Character Management: Buying and Selling Goods and Services

Guiding Principles

Earthdawn Eastmarches has a closed economy. The only money that comes into the economy is from mission rewards.

Selling items

Characters may sell items they receive from missions at half their value either at the markets in Tent City or to other PCs, but never to alts of their player. Characters may not craft items to sell at the markets or to NPCs in any other form, as per the closed economy.

Selling services

Characters with time based abilities such as the Item History, Research, or Forge Weapon talents may do so at 25sp per rank to other PCs. In this case downtime spent must come from both PCs. Because downtime costs 30s a week this means it is not profitable to sell services to other PCs until you have two or more ranks in something.

The character buying the service is free to use that downtime for other activities - their presence is not required if they are paying someone else to do something for them, but it is important that time does pass for them.

Buying items

Items may be bought before or after any game session.

All items in the Player's Guide have a listed availability: Everyday, Average, Unusual, Rare, or Very Rare. Everyday items are always available. Average and unusual items may or may not be easily available for purchase: there is a 70% chance for average items, and a 40% chance for unusual items.

If that chance fails, or if you are looking for Rare or Very Rare items, you will need to Haggle (a default Charisma skill) versus a Difficulty Number of 5. Average items can be found with 1 success, unusual items with 2, rare items with 3, and very rare items with 4 successes. If you are willing to pay more for an item, you gain one free success for each +50% of the item's value you commit to paying. A professional buyer or merchant may be hired to locate items for you, granting a +2 to your roll per 20 silver spent.

A character with ranks in Haggle can also used in for the more traditional purpose of haggling over price. Merchants have a standard Haggle step of 9, and a Social Defense of 10. They will make two rolls against PCs who haggle with them; PCs may make a number of rolls equal to their ranks in Haggle. Each success on a haggle roll from either side moves the price 5% in their favor, to a maximum of 50%/150%.

Buying Thread Items

At the beginning of any session there is a Standard Matrix Item for sale in Throal at a price of 5d4x100 silver.