Cinco: Treasure & Downtime

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Okay so basically last Friday I was going to post about play procedures—the basic bitch shit for travel, exploration, and combat—but then I was like busy with nice real life things and didn't really care enough to post here. The truth is I wanted to participate in a blog bandwagon about economy shit just because I think it's fun? And the posts up until now were just to make it look like a coincidence? But again I don't really care enough to put the effort in to do that. I just care enough to write into the void and hit "publish".

That being said, I am really happy with what I have going on with this. The campaign's goals aren't super oriented around treasure or money or stuff like that, but I think of it as like when you're playing Fall Guys (yeah) and you get special currency to spend on fun useless things. In this case, you don't really spend it on useless things, but it just feels fun and that’s more the point of it than anything else. Here's how it works.

Again, there's no chump change. There's only treasure tokens, basically unit-items that you can spend for downtime activities. Treasure tokens can be bags of coins (remember that?), valuable commodities like rum, and magic items like spell scrolls or other fancy things. In the first two cases, you basically make the decision about whether to make room for treasure so you can do downtime later, or pack more useful items for your adventure. In the last case, since magic items are useful for you, the choice is whether to keep or spend them if you think they're not of any use to you.

What downtime activities are there? Glad you asked!

  • Construct: Make 1 progress towards building a ship or haven!
  • Employ: Seek and hire an NPC crewmate! You have the right to refuse.
  • Market: Exchange your treasure for another! Who knows what you’ll find?
  • Party: Gain 1 extra experience point by going out on town!
  • Research: Describe, or ask the game mother to clarify, 1 rumor on the map!
  • Train: Improve one of your aspects by +1 (up to your maximum)!

Originally, when I first drafted these, there was like a D20 check you made to see how good you did, but when I ran it first for the first time I straight up forgot the roll. And honestly? It's (probably) much nicer. There's already enough going on within the activity itself to worry about random factors. The point of downtime, something I picked up from Nick Whelan's campaign, is to act like an appetizer for the game session proper. It works really well, especially if you integrate NPC interactions within activities and make them quest hooks to pursue. Just fun!

I think my friends’ favorite activity is research. I don’t know if I’ve talked about it on here, but basically I use a simplified version of Prismatic Warren’s collaborative world-building where when a player joins I give them a map and tell them to imagine a “rumor” and attach it to an island on the map. When you research, then, you can put a new rumor on the map or force me to elaborate on a rumor on the spot (theoretically to have a better idea of what I might have planned, but practically because it’s fun to watch me squirm I think). It’s very fun! And a nice compromise between me being the canon queen and things being overly wishy washy.

Anywayyyyy yeah! I’ll post about the other stuff eventually because I’m happy with it too, just wanted to hop on the bandwagon. Admittedly very settler behavior riding wagons and all that. Will self-crit.

Art by Norn Noszka!!!

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