QAM logistics
Let’s talk a bit about Queen Abby’s Mob, and more specifically, Queen Abby’s Mob in Sigil. That is, how big is Duke Stands-on-the-Mountain’s organization, and what would its org chart look like?
Well, at the top is the Duke. The Duke doesn’t answer to anyone else in the organization, and his word is, basically, law. There’s no appeal. Technically the Duke does have a superior, but the superior is pretty hands-off. All the PCs know about the superior is that he’s nominally male, and his title in the Mob is “Secretary of Tapestries.” The Secretary of Tapestries controls the activities of Duke Stands-on-the-Mountain in Sigil, Duke Vanya in the City of the Saved (on Acheron), and Countess Woldo in the City of Glass (on the Elemental Plane of Water). The Duke delegates much of the day-to-day operations, and spends a lot of his time unavailable, in special projects.
Directly under the Duke there are his bodyguard and his consigliore, and the player-characters. Lady Tall and Elaine the Knife do not answer to the PCs. Lately they too have been unavailable. They’re in Xaos, routing the Yellow Bells from there, on the Duke’s orders. And in the absence of all three of these authority figures, the PCs are de facto in charge of the Mob in Sigil.
So what, exactly, are they in control of? This is something that I’ve been kind of vague about, for several reasons. First off I don’t want to overload the players with too much information, and secondly I don’t want to overdo or underdo the scope of Mob operations. However, at this stage in the game, the players need and deserve some clarification.
The QAM areas of influence in Sigil are made of three discontinuous regions. In the Market Ward, centered on the Compleat Orthodoxy, the Mob controls a neighborhood which itself takes up about twenty percent of the Ward. The rest of the Ward is controlled by the Sensates (10%), the Signers (15%), the Ciphers (15%), and the Indeps (40%). The wealthy, cosmopolitan nature of the Ward, however, means that the QAM footprint on its neighborhood is relatively light. If the QAM were to suddenly raise “taxes,” there’d be a lot of outcry from the other factions, and problems would happen.
The QAM’s neighborhood is called Orthodoxy, after the nightclub the Compleat Orthodoxy, which is in the center of the neighborhood. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from one end of Orthodoxy to another.
The cost of doing business in the QAM’s section of the Market Ward is two hundred jink a week, or ten percent of the gross take, whichever is higher. There are about fifty businesses in the area, and Orthodoxy extortion brings the operation in about twenty thousand jink a week. The businesses in the area include Pauline Silver, the Bengali Moneylenders in Prince Graham Square, and many others — mostly small retail outlets, some artisans. The Duke owns a casino in the neighborhood, called Platinum Wheels, which operates at a slight loss (as does the Compleat Orthodoxy itself) but provides prestige.
A cadre of enforcers, mostly first-level warriors/first-level rogues, with a few higher-level leaders, carry out the day to day work of collecting these taxes. A handful of Mob hijackers and burglars supplement the extortion money through theft of salable goods. Your generic “QAM thug” is CR 2. Your generic “QAM elite” is CR 4.
Orthodoxy Economics Breakdown:
Extortion intake (projected; 48 businesses averaging 470 jink per week): 22 560 jink / week
Theft intake: 8 000 / week
Gross intake: 30 560 / week
Skim (projected): 2 500 jink / week
Salaried Employees, minor (80 thugs @ 100 jink per thug per week): 8 000 / week
Salaried Employees, medium (12 elites @ 400 per elite per week): 4 800 / week
Salaried Employees, major (5 capos @ 1000 per capo per week, 1 capo @ 1200 per week): 6 200 / week
Losses on the Compleat Orthodoxy: 500 / week
Losses on the Platinum Wheels: 100 / week
Tribute to the Secretary of Tapestries (10% of gross less skim): 2 806 / week
Total Expenses: 24 906 jink / week
Net Profits: 5 654 jink / week
Who are these capos?
* Kettle Bill, manager of Compleat Orthodoxy (Bariaur expert 4/fighter 1)
* Honest Avery, lead singer of the Peacables (Doppleganger bard 3)
* Artur the Maker, fletcher to the QAM (aasimar ranger/order of the bow initiate)
* Irwin Talon, manager of the Platinum Wheels (halfling expert 5)
* Sister Acid, alchemist and accountant (gnome expert 6)
* Filhomeena, infiltrator (tiefling expert 4/rogue 4)
NB Filhomeena gets 1200 jink a week, while the other capos get 1000.
The QAM also controls a large neighborhood in the Low Ward, the lightly industrialized Seven Corners. The center of power is Effers, a dingy alehouse in a plaza in the middle of the Seven Corners, run by Hukkey. Though the Seven Corners covers almost 40% of the Low Ward, a larger geographical area than Orthodoxy, its more residential character means that slightly fewer taxable businesses are in the area. This contrasts to the Foundry, the Godsmen-controlled neighborhood that makes up much (30%) of the Low Ward. The remaining 30% includes slivers of territory of a dozen different factions. As the Seven Corners are lower-scale than Orthdoxy, the tax rate might be expected to be lower, but there are also fewer economic pressures on the QAM to keep taxes low. Ergo, the tax rate on the thirty-odd businesses in the Seven Corners is the same as that in Orthodoxy. Further, the tighter grip means that there’s less of a skim on the part of the low-level thugs; the Duke’s auditor, Tor Aumstrand, is based out of here. The Duke’s moneylending office is also located in the Seven Corners, for security reasons. Businesses in the Seven Corners include Old Udley the Apothecary, Dudley Swanson the Carpenter-At-Law, the Binge, the Bengali Brothers Fireworkery, and many other small businesses and workshops.
Seven Corners Economics Breakdown:
Extortion intake (projected, 30 businesses averaging 420 jink per week): 12 600 jink / week
Racketeering intake: 6 000 / week
Gross intake: 18 600 / week
Skim (projected): 1 300 / week
Salaried Employees, minor (40 thugs @ 100 jink per thug per week): 4 000 / week
Salaried Employees, medium (8 elites @ 400 per elite per week): 3 200 / week
Salaried Employees, major (4 capos @ 1000 per capo per week): 4 000 / week
Tribute to the Secretary of Tapestries (10% of gross, less skim): 1 730 / week
Total Expenses: 14 230 jink / week
Net Profits: 4 370 jink / week
Who are these capos?
* Blind Rhea, local administrator (human commoner 3/expert 3)
* Brother Yon Tregoran, actuary and appraiser (earth genasi expert 6)
* Mushmouth, enforcer (dromite soulknife 5)
* Tor Aumstrand, auditor (dwarf psion 3/expert 3)
The third zone of QAM control is in the Hive, the broad and filthy slum district where nobody looks too close into anyone’s business and life and death are cheap. The QAM controls only a fairly slim sliver of the Hive (8%); an area called just the Queen’s. The rest of the Hive is skivvied among the Dustmen (22%), the Bleakers (18%), and the Xaositects (47%) with a few side streets (5%) no one at all even tries to control. Despite this, Queen’s is a bit of a prize, since the QAM is able to wrest a profit out of it. Only a few (12) businesses operate in Queen’s (once including Sage Rax) but compared to much of the rest of the Hive, it’s a hub of trade. To keep the businesses from completely going under, the QAM’s tax floor is only 100 jink, instead of 200.
The real flow from Queen’s is the drug trade. The QAM moves opium through Queen’s into the rest of the Hive, making a tidy sum which unfortunately demands a heftier-than-otherwise number of guards. There’s also a problem with skimming the profits, but some money is better than none, right?
Queens Economics Breakdown:
Extortion intake (projected, 12 businesses averaging 330 jink per week): 3 960 jink / week
Opium intake (projected): 10 000 / week
Gross intake: 13 960 / week
Skim (projected): 1 600 / week
Salaried Employees, minor (40 thugs @ 100 jink per thug per week): 4 000 / week
Salaried Employees, medium (4 elites @ 400 per elite per week): 1 600 / week
Salaried Employees, major (2 capos @ 1000 per capo per week): 2 000 / week
Tribute to the Secretary of Tapestries (10% of gross, after skim): 1 236 / week
Total Expenses: 10 436 jink / week
Net Profits: 3 524 jink / week
Who are these capos?
* Billy Fernsworth, troubleshooter (halfling expert 4/enforcer 1)
* Cousin Ghelli, opium peddler (tiefling rogue 3/expert 2/fighter 2)
Economics Summary:
Orthodoxy Income: 5 654 jink / week
Seven Corners Income: 4 370 / week
Queens Income: 3 524 / week
Misc. Other Sources (Extradimensional casinos, etc.): 1 500 / week
Total Net Income: 15 048 jink / week
Projected Gross Income: 63 120 jink / week
Projected Skim: 5400 ( 8.6% of gross, 36% of profit)
WHERE HAS THE DUKE BEEN?
Not your business.
WHERE HAVE ELAINE AND LADY TALL BEEN?
Elaine the Knife and Lady Tall were in Xaos, the gate-town connecting Limbo (the plane of pure chaos, home of the strange slaadi and also the Yellow Bells) to the Outlands (the plane of Concordant Neutrality, in the center of which is Sigil). The Duke sent them and several enforcers (including a disproportionate number of elves) to root out the “anarchic elven silk merchants” and their red half-slaad butt-boys and summoning ooze(s) who killed Gerr Flim Bak and attacked him. They report that outside the town a large fortress had been hurriedly built, which they and their escort stormed. The place was full of the red half-slaad slaves, who were easily handled by their elves until the elves were killed by “actual Yellow Bells,” the anarchic elven silk ones. Specifically, there were four of them and around a hundred of the mooks. Also one of the summoning oozes, a big one that liked making giant ants. Lady Tall blasted ‘em and Elaine cut them, and were able to defeat the forces in a massive melee — it was close, and it was a good thing they brought a bandoleer of healing potions and a wand of ice storm — but the elves in the yellow silk robes wouldn’t be taken alive. They beheaded them, as usual, for _speak with dead_ questioning, but then something peculiar happened: the heads melted. Very bad juju.
While they were alive, the elves appeared to be fighting with a combination of monk-type unarmed combat and magic. Also while they were alive, these elves seemed to have some kind of disease involving redness and swelling, all four of them, but in different stages — one was just covered in red splotches, one had hard little lumps all over her body, like she had cherries growing out of her, and the other two were in between.
Anyway, during the fight, there was this strange apparatus made of wooden beams and silk and bits of metal wire, which the Yellow Bells destroyed before we could capture. I mean, they smashed it — we got the pieces.
It looked like while the main force kept us busy, one or two of the elves was going around destroying things — we found a lot of ashes. Sadly the stuff they destroyed was definitely destroyed, but Lady Tall figures she can root something out about the location, given time.