However, they also have contact with a guild of dwarven artificers who they helped out of a jam recently and, in return, were allowed to get access to magic items. The adventurer’s guild can get access to custom items, given enough time, but the artifcer’s guild usually has a number of odd, potent magical items in stock, giving the players choice on how they want to spend their parcels.

Often, when the group wants some hot new tech, they have to go to one of their various contacts and ask them to search around (because very few of them are sellers themselves). This gives me some control over how quickly they get their loot, but also rewards the players for helping out their contacts by forwarding them some bit of paydata they might find useful or tipping them off to information on their latest mission. As valued contacts, these NPCs are more motivated to help their friends find what they need. And when it turns out that these contacts have a favor to ask of the Runners, the players have invested themselves in them enough that they feel the desire to help them out.

Although some of these may be a bit railroady, here’s a couple of options that I’ve considered:

Religion – Holy Troubleshooters, Batman! Religion resolves so many of the traditional questions: motivation, pay, party cohesion, access to powerful items/effects, questions of morality, etc. Depending on the religion, it can open up a few tensions as well.

Independent Contractors – This is the loose ‘traditional adventuring party’ model, made official by the use of a charter and the rights/responsibilities therein. The charter can be as expensive, and as relaxed or as restrictive as you want.

Guild of Adventurers – This can be either a loose affiliation or a tightly run organization, which has bargaining power with the other guilds, items for rent or sale, the cash/credit to bond and finance operations (with proof of prior success), etc. Of course, members have a code of conduct, and membership fees, taxes, tithes, and even outright bribes and favors may be necessary.

Once they are an organization in their own right, they sick the research department on finding the ‘whatzit’ they decided they need. That could be either a merchant that has one, or a mage who could make one…. for a favor.

Once they are an established presence, of course people are going to dispatch a message to their business manager when they need help and the powers that be may tap them for a job that they’d be perfect for.

I like the idea of them having a little empire for them to care about. Sadly my success rate of getting my players to follow along has only been so-so. Too many players are afraid of having something to care about, to many bad GMs have made them sand off all the handles because GMs have only used them to hurt them.

As for #4, I’ve run systems that have wealth/resources a skill or skill like thing. I usually require the investment of loot to raise it and if I just a pile of cash to give them I just give them 500 wealth xp to raise that skill (which can’t be raised with normal xp) or a +1 wealth roll token they can redeem later.

Depending on that skill level will determine what sort of life they are living.

Of course, as anybody who’s actually played Paranoia quickly finds out, ‘completing a mission’ is not something that happens very often – and you have to be alive if you want to enjoy your bonus credits.

They are recruited to work for a mysterious stranger the party never meets (call him Townsend?). Instead the party only hear his voice and see a shadowy outline in a crystal orb attuned to Boz – who acts as local support/liason for the adventurers (maybe a NPC who can manage an occasional resurrection) but never goes adventuring.

Finding out who the sponsor is and what his goals are will make for some interesting long term play.

The sponsor idea nicely addresses my discomfort with ‘magical’ and elite items being too common. Requiring powerful friends and significant effort to get bonus item should make them more ‘special’ to the players.

A problem I ran into with sponsorship (with reference to # 2) was the players treating it like their own personal high-end supermarket. When it came time to to resupply the group after their last adventure, they’d dig through to find just about everything they could get their hands on.

It didn’t help that one of the characters was the only normal-sized person in the group, and combined all the more objectionable traits of a pack mule, a pack rat, an elephant, and a bag of holding. He literally carried all of the equipment for the group that wasn’t absolutely necessary for the others to have on their person. In fact, he insisted on it.

That is where things like availability, item creation time, and personal quirks come in. I actually used this one once, and had the players roaring with laughter: “Oh, our artificer won’t make those any more. He says the prime ingredient makes him sneeze for days afterwards.”

It’s important to stress to players (and by association, their characters) that there had better be a very good reason for an item or expense. “Portable hole??? Carry your own d—d luggage.”

Another trick to use is a mini-patron. This is an interested party who can be relied on to provide a very specific and limited service in return for a very specific and limited favor. In one of my worlds, their is a sisterhood of clerics, who gather and disseminate knowledge, acting as the world’s librarians. Usually any large city has at least one making rounds, dropping off books and picking up returns. My group was able to use the sisterhood as a means to relay messages to other folks (such as family – I like my players to have to worry about ‘real life’ issues as well as adventuring), in return for the donation of a single item they had found that was quite useless to the group. They also found that, on occasion, when they gave the sisterhood some piece of information that was deemed important, the sisters would volunteer to do some small favor for them, such as provide a map for a particular area.

Providing the players with a NPC group that is friendly and will exchange these small favors works very well. My players actually started keeping notes of things they saw, to provide to the sisterhood. This gave them access to better favors as they went along, and the interactions with individual sisters gave them more insight into how the world worked and the sisterhood’s place in it.