Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition / FATE / and Systemless Supplement by Yoru Creative Studio
EVERY OTHER TRADE PRODUCES SOMETHING. THIS VOLUME DESCRIBES THE SYSTEM THAT SKIMS VALUE FROM EVERY CONNECTION.
While previous volumes mapped the raw production of iron, cloth, grain, and texts, Mercatura Volume IX: Coin & Caravan uncovers the financial architecture and distribution networks that move that wealth across borders. The money changer weighing clipped coins at the gate, the merchant banker issuing international letters of credit, the caravan master planning hostile routes, and the smuggler slipping past custom tolls all operate within the same interconnected machine.
This volume hits your tabletop with immediate, practical relevance because it addresses the true reality of a TTRPG adventuring economy. When a party drags a chest of ancient coin out of a dungeon, they enter this exact financial ecosystem. They must navigate coin weights, shifting mint face values, stolen merchant ledgers, and the dangerous gray market of moving contraband value.
Inside This Volume:
- Twenty Specialized Financial Roles: Instantly populate your urban centers and trade routes with money changers, merchant bankers, high interest pawnbrokers, sovereign usurers, tax farmers, caravan masters, contraband smugglers, and fences who interface between the criminal and legitimate economies.
- Currencies, Instruments, and Cargo: Master the deep details of 20 primary economic materials, from gold sovereign bullion and debased currencies to complex bills of exchange, pledge receipts, and bearer bonds. Detail your establishments with specialized equipment like basalt touchstones, acid test kits, abacus counting boards, letter seals, and hidden false bottom containers.
- Debt, Credit, and Coercion Frameworks: Implement a comprehensive modular table that sets the local financial rules. Navigate systems of religious usury prohibitions, legal debt bondage where human freedom serves as physical loan collateral, collective family liabilities, and severe sovereign defaults.
- Counting House & Caravanserai Settings: Flesh out the social environments of commerce using tables for unique quirks and staff hierarchies. Run foreign merchant branch offices, shadow ledgers, confidential letters of instruction, and sprawling caravanserai courtyards where normal social hierarchies are entirely suspended.
- Overland Caravan & Route Logistics: An operational tool tracking transit speeds, toll frequencies, and danger encounter tables across major stabilized roadways, minor mountain passes, wilderness frontier trails, and seasonal maritime waterways.
- One Hundred Adventure Hooks: A massive d100 table of story seeds involving vanished seasonal caravans, mass circulation of counterfeit currency, stolen client credit ledgers, and desperate debtors begging for help to disappear.
- System-Specific Rule Extensions: Complete mechanical conversions, professional stunts, and situational aspects for Fate Condensed alongside D&D 5th Edition (SRD 5.1), featuring an advanced transaction DC reference table and legendary actions for elite NPC targets like a Merchant Family Patriarch.
The blacksmith shapes the iron and the weaver works the loom, but the merchant banker dictates exactly what their labor is worth.
Mercatura – Coin & Caravan is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.
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Voices From The Pulpit 