Editing No Sharper Spur (section)

=Far Trade=
1) What do I need to do Far Trade?
A ship, some credits (maybe a lot of credits) and a minimum of Business-1, Culture/Spacer-0 and Culture/Traveler-0 between the group. Higher Business ratings and specific cultural skills are also useful.

2) How do I buy things?
Every planet has a Trade Goods table that contains 10 items. Items have tags that help describe and categorize them. When you get to a planet, I roll twice on that table. Those are the best available deals. You can choose to reroll as you desire, but each reroll drives the Friction up by 1 (we'll talk about Friction soon). You can also commission a good not on the table but theoretically available on the world at the cost of +4 Friction.

Once you pick out your goods, we take your '''expertise''' (Business+Culture+Int/Cha mod), including your factor's Culture skill, and subtract it from the world's base Friction+any Friction you generated. '''Friction''' is essentially the local tax, graft, paperwork, theft and general hostility to foreign traders that can eat away at profit. The result, positive (bad) or negative (good), modifies the trade roll, which is 3d6 against a chart. High totals drive the price up from the base, low totals drive the price down from the base. Planets generally have a couple of goods tags that they value highly, and a couple of tags that they don't value, and they also modify this roll.

If the Friction is too high for your tastes, you can run an adventure to remove it for a trade, and some holdings also reduce it. Friction can never go below 1 without an adventure.

3) How do I sell things?
Just like the above, but in reverse. So positive modifiers are good and negative modifiers are bad.

4) What do I do with local credits?
Buy an HQ, create holdings, buy local goods to sell elsewhere.

5) An HQ and holdings?
An '''HQ''' is a permanent presence on a given planet. It has levels from 1 to 10, and generally you can build up to level 5 without any special permissions. Each level has a number of holding points and cost a certain number of credits to buy, as follows.

*1: 10k credits, 3 holding points
*2: 25k, 6
*3: 100k, 12
*4: 200k, 18
*5: 500k, 27

'''Holdings''' are associations and infrastructure that do useful things for you. These can be starships, medical centers, production centers, bribery rings, propaganda outlets, starports, security, trade legions, etc. Most holdings have a minimum planetary population and a minimum tech level, so not every planet can support every type of holding. They also cost credits to establish, one can be established every month at each HQ, and the locals can contest some of them if they desire. Not every alien world will just let you raise a nation-conquering army, no matter how much money you throw at them! Each holding also costs a number of holding points that varies from holding to holding.

HQs also need a '''factor''', a trusted local who advises you and oversees your operation in your absence. They can lend their relevant Culture skill to trade rolls they're present for, they can commission HQ increases and holding construction based on orders left for them, can oversee the purchase of goods from production centers and many holdings use the factor's abilities to govern how useful they are.

6) This doesn't sound so hard. What's the catch?
Trouble. Whenever you initiate a far trade, I roll to see if there's trouble. If there is, I roll on the trouble table for the planet to see what happens. Some trouble is annoying, a delay of weeks. Some can be costly, raising the Friction of the deal. Others can be disastrous, consuming up to half of the goods with no recourse. Adventures can be ran to handle the trouble without losing anything.