The City Holding

Version 0.10 · not yet playtested

Jon Mayo. PUBLIC DOMAIN (CC0-1.0)

The City Holding

Not every base sits out past the wall. A company that wants a foothold inside an established city-state, a thieves’ bolthole, a guild hall, an inn it runs, a back- street smithy, a minor shrine to a lesser god, takes a city holding: a property within the walls, where the danger is not raiders but the landlord, the watch, the guilds, and the tax-collector. This is the mini stronghold, a smaller, city-bound sibling of the frontier hold.

It runs on everything the frontier Stronghold already sets up, read that first, and this supplement only spells out what differs. It sits on the downtime fortnight and its coin / materials / time economy (Downtime); it adds no new dice (every roll is the usual 3d6 on the standard ladder, every table ordinary d6); and it keeps the stronghold’s first law: a holding buys access, options, and convenience, never raw power. No facility, no tag, no upgrade here raises a character’s attack, defense, HP, or damage.

To that the city adds a second hard law: a holding never turns a profit. An inn takes coin at the bar, a smithy sells horseshoes, a guild collects dues, but those takings are bookkeeping that, at best, pays the place’s own upkeep. They never hand the party a surplus. A holding is somewhere coin goes, not somewhere it comes from; that is the whole point of owning one, and the moment a base starts funding the company, it has quietly replaced the dungeon as the engine of the game. Adventuring stays the only real source of wealth.

1 The property and its type

A holding belongs to the company and runs through the same shared purse and vote as a stronghold (the tithe feeds its Treasury; the company votes what to build and what to pay). Track it on the base sheet: Name · Type · District · Tags (and each tag’s state) · Heat · Cover · Treasury · Staff · Notes.

Pick a type, the fiction of the place, which sets its face to the city and its one or two starting tags:

Type | What it is | Starts with
Bolthole / hideout | a hidden room, a cellar under a front | Concealed, Bolt-run
Guild hall / lodge | a chartered company’s seat | Standing, Common room
Inn / tavern | rooms above, a taproom below | Common room, Bunks
Smithy / workshop | a back-street craft house | Forge, Standing
Shrine / minor temple | an altar to a lesser power | Sanctuary, Standing
Trade house / shop | a chartered storefront | Market contact, Standing

A starting holding is modest: the type, its one or two tags, no staff to speak of, and an empty Treasury. From there it grows by tags.

2 Tags: the upgrade system

A holding does not have a fixed list of rooms; it has tags. A tag is one named capability bolted onto the property, an access, an option, a convenience, and the list is open-ended: players propose a tag that fits their place, and the GM prices it by analogy to the ones below. You do not need a rule for every possible upgrade; you need the pattern, and a tag is the pattern.

Tag | Grants (access / option / convenience)
Concealed | the place is hidden; the watch and rivals must find it before they can move on it (lowers Heat’s bite)
Bolt-run | a tunnel or roof-route out; escape the watch, slip a raid, leave the city quick
Vault | a hidden strongbox; protects the Treasury and stash from theft, and halves what a shakedown confiscates
Bunks | beds for staff, guests, and retainers; a safe full rest for allies you house
Forge / Workshop / Lab | craft at home: enables a craft project, or lowers one a tier (cheaper, faster), like the stronghold smithy
Scriptorium | a mage may run the spell-research project here
Training floor | a fighter, monk, or rogue may train advances here, sparing the city’s for-hire tuition
Sanctuary | tends curses and disease; a cleric or paladin may train here
Common room | a place to meet contacts and gather rumors: ease the Carouse / network downtime action
Market contact | buy more of the harder-to-find gear list, reliably
Fence | move hot goods and buy what the open market won’t sell (the gray list)
Standing | a charter, a license, a patron’s word: legitimacy that lowers Heat and lets you operate in the open

Building a tag works exactly like raising a stronghold facility (Stronghold, Facilities): a downtime project with a build clock, paid in coin up front + upkeep every fortnight, the better tags gated by materials. Use the stronghold’s Tier I / II costs as the dial, a simple tag (Common room, Bunks) is a Tier I; a serious one (Forge, Scriptorium, Vault) a Tier II. A tag can be upgraded to grant more. (There is no Tier III here, the grand works belong to a frontier hold or a founded city, not a rented room.)

3 What it costs you, every fortnight

A frontier hold bleeds coin to garrison and raids; a city holding bleeds it to the city. Three drains come due each fortnight, paid from the Treasury:

Drain | What it is | By district (v0)
Rent or tax | a landlord’s rent, or the city’s property tax if you own | humble ~2 · respectable ~6 · prestigious ~15
Staff wages | every staffed tag needs hands: a keeper, a smith, a fence, a guard | ~2 per staffed tag
Dues or protection | the price of being left alone: guild dues, a magistrate’s “consideration,” a gang’s cut | ~3, more as Heat rises

If the Treasury can’t cover the fortnight, the place frays the same way a stronghold does: tags go dormant (no benefit until paid up), staff drift off, and Heat rises, a missed payment is exactly the sort of thing that gets you noticed. A grander address in a prouder district costs more on every line; a humble hole in a poor quarter is cheap to keep but buys little reach.

4 Heat and trouble

The city’s answer to the frontier’s raids is Heat: how much hostile attention the watch, a guild, the tax-office, or a rival pays your holding. It is a 0–5 track (the city echo of a region’s threat). Heat rises when you commit crimes that trace back, miss your dues, or get seen doing what you shouldn’t; it falls with bribes, lying low for a fortnight, or buying legitimacy (the Standing tag, a Concealed place).

Against Heat you set your Cover: legitimacy plus discretion, the sum of cover- granting tags (Standing, Concealed, Bolt-run) and any standing bribe. Each fortnight, as a stronghold compares threat to defense, compare Heat to Cover:

Shortfall (Heat − Cover) | What the trouble costs
0 or less | Quiet. The right palms are greased, the place unremarked. Nothing.
1 | Noticed. A fine, a bribe demanded, a warning shot. Lose 2d6 × 5 coin.
2 | A shakedown or a raid. Lose 3d6 × 10 coin and a tag is sealed (dormant: a writ nailed to the door, goods confiscated) until you clear it.
3+ | Closed down. Lose 3d6 × 20 coin and a tag is wrecked; the holding may be seized outright if you cannot pay or pull strings.

A Vault halves the coin a shakedown takes. So the decision the players carry is the stronghold’s, in city dress: keep your Cover at or above your Heat and you are left alone; let the gap open and the city closes in, worse the wider it is. Pay the dues and stay legitimate, or run hot and dirty and gamble on the bolt-run.

Will the heroes handle it? Whenever a shortfall would cost you, the players choose, just as they choose to defend a frontier wall:

Take the loss. Pay the fine, eat the confiscation, go adventure.

Make it the session. Bribe and scheme it away across a downtime fortnight, or play it out, a heist to recover the sealed goods, a tense audience with the magistrate, a knife in the dark for the rival who informed. Win and the trouble is averted, with a lead or a favor for spoils; lose and you take it at the next worse step.

5 A note for authors

Hold both laws. Access, options, convenience, never raw power, no tag touches a character’s numbers; and a holding never turns a profit, its takings only offset its own upkeep. When you invent a tag, price it against the table and ask what it opens, never what bonus it adds or what coin it yields. A city holding is a set of doors and a stack of bills, a place to spend the spoils of adventure, and a fresh way for the city to take them back.

Beta: not yet playtested. A working draft (version 0.7), reasoned against the stronghold’s economy but unproven at the table. Play it, push on it, report what breaks.