The Book of Five Blings: Making the Most of Downtime
Downtime is perhaps a daunting matter in Pathfinder, thus it falls to this fledgeling deity to clear the fog on this matter and bring my compatriots through the mountains, to the gates of the interior of the way of capital strategy…
The mountains of gold, motherfuckers.
I’m here to make matters clear, to offer you the foundation of a strong business, to give you the infrastructure to operate on the economic level of NPC organisations and to buy the thing you’ve always dreamt of having.
I have separated these methods into 5 books, covering the 5 subjects of the downtime capital system:
Earth: Basics, The Garden and other primary industry
Water: Watering holes and other Influence generation methods
Fire: The Alchemy lab, other secondary industry and humanoid resources
Wind: Operating on an NPC level and supplying services.
Void: Handling the DM whilst doing all this and building upon this backbone.
The Earth Book
In this Earth book I will detail to you how fucking important the Garden is to your set up.
Downtime’s basis is in the generation of raw currency and capital. You invest currency and it pays you a daily rate as part of a daily check that you yourself may initiate or do so by proxy.
Trained labor via a skill generated gp/capital equal to 1/10th of the result of a skill check per day. So taking 10 on an alchemy roll at +10 would yield 2 capital or gold pieces per day.
Purchasing facilities, teams and items will boost your skill roll and these bonuses stack for the purposes of these checks.
Capital is divided into 4 forms: Goods, influence, labour and magical.
Priced thus:
*Goods: 20gp market, 10gp cost to generate
*Labour: 20gp market, 10gp cost to generate
*Influence: 30gp market, 15gp cost to generate
*Magic: 100gp market, 50gp cost to generate.
Thus it is plain to see that generating capital will always be preferable to generating GP, though the generation of capital cannot be performed upon itself without incurring DM intervention. Thus it is necessary to generate gold whilst also keeping a secondary stock of capital generation.
The best room for its price/output ratio is by far the garden at 180gp (90gp with capital conversion) for +8 bonus to your check. It outputs both goods and gp capital bonuses and is incredibly flexible in its fluff output. I favor fungus farming and other pharmaceutical plants. coupled with good quality food stocks and renewable plants. Also drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.
Its main advantage is not only the 22.5 gp per +1 market price tag, but that they’re compact and are affected by plant growth enrichment, something that you can achieve with a ceremony from the Earth domain from a level 1 cleric, someone you can hire for 440gp market price.
This, rounded down, improves output to +10 for 180gp market price, 18gp per +1 bonus with a 440gp overhead cost, and you can easily have that cleric do odd-jobs to provide his own +4 to influence or magic.
This is why the garden is the core, the foundations of the way. Its yield is efficient, it is space efficient and it can provide you with a wide variety of goods, including drugs or food. Fungus farms are especially useful since they can be built in layers, down into the underground, allowing for an emergency food or drug supply during a siege or other high risk scenario.
It is also mid-maintenance and scale semi-skilled work, meaning it will attract moderate quality labor to your region, allowing for a good stock to train up for skill labor in the later portions of these books, but also bringing sufficient scale to increase demand for the watering hole and other amenities.
Thus we can see that the garden is not only quantitatively efficient, but also has a positive knock-on effect for the rest of your strategy.
The Water Book
In the water book I will explain the benefits of watering holes, docks, wells and other infrastructure improvements that will allow you to build influence.
The watering hole is 200gp market price for a +8 to goods, gp or influence, making it comparable in value to the garden that forms the core of the operation.
The watering hole can take many forms in fluff:
*An actual watering hole for local herds
*A well for locals to draw water
*An irrigation system for crops in the region
*A water purification plant
*a hot spring/onsen (can be paired with a sauna)
Influence is perhaps the least common form of capital cost, but it is used extensively in recruitment, which you will NEED for your eventual magic item development labs and public relations/logistics departments.
Influence can also be spent in roleplay in order to lean on people in communities, such as politicians and guilds. After all, the owner of the regional water supply will encounter almost everyone and know their routines fairly well. It’s a position with a great deal of social clout.
If you wish to perform economic or political warfare then you will need a solid stock of bureaucrats which means a strong influence infrastructure.
It also provides the means to prevent your DM attacking your operations via the in-game authorities, which any good DM will do when you grow too strong. By keeping the roleplay up and hammering it home with the means provided by this system you will gain advantage after advantage.
Docks, on the other hand, are the most efficient method of producing labour capital, as it allows you to import staff more efficiently. With the advent of airships, sky docks will take over this role and will allow you a stranglehold on the air freight industry.
The Fire Book
In the fire book I will detail the alchemy lab and other forms of secondary industry to expand your business and quicken your advantage.
The Alchemy laboratory is the second most efficient form of magic capital generation at 390gp market price for a +10 to magic, goods or GP generation, The best being the classroom at 250gp for +8 generic capital generation. Classrooms can be used in this sequence to pass on scientific and alchemical data to workers and further improve alchemical and magical processes.
The lab will process your crops into everything from drugs and poisons to rations and medicines. It can turn a field of poppies into enough laudanum to completely undermine an illicit drug market.
It can also turn your money into magical items.
We’ve arrived now in how you turn your earnings into personal upgrades, with it is the all important humanoid resources part of the process.
The lab provides the means to generate the capital most efficiently, but unless you intend to make only mundane alchemicals or grafts, you will need a mage and a priest.
Mages cost 960gp market price and will be a level 3 arcane caster, providing +7 magic.
Priests cost 810gp market price and will be a level 3 divine caster, providing +7 magic.
They are not very efficient, but both are capable of taking craft wondrous item, the most important feat available to you along with some others I will soon detail.
With these acquisitions you will have every level 1 and 2 spell at your fingertips and with some extra work all the rest for spell item crafting.
I personally like to take a wizard with the discoveries that aid magical item creation, a bard for my PR department and for some of the more social spell effects, an ecclesitheurge for domains and a forgemaster for craft magical arms and armor at 3rd level, the only manner to hire someone with that feat.
Add to this a number of other lackies or perhaps a manager who has the focused worker and focused overseer feats in the capital resource associated with the room you post them at. These feats will allow you to generate 50% more capital per day and all association capital will be at a 50% discount.
Managers will also insure the proper function of your businesses in your absence, though ideally you’ll want a level 5+ cohort to do the job for the skill unlocks, which can boost gp production massively.
Merchant lords from the downtime rules allow you to bypass normal settlement price limitations AND obtain a further 5% discount.
This can also be used to obtain normally unavailable capital as long as it’s a singular shipment, though it takes 2d6 days, or a single day with a 900gp cost, though your own shipping would likely reduce this.
Merchant lords are 100gp a team, which is a fucking steal.
The level 5 skill unlock for profession alters your GP generation to your skill roll in gold pieces, effectively increasing your output by 900%.
This is why leadership turns any operation into a money making machine.
Add to this that your cohort will be rolling in your place and you can specialise them in profession very easily AND buy them magical items to boost their role very cheaply (by means I will detail next.)
To optimise magic item creation you will need that mentioned above to form a solid foundation, but the master stroke is to come.
You’ve got your crew with hedge mage and other methods to reduce magical item creation.
Now you will need a magical item from Quests and campaigns.
The Horn of Plentiful Magic is a 6500gp market price item that allows you to trade other capital for magic capital at a 3:1 ratio.
This allows you to generate magical capital at a 40% overall discount to generating it through normal means.
Magical capital and a crafting crew already made magical items pitifully cheap, but now we’re entering full-retard territory. This is also why you only build a few labs since now you want to turn some of those gardens into goods generators, Hel, turn the labs into the horns of plentiful magic themselves.
Let’s review our overall magic item discounting
1: Crafting feats: 50% market
2: Capital generation: 25% market
3: Horn of plenty: 15% market
4: Class/alignment restriction: 10.5% market
5: Skill requirement: 9.45% market
6: Trait discount: 8.9775%
7: Merchant lord: 8.528625
To say this is obscene is an understatement and that’s just discounts that I can recall off-hand, with others likely cropping up within the system in obscure places.
Now, this would mean that a custom item of Create Soul gem would be 2558.5875gp. An item which is normally 30,000gp.
With such an item acquired, you can progress right to the nasty side of things.
The Soul Economy.
A basic sapient soul is worth 100gp.
A human sacrifice is a worth manner of garnering magical capital, such as from a horn of plentiful magic.
A lab is a good place for a vivisection.
A lab, enchanted as a horn of plentiful magic AND a custom item of create soul gem can turn a 75gp common slave into a 100gp soul gem and 125gp’s worth of magical capital, tripling your money.
You can now engage heavily in the slave trade and medical vivisection, crafting magics at the expense of humanoid life.
You could also go into the animal sacrifice industry, since a non-sapient soul is still worth 25gp when most animals cost about 20gp.
A duck is ideal, since it’s 2gp and has no moral impact since ducks are all horrible rapists with corkscrew shaped dicks.
Pigs are also good at 10gp since they provide 300lbs of delicious pig to boot.
I only suggest human sacrifice because it’s traditional and if you are friends with a nation, they’ll sell you prisoners on the cheap, anyway.
It’s just good business sense to create magically enchanted soul-sucking gas chambers/meat grinders.
Don’t look at me like that, my alignment is unlisted for a reason.
The Wind book
In the wind book I will detail the frame shift effect, that of expanding your influence into the spheres usually governed by NPCs.
Here you will begin to alter the course of the world through your political and financial influences.
You will reach a stage where you can pay NPC adventurers to perform menial tasks and acts of espionage.
You can easily pay for vehicles and devices few dreamt possible.
I shall provide first an example of implementation:
For 3 years now you have been working the pharmaceutical industry in your city of Carty-garbageton, expanding your business from simple gardens and alchemical production plants into a large standing force of scouts (robbers, level 3 slayers) and an entire housing district of high standard homes for your workforce, surrounded by a 20ft stone wall with airlock style portcullis gates made of iron.
Your next target is a ruined city, plagued with the undead, that needs to be recovered for your expedition into this ancient land. The siege would be a pyrrhic victory at best via conventional means.
You meet with your adventurer friends in your war room to devise a plan of attack.
You currently have no time pressures, a rare grace.
You resolve to build an airship for your force of 100 scouts, a magical one.
Usually these are a 50,000gp magical investment, but your infrastructure brings it down to a favorable 4488.75gp. You load it with a crew of desperados with bolt ace deeds and some light ballistae. The rest will be scouts who will demolish or open as many gaps for the external forces as possible.
You and the party will drop behind enemy lines to take out key targets as the ballistae crews lay down sniping support, ladders and breach doors with their bolts to save you action economy.
With this in place you can begin spending capital in order to boost skill rolls necessary to infiltrate towards the palace.
The war room allows you to pay for bonuses to two skill checks, so you decide on stealth and Intimidate, since your warlord buddy is a rather vicious intimidation build who can affect even undead.
Meanwhile you have used your prime place in the region’s food and pharmaceutical industries to have a holy crusade proclaimed against the undead swamped city.
Your scouts will open the gates and the bulk of the undead in the city will be cut down by the men at arms and knights of the crusade and the complete purification of the city will be carried out by priests who will render it safe in the long term at reduced cost of life to your own men.
By this method we can see that downtime can be used to turn an insurmountable task into one quite favorable for your own side.
There is no need to owe favors to nobles or to mad wizards, for you have your own funds and own mad wizards on the payroll.
You have gained the position where the DM is no longer dictating the quests, now you are setting the course, you have exchanged the roles of quest giver and adventurer.
At this level of operation, that of NPCs, you must hoard influence or your DM will turn the NPC factions upon you as an upstart. You must control the means to remain vital and you must maintain good public relations.
To this end maintain a team (headed by a level 3 bard) of bureaucrats, all level 3 unchained rake rogues with black market connections and a speciality in skills such as law and local/nobility knowledge, using their rumormonger ability to swing public favor.
Invest in promoting the business, which will allow it a second track at a +5 for the cost of 1 unit of capital, preferably goods. Your bard spends 20gp worth of goods capital and suddenly he’s doubled his production of influence for 1d6 days with additional +5 bonus.
The more higher ups you involve spending a day and spending 20gp, the more tracks of influence the department will generate. With a large department this can generate a massive amount of influence in a very short time, you need only spend what your gardens generate every day, and this can be used by your garden complexes as well to generate both GP and goods capital.
Events tables, being what they are, you may eventually get fucked over by events, but public relations and human resources departments will help smooth things over. Crew will be reacquired, settlements will be made, people will be disappeared.
All according to plan.
Running a successful business is all about becoming unassailable and unstoppable.
Should your rivals seek to hurt you, you must be out of their reach.
If you seek to hurt them, you must fall upon them and devour them.
Politicians must be either coddled or removed.
Garner your sovereign’s trust and think earnestly of the nation’s welfare, see to it that your means are sustainable or at the very least have a positive impact upon the nation’s well being and the well being of the earth.
Even if your acts are monstrous, a good spin doctor can make you a hero, their slanders will profit them nothing and your supporters will rise to your aid, throwing their lot in with yours.
Set yourself up for such a position and do so meticulously.
Make yourself indispensable to noble and commoner alike.
The Book of the Void
In this book of the void I will handle all manners that are, in character, nothingness.
This book details the handling of meta concepts, such as your dungeonmaster’s mood.
You must use this enormous power sparingly.
You are empowered by rules as written, but a DM (good or bad) has carte blanche to do whatever they see fit to ensure that their game goes smoothly.
If you overstep and create too much you will limit yourself to that which is purely RAW.
The DM has the unique ability to grant bonuses which are outside of normal RAW, such as artifacts or custom magical items with effects outside of those published.
Purchase things which expedite matters and build ways to avoid awkward rules a DM might hate.
If your DM hates grappling, rings of freedom of movement might seem like a waste of money, but it allows him to ignore rules that he hates, and many creatures have attacks with the grab ability. This gives him more options to work without having to deal with a rules system he hates.
Identify the vices and weaknesses of your DM, work to alleviate them.
If you think to yourself “My DM is infallible and his rule absolute” then you will never profit and you will succumb in every discussion.
At no time are you to allow him to believe his rule is absolute or that your positions are antagonistic to one another. Discourse should be fluid and malleable. Both parties will profit from such an arrangement.
Allow apparent openings in your plans but plan around this bait, proofing yourself against every eventuality.
If your business supplies your DM with avenues to provide quests, to guide the rest of the party and to give motivation, then it is all the better.
There is no greater service than to the story, and it pays dividends every time.
When your downtime serves to increase your power AND to guide the progression of the story, to grant agency to all involved and to succor the story which will in turn succor the business.
That is the height of the art. Downtime that heightens the experiences of all involved.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/downtime
This address will show you the details of every downtime function.
Heed my words and you will have sufficient foundation for any business your roleplay would incline you towards.
I’ve gone into detail regarding my method, though this is just a rough draft of this guide.
I will continually update this as new information and rules bubble up to the surface of our mutually endured mire that is Pathfinder.
Until that time that we speak again, do have fun.
A Quick Afterword on Rebellions
The new rebellion rules are a wondrously abusable clusterfuck which will aid in any downtime heavy campaign, since it allows for your recruits to take a more active role in the campaign.
Agitators can alter a city’s statline by 2 for the week, which is essentially a permanent position for that team that potentially stacks with additional teams doing much the same.
This means a solid espionage department can keep the market booming and the populace stupid.
Saboteurs can do as their names suggest, allowing you to fuck with competitors, distract authorities or otherwise allow your teams to take an active role in your pre-planning stage.
Now your stealthy approach on the enemy camp can be supplemented by everyone having crippling dysentery or the like.
Cabalists, Infiltrators, or Spellcasters can now break people out of jail, meaning you’re effectively able to field full-blown shadowrunners with zero actual consequences, meaning you can curb all crime but the crime you fund that the constabulary now can’t stop.
Black Marketeers, Merchant Lords, or Merchants can refresh the market for 100gp. This means you can actively import goods you need. Alternately you can cycle the market to fuck with your enemies as the items they want disappear into the hands of your criminal network.
Cabalists can also manipulate events, allowing you to induce an event and choose between 2. It’s risky but potentially useful.
Merchant Lords can also place special orders, as mentioned in the fire book, at a 5% discount. A useful little ability.
Black marketeers can establish a black market, which improves item availability by 15% and allows you to sell items at 55% market value rather than at cost.
Most importantly it doubles the available cash for the city for the week, which allows you to dump huge sums of cash into the economy without incident.
In conclusion, the rebellion system is a nice little bonus for what’s shaping up to be a rather shitty adventure path.
I suggest using downtime and throwing out the wastes of space who try to steal the show from the PCs.
Fuck bitches, get money.