Favors and intrigue at a fancy party

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I was watching a generic fantasy show and the obligatory scene of the lowly heroes having to go to a fancy political party came up. I was thinking that ACKS is very good at handling this.

Here’s my thinking. In other games, you would have to hand wave what kind of favors a PC may bargain for, trade and receive. In ACKS, with the need to maintain a domain, a retinue of characters, and other character holdings, these favors would have significant meaning and would come from NPCs that actually have them to give… and reasons not to.

A writ from a landholder to march your troops through and to gather food on their land as you travel. A loan to complete your stronghold with the compact that you and the lender are now allies. Allowing the PCs to conduct hijinks in one of the NPC’s cities for a season.

It seams like ACKS is very suited for this type of play.

Does anyone have any advice or experience with these type of favors?

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The Favor/Duty table for vassals has lots of good suggestions, basically with the consequence that they’re balanced against one another and for every favor you’ll owe a duty. In more general terms, a lot of favors can be converted to an approximate gp value and weighed; others can be considered in terms of the downside to the granter. If the Judge knows what he wants going into it, many simple things can become early-game political hooks. Taxes on treasure, constraints on the number of mercenaries that can be retained with a charter or domain, even something as simple as the right to bear arms in town can be restricted without proper permissions. Lots of good, gameable potential.

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