Kharille wrote:
Originally I was thinking of house purchases. Then it crossed my mind, an adventurer might want to start buying up farmland, make some investments and maybe have something to do in between adventures, especially with all the loot they got. Now, it might not be everyone's idea of fun to start up a medieval logistics company, but is that something that can be explored? We have some basic rules on ships in old book 6. So what if the players start getting into various business ventures? Would this be worth creating a paperback supplement or fan made material or do you think this has hardback potential?
It depends how your Ellesland operates culturally. Assuming parallels with Dark Age Britain, vagabond adventurers wouldn't be allowed to own land and knights, who owned land, would consider running a business to be beneath their social class. Roll forward a couple of centuries, and you could play in a realm where there is tension between the declining noble classes, resentful of their loss of power to an increasingly wealthy (and therefore influential) merchant class. And the merchant classes themselves embroiled in their own politics of guilds and underhanded economics that could rival anything the nobles would get up to.
Warhammer FRPG released a supplement that enabled characters, based on their professional skills, to run businesses in their downtime, but WFRP was set in a pseudo-historical setting many centuries after DW. In the DW-era, you'd really only have nobles owning land, and merchant classes running small family businesses - the concept of a self-sustaining sprawling business empire would be exceptionally rare in that period.
The DW mechanics also don't really lend themselves to mercantilism - for example, where is the skills system or the economic model that would enable a GM to determine whether a business failed or prospered?
Of course, if the intention would be to give the characters something to do with their surplus loot, that's possibly the topic for a very different thread! After all, there's very little in the equipment lists for a character to buy, and I think a more relevant supplement to DW might be to look at what rich adventurers are more likely to spend their money on - for example, building a keep (once they have permission from the noble landowner, to whom they would also have to swear fealty, of course, which could itself be the source of many adventures!), sponsoring minstrels to sing of their achievements, donating to churches, erecting monuments, maintaining a militia (officially or unofficially...), wooing a potential wife/husband, etc. There are _LOTS_ of ways to part adventurers with their cash without having them invest in property or land
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