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Financier

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Qualified Classes: Burgher.

Your Capital is a banking family’s palace, a massive complex of vaults, offices, & residential quarters that oversees financing to uncountable clients.

  • Creditor Network: You know every financial debt, defaulted or otherwise, that all Factions owe to other Financier Factions. The GM reveals it by default as relevant.
  • Promissory Banking: Your Capital is equal to your silver $ reserves plus your Followers, who represent civilian depositors. You can extend loans up to your total Capital to an unlimited number of debtors without losing any $ — you gave them your silver, but you have an IOU saying they’ll pay it back (plus interest), which is as good as money to you. This suffers the following restrictions:
    • When a loan is fully repaid with interest, increase your $ by the interest (typically 10% to 20% of the principal).
    • If anyone defaults on a loan, even if you forgave it, you instantly lose that much $ — because the IOU won’t be paid back. It goes bad. If you can’t lose $, you lose 1 Follower per $ instead.
    • If more than 25% of your Capital is lost from loans going bad within a single month, you trigger a liquidity crisis.
    • When a liquidity crisis occurs, you have 1 month to find the funds (i.e. by calling in other debts you’re owed) to cover the entirety of the $ value of the loans that went bad. If you fail by the deadline, your Faction implodes from a cascade of depositors & debtors realizing you’ve become insolvent. If you succeed, you keep any $ you recovered to survive the crisis, but lost Followers are gone for good.
  • Non-Territorial: Your actual staff is only at most a couple hundred clerks & guards. Your Followers are debtors & civilian depositors, not productive labor assets. You cannot directly control any Location other than for your business centers (but you can have Subfactions that hold other property). If you lose your vaults (in the Settlement your Capital is in) & haven’t taken precautions, you lose all of your Faction’s $ (possibly triggering a liquidity crisis).
Tip

Playing a Financier. Financiers are information brokers who turn debt relationships into political leverage. Your power comes from knowing who owes what to whom & twisting those relationships to ensure you can cover your bases.

Your primary tools are:

  • Debt coordination. Offer (complete or partial) debt forgiveness to one client if they take hostile action against a second defaulting client. See Negotiation.
  • Selective credit. Choose who gets your money. Deny to enemies, extend to allies.
  • Intelligence. You know everyone’s financial position & can use this to predict future moves.
  • Reputation. One unpunished default encourages more. Make brutal examples of your defaulting debtors.
  • Caution. You can loan tremendous sums, but keeping loans beneath 20% of your Capital prevents a single loan from triggering a crisis.

You are vulnerable to sovereign risk. Your direct liege can seize your offices & vaults & expel you from the realm. If you loan to someone who can kill you, make sure you have allies you can rely on to scare them away from trying. Just remember: One defaulting lord can become the target of all his neighbors who owe you, who will leap at the chance to plunder his realm to pay off their own debts.

GM Note

GM Advice for a Financial Crisis. A Financier’s implosion sends shockwaves through every Faction that interacted with them.

  • Outstanding Debts are sold to the highest bidder — rival Factions, vulture investors, foreign interests, or any other Financiers operating in the region, if any. Debts are sold for 30% of their actual value & the receiving Faction must pay for it. If no Faction can buy a Debt, find a new world entity that isn’t modeled yet who could see an opportunity in it. If there is genuinely nobody who could plausibly collect on the Debt (by forcing the debtor to pay), it will vanish — but this is rare.
  • Credit availability becomes a problem, especially if the Financier was the only source of liquid cash. Mercenaries can no longer be hired & Factions can only rely on their own limited discretionary income — only $1 per month per Follower.
  • Speaking of hiring mercenaries, mercenaries become a problem. If nobody is hiring them, they’re going to be plundering Settlements for $ to operate with.
  • Every Faction & everyone in a Faction or subordinate to a Faction that owed a Debt to the Financier gets an Economic Collapse Condition that lasts for 1 year. It penalizes every financial & economic Save. Even random commoners who live in an affected Settlement receive this penalty.
  • New, smaller banking families have an opportunity to move into the capital city where the old one operated to take over the larger Settlement & thereby expand their basis of Capital. This may produce a brief zero-sum banking war as several families move from a previous city to war over the larger one.