Guild Merchant Prestige Class

Skill Points at Each Level: 8 + Int modifier.

Class Skills: Appraise (Int), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Diplomacy (Cha), Forgery (Int), Gather Information (Cha), Handle Animal (Cha), Jump (Str), Profession (Wis), Ride (Dex), Sense Motive (Wis), Speak Language, Swim (Str), Use Magic Device (Cha, restricted skill).

New use of skill: Invent Business (Appraise)

Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Guild merchants are proficient with all simple weapons and with the halberd, longsword, rapier, sap, and short sword. They are also proficient with light and medium armor, and with shields. Note that the standard armor check penalties to skills apply.

Cross-Guild Training: A guild merchant is a member of one guild and masters the skills of that guild, but because of your general experience and the respect you gather among the guilds, you are allowed to cross train in the skills of other guilds. As a guild merchant, you begin with the list of class skills described above plus the skill of your own guild and the skill of one additional guild of your choice. Each time you advance in level, you may select two additional guilds and the skills of those guilds become class skills for you, as well.

Guild Specialization: The guild merchant is a member of a guild, brought up within a guild, instructed by a guild and has access to all the trade secrets of his guild. This has the effect of drastically increasing his proficiency in the skills of his guild, as well as in recognizing quality items and workmanship of any kind. Choose a guild specialization for each guild merchant and a skill to go with this guild. Most guilds are professional or crafts guilds - like barristers, carpenters or shipwrights, but some are more exotic. The guild of shopkeepers and stall holders haggles (bluff), the ostlers guild train and ride horses and so on. Here is a list of allowed skills and the guilds which practice them. Not all of these guilds exist in all cities or game worlds.

Notice that there is no guild for bankers or large-scale merchants; those exist in the leadership of all guilds, and are represented by this class rather than by a separate guild. The skill associated with such activities is Appraise. This abstract guild system does not cover organized crime and other illicit businesses; though the activities of certain guilds may be illegal in some areas, they are all assumed to be based on normal commercial activity.

Option: Certain guilds are highly respected and very rich. Others are not very well respected, and some are even illegal. The table gives an income percentage for each guild, guilds with high percentages have high status and earn correspondingly more money. Startup costs are also modified accordingly.

When working with his guild skill, or when using the Appraise skill, the guild merchant gains a bonus equal to his class level. This makes guild merchants the undisputed masters of their respective guild skills.

Guild merchants lead their respective guilds. You need not be of the guild merchant class to be a member of a guild; NPC experts are usually guild members, many bards are members of the player's and entertainer's guild, rangers flock to the guild of scouts and caravan masters and rogues can join almost any guild, especially the guilds of theives and burglars, but these are merely organizational ties and do not offer any special skill advantages. Many members of these professions elect to become guild merchants late in their careers when they want to establish a large-scale business.

Pidgin: You have visited a hundred markets at least during your career and can hold simple conversations in any language. This lets you communicate basic things, like a need for supplies and to barter, even if you have no language in common with those you are speaking to. You may use no more than three words in a sentence and three syllables in each word when roleplaying the speaking of pidgin. You can only communicate with creatures who can speak some language. A purely telepathic creature, or one communicating through scents but not words, is unintelligible to you.

Business: A guild merchant can produce crafted goods at a much greater rate than normal. Production rate is per day, rather than per week. You can build profitable organizations in non-craft guilds along these lines, as well. This requires a large workshop or other work space and many helpers, both skilled and unskilled. A basic investment of 500 gp is required to set up shop.

The size of the organization, the profits generated and the amount of work produced all depend on your skill bonus in the guild skill, according to the following table. There is no game rule to prevent you from having several businesses or setting up a business in another guild, but you are usually more proficient in your own guild skill and guild rules may look harshly on outside competition.

Skill Bonus	# Workers	Weekly Production	Weekly Profits
+10	10	240 gp	40 gp
+15	15	375 gp	60 gp
+20	20	540 gp	90 gp
+25	30	735 gp	120 gp
+30	40	960 gp	160 gp
+35	50	1200 gp	200 gp
+40	60	1500 gp	250 gp

Notes: The table is based on the craft skill rules from Core Rulebook I. It assumes you can work six times as fast when working in a workshop with employees supporting you, and that you take 10 each time and work on a project whose DC is exactly what you roll when you take 10. It also assumes that 1/3 of the value of the final product is spent on raw materials and salaries, and that you sell your produce in bulk for half the list price, thus the profits is one-sixth of the value of the produced goods. If you want the formula for income , it is (skill bonus +10)^2 in silver pieces per week. The number of workers is approximately one per 4 gp of weekly profit, with an approximate salary of 4 gp per week, which is included in the costs of production. The numbers have been tidied up a bit in the table above.

Birthright holding application: You can personally oversee the creation of a level 0 guild holding in a months time using this ability; this means you can break even from the very beginning, so there is no Gold Bar cost for this action.

Competition: At this level, you have learned enough of the economic realities of guild life to start to compete with others. Guild rules are usually very strict on competition; different guild masters get different quotas, prices are set, and the market is not free in any sense of the word. This is usually not a big problem either, as there is almost always a death f manufactured goods in a medieval economy; there is no such thing as a saturated market. But there are still ways to force out your opponents financially, and you have mastered them. In game terms this allows you to reduce the profits of another's business by lowering the profitability of your own. For each gp of income that you give up, your competitor looses two. Both businesses must be in the same guild.

In Birthright, your guild holdings are harder to remove through competition. When over-establishment occurs among guilds, your guild holdings are reduced by one level only after all other holdings in the area have been reduced, and only if there are still too many holdings in the particular province.

Speculate: The ultimate trade commodity is money itself, and at this level, you have gained a practical understanding of this fact. Every three months, you can speculate. Decide how many gold pieces you will risk. At the end of three months, you can make an Appraise roll to see how your investment has fared. The difficulty is 20, plus one per 1,000 gold pieces invested. For each point over or under this difficulty that you roll, you gain or lose 5% of your investment capital. You can't take 10 or 20 on this roll.

As an optional rule, the player of a guild merchant can try to predict the future and speculate accordingly. The player makes a statement, such as "my country will win this war." If this statement has become true by the time the payback is due, there is a +5 bonus; if it has not, there is a -10 penalty. Only statements that are politically significant and uncertain are valid; statements like "there will be dwarfs in the mountains" or "grass will be green" won't help your speculation. It is ethically questionable but perfectly by the rules of the game to manipulate events in your favor.

In Birthright, investments are in Gold Bars, the minimum investment is 10 GB, the difficulty is 30 minus 1 per extra 10 GB (to a minimum of 20) and the profit/loss is one GB per point of margin.

Cottage Industry: By building a large network of interrelated workshops like those mentioned in the Manufacturing ability, you can produce items even quicker and cheaper than when using manufacture; multiply all figures by ten. Another benefit is that you need no longer work in the business yourself; you only need to supervise it (a workload of about one day per week). The cost to set up shop is now 10,000 gp.

Birthright holding application: This allows you to set up a level 1 guild holding rather than a level 0 guild holding when expanding into a new territory, skipping the level zero stage.

Financial Manipulation: You now have such an understanding of the financial world that you can manipulate it almost at will. This will allow you to influence world events by discreetly spending gold. You can cause unemployment, divert trade from one town to another, cause food prices to rise or fall and otherwise change the fortunes of a country, and no one will be the wiser. This is a great way to increase or decrease the popularity of a ruler or other public person. As a rule of thumb, this costs 1 gp per person whose life you wish to change for the better or make worse to the point that he might rebel. This assumes that you have some local economic activity to channel the influence through.

Discovering your manipulations can be as simple as a Gather Information roll against your Appraise skill, or it can be the scope of an adventure (especially in the case of evil NPC guild merchants and their sinister plans).

Birthright holding application: You can spend Gold Bars as if they were Regency Points, at a ratio of one GB equals 2 RP.

Level    Base Attack Bonus Fortitude Save Reflex Save Will Save Special 1 +0 +0 +0 +2 Guild specialization, pidgin, cross-guild training 2 +1 +0 +0 +3 Business 3 +2 +1 +1 +3 Speculate, competition 4 +3 +1 +1 +4 Cottage industry 5 +3 +1 +1 +4 Financial manipulation