Behold, the Merchant-Adventurer!

Behold, the Merchant-Adventurer!

Behold, the Merchant-Adventurer!  A new class I worked up, basically untested.  It should have the option of playing in a few different ways:  as a medieval-ish take on the Apocalypse World Operator, or as a pirate captain, or as a fast-talking rogue with lots of options on Parley.

A couple non-standard notes:  the “Races” are cultures from my game world, since I find the standard Dwarf/Elf/Halfling kind of boring.  But you could easily relabel them if you like.  Also, I have “Ambition” instead of Bonds, because Bonds never really did much for us.  We just declared that Aid/Interfere is always rolled at +1 (because pretty much it was), and required everyone to declare a specific Ambition for their character.  Any session in which you do something (pretty much anything) that in some way advances you toward your Ambition, +1 xp in the End of Session move.

Otherwise, my goal is for this to be reasonably balanced against the standard classes.  Comment welcome (and definitely let me know if you play it, how it goes).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzqpqKC_xlNLVkp6aXFBUEtqTTg/view?usp=sharing

8 thoughts on “Behold, the Merchant-Adventurer!”

  1. I should credit a few moves borrowed from Johnstone Metzger’s Merchant and Captain classes, and the regular Bard class, and probably one or two other places I’ve forgotten now.

  2. “Captain and Commander” is great!  How does the coin cost for rewarding mercenaries sync up with the “300 coin/month”?  Is that additional, so the 300/month is also needed for thugs and retainers?

  3. Hm.  Good question.  I wanted there to be a maintenance cost to encourage regular use of Entrepreneur, and probably everybody needs to be paid at least some coin.  Do you think it works to leave the 300/mo as a simple coin payment, and leave the “coin/status/debauchery” rewards as RP color?

    My thinking is that the reward preference is a thing that will mostly come up on partial successes with Caravan Master, and occasionally as a bit of post-adventure color.  Rewarding with coin is usually going to be the least complicated thing in play, though sometimes you get a broke baron as an employer who’s more keen to throw a parade than actually give anybody any money. And it’s usually pretty straightforward to buy debauchery with money, though if you don’t care how much damage you leave behind, it could be somebody else’s money that pays for cleanup.

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