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Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen
Downtime

Rooms and Teams

Source Ultimate Campaign pg. 90
Many players want to run inns, found mercenary companies, build temples, or lead cabals of mages. The downtime system allows you to do this by presenting small constituent units: rooms for constructing buildings and teams for forming organizations.

A room can be as simple as a 10-foot-by-10-foot area surrounded by wooden walls, or as complex as a stone-walled guard tower with a heavy wooden gate. A team can be as simple as a few beggars or pickpockets, as skilled as a group of acolytes trained in the healing arts, or as dangerous as a band of veteran mercenary soldiers. The details of the room or team are left vague to allow you greater versatility— they provide the game mechanics for your building or organization, but you decide the layout or hierarchy that suits your aesthetics.

Each room and team costs one or more kinds of capital (gp, Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic). When you construct a building or create an organization, determine what rooms or teams you want, add up the gp, Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic prices for these rooms, and spend that capital to begin construction or start recruiting. A list of rooms begins here and a list of teams here.

Constructing Buildings from Rooms: If you are constructing a building (described starting on page 107), you can connect these rooms in any way you see fit using normal doors and hallways, or fit them together without interior partitions into a large common space. Unless otherwise stated, each room includes a floor, ceiling, walls, furniture, doors, windows, and other details that are appropriate to the room’s purpose in your building.

Example: A Common Room is a large area designed for use by many people at once. In a Fort, a Common Room has tables and chairs and functions as a mess hall for soldiers. In a Tavern or Inn, it has tables and chairs and is the main place for socializing and drinking. In a Temple, it has chairs or pews and is used for conducting worship services. In a Bardic College, it has chairs and music stands and is used for practicing performances.

Exterior doors are good wooden doors with simple locks. Interior doors are simple wooden doors with no locks. You may install different locks by paying the normal price for locks.

You don’t need to construct all of a building’s rooms at once. The price of constructing a two-room building is the same whether you build them together or complete the first one and add the second one later.

Broken Rooms: If a room takes damage in excess of half its hit points (or is otherwise rendered sufficiently damaged by a downtime event or at the GM’s discretion), it gains the broken condition. A room with the broken condition generates half the normal income. In general, repairing a broken room requires spending an amount of gp or other capital equal to half the price of constructing the room from scratch. Certain building events may have alternative prices for repairing rooms with the broken condition.

Entire buildings can also gain the broken condition. Treat the building as if each room in it had the condition, except you must repair the entire building at once rather than repairing rooms one at a time.

Creating Organizations from Teams: Unless otherwise stated, the people on a team have clothing, a small amount of personal gear appropriate to their line of work, and a place to live—in other words, lives outside of their involvement with you. You may outfit them with better gear and construct or purchase a place for them to live.

You don’t need to add every team to your organization at once. The price for recruiting a team of beggars and a team of burglars is the same whether you recruit them together or recruit one and add the second team later.

The composition of a team is flexible and can change over time depending on the nature of your organization. For example, if your thieves’ guild has Cutpurses and Robbers, some of them might get caught and jailed, but it is assumed your organization replaces them with individuals of similar skill. In the same way that you don’t have to track routine maintenance on a building you own, replacing individuals who leave your organization is factored into the price of the team.

You can only recruit a team if the character levels of its individual members are equal to or lower than your Leadership score. Even if you don’t have the Leadership feat, calculate your Leadership score as your character level + your Charisma modifier.

Unless otherwise noted, the members of a team are not adventurers and are unwilling to accompany you into dungeons and other deadly locations.

Example: An Acolyte is a low-level divine spellcaster. In a Cult, Acolytes are the lowest-ranked members of the group and handle most of the interactions with new converts. In a Thieves’ Guild, they are responsible for patching up members of the guild after a robbery or gang war. In a Mercenary Company, they look after the spiritual needs and physical injuries of the soldiers.

Teams and Leadership: One advantage of having followers from the Leadership feat is that they increase the effect of Influence and Labor you spend in a settlement (see Using Followers). As the primary component of the price of recruiting teams is Influence, having followers in a settlement makes it easier to get the word out about the organization you want to build.

The people in your organization obey you because you pay them, or at least keep regular contact with them and direct their activities. Unlike with cohorts and followers gained from the Leadership feat (who are loyal toward you because of your reputation and behavior), if you’re away from your organization for a long period of time, you might lose your connection with it. In the Upkeep Phase section, see Step 3—Determine Capital Attrition.

In addition to the ways to combat attrition mentioned in the Upkeep Phase section, recruiting your followers into your organization can help with this problem. You can automatically add followers to your organizations as you recruit teams. For every five of your followers who are also members of your organization, you gain a +1 bonus on the leadership check to avoid attrition. As most followers are low-level characters with NPC classes, most teams of followers aren’t trained for combat and are usually recruited to be Acolytes, Bureaucrats, Craftspeople, Lackeys, and so on (see Teams).

Combining Rooms and Teams: This system allows you to construct a building that has no workers, create an organization that has no base of operations, or combine the two to make a fully staffed building or an organization with a headquarters. For example, if you build a Temple and recruit Acolytes in that settlement, you can have the Acolytes work at your temple. If the Temple has a place for the Acolytes to sleep, they can even live there. If you later want the Acolytes to go somewhere else or disperse, you still have the Temple and can use it for whatever purpose you see fit.