>
> I would imagine it working closer to a protection racket.
Wonderful stuff! plenty of adventure hooks there!
>
> You meet the chief and are fed and beered, and he mentions that it
> is good his men happened upon you, because the Telmori, or bandits,
> or walking corpses, or whatever has been stalking the woods.
Make this a threat the characters will be eager to take on (Chaos if
they include Uroxi, Walking dead if they are lead by a Humakti,
whatever)
- Do they offer to help to rid the woods of the threat? Will this be
acceptable to the "hosting" clan, or is it taken as an insult? ("do
you think that we are not capable of dealing with this problem on our
own?")
- Will it delay the parties own mission (Try explaining to the Clan
Ring that "We managed to avoid giving any of the goods to the Red Fox
clan as we crossed their tula, but unfortuantely we were 5 days late
at the Old Owls market and were unable to sell any of them...")
- What if the threat is just an "excuse" and there are no
Telmori/bandits/walking corpses? How long before they give up? Do
the hosting clan claim that they have failed to bring back any proof
they are defeated
- What if the threat is just an excuse, but the players stir up some
other form of trouble that had been previously lying dormant.
- The problem is claimed to be Bandits. It turns out to be raiders
from another clan who recognise the PC's, or at least their clan -
how does this affect their clan in the future? What if the raiders
are a clan the charcters clan is allied to? Or the clan they are
travelling to visit? What if they kill one of the raiders and his
clan demand weregild or launch a feud?
....
>
> This of course is your cue to make generous with presents. If you
> don't cough up enough, the chief might pointedly admire some of
> your possesions. Eventually you pay up, or somehow wiggle out of
> it. Oddly enough, those who wiggle out of it seem to often get
> ambushed on the road on the way out of the tula, with no survivors
> to say who attacked them....
>
...News of how you deal with one clan on your route may also travel
to any other clans you may need to pass - if you are extravagant once
then the other chieftans may be insulted if they are not equally
lavishly gifted... (The clever Issaries Trader manages to persuade
each chieftan that his gift is truly magnificent, but that fool down
the road was happy with some old bit of tat that merely looked
good...)
> Of course, all of that is only if you don't have some established
> relationship with the clan in question.
...Unless they think you can get away with it.... You may need to
remind them of your relationship (cue those favourite heortling
activities of drinking, boasting and tale telling...)
> Lacking anything else, I'd roll a simple test of your relationship
> to the clan in question, or the authority that should let your
> travel there, modified by how desperate or greedy they are, and how
> they are getting along with the authority that you are leaning on.
>
... and whether it is intended to be a minor incident or the main
focus of tonights session....