So we currently have a campaign with a paladin, trickster, cleric, ranger, and nightblade, all starting at name level with domains.
The first four classes used the recommended buy-system for high-level conquerors (240,000 gp), and they all ended up with similar domains: About 4-8 hexes of controlled land, a monthly income of around 10,000 gp on revenues of twice that, and some moderate expenses. They’ve been growing very slowly at a few percent a month, with heavy investments of gold that will take many months to pay back. All this seems to be working fine.
The thieves’ guild is rapidly expanding, and is earning more net income than everyone else combined.
Roughly speaking, he started with around 120,000 gp worth of spies, the highest level thief type. They’ve been making something close to the estimated average of 425 gp of net income per month using their hijinks (and paying various court fees, etc). With around 100 spies, this amounts to 42,000 gp of income, against 12,500 gp of their salary expenses, for around 30,000 gp each turn. Which means that guild income already starts out a factor of 3 larger than everyone else’s.
More to the point, guild income can rapidly expand. With access to a few major markets (I have a Class I and two Class II’s within a month’s travel by sea), his roster can add a couple dozen spies a month and many more low-level ruffians. At this point he’s making over 70,000 gp per month, while everyone else is still creeping slowly through the 10,000 - 15,000 gp range, and is expanding his syndicate to multiple cities.
He’s also obviously at a loss for what to do with all this extra money. He keeps petitioning me for some kind of elite high-level exotic troops that can be quickly recruited to absorb this income. But I really don’t want to move the campaign in that direction so quickly, with griffon riders and vampire platoons making everyone else’s basic infantry look paltry by comparison.
What can I do to create a sink for all this exponentially rising syndicate wealth? Is there some sink already in the rules that I’m not noticing?
He’s already offered to switch to playing a mage and restart his domain if I can’t find another solution, but I hate giving up on the rogue classes entirely for domain-level play.