| Check Total | Result |
|---|---|
| 1-5 | Character has made a hostile contact. |
| 6-10 | Character has made no new contacts. |
| 11-15 | Character has made an allied contact. |
| 16-20 | Character has made two allied contacts. |
| 21+ | Character has made three allied contacts. |
Contacts are NPCs who now share a bond with the character. Each one either owes the character a favor or has some reason to bear a grudge. A hostile contact works against the character, placing obstacles but stopping short of committing a crime or a violent act. Allied contacts are friends who will render aid to the character, but not at the risk of their lives.
Once a contact has helped or hindered a character, the character needs to carouse again to get back into the NPC’s good graces. A contact provides help once, not help for life. The contact remains friendly, which can influence roleplaying and how the characters interact with them, but doesn’t come with a guarantee of help.
You can assign specific NPCs as contacts. You might decide that the barkeep at the Wretched Gorgon and a guard stationed at the western gate are the character’s allied contacts. Assigning specific NPCs gives the players concrete options. It brings the campaign to life and seeds the area with NPCs that the characters care about. On the other hand, it can prove difficult to track and might render a contact useless if that character doesn’t come into play.
Alternatively, you can allow the player to make an NPC into a contact on the spot, after carousing. When the characters are in the area in which they caroused, a player can expend an allied contact and designate an NPC they meet as a contact, assuming the NPC is of the correct social class based on how the character caroused. The player should provide a reasonable explanation for this relationship and work it into the game.
Using a mix of the two approaches is a good idea, since it gives you the added depth of specific contacts while giving players the freedom to ensure that the contacts they accumulate are useful.
The same process can apply to hostile contacts. You can give the characters a specific NPC they should avoid, or you might introduce one at an inopportune or dramatic moment.
At any time, a character can have a maximum number of unspecified allied contacts equal to 1 + the character’s Charisma modifier (minimum of 1). Specific, named contacts don’t count toward this limit — only ones that can be used at any time to declare an NPC as a contact.