D&D 5E Using the Acquisitions Inc book

[Weiley31]

Looking back through this book, and at the growing your franchise chapter especially, this reminds me a lot of 2e when you'd hit name level and gain a bunch of followers, kind of has that old school feel for me though back then you'd receive soldiers, thieves, and apprentices.

And if you wanted too, you can give em stat blocks like "Veteran, Archmage, Common," etc, etc with updated stat blocks when appropriate and there ya go: hirelings/minions.

 

[pukunui]

I'm finding the cartographer's "Tale of Safe Travel" ability a little confusing. I have questions.

It lets you perform a 45-minute ritual that enables you and your party to travel "to another location you could normally reach within one day". As per the default rules, you can travel for 8 hours in a day. At a normal pace, you can go 24 miles in normal terrain. In the jungles of Chult, you can move one hex (10 miles). So I presume this means that the party can condense 8 hours of travel into 45 minutes.

Turn the page and it says "if your tale is told with reverence and precision," you and your pals enter the Border Ethereal. What if it isn't told with reverence and precision? Does the ritual just fail?

Lastly, it says that the destination must be somewhere you've been before or somewhere for which you've got an accurate route and map. It also says that whenever you end / interrupt the ritual, you arrive safely at your destination. However, it also says you can end the ritual early if you want to engage with something that the DM is describing. Those two sentences together make it sound like if you end the ritual early to engage with something along the way, you still end up at your ultimate destination safely. Is that the sense other people are getting? Or would the encounter along the way become the new ultimate destination and you'd have to restart the ritual from there to get to your original destination?

Thoughts?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Turn the page and it says "if your tale is told with reverence and precision," you and your pals enter the Border Ethereal. What if it isn't told with reverence and precision? Does the ritual just fail?

They turn up wherever the DM decides they turn up - it's like flying a Tardis.

 

[Eltab]

I would say that you can get back home with the ability but you cannot transit the unknown jungle with it. If you stop the ritual partway through, you stop travelling at the point that was being described. If you got lost on the way out and had to re-orient yourself, the travel ritual dumps you out when you reach the zone where you were lost.
I don't know what an irreverent telling of a trip would do. An imprecise telling could get you lost, I would expect.

 

[Mr. Patient]

I'm finding the cartographer's "Tale of Safe Travel" ability a little confusing. I have questions.

It's really just a mechanism to hand some minor narrative control to your players. In the "C" Team games, Jerry lets Kate Welch (Rosie Beestinger) narrate the travel between well-known destinations, which she spins into a fun, low-stakes story involving the other characters or very familiar NPCs (perhaps Brahma or Coriander, for those who know the show). Nothing of real consequence happens, unless Jerry decides to take elements of what Kate is narrating and turn it into something important. Whatever generates the most fun is probably the correct use of the ability.

 

[pukunui]

Thanks guys. That helps clear that one up. The next one that's confusing me is the hoardsperson's What a Deal feature.

If I am understanding it correctly, you can use this feature to buy any one mount, vehicle or trade good. When you do so, you have to make the Persuasion check to haggle the price down. If you succeed, you buy the item at half price. If you fail the check, you still get the item, you just have to pay full price ... but you also can't attempt to buy another item until after you've had a long rest.

Once you've bought two items at half price, that's it. You're done until your franchise gains the next rank. You can't even attempt to buy an item at full price through the feature. However, as long as you keep failing your Persuasion checks, you can buy as many items as you want at full price, just with a limit of one per long rest.

Is that how other people are reading it?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Looking back through this book, and at the growing your franchise chapter especially, this reminds me a lot of 2e when you'd hit name level and gain a bunch of followers, kind of has that old school feel for me though back then you'd receive soldiers, thieves, and apprentices.

Yep. Jerry is an old school DnD nerd, so this isn't a surprise to me. Just puts the whole followers and strongholds thing into a potentially humorous package, and outside the class structure. A skilled hireling could easily be a soldier, thief or apprentice, after all.

 

[pukunui]

Yep. Jerry is an old school DnD nerd, so this isn't a surprise to me. Just puts the whole followers and strongholds thing into a potentially humorous package, and outside the class structure. A skilled hireling could easily be a soldier, thief or apprentice, after all.

Yeah, I was reading somewhere that some of the company positions are also inspired by Jerry's love of old school D&D - the mapper, the person who tracks party loot, etc.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, I was reading somewhere that some of the company positions are also inspired by Jerry's love of old school D&D - the mapper, the person who tracks party loot, etc.

Yeah, he presents them as being tools to engage players while taking some of the work off the DM, though.

 

[pukunui]

Am preparing to run my first session on Saturday. One of the rumors in Episode I mentions a half-elf who tried to assassinate someone. This points to an injured half-elf in a shop near the starting point of the adventure. The half-elf uses the assassin statblock. I'm not sure encouraging 1st level PCs to try and take on an assassin is a good idea, so I'm going to either ignore that rumor or use a different statblock.