How My PCs Created a Mythical Poet and Scummed an Art Collector

A few weeks ago my friends and I started a SWN campaign of which I am the GM.

We are in Session 2. The group has met and has found out that they are looking for the same person, a professor in the field of AI who happens to be in a nearby system. Due to events that I will not describe here to make this post shorter, they are travelling with the same ship which is piloted by my character.

So my character tells them that ships are expensive and that if they hope to keep travelling they need to find some clever ways to make money. They semi-dismiss my advice and we continue playing. At this point, one of my PCs who is said professor's butler and also a VI (named A.L.A.N.), decides that he wants to make some art. Only there's nothing on the ship other than a few metal nails and generic workshop materials.

At this point I should mention that our ship is called Muscovy which happens to be a kind of duck. So A.L.A.N. creates a horrific sculpture which vaguely resembles a duck and brings it to my character (named Jax). Jax quickly dismisses A.L.A.N.'s art. Sad A.L.A.N. leaves his sculpture to the common room in plain view. A few hours later, another PC who is a dubious travelling merchant (named Avy) asks about the sculpture.

Immediately Avy sees a financial opportunity. She informs the others that if they can find an art collector they could easily sell this item and instructs A.L.A.N. to make more. However, to sell the item they first need to create a tragic origins story. So they spend almost 30 minutes creating his backstory. Inspired by a famous Greek romantic poet (one of the players is Greek), they create this awesome half-tragic half-ridiculous backstory.

At this point I'm ecstatic by their level of creativity. I tell them that once they land, the only thing remaining is finding the right person. So Avy, who has Connect-1 and Charisma-1 rolls a 14 on Cha/Connect. Well, well, it seems they found exactly the right person, a young, rich but inexperienced art collector by the name of Arctus Arctan.

First I make A.L.A.N. roll on how 'elegant' each item looks. Then they spend another half an hour discussing the perfect asking price for each item by introducing numerous ridiculous theories about art and whether it's supposed to look beautiful or not.

A few hour later, they meet with Arctus Arctan. Avy needs to roll one final skill check, Cha/Talk. She rolls a 12 and they manage to sell every item in the list. Amazing.

The funny thing is that I had prepared several instances/missions where they could make some (easy) money. However they pulled this stunt out of nothing and were incredibly creative in the process. Needless to say, I'm ecstatic. I'm actually so happy about it that I made a post about the origins of the poet on my blog. If you're interested, this is the The Tragic Story of Castorys Carios.

Submitted March 04, 2019 at 06:58PM by LexMeat https://ift.tt/2Heki6b