The Gaming Den

A setting/monster idea, genies serve the brass city and grant wishes like banks granting loans. So the idea of "genies and monkey paws give you wishes in the most dicky way possible" is what happens when you wish with bad credit or unable to repay interest fast enough.

So what do you have that the wish granters want?

Your soul! Mwahahaha.

No seriously, it's one of the things the genies can't create, so they want you to serve a term in their giant spirit armies for wars against the Efreeti. Your spirit will be coal for the celestial war engines...

If the genies want disembodied spirits to work for them, then high-quality wishes are probably not much like loans. Wealthy or powerful mortals with hundreds of slaves or serfs can offer a better standard of living to servants that pledge to keep working post-mortem and then put the contracts on the interplanar market. One person's soul is unlikely to be worth a broker's time unless there's a serious quality advantage, but if they are that powerful then you don't need to turn them into a spirit soldier.

Could be some entertaining stock market parallels if genies are investing into various ventures to develop batches of useful souls, though. Especially when one of them is a vampire count mesmerizing thralls into genie war boot camp, who is constantly worried about how he'll look at "stakeholder meetings"

I've often seen a similar approach from the other end: genies (or whatever) aren't individually powerful enough to grant wishes, but they create something like an insurance policy that allows individuals to draw on centralized magical "funds." Each genie has to justify all wishes granted to the insurance agency, so they avoid using that ability if at all possible.

I think the original example of that was with lepracauns instead of genies. The fey of a particular forest had enough magic power stored to grant one wish, and it was only to be used when the inhabitants were in serious danger.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:vampire

"stakeholder meetings"

*golf clap*

Avoraciopoctules wrote:So what do you have that the wish granters want?

That's something I'd like to find out. Souls is one abstract thing, but what else could be desired by the wish granters

Souls could work, especially if it's not necessarily the wisher's soul.

Souls could totally work. You couldn't farm souls because D&D has levels and level 1 characters could just not have enough value to be worth a wish. Under a Level=Soul Power paradigm it would make perfect sense that Genies, Ifrits, and Demons try harder and harder to get Adventurers souls as they move up in the world.

Soul bargains, like aging effects, are basically bad for RPGs. RPGs have a finite end, and power now for pain later trades are things that will either be paid or not depending on how long the game is played. Essentially it creates an incentive for players to stop playing this game and start playing another one. That's quite corrosive to the game.

-Username17

Well, nobody said "after they die." You could make a wish and become Soulless on the spot. Make wish, apply template.

Or it could be a quid pro quo thing. They do a wish for you, and then you have to do something they're forbidden to do, like erase one of the solomonic seals keeping the City of Brass out of phase with the prime material plane or something.

Ancient History wrote:Well, nobody said "after they die." You could make a wish and become Soulless on the spot. Make wish, apply template.

What do I need a soul for? It's not like I was using it for anything.

...that you know of.

But the more we gave them away, the more we came to realize: Drink would not satisfy...food turned to ash in our mouths...and all the pleasurable company in the world could not slake our lust...We are cursed men, Miss Turner. Compelled by greed, we were, but now...we are consumed by it.

And of course, you could always go the William Hope Hodgson Lord Dunsany route, where you're keenly aware of everything your soul is going through constantly when it's away from your body.

Ancient History wrote:And of course, you could always go the William Hope Hodgson route, where you're keenly aware of everything your soul is going through constantly when it's away from your body.

I almost want to look this up purely for this, but I doubt it can compare to the image in my mind, of a gruff swordsman slogging through waist deep sewage to track down the feces daemon, keenly aware that his soul is currently dick deep in a five succubus orgy, just thinking "that fucking bastard...."

Actually, come to think of it I got WHH mixed up with Lord Dunsany. The gist is that a pirate captain stopped off at some witchy isles and learned how to bewitch the souls of his crew; for discipline and his own amusement he'd send their souls out into outer space or the bottom of the ocean or whatever pleased him. In the end they marooned him to die, but he got his revenge...

Larry Niven also had a great story where a damned soul couldn't even perceive a church or priest to seek absolution; it's like they didn't exist for them. In a D&D context that might mean an inability to be effected by divine healing or summat.

Ancient History wrote:Well, nobody said "after they die." You could make a wish and become Soulless on the spot. Make wish, apply template.

DC comics actually put out a (moderately crappy) comic about that situation. Guy thought he was getting a "power now for pain later" deal, but the devil cheated him and took his soul while leaving him alive.

Claiming souls though turns genies into Devils with the labels switched.

OgreBattle wrote:Claiming souls though turns genies into Devils with the labels switched.

Then we still need to figure out what the genies want. Since this is a loan, the genie is giving you something now for more of it later. And what it's giving you is magical exertion and part of its time.

How about this: the immortal Genies have a tradition of bartering years of service in exchange for power or knowledge. The modern economic system complicated things, with people buying and selling shares in genie contracts and some genies entering service when they default on other obligations. Organizations of specialists developed to handle the complexity of these contracts and more easily allow people to manage investments. "Genie banks" don't care about money, but they do recognize that mortals have some value in their time. (the fact that a mortal's time is finite is actually sort of an advantage when part of the calculations are how valuable the time is to you)

If you want a wish, you need to convince the bank that your time is valuable enough in comparison to that of the genie who could grant it. If you are persuasive and can provide collateral in the form of letters of endorsement and proven achievements, you can trade a year of service later for 3 wishes now. Of course, you can't be certain who exactly will buy stock in your year of service, and if your time is seemed insufficiently valuable, you may owe more years than your expected lifespan. That means you're in trouble.

Genie investors "farming" powerful souls would explain why there's always a convenient duke or baron or whatever who has a convenient series of troubles for you adventurerers to look into. He's fattening you up to earn his big wish bonus at the end of the decade.

A while ago I had the idea that genies would grant wishes because when they do, your name goes in a giant book that they will look at whenever they need something done and don't want to/can't do it themselves. They try to keep an eye to appropriate level and such, so a first level newb who gets a wish might get summoned to muck out some stables in the City of Brass, and a mid level seasoned adventurer might get summoned to retrieve the Sultan's prized flaming scimitar from the Elemental Plane of Water. Basically you're getting wishes in return for a promise of doing labour, which is really just "at some future point, you'll be given an adventure by the genies"

IMHO this whole topic essentially fails right at the start because, as Frank said, playing on credit can never result in a balanced system. So no, Genies can't be bankers and wishes can't be loans if you want to have access to wishes in your game. Besides, I don't think it's substantially better if you lose your soul as soon as the bargain is made. Paying with your own character power for stuff is nothing short of paying with XP and I think everyone agrees that that's made of fail.

The reward for being proactive is that you get your loot before the quest instead of afterwards.

This is true whether you start a business, or take out loans from Efreets.

Prak_Anima wrote:A while ago I had the idea that genies would grant wishes because when they do, your name goes in a giant book that they will look at whenever they need something done and don't want to/can't do it themselves. They try to keep an eye to appropriate level and such, so a first level newb who gets a wish might get summoned to muck out some stables in the City of Brass, and a mid level seasoned adventurer might get summoned to retrieve the Sultan's prized flaming scimitar from the Elemental Plane of Water. Basically you're getting wishes in return for a promise of doing labour, which is really just "at some future point, you'll be given an adventure by the genies"

So you become bound to a "Summon Adventurer X" contract? That sounds fun.

As for it being bad for gameplay, I'm thinking of it more in terms of writing a story than a tabletop RPG.