Money
General Comment
| In a general sense, adventurers have a significant impact on the economies they interact with. Treasure awards should be carefully weighed — both in quantity and timing — to avoid distorting the economic texture of the campaign. |
Player Character Starting Money (p.25) 
| The vanilla AD&D starting money formula produces a random result that may bear no relationship to the character the player has in mind or the campaign the GM is running. A fighter who rolls poorly starts at a disadvantage through no fault of play; a thief who rolls well arrives over-equipped for a low-resource campaign. |
The Oath-Bound approach is mediated agreement at Session Zero: as part of character creation, the GM and player agree on a starting budget appropriate to this character, this campaign, and this point in the fiction. The result is coherent rather than random, and arrived at before play begins. The vanilla formula remains available to tables that prefer it.
Player Character Expenses (p.25)
| Vanilla AD&D player character expenses are frequently set aside at the table as an unnecessary bookkeeping burden. In Oath-Bound they are not optional — the economic texture of the setting is part of the fiction, and characters who ignore it are not playing in the world. |
The vanilla expense structure applies with minor variations, omissions, and inclusions that do not materially distort the overall cost picture. Characters operating in Velasian-descended territories will typically have tithes to meet — modest, not punitive, but present. Starting characters are rarely oath-bound and carry no standing institutional obligations, but tithes are ambient from the outset and should be factored in accordingly.
Value and Reputed Properties of Gems, Herbs, etc. (p.25)
| The vanilla DMG gem value tables are genre-conventional and largely reliable as a pricing reference. The "reputed properties" qualifier is doing careful work in the original — TSR lists folklore without committing to mechanical effect. In Oath-Bound, reputed means exactly what it says. A gem’s associated properties are what people believe, what tradition records, and what hedge practitioners act on. Whether any given property has a genuine basis in nwyf interaction is a question the setting leaves open. |
The vanilla gem value tables apply without material distortion. Reputed properties are retained as setting flavor and as the basis for folk practice, engravure work, and the occasional divine rite. They are not a mechanical guarantee.
Herbs occupy an interstitial space in the Oath-Bound genre. They have mitigating properties — they take the edge off, slow deterioration, improve the conditions for recovery — but not curative ones. They do not heal. A hedge wizard’s cabinet and a village wisewoman’s knowledge are real and useful; they are not medicine in any robust sense, and they are not arcane infrastructure. Nwyf shaping does not use material components. Herbs may appear in divine works as gesture and tradition — meaningful theater, but not the mechanism by which the work operates.
Where a player wishes to use a herb that appears in the real world but is not represented in the vanilla DMG — including mushrooms — the real world’s properties apply as the reference point, held within the mitigating rather than curative constraint. Yarrow slows bleeding; it does not close wounds. Valerian encourages sleep in someone who is merely exhausted; it will not sedate someone in extremis. The real-world property is the starting point. The fictional register is the limit.
Regarding the Magical Properties of Gems, Herbs, etc. (p.27)
| The vanilla DMG’s note on magical properties addresses the question of whether gems and herbs actually do what folklore claims. In Oath-Bound the answer is deliberately inconclusive — which is the honest answer for a sepiatone setting in which the numinous is present but not dominant. |
Some materials interact with nwyf in ways that give their reputed properties a genuine basis. Others are pure superstition that has accumulated the patina of tradition. Most occupy the uncertain ground between. Practitioners — arcane, divine, and folk — hold strong opinions about which is which, and those opinions do not always agree. The GM should feel free to be inconsistent across materials and contexts. The uncertainty is the point.