The Mayoress

The Mayoress is going to be an entity that stores some information about the town as a whole. She needs to understand how much cash the town has access to, where the threats are likely to come from, and the current state of the town so that she can respond appropriately.

If the Mayoress is wealthy (or feels a little underdefended), she may consider it appropriate to hire a couple of the town peasants to shift up to guard duty, at a cost to equipment and an ongoing wage. So she needs to understand at what level of threat the town is at, how much cash she holds, what else she might need that cash for in the near future, and how much income she is enjoying. At the start of the game, there are plenty of shops in town (13), and they all pay about $25 per month. So the Mayoress will probably receive in the region of $325 on the 1st February. This gives a baseline to balance stuff around, which will hopefully start to drop off pretty rapidly if things start getting too chaotic.

Hopefully she can be pretty proactive about things, although sometimes that might not be enough. If (for instance) a monster is sprung from one of the dungeons, she will need to take a quick view on how safe the town is. She could:

a) Hire some guards and hope they can stop the menace. Or perhaps raise a militia from the townfolk.
b) Set up a contract for one of the Heroes to stop the menace.
c) Do nothing, hoping that it will take care of itself. Maybe she has been blessed with some foresight, and already has the town set up sufficiently.

She will want to stop the monster, as it is in her interest to keep order so that she can charge more taxes per month. If she gets particularly clever - she may recognise that the order of the town is on a downwards trend, perhaps due to a particularly successful dungeon, and she may make a concerted effort to purge that dungeon of demonic inhabitants (by raising contracts for heroes to pick up).

In the future she will also need to understand what material resources the town currently holds (say these are primary goods such as iron ore, cattle and wood, with secondary goods like leather, paper, charcoal and iron) and either react to low supplies or stockpile goods as necessary. She might need to build a charcoal burners hut, a tanners, a paper makers (?) and a smelter, if she doesn't already have one. Monsters also need to recognise that these things are valuable targets, and the town industry should protect them and lament their loss (as it represents their route to producing cheap items for sale). This should be pretty straightforward, as I imagine the town will operate on a fairly communist manifesto (outside the specific shops), so any workers would just gather stuff up and dump it at the feet of the Mayoress.

She will maintain a noticeboard, from where she will pin a few jobs for the heroes to examine. She will use this to generate here own contracts if she needs to sub-contract the protection of the town. She may even feel the need to take a more active stance in telling the heroes of the town various things. So the noticeboard should function as something that the heroes can look at, and also something that can be put in front of the heroes noses.

This goes hand in hand with the heroes getting new brains and desires, and hopefully it should be quite a neat but coherent solution to collecting the needs of the town and communicating that to the heroes - and the player - whilst allowing for some interesting expansion of the various mechanics in the future (town industry, for one thing).

But whatever she does, she needs to look after the town.

And perhaps most interestingly, that should include the desire to destroy the player, if that is what is required.

Hmm.