A Quick Guide to Prospecting and Mining

[The1True]

Like an idiot, when I revized Irradiated Paradox, I promised a quick guide to mining in the appendices numerous times in the text.
When I playtested the adventure, the players went 100% completist and managed to activate the Prospector Endjinn which they promptly steared towards the Mithril Motherlode for which they had found the deed earlier in the adventure. Cutting a swathe of destruction across the Southwest Tusks obviously alerted various factions and it turned into a thing which I believe I have recounted before (they ended up driving the Endjinn into the lake and ditching it). I had however, anticipated some sort of greedy attempt at a business enterprise and written up a page of offers from the various factions as well as a rough idea of what they could excavate from the mine before the battery on their Prospector ran out.
Thinking that would carry me, and thinking that there was some potential for actual fun here (as opposed to Advanced Accountants & Actuaries), I forged ahead with the assumption that a quick appendix would be easy.

It did not go well.

I loved the elegance of the two-page writeup from @Agonarchartist 's excellent "On Downtime and Demesnes". I reached out to see if I could reprint it, but he did not appreciate the cold-call from a weirdo on Discord. lesson learned. Sorry man! So, I set out to reinvent the wheel.

I gave the unholy mess I came up with a self-playtest yesterday, before running it by my players. I got bogged down fast in my DIY madness (manifesting as 7 pages of tangled, nested tables). I promised to produce a simple, heavily abstracted system that was more about generating NPC contacts, interesting Encounters, and enough cash for ambitious powergamers to level up in a Gold-for-XP game, but (despite the abstraction) strayed immediately into this bizarre, confusing simulationism.

I don't know what to do. I've made Resources part of the Vanished Wastes campaign. It's the raison d'etre for a lot of the NPC's and there's no reason it shouldn't motivate the PC's as well. I'd love to stick a breezy 2-4 pages at the end of the work for players who want to make some extra money on the side or do something meaningful with their downtime with accompanying rewards and consequences. I'm throwing it out there. If anyone's ideas or a fresh perspective, I'd love to hear it!

 

[The1True]

I've shared some execrably amateurish writing here, but this one's rough even by those standards. In case people need a point of reference though, here's a link to the insanity.

 

[Beoric]

So, I read about 2/3 of the "quick guide". You have made a bunch of region specific tables that could be useful for inspiration for a DM who wants to create an adventure, but it isn't really a self-contained adventure by itself, it needs a lot of DM work to riff off the results. And of the infinite number of scenarios it might create, your players are only likely to play one of them.

So, particularly if this is intended for publication, why not create that one adventure? It seems a lot easier than trying to create a self-contained, robust system to inspire multiple adventures. Figure out a couple of sites the players might prospect, and pre-roll the characteristics of those sites. Pre-roll the NPCs, and give them colorful personalities. Make up various obstacles that the PCs will have to overcome, some of which are linked to the choices they make. That way you don't have to anticipate every eventuality, just a few of them.

 

[The1True]

I found when I self-tested that the players would want in almost every circumstance to either sell the concern and be done with it, or go it alone and reap maximum rewards. So, all this fluff around finding a business partner or lender is pretty pointless.

So yeah, I'd maybe keep those faction writeups as organizations willing to compete to purchase the mine or the resource when the PC's bring it to market and cut the partner dossier stuff. The "Overhead" tables got wildly out of control to the point where I was too exhausted to stat them out and turned them into a rock/paper/scissors vs whatever Security personnel the PC's employ, but it became clear as I rolled things up that the PC's, if they did choose to stick it out with their mine, would most likely hire a bunch of 0 lvl miners, augment their labour with daily castings from party spellcasters plus whatever ingenuity other crafter PC's might devise to speed up the process, and leave the security to themselves, making the Hazards and Encounters the most important part of the enterprise. I guess if the PC's continued to prospect and make claims in the course of their travels, they would end up with numerous active concerns and eventually be forced to either sell, or rely on NPC's to run things unsupervized, and that should probably lie outside the scope of the appendix.

I think what you're suggesting is, instead of doing the above generalized appendix, I should flesh out and suggest some rewards and consequences to reactivating the Endjinn and/or developing the claim on the Mithril Motherlode as an example for future prospecting activities?

 

[Beoric]

Maybe give them an option of 3 or 4 possible claim sites, all very different from each other, but all in the same community. And then flesh out the potential investors, rivals, market conditions, etc. in that community. So the DM isn't creating a new scenario based on die rolls, he is running an already created scenario with the major elements already fleshed out.