Two compacted city blocks down Wailing Blvd. from The Portal of Screams in Wizard City, past the scream-squatters and the drug-addled gentlemen and the occasional confused criminal from the future, lies The Finders Auction. It's a soggy, sagging building whose ramshackle and haphazard architecture is accentuated appropriately by the piercing screams echoing down the boulevard. Luckily, business is handled on the street, and only Finders agents need peril themselves inside the interior.
The Finders are a bounty hunting agency. There are no membership dues (hence the dismal state of the building), and anyone may partake in the bounty auctions at their leisure. Patrons of the agency will contract Finders agents to find particular things or people, who then outsource this task to bounty hunters via auction.
The lowest bidder gets exclusive rights to the bounty for a given period of time. If the time expires the rights then pass up to the next-highest bidder for the same time period, repeated ad infinitum. Should someone bring in bounty they do not have rights to, payment shall go to the rights-holder.
Finders agents traditionally take an inverse-proportional cut of the reward money - the lower the cost to the patron, the bigger cut they get. Hence, a certain trust is valued in Finders that don't embezzle their bounty hunters.
WHAT'S ON THE BLOCK?
d12 | The Patron Requires A(n)... | But... | Auction Price Will Be Starting At... |
1 | Cute Exotic Pet | It must be ALIVE… and UNSPOILED! | A high-quality ham sandwich. |
2 | Joke. A good one. | Nobody’s seen one of those in years! | Five 30-gallon drums of unshelled peanuts. |
3 | Criminal from the Past to document for historical purposes. | It must be pristinely clean! | Tutorrage for four years in the topic of the Bounty Hunter’s Choice. |
4 | Cursed object in order to entrap and disqualify their sibling from the family fortune. | It can’t be second hand. | Five years worth of rent. |
5 | Secret Meeting Place | This thing is the object of a dramatic Butterfly Effect disaster. Expect visitors from the future. | A very nice and expensive dress suit. |
6 | Trade Secret, Dubiously Acquired. | Those things are historically very slippery. | A lifetime supply of waffles. |
7 | Nice Shrub | Those things have suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from shops everywhere! | University Tenure |
8 | Specific irresponsible warlock who skipped Suit Court. | Not that one. They already have that one. | Use of an indentured hireling for no longer than 1 year. |
9 | Murder Weapon. (That is, a weapon which has been used to murder someone.) | It must be delivered into a dungeon. | 250 Spellgold |
10 | Lost cat. | This thing just became the hot new speculative currency. | 500 Spellgold |
11 | Human footstool of precise dimensions. | A dragon is attempting to hoard all copies of this thing. | 1000 Spellgold |
12 | Scientific Samples! | The patron definitely misspelled the thing they wanted, and the Finder doesn’t realize the error. | 2000 Spellgold |
I do like the idea of bounty hunting a cat but "Not that one. They already have that one." with the bidding starting at the lifetime supplies of waffles.
ReplyDeleteGood readding this post
ReplyDelete