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As an adventuring boom town, Pathika has some unique quirks and mechanics associated with them. These mechanics are designed to be relatively system agnostic, easy to adjust, and entirely optional to one’s enjoyment of the city.
Juice and Fame
For many vagrants, life as a candle that burns bright but briefly is a life well spent. Most will gain rep from winning duels, spreading their stories at fêtes or solving problems in the city, but only a few will turn this temporary social momentum into a true legacy. The book provides a mechanic to model this.
“Juice” is a resource that measures a vagrant’s current social pull and leverage and is gained from a customizable list of various small objectives common to old school adventure games. It models their ability to cash in on their heightened presence in the city to call on favors, which might include things like changing local laws, using the legal system to attack their rivals, or attracting followers. Once juice is spent, however, it’s gone.
The book comes with a long list of example favors and juice costs, but the list is not meant to be exhaustive. Also, remember that this list, as well as the Juice mechanic in general, is not meant to imply that player characters cannot pursue these favors through regular play. Like trading gold for a sword, Juice is simply meant to be a guaranteed and easy way of accessing certain benefits by spending resources. A player can always undertake an intracity adventure to set a new festival or start a political campaign.
Vagrants who want a more lasting effect will instead spend their Juice to increase their Fame by 1. When a vagrant meets a stranger, the GM can roll a d10 (plus or minus some modifiers), and any result equal to or below their Fame means the NPC has heard of their exploits. While the vagrant chooses what kind of fame they will emphasize when spending Juice (for example, a vagrant might spend resources to spread their fame as an archaeologist), there’s no guarantee that their fame will be positive. A vagrant famous for leading serf revolts may find it hard to use their fame to curry favor with the local nobility, for example.
Market Instability
At least two common goods or services are always experiencing a shortage in Pathika. Players will have to either make do without them or spend additional resources or effort to secure them. Conversely, there is always at least one good or service that is available in Pathika that wouldn’t be in other cities in the campaign world. Players will roll these every two weeks or when they return from an expedition, whichever is later. As an example, players may return to Pathika to find that there is no potable water available in the city, but magical item duplication is readily available.
Pathika’s economic instability also manifests in the prices of goods, though this system is presented more as a tool for the GM to use at their discretion. Pathika’s prices are not listed per good, and are instead separated into price bands to make it easier to change item pricing in reaction to crises, player actions, etc. The “base” price of a good is 2d6 of your standard currency, which can be rerolled for each item or each shopping trip. This price is then multiplied depending on the price category. So a “Plentiful” good is 2d6 coins, a “Limited” good is 10x that, a “Rare” good is 20x that, and a “Treasured” good is 200x that. The utility of this system is that, should a crisis or player action affect the price of goods, you can simply shift the good up a price category quickly and consistently.
This way of handling pricing also makes it a bit easier to model inflation and deflation too, if you want to go that far. If something causes the wealth of Pathika to suddenly rise or fall, you can move the die sizes up and down to model this.
Crisis Stack
The crisis stack can serve one of two purposes: either it can be a procedural and scheduled bad thing happening in Pathika for the party to deal with as the main game objective, or it can just be the flavor of the latest weirdness happening in the background of your hub town as players focus on other things. If you go with the former, you’ll roll one up every month or each time the players return from a trip, whichever is later. If you go with the latter, simply pick one you find interesting whenever the current status quo gets boring.
If you use crises procedurally, they stack up to three times by default. So if the players don’t deal with the ongoing famine this month, next month there may be mass fires and the famine. Then the month after there might be a kaiju attack on top of it. As Pathika is a city of NPC adventurers, other vagrants will eventually solve these problems if the players do nothing. As such, once the fourth crisis is added to the stack, the oldest one goes away. Let the players tell you how much they want to interact with this system and adjust the number of crises you want to stack at a time accordingly.
Below are a few examples of crises:
44-47 Guild Takeover. A guild has amassed enough power and influence to take control of the city. All elections are suspended, and all officials are either replaced by or strictly overseen by members of this guild. Any treasure brought into the city must pass through the guild’s checkpoints, where guild officials will take their pick. Taxes are still paid, but they go to the ruling guild instead. Their rule relies on:
- The guild’s armory, which is well-defended but volatile due to the amount of gunpowder and magical weaponry stored there.
- Hostages and dark secrets of various guild leaders and key supply chain personnel, who have been blackmailed into supporting this guild’s rule.
- Control of the First Guild Bank, which they occasionally plunder to pay (and mistreat) non-Pathikan mercenaries for extra muscle.
- The ego and prestige of the guild’s leader (6th level version of a character from the Big List of Vagrants), who has never lost a duel.
Omens: New flags flown over the city’s outer walls. Unfamiliar staff at the gates. People getting physically harassed by town guards, when the opposite should be true.
58-60 Child Gangs Get Restless. The many abandoned children of Pathika, most of which are organized into various local youth gangs, have not been getting the respect they demand from the guilds. They all send their own version of a message, demanding mean-spirited bribes from vagrants, causing traffic jams for fun, playing possibly-lethal pranks, and sometimes attacking vagrants using magic items they don’t understand. They will keep this up until they are pacified or get bored (when the Crisis leaves the stack, or about a month, whichever is sooner). Identifying and holding the parents of the ringleaders responsible can also help turn the tide.
The child gangs want: Money, respect, territory, weekly tribute, a family, home-cooked food, to avoid spankings.
Omens: Vagrants held up against walls with unidentified wands. Children riding sympathetic trolls and bears running amok in the streets. Gangs of kids with flails and muskets banging on shop windows demanding money.
61-63 Magic Items Awaken. They’ve been hiding their intelligence, whispering to each other from scabbard to scabbard, roommates in chests under beds and while floating in the voids of interdimensional storage bags. Now, having amassed the numbers, the magical weapons, armor, and wondrous items of Pathika have taken control of the city through human puppets. Choose three guilds the players have heard of.
These now have the same new agenda dictated to them by their material overlords (d4).
1) Find new bodies for souls trapped in magic weapons, by taking them from their captors, making new ones, or otherwise.
2) Destroy all magic items entering the city, transferring their power to existing sentient items or at least granting them freedom from their imprisonment.
3) Establish sentient constructs as Pathikan citizens with equal rights.
4) Find “useful” souls and transpose them to new magic items, creating a new society controlled by an immortal ruling class.
70-76 Infrastructural Collapse. Buildings are demolished and rebuilt so often that no one pays much attention to infrastructural upkeep, and even a minor earthquake can start a chain of structural collapse. Ironically, this means that Crises like these pop up when a structure lasts long enough in Pathika. While this Crisis is on the stack, any bridge, boat, walkway, or non-guild HQ building the players are in is in danger of collapse. Each time they enter or stand on such a structure, secretly roll a d6. On a 5+ the structure was recently built and can take a few more beatings. On 3 or 4 the structure is in obvious disrepair but still standing. On a 2 the structure is in obvious disrepair and will start slowly collapsing; it’ll be gone within the next 10 minutes. On 1 it looks normal, and will collapse about a minute after the players stand on it or enter it.
Omens: Dust and loud rumbling in the distance as an entire building crumbles. Loud splashes as bridges fall into rivers. Vagrants sending junior members into buildings first, telling them they have been made the party face.
96-97 Some asshole got a Boon. It happens at least once a generation: an old yogi or an ambitious upstart performs enough penance, charity, or remarkable deeds to earn a boon from a deity, then immediately reveals they were a dick the whole time. They take over guilds, carry out petty vendettas, or commit crimes large enough to draw unwanted attention to the city. The guild liaison office will put a hefty bounty on their head.
While this Crisis is on the stack, treat this single person as a faction of interest, creating an appropriate agenda. Their agenda will usually be ironically material interests such as wealth and influence, but using an agenda pulled from the Big List of Vagrants (pg. XX) could make for a more interesting problem to solve. For some reason, the boon is always an ambiguously worded attempt at near-immortality, and their non-fatal injuries will regenerate within minutes.
Omens: Whenever the party enters a district, there will be a 1-in-6 chance this person is there casually abusing their newfound powers to steal, blackmail, and skip lines. Most people in the district will try their best not to acknowledge their existence, lest they become the pest’s new target.
They cannot be killed… (combine two):
1) …by man or beast
2) …with weapons or bare hands
3) …indoors or outdoors.
4) …in the day nor at night
5) …except by the bones of a sage.
6) …intentionally.
7) …undesirably.
8) …at home.
9) …fewer than 9 times.
10) …with deceit or honesty.
And Then Some More, Too
While these are the mechanics that get referenced the most, the book offers a lot of specific mechanical advice for handling common situations in Pathika. In the full book, you’ll see mechanics for trials and sentencing, procedures for generating and seeding rumors, a method of tracking and progressing guild and NPC agendas, a method of setting monster arena betting odds, advice on how to handle eating or making weapons out of monsters, a giant generator for custom weapons, chase rules which include an encounter table just for chases, and not one but three sets of rules for dueling to suit your desired level of mechanical intensity.
If you enjoy modular mechanics, especially those tailored to a specific setting or campaign tone, you’ll find a lot to steal from Pathika. A “demo” version of the book is coming soon, but in the meantime please subscribe to the newsletter for exclusive previews, news of other stuff I’m working on, and some quicker and more casual thoughts on game design and media than you would normally find on the blog proper. Thanks for reading! 
Pathika 
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