This time we’re going to give your faction a home by building it a base.
The Wealth Skill
We’ll be going over faction skills and specialisations next time, but for now all we need to worry about is the Wealth Skill. It has some important in-game mechanics that the PCs will be able to use, but for base building the Wealth Skill also acts as a cap to how much you can “purchase” for your base. As with everything else in the Sigil System, the Wealth Skill runs from 1 – 100 and you roll on the table below to determine your starting Skill Level.
1-19: 1
20-36: 10
37-51: 20
52-64: 30
65-75: 40
76-84: 50
85-91: 60
92-96: 70
97-99: 80
100: 90
The number you roll will act as the upper limit to how much you can buy. Each of the items below will have a cost associated with it. When you add up all the costs of the things you want to buy, it can’t be higher than your Wealth Skill. Any points left unspent is wasted, so spend as much as you can.
Luxuriousness
Now that you know how much you have in the bank to spend, the first thing to decide is how fancy, luxurious, and opulent you want your faction’s base to be. The fancier you want it, the more you will have to spend, which means you will have less over for buying the parts of your base. However, the more luxurious your base, the higher you reputation will be and the happier your members will be. This has huge implications for gameplay as unhappy members can lead to “Treachery Events” (which we’ll cover in a later blog-post).
So choose carefully on the list below how much you want to spend:
0: Wretched
10: Poor
20: Average
30: Rich
40: Lavish
50: Palatial
Acquisitions
The final part of base building is actually building the base. You start off with a basic “base structure” for free, but this is little better than a large, empty room. Everything else you will need to buy. You will see on the list below that you can buy additional “base structures” as well as “safehouses”. If you do get these, you can spend some of your Wealth Skill points to buy acquisitions for these as well.
3: Armory
10: Base structure
3: Camouflage
3: Crew quarters
5: Dock/Garage
3: Entertainment space
3: Hygiene/bathing
3: Jail
3: Kitchen/dining
3: Office space
3: Safehouse
5: Specialist quarters
1: Misc (eg storage)
3: Training grounds
3: Secret passageway
3: Vehicles
3: Defensive structures
You’ll notice a few bolded names here. The Misc section is there not because we ran out of ideas, but because each of the non-bolded names has a mechanical impact on your Faction’s Skills and Specialisations. By acquiring these parts, your faction will become better at doing certain things. Thus, if you want anything else for your base, it can go under the Misc section. The Dock/Garage allows you to park your vehicles in your base, and the Specialist quarters allow you to recruit (wait for it) Specialists. Specialists are powerful NPC members that will help your faction grow and become powerful. We’ll cover them more in a future blog-post
Exemplar
Last time we finished off our Righteous Prophets, the gang of corrupt cops turned smugglers. Now let’s see where they call home:
With a roll of 30 we find out they have a Wealth Skill of 10. They are as poor as they are corrupt. This means we will have to stick with the Wretched level of luxuriousness so that we can buy acquisitions, but it makes sense that their base will be as poor as their souls.
With 10 points we can’t buy a lot, so we have to prioritise. As smugglers inside a police force (and one that’s been busted before) they need to stay hidden and have a way of getting in and out unseen, so we’ll spend 6 on Camouflage and Secret passageway. To make sure they don’t get overrun by the cops again or by rival gangs, we’ll give them Defensive structures on their base, and with the last point we’ll spend it in Misc so we can get some storage for all their smuggled goods.
It has none of the comforts of home, but it’s a practical place for practical people.
And that’s it for base building! Tell us what you think about it, what your bases ended up looking like, and if you have more suggestions for acquisitions!
Next time we’ll start going into gameplay with the Skills and Specialisations of your faction.
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