Contacts in TOWR

Contacts are NPCs with some power, influence or other ability to do the characters favors, and is - along with the favor system and how it works with downtime - one of the most refreshing mechanics in The Old World Roleplaying Game (TOWR). However, after playing a campaign based on the information in the Players Guide and Game Masters Guide since they were released, I do have some thoughts on how they might have been done better.

The great thing about contacts is that it connects the player characters to the game setting and its plots immediately. This, combined with the excellent writeups of the various contacts in the Game Masters manual for TOWR, the way they know each other and are part of each others plots, means that campaigns almost run themselves. And when players have contacts in common, it makes for very satisfying hooks to make the players know each other, even when they come from different social tiers or have other things that would seem to distance them.

Where the game could have done better is with the amount of contacts available. TOWR presents no less than 16 contacts for Taalagad. That means a lot of them go unused, which is fine if you play in the same setting several times with the same group, but in reality a campaign where to contacts actually matter is likely to last a very long time. It also means that its a struggle to make them all interconnected, or even interesting. For instance, Cox Flummery is a fun character, but he really isn't heavily involved in ongoing plots in the way Giselbert, Karoline, Olena or Lotti are. Other examples of characters that have one trick or little else are Rosamunde and Yuri. Of course, your mileage may vary, and if you love one or more of these characters, leave a comment and tell me how I'm wrong.

Regardless, even if they were all great, I believe fewer potential contacts would be better, simply because player characters would have more in common.

For this reason, I suggest that future settings for TOWR should only have 8 potential contacts - but these contacts should show up in more than one list of potential contacts. As an example, lets look at the a named NPCs in Kemperbad from the 1996 version of Death on the Reik. (Extremely mild spoilers for The Enemy Within ahead, beware.)

Luigi Belladonna is a mob boss with a reputation for viciousness, who's wealthy enough to wear the finest silks and wools. He is also a bit of a robin hood character. Refer to Death on the Reik for details, but thats enough for our purposes.

Luigi is clearly a suitable contact for the The Common Folk, Wanderers and Wastrels and The Great and the Good lists. Of course, the relationships to him in the various tables should reflect that table, and the contact. The Common Folk might have relationships like "you owe him money" or "his goons killed someone you care about by mistake, he has appologized and owes you a favor". Wanderers and wastrels might have entries like "he hid you from one of his rivals, now you owe him a favor" or "you once ran into him when he visited one of the soup kitchens he runs, you had a conversation and he took a liking to you". Entries for Great and the Good on the other hand could read something like "You have mutual business interrests" or "Using his contacts from Tilea, he advices you on the latest fashions".

If you design 8 characters with wider types of relationships in this manner, the types of contacts you get should still be meaningful through the types of relationships you have, but there will be more chances for characters sharing contacts. It is likely also easier to write a smaller set of contacts and keep them all interesting. If I design a starter setting for TOWR, this is how I'll do it.

I do, however, concede that 16 works well for a GM guide with a "starter set" feel like the one for TOWR, as it provides a lot of inspiration for a GM. The trouble is that it bled into the Players Guide, and the GM is left with no control over whether players will have contacts relevant for the plot threads she wishes to use. If they'd been in the GMs guide with a suggestion of shorter sublists to use for players depending on the focus of the campaign, that would have been awesome. One of these, perhaps suitable for the first introductory adventure to be released (they really should have dropped a free one when the game released), could have been in the Players Guide as an example.

There is another way I would change contacts - namely how you get them through play. In the TOWR rules, you're supposed to use the Aid Contact endeavor to make an NPC a contact after endearing yourself to them. That can be fine - especially if what you did was a small thing. But I've found several times in play that a relationship forms to a powerful NPC that should be a contact relationship, complete with favors. Sometimes this comes out of backstory, sometimes out of repeated interaction. It is a very small houserule, but a houserule none the less, that I will from now on just grant contact status in such cases.

What are your feelings on contacts? Do you like having 16 to work with, or do you think the list could have been slimmed down a bit?