Social, Trade, and Governance Systems¶

Direct Trade¶

Players should be able to trade freely. This needs two-way confirmation, clear item snapshots, and server-authoritative settlement.

Player Job Board¶

Once a player proves competence through relevant skills and local standing, they should gain the right to post contracts on a public board. These contracts should be templated and server-verifiable.

Recommended contract types:

hunt targets
gather quotas
delivery jobs
escort jobs
survey requests

Contracts should use escrow, deadlines, and reputation.

NPC boards should follow the same town-demand model, with supply shortages and town projects generating their own work.

Knowledge Economy¶

Players generate valuable information through play — new zone discoveries, dungeon maps, monster behaviour reports, resource patch locations, and upcoming event intelligence. This information has economic value and should be tradeable.

Publishing Discoveries¶

Players can submit discoveries to Archivist Gwydnila in Trevalkaan. Accepted submissions earn coin at the time of submission and are added to the purchasable codex pool. Submissions are stamped with the contributor's name in the codex entry.

Submission types and requirements:

Type	Requirement	Reward Basis
New zone map	Explored a zone not yet in the codex; map completeness matters	Coin scaled by zone rarity and coverage
Monster report	Observed a creature type above current codex knowledge level	Coin scaled by knowledge gap filled
Dungeon layout	Mapped a hazard site interior	Coin scaled by depth and accuracy
Resource patch	Located a named harvestable not on the public map	Coin scaled by patch richness

Once a discovery is submitted and purchased by one player, it does not disappear from the codex. First-submission credit persists, giving explorers a lasting reputation signal visible to the Archivist and to anyone who reads the entry.

Players can share discoveries with their guild instead of publishing them. Shared discoveries go into the guild archive (already listed as a guild feature) without coin reward. The guild gains exclusive access to the information until a member publishes it. This creates a genuine trade-off: publish and earn coin but lose the information advantage, or hoard and keep the edge.

Selling Intelligence to Senaax¶

Event intelligence — advance knowledge of an incoming village threat, resource surge, or market disruption — can be sold to Innkeeper Senaax at Polheen. Senaax pays coin for verified, unique intelligence and adds it to the purchasable rumor pool. See ../../../world/villages.md Polheen section for mechanics.

Standing Bounties¶

A player with sufficient Trevalkaan Civic Standing may fund a standing bounty from their own coin. The bounty appears on the Adventurers Hall board as a standard order, indistinguishable from NPC board work except for a small "Player-funded" tag.

How it works:

The posting player commits coin to escrow at the time of posting
Any Hall member at or above the specified rank minimum can claim and complete the bounty
On successful completion, the coin transfers from escrow to the claimant; the Hall takes no cut
The posting player earns Civic Standing scaled to the bounty value (incentivises wealthy players to reinvest in the community rather than hoard)
The claimant earns Hall rank progress as normal, since the order is indistinguishable mechanically from an NPC order

Bounty types a player can post:

Creature cull — specify creature type and zone; claimant provides proof of clearance
Escort commission — fund an escort for a specific cargo run the player does not want to do personally
Village aid — post a bounty specifically tied to a village in crisis; the bounty is automatically elevated to the Urgent tier on the Hall board
Named bounty — fund a bounty against a named elite creature or bandit leader; single-claimant, first-complete-wins

Bounties expire after 7 real days if unclaimed. Expired escrow is returned minus a small posting fee. Players who post bounties that consistently fail to attract claimants (poor pay, unrealistic requirements) receive a private note from Board Clerk Lowenax.

Teaching and Apprenticeship¶

Advanced players should be able to teach lower-skilled players for free or for a fee.

Recommended formats:

private free mentorship
paid public lesson listings
apprenticeship contracts
guild-sponsored academy sessions

Teaching should accelerate skill growth, improve guided practice, and help establish better combat habits, recipes, or route methods earlier, but it should never bypass actual action-based progression.

Guilds and Clans¶

Guilds should handle social coordination, group identity, storage, and town-level ambitions. Clans can be smaller social units or specialized sub-groups depending on final design.

Guilds should also be able to support training halls, sponsor teachers, and run internal apprenticeship programs.

Town Ownership¶

Major guilds should be able to control towns, but only through systems with cost and friction:

influence or control points
upkeep
scheduled conflict windows
tax caps
public treasury logs for officers

Controlled towns should still rise or fall based on food, water, security, medicine, and building material flows. Ownership changes policy, but it does not bypass the settlement simulation.

Why Governance Matters¶

Regional markets, taxes, and production become more interesting when powerful groups can shape local policy without permanently ruining the game for everyone else.

Town taxes, guild treasuries, and player contracts all need logs, caps, and delay windows so leadership abuse does not become a permanent server problem.

Teaching fees, apprenticeship contracts, and guild-sponsored training should also be logged so the system cannot become a hidden abuse channel.

See guilds-clans-and-town-control.md, ../economy/market-contracts-and-logistics.md, ../progression/teaching-and-apprenticeship.md, ../../tech/unified-board-item-and-player-contract-model.md, and ../../tech/expedition-acceptance-and-settlement-model.md for the expanded technical direction.