Jointly, you and the other players in your campaign can create a club - an association organized around a purpose determined by you at the time of its creation. Through this club, players can influence the world and build networks of allies, and support for their endeavours.
In order to create a club, you must purchase a suitable headquarters for it. This will ordinarily cost 5000 gold, although the price may vary depending on location and other factors (expect to pay more in a large city, for example), and you may be given a suitable headquarters as a reward for a quest. Your headquarters need not be a building on a plot of land but it does require physical infrastructure of some kind - you might be headquartered on a ship, or with a trading caravan on the move.
When creating this club choose a name. For example, the Waterdeep Glazier’s Guild, the Society for the Restoration of Omu, The Order of Moradin’s Breastplate. Record the name on a ‘club sheet’ - a sheet kept for the purpose of recording information about your club.
While you have a club, you may invest in it. When you invest a certain amount of gold in a club, pick an NPC contact of your party (someone who you have met and endeared yourself to in the course of your adventures) to help you make the investment. An investment could be anything that enhances the club as an organization - you might add a new wing onto your headquarters building, purchase a collection of books for its library, purchase a stake in a fishing company who’s proceeds will be used for the upkeep of the club, open a chapter of your club in a new location, or one of many other things. The GM will determine the cost of these projects, and if the players want to invest a specific amount of gold suggest amendments to the planned investment to increase or decrease the amount of gold it requires. Record all of the investments made (and their cost) on your club sheet.
These investments by themselves might provide utility to you in the course of your adventures, but they also provide your club with pull. A club has as much pull as the total amount of gold invested in it (including the initial cost of its headquarters), divided by 100. Pull represents how attractive the club is over all to others who may wish to become involved with it, and this includes the club’s capacity to pay and otherwise compensate those that work for it.
You may also choose to give a magic item you have to your club. Each magic item the club has gives it an additional 10 pull. Record the total amount of pull your club has on your club sheet.
You may spend 3 days in the location of your headquarters to convert some of your club’s pull into money, by selling off its assets or soliciting donations. In so doing, you can convert pull into gold at a ratio of 1 pull to 800 gold. You might wish to do this if you suddenly need gold, to purchase something like a sailing ship or a grist mill for reasons related to your particular adventure.
You may spend 1 day in the location of your headquarters to decide how the club’s pull shall be allocated. Whenever you do so, you may reallocate all of your club’s pull as you wish (so if my club has 10 pull currently allocated to employ 10 workers, I may reallocate it to instead employ 5 guards). You can allocate pull to three things: donation, hirelings, and specialists.
Donation
Faction Aid: You may allocate any amount of pull towards the endeavours of some sort of faction or organization. This represents your club’s resources and efforts being put towards the advancement of that organization’s goals. This will of course engender good will between that organization and the players, and the pull allocated more the better. Players should have a specific plan in mind for how their club will provide aid to the organization they are endeavouring to help.
Charitable aid: You may allocate any amount of pull towards charitable endeavours. This generates a general sort of good will towards the club and the players, and is a heroic and intrinsically worthy thing to do. Like with aiding a faction, the players should have a plan in mind for how their club’s resources will be deployed charitably.
Hirelings
Hirelings have three statistics, which are used to determine how helpful they are for completing jobs you assign to them. Jobs will be detailed below. When you hire hirelings, there is no need for the gamemaster to give them specific names and identities, as their particular quirks are unlikely to be important to the story. Here is a list of hirelings that are available to you to allocate pull to by default. Your class talents may give you the ability to hire additional types of hirelings:
Worker. This sort of hireling is an unskilled labourer. It costs 1 pull to employ 1 worker. A worker has 2 labour, 0 admin, and 0 force.
Guard. This sort of hireling is trained in the use of weapons. It costs 2 pull to employ 1 guard. A guard has 1 labour, 0 admin, and 2 force.
Servant. This sort of hireling is trained in manners. It costs 2 pull to employ 1 servant. A servant has 1 labour, 2 admin, and 0 force.
Story Hirelings. In addition to the hirelings your party has from assigning pull, you may have additional hirelings temporarily as a result of the events of your game’s story. For example, if the players are put in command of the garrison of a town because they are tasked with its defense, so long as they keep that commission they have each member of the town’s garrison as a guard hireling, and do not need to use pull to employ them.
Specialists
Specialists, like hirelings, have labour, admin, and force statistics. Specialists They also have special effects when they are made the taskmaster of a particular job you assign them, and an ‘area of expertise’. An area of expertise is just like a player background: it is made up when the particular specialist is created, used to determine whether they are proficient at tasks. As such, specialists have greater importance and take a bit more work to create than hirelings - they should be given names and identities when the GM creates them (in addition to areas of expertise), and ideally, players would hire NPCs that they have already interacted with in their adventures as specialists. If the players don’t know a suitable NPC to hire as a specialist, at the GM’s discretion the reallocation of their pull might take an extra day as they search for a suitable person.
Specialists expect to be retained once hired - if you fire a specialist (reallocating pull away from them) the specialists will not be willing to work for you again - at least not without some form of compensation or pleading, that will normally involve a charisma-based skill check. Here are the types of specialists available to you to hire.
Foreman. This sort of specialist is a skilled artisan of some sort, capable of managing a team of workers. It costs 6 pull to employ a foreman. A foreman has 5 labour, 1 admin, and 0 force. A foreman has an area of expertise (see above). When you make a foreman the taskmaster of a job, workers assigned to that job have +1 labour. If the foreman’s area of expertise is relevant to the job, workers assigned to that job have a further +1 labour, for a total of +2.
Commander. This sort of specialist is a skilled warrior, capable of coordinating other combatants. It costs 6 pull to employ a commander. A commander has 1 labour, 0 admin, and 5 force. When you make a commander the taskmaster of a job, guards assigned to that job have +1 force. If the commander’s area of expertise is relevant to the job, guards assigned to that job have a further +1 force, for a total of +2.
Clerk. This sort of specialist is capable of navigating legal and social challenges on your behalf. It costs 6 pull to employ a clerk. A clerk has 1 labour, 5 admin, and 0 force. When you make a clerk the taskmaster of a job, servants assigned to that job have +1 admin. If the clerk’s area of expertise is relevant to the job, servants assigned to that job have a further +1 admin, for a total of +2.
Jobs for Hirelings and Specialists
The main utility of employing specialists and hirelings using your club’s pull is the ability to send them out on jobs. You may assign your specialists and hirelings jobs when your adventure reaches an adventure transition point (see the refresh rules), and is in a position to communicate with their hirelings and specialists. Adventure transition points happen when the GM identifies that the tempo or style of the game’s action has significantly changed, such as when the players depart from a town on a new quest, or return to a town triumphantly after having completed such a quest.
When the players want to assign their hirelings and specialists a job, they explain to the GM what they would like their hirelings and specialists to do, and what success and failure at the job might look like (including the timeframe they are asking the hirelings and specialists to complete the job within). The GM might declare that the job is impossible within the player’s proposed time frame, or for another reason, and ask them to describe that. If it is possible, the GM should assign the job ‘difficulty dice’ in three categories: labour, admin, and force, and shares this information with the players. For many jobs, not all of these categories will be relevant, and so some of these categories will have 0 difficulty device. See the example jobs below on this page.
After the difficulty dice are assigned, the players decide which hirelings and specialists they assign to the job, and which of their specialists will act as the taskmaster for the job (if any). The GM then determines if the specialist’s area of expertise is relevant to the same job, in roughly the same way that they would determine if a players’ background is relevant to a skill check. The players then determine the total labour, admin, and force, that has been assigned to the job.
The GM then rolls the difficulty dice for force, labour, and admin, in secret. If the combined value of the labour dice exceeds the total labour the players assigned to the job (players win a tie) then the job fails. The job likewise fails if the value of the admin dice exceeds the assigned admin, or if the value of the force dice exceeds the assigned force. If the job does not fail, then it succeeds. Whether or not the job succeeds or fails will become apparent to the players as the story of their game plays out - but immediately, they only know that their hirlings and specialists have set out to work on the job that they have assigned.
Failure does not need to mean complete failure, and indeed it might mean partial success. For example, if the players order their hirelings to construct a wooden palisade around a town in 30 days, they assign 20 labour to it, and the difficulty dice come to 22, this might mean that the wall is only 80% complete at the 30 day mark. This will make a follow-up job to complete it much easier, but of course in the meantime, the wall will not be nearly as effective as a completed wall.