Instead of actually keeping track of things the player just has a category:
Broke
Skint
Hard-Up
Okay
Doing Well
Cushy
Super Cushy
Rich
Filthy Rich
Wadtastic
Wadtastic Omega
This system assumes a constant level of minor attritions , impulse purchases, minor financial pay offs and being a little fucking stupid with your money. Okay it assumes the players are fucking awful with their money and are constantly under siege by hussle, fraudulent currency conversion rates, inscrutable foreign money systems, parasites, scams and substance abuse problems.
But hey they are badly dressed transits with clear signs of mental disorders carrying pockets of diamonds so this is not that implausible.
Broke is zero, they have nothing. Presumably you could add categories below broke to represent debt and the percentage chances of people coming after the player
Stuff has a cost in wealth categories . You can get anything that costs a lesser category without worrying about it. *
You can get one thing at the cost above your wealth but then slide down a category.
Anytime you get a thing that costs your wealth level roll a d6 . If you roll a 1 , slide down a category
COSTS OF THINGS:
An egg: Skint
Chicken : Hard-up
Tallow Candle: Skint
A dagger: Okay
A sword: Doing Well
Leather: Okay
Chain: Doing Well
Platemail:Super Cushy
If players pool their resources it counts as one higher than the lowest category. Because their characters are idiots.
*Unless it seems like an "unreasonable amount" . An unreasonable amount is defined as anything that it would look weird for one person of the players circumstances to buy in one go. This counts as either purchasing something at your wealth level or if especially ridiculous above it.
The FLOWERING BOMB:
These are found sometimes. They thought of as bombs It looks like a polished coral sphere of virulent ever spiraling pattern. It has a dent on top to fit a finger. As a finger is placed on the dent a green hue spreads from the dent. The hue spreads faster if the finger is held on. In this way the "fuse" may be altered. 30 second it will take to turn green if a finger is held for a second, hold it for 2 seconds for a 10 second delay , hold it for 3 seconds for a 5 second delay. 4 seconds and it will turn green in your hand.
It doesn't explode per say but destroys.
Most often suddenly everything in 1d10 metres around it is corroded , stained, and vastly weakened and coated with minor poisons.
Rarely its effect is everything in 1d100 metres is damaged as before but twice as bad and affected as if a fire had swept through. And now radioactive.
Even rarer is nothing at all happens except a couple of new meaningless squiggles appear on the bomb and it is now inert
What happens is this:
the flora and fauna of your finger is taken and used to seed a new world. The flowering happens at a fantastic rate, a second is 10 billion years to this tiny world. Life flourishes , spreads , stumbles into a particularly virile consciousness , spreads itself , scours the surface of things , consuming and poisoning and then collapses , unable to see far enough to stop its stampede into oblivion
Sometimes the flowering happens to create an intelligence more far seeing than this. In this case the intelligence discovers powerful weapons and destroys itself with those instead of merely drowning in garbage.
Rarest of all is when an intelligence is formed that realizes the nature of its existence and that all other intelligent life is unreachable to it. A universal language is created and a message left for the great beings of deep time (the meaningless scribble) and the intelligence then transcends. Or mass suicides. It looks the same from where we are standing.
1. Tailors make everything out of their own hair which grows fast enough for this to be plausible. When people want to kill themselves the hair in the garment offers to have their life instead. The person then legally dies , and the hair is the new personality. The only change is the body is entirely filled of hair. The mouths and eyes open to this dense mass.
People reborn as hair people are nice but socially awkward. The whole thing is awkward for everything involved really.
2. Everyone prepares their bread but all the baking is done in the one oven. A vast oven. A little dough is snuck off everyone's loaf and used to bake a small bread man to be kept under the oven to defend the town if needed. They still need a unwanted child's skull as way though but thankfully the dudes who bury unclaimed bodies provide their in exchange for special pastries. No-one likes it when the eat them in public but no-one really says anything. They literally know where all the bodies are buried you know?
3. Once a month their is a night where the vermin is allowed to run the town due to some complicated myth involving the roles of all the animals been given out and the vermin were late so the living in cities got given to people instead of them and people feel bad about and give them a turn. Everything stays inside their homes and these people walk around with shitty looking vermin masks and use all the tools and courthouses. Underneath the masks are actual vermin. They thought it was polite to wear the masks due to some complicated mythes of their own.
that didn't have anything to do with professions I don't care I'm bored of this and these are now a table of town quirks
4. Everyone just eats eyeballs here or at a pinch food made to look like eyeballs. If this enquired about people make really shit puns about "Eye don't see the problem here"
Everyone crys milk as well. This place sucks
5. Enemies may only communicate via message lizard or be sewn together so everyone pretends to get along. This place is so passive aggressive you have no idea.
6. People are have trained walrus to dig up clams for them. Well they dig up clams anyway. They don't share them. But everyone claims they will when people really need them to. It is a fashion here to a have a boat like a hat and a hat like boat. This place can have 2 things
7. All justice is debated and sentenced by puppet show. The bigger the crime the bigger the puppets. those that would have ten years here have puppets 2 stories high , and the town is in the shadow of a puppet the size of a small mountain for a crime no-one will dare speak of.
8. This town built their last bell tower underwater (it's underwater anyway) and rings it by rowing to the middle of the lake and drop rocks . Various bets and feuds are resolved by predictions of how many rocks it will take to ring the bell this time.
If asked why the bell tower is at the bottom of the lake the people will tell you "it is for the eels. them poor eels")
9. Everyone here refuses to recognise a cat. Not just any particular cat but the entire concept and category. If pressed they will claim that the thing you are described is most likely a dog that is poorly or an ambulatory chair softener.
10. The people here keep feeding their pigs to pigs and the pigs keep getting bigger. It's not going to end well I can tell you now.
11. They hate the earth and any digging is carried out like a military operation with medals and everything
12. The town keeps trying to give fire back to the gods. Generally by trebuchet but they will give passing priest a torch and tell them to hurry back.