[Rules Question} Hocus Fortunes

All Hocus characters get Fortunes: fortune, surplus and want all depend on your followers. At the beginning of the session, roll+fortune.

And, By default you have around 20 followers, loyal to you but not fanatical. They have their own lives apart from you, integrated in the local population (fortune+1 surplus: 1-barter want: desertion).

So this means that the Hocus has to roll 2D6+1 at the beginning of each session to see how the followers are doing.

The only way to increase this is to take the option:
Your followers are involved in successful commerce. +1fortune.

If you take this option (at start or through advancement), you would then get to roll 2D6+2 at the start of each session, correct?

Thanks.

Correct.

There's wiggle in descriptive-proscriptive that lets you get change your followers' fortunes stat without taking an improvement option, but few groups seem to really play it that way.

Certainly the only reliable way to go up to +2 fortunes is to take that option.

Thanks, I thought I had that part right.

Even at +2 that's still a lot of failures though.  Hocus followers are trouble waiting to happen.  Sometimes they don't even wait, though.

There's something in there that I've idly wondered about before.  If I'm the hocus and I spend time bettering the lot of my followers, increasing their productive capacity, whatever.  As MC, what would it look like before you gave me +1 fortune?  And specifically, what would it look like as contrasted against deciding to give my cult +1 barter?

(I think it might be the kind of thing that's more clear in play but I'm a little stuck just imagining examples.)

Even at +2 that's still a lot of failures though.  Hocus followers are trouble waiting to happen.  Sometimes they don't even wait, though.

You just need to get another PC as one of your followers and get them to help you with your fortunes roll!

Easy peasy!  *laugh*

Good idea!  That makes utter failure much less likely.  Now, what can I do to convince another PC to become a follower...

Good idea!  That makes utter failure much less likely.  Now, what can I do to convince another PC to become a follower...

In three campaigns so far, I've never seen another PC join a Hocus's cult...  I've seen PCs rather join NPC cults than follow a hocus... *laugh*

My faceless, Kray was a member of Rabbit's cult, but mostly for the coke and hookers.  Until the poor, poor campaign disappeared mid-stride.

Will, the brainer as "the hatter" and barman of the "March Hare", was an active member of Lost Rabbit's cult of Wonderland in my own campaign.