Editing Bribery & Gambling (section)

==Gambling debts==
In the Last Age, gambling is a widespread activity, especially in occupied lands.It serves both to escape the sadness of life, and to provide some much-needed resources (at least that is what the people think before they try their luck).

Guards also play to increase their pay so that they can feed their family, or just simply to escape boredom of guard duty. A clever PC might beforehand “win” against the guard at a game of chance. That way, the guard might be indebted to the PC for a specific value (see the table above for the “cost” of services a guard could provide). The PC might also “buy” the debt from someone who owns a debt to the guard (legally it is called a subrogation).

It is an unwritten but fundamental rule in the life of the Last Age: a gambling debt always has to be paid, no matter the risk one takes. If the guard did not want to take risks, then he should not have played in the first place. There is a specific underworld organization, dedicated to widespread gambling, that can’t afford to let people go on without paying their gambling debts. It just would ruin the business, after all. Everyone knows that, everywhere there is a gambling ring, there are also “enforcers” (usually thugs or even corrupt orcs for that matter) who will not hesitate to give crippling blows to a person who does not pay his debts, even going a sfar as taking their family captive to be sold as slaves later.

There is a simple system to make sure one owns a gambling debt: the owner of the gambling ring simply provides the “winner” with a token (usually a feather) the color of which depends on the price. The owner of the gambling den keeps tabs (most can’t write or read, but they do have a very good memory). Only them can allow a person to “buy” a gambling debt from another, to make sure it will be “enforced” by the underworld.

It is widely known in the underworld that the gnome family of the Crossbow “owns” every gambling parlor across Eredane. Their secret organization, known as “the Wild Cards”, attracts many people to their gambling dens. The love of gambling is growing strong in the Last Age, so one could meete even orc commanders, traitor princes and even low-ranking legates in “Vip rooms” of some gambling halls. All were “hooked” to gambling and, worse, owe the Crossbows a few “favours” (the Crossbows are also masters in cheating to chance games, all of them having almost supernatural scores in Sleight of Hand…). Very few people know that such gambling debts are sometimes used for the resistance (blackmailing officials into giving vital information, giving safeconducts to specific individuals, or the liberation of a specific slave or prisoner). What remains to be known is whether the Resistance “buys” such things from the Crossbows or the family itself is part of the resistance…