe to say that they frittered it away on something trivial, and are so satisfied with doing so that they gains a minor bonus to attack rolls and saves for the rest of the encounter, and can increase the escalation dice by one if they so desire. This can take the form of a night at the tavern, or a fancy tea-party, or other forms as the players desire.

• Bribe NPCs who are amenable to such things, and thereby treating any and all charisma checks with those NPCs as a natural 20.

• Skip sidequests to obtain components for rituals. “Yeah, I’m just going to go bribe a bunch of more expendable adventurers to get the Ruby Eye of Amon for me, okay?”

Naturally, this doesn’t achieve the obscene levels of avarice that every adventurer strives for, hence five Filthy Bribes will become a King’s Ransom. Unlike Filthy Bribes, a King’s Ransom is more narrative in scope. A King’s Ransom can be used for such things as:

• Building a small fort to be used as a base of operations

• Hiring a company of mercenaries to distract a necromancer’s vast zombie horde

• Get a lead on a magical item of a player’s choice

• Your very own airship, with leather seating and everything

• A regular sea-ship, with extra features to compensate

• Enough treasure to get a Young Dragon to suffer through the indignity of assisting you for a time

King’s Ransoms are used to gain useful devices that can be used for the rest of the campaign, or for significant bonuses that last for the duration of a current quest.

Five King’s Ransoms can be put together to obtain a Great Wyrm’s Hoard. You have enough money to give even an Icon pause. Your wealth is coveted and envied by all who approach you. A Great Wyrm’s Hoard, when spent, will always do great, but terrible, things to a nation’s economy. If you have the brass to spend it all at once, you can get:

• As many 6′s as you damn well please on the Icon Rolls for the Icon of your choice. You make a suitable donation to the Priestess’s Cathedral, getting sainthood for at least two or three religions. The Prince of Shadows reluctantly accepts your tribute and sighs as he puts away his plans for stealing it. The Dwarf King adopts you as his own child. The Orc Lord loves the shiny armor his warriors are now kitted out in, he agrees to kill you last.

• Found your own Kingdom. You got armies, you got wizards, a couple of dragons agree to roost in your aries in exchange for some of your shiny, shiny gold. The world is your oyster, and the GM screams inwards as he swiftly makes up plausible rules for managing kingdoms and mass combat. If s/he didn’t want to do it, s/he shouldn’t have let you get so much treasure in the first place!

• Get the use of a Wish spell, ala older editions of D&D. You spend the lot on a magical ritual to power a Wish. The GM shouldn’t try to go against the spirit of this wish, unless of course the Wish would derail the campaign in a way that is exploitative, boring, or unfun. Derailing the campaign in a way that is fun, that ought to be just fine.

Naturally you want to encourage an easy-come easy-go approach to this sort of thing, and remind players that spending money might come in handy. The more money they accumulate, the more likely that others will covet their money, to the point where they might get shaken down by dragons should that pile become too vast. Vast amounts of money should come with dangers as well as opportunities.