HARD CURRENCY Up For Grabs!

Travel.  Buy.  Sell.  Sell.  Sell.  Oh god not like that.  Buy again.  Sell.  What do you mean wheat futures have dropped 40%.  Get me the duke in this room in twenty minutes or you’re fired.  What do you mean the guilds are blocking my shipment of iron?  Get my good tunic.  I’m going to deal with this personally.

You’re not just an adventurer.  You’re a trader.  And you have some HARD CURRENCY to collect.

This is HARD CURRENCY, a modular trading minigame for adventure games.  You’ll buy goods in marketplaces, trying to find marketplaces with high Commerce Ratings so you can trade in greater volume.  But you’ll also want to minimize the Friction of your marketplaces, because Friction costs you….you guessed it, HARD CURRENCY.  Every part of the Commerce Rating or Friction of a marketplace is always defined, and that means you can interact with them as you would with anything in the world.  If the guilds are blocking your shipment (raising Friction), and you go “take care of” the guilds?  They’re not blocking anything anymore and your Friction goes down.  If the bridge to town is out, lowering the Commerce Rating, and you organize the town to get it rebuilt?  That Commerce Rating goes back up.  Take actions and interact with the world to support your trading, and you’ll be rewarded with….HARD CURRENCY.

HARD CURRENCY is system-neutral and can be plugged into any game with an appropriate setting and expectations.  Generally speaking, it assumes that travel is difficult but not impossible and that commodities are valuable with varying values.  This means that its assumptions fit most TTRPG worlds, but would not fit in say, a post-scarcity sci-fi setting.  It is not designed to be playable on its own, but requires you to plug it into an existing system and world.

If you've ever been disappointed at your chosen system not providing you with the rules you needed to just load up a wagon with stuff and go sell it in another city, HARD CURRENCY is for you.