The Night Chalice: Wealth and Network

Sharp Eyed readers will have seen the new page up on the blog holding the write ups of my Swords of the Serpentine game, the Annals of the Night Chalice. The rough concept is the PCs are the last surviving members of a moderately successful thieves guild in the default city of Eversink who, after an encounter with a sorcerer has slaughtered the rest of their guild, are trying to keep the Night Chalice a going concern. There's only one issue with the rules/concept meshing, and that's with trying to run a continuing business in a system where the default is don't stress the money. 

My current solution is that while play started with the Night Chalice being dead broke in liquid assets (the sorcerer stripped all of their accounts), they are still technically collecting money from the funeral statuary shop, brothel, smuggling shipbuilder, bar, gambling establishment , and smuggling warehouse that the players defined as places under their protection. (The warehouse full of smuggled goods which they never looked into because that's also where all the guild was slaughtered... Of course I also just thought of it so that's part of today's plot.) The sorcerer who was trying to destroy the Night Chalice also promised a smaller up and coming guild control of the Chalice's rackets as prepayment for future services, so if they didn't move quickly the PCs would lose those too. 

Fortunately for our heroes, the Night Chalice just broke the Hanged Men in a devastating raid, and are claiming their meager treasury (15 wealth), which is enough to keep them Comfortable with a bit left if they still have all of it at the end of the adventure. 

It also keeps them their profit making businesses: as long as they can defend their 6 sites each generates 3 wealth per adventure, giving them Comfortable lifestyles with 6 extra wealth. Of course they have also just stolen the recruits that the Hanged Men were bringing on board. Normally spending Wealth gives you 3 general ability point pool for when wealth might be useful, but if they prepay wealth per month they have a 3 point Network (stolen from from Night's Black Agents) per Wealth spent - They can assign Network points to a newly named member of the raw recruit gang and then use those points to have the member do stuff. But once the named member's network drops to 0, they get killed, burned, turn traitor, or what have you. So once someone is created, you need to keep unused general ability points in their pool to keep them loyal, and keep spending Wealth into the gang to keep it active. 

We'll see how this works.