The Bank... of Monsters

[Messenger]

DISCLAIMER: I don't really play D&D. I was introduced to it (AD&D) in high school 25 years ago but only got to enjoy making characters and having a few short fights or duels (rather than whole adventures or campaigns) during recess and lunch. As an adult, thanks to YouTube introducing me to Critical Role, I recently bought 5th Ed. books (PHB, MM, Xanathar's, Volo's, and Mordekainen's). I'm just too busy in my life to play and at best is content to read the materials, both fluff and rules. I have practically no real experience for making balanced, thought-out homebrew stuff. So I'm just posting my ideas here, raw and rough as they are, in hopes someone could make use of them. I apologize in advance for any errors and wrong ideas I have or anything that's already covered in the game by official materials.

So I was at the bank today, it's part of my job, when this idea hit me:

A BANK RUN BY MONSTERS. OR EVEN A LICH.

Think about it: why not a bank or a bank's main vault housed in a dungeon? It's going to be well-guarded and very secure. Even if adventurers occasionally penetrate its defenses and loot it, how many, many, many more adventurers have failed and died trying, even adding their own goods to the wealth of the place?

And it's not necessarily a bank only for monsters or villains. It's a bank anyone can go to, from kings and merchant lords to the vendors who sell to adventuring parties and the innkeepers who prefer to keep their little wealth safe (or even earn some interest). Even if the monsters running the place are evil, let's say that the day-to-day operations lean a LOT towards the Lawful side of things. This is a bank people (more or less) can trust to deal with them fairly and responsibly (so Lawful Neutral with Lawful Evil tendencies at the absolute worst).

Think of the interactions between the bank and its clients. The fearsome guards at the entrance are ready to butcher anyone trying to rob it- but will happily say "Good day" and tip their helms at the little old lady going in to update her passbook. Some snooty lord arrives to put something in a safety deposit box (which is further reinforced by anti-Divination magics to ensure privacy) and the staff pull out all the stops to make him comfortable (in a place filled with traps, evil magic, and stone skulls decorating the walls).

And how do players deal with the bank? It's a dungeon definitely filled with loot, so is it the target of their next adventure? Or does the bank hire them for one reason or another? To guard the transports/caravans of wealth from their branches in cities and towns to their central vault? As guards after being tipped off that another group of adventurers (in fact your party's rivals) are coming in to raid the place? Or even as clientele, safely depositing their loot and excess magical items between adventures?

I even imagined the bank being owned and run by a lich, but I discarded it because I realized that most lichs and (evolved) demilichs don't really care about accumulating wealth and profit.

So... there you go. Hope you guys like it.

[rferries]

You might get the most replies if you post this in the World-Building subforum.

I like this idea! Given the high-magic nature of the bank, it could even be an artificial demiplane created by a lich obsessed with the acquisition of wealth over his/her/its long lifetime (via genesis in 3.5 for example). Clients could access it via various portals from other planes.

[Messenger]

You might get the most replies if you post this in the World-Building subforum.I was wondering about that. Thanks for the clarification.
So... Repost this there? Or is a mod supposed to move it? What to do?

[rferries]

I was wondering about that. Thanks for the clarification.
So... Repost this there? Or is a mod supposed to move it? What to do?

The mods here are fairly quiet; I'd just leave this post and make a new one in Worldbuilding.

[rlc]

You can report your own post and ask to have it moved

Anyway, it sounds like a fun idea. You could even stick with the idea of a lich running it because he wanted that kind of power, I'm addition to magical power.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I've used banks run by dragons in several campaigns to very good effect:


In a few of my homebrew settings, I have banking systems run by the older dragons who have decided that they're sick of the annual assassination attempts by local adventuring parties. You give the dragons your valuables, they catalog all the relevant ownership details, the valuables are added to the dragons' hoards, and you're given a tiny enchanted gemstone that works like a debit card to use instead of currency. The dragons charge a nominal upfront tribute fee to each polity in which they operate to set up the gemstone focus system, and humanoid artificers work together with the dragons themselves to ward the hoards even more than the dragons already do.

The public like the system because they don't have to carry around lots of heavy coins, merchants like it because they don't have to deal with nearly as much security as they would if they dealt in hard currency, dragons like it because they get more coins to lie on (and if some coins are eventually withdrawn, well, it's hard to part with them but at least their hoards are always bigger than they would have been otherwise) and any dragon who breaks the rules (by, say, refusing to give back some items from their hoard) forfeits its hoard to be divided up among the other dragons in the network, and governments like it because anyone who tries to mess with the financial system or the monetary supply itself via forgery or identity fraud or the like have a convenient tendency to die suddenly and painfully in a cloud of dragon fire without the government having to lift a finger.

[rferries]

I've used banks run by dragons in several campaigns to very good effect:

That is such an elegant, logical, and entertaining idea... I love it!

[Saintheart]

The Prudential Dragon Bank: Deposits Are Easy, Withdrawals Are Not!

[Tvtyrant]

It would be great to have a dragon that is the living embodiment of Scrooge McDuck, including swimming in his gold pile and being unwilling to invest due to fear of losses. Instead it sends its nephews on adventures to collect gold to pay the clients as interest on their deposits.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

It would be great to have a dragon that is the living embodiment of Scrooge McDuck, including swimming in his gold pile and being unwilling to invest due to fear of losses. Instead it sends its nephews on adventures to collect gold to pay the clients as interest on their deposits.

In one of my campaigns (after the dragon banking setup was established and familiar) the party discovered that the oldest dragon in the system, which everyone had thought was a great wyrm gold dragon, was in fact a great wyrm red dragon who'd been lying largely immobile under his massive pile of gold coins for so long that his body heat had fused them to his scales. Now unable to leave his lair or even move more than a few yards at a time due to the weight of all that gold, and literally unable to invest his gold in anything because it couldn't be removed from his body without melting it down and re-minting it (and thus potentially causing some possibly-unfixable trust issues in the entire banking system, if it couldn't keep basic gold coins safe without ruining them), he hired the PCs as discreet intermediaries to help him out on several occasions.

It made a fun change of pace, since whenever the dragon banks had come up in previous campaigns they were generally a source of "someone's trying to go after dragon X and steal Y, stop them" or "someone committed X crime, track them down and punish them" side quests. In this case, though, the party was a fairly non-combat-focused one (consisting of a social-/illusions-focused bard, a divinations-/crafting-focused binder, a disguise-/stealth-focused swordsage, a temporal-/telepathy-focused psion, and a jack-of-all-trades mystic ranger), so that campaign's side quests were off-the-wall things like...

"Kingdom X runs on the gold standard and a bunch of merchants want to recall a lot of their gold from the bank at the same time, a request which is physically impossible to satisfy; persuade/bribe/coerce the merchants into accepting other forms of payment." The party solved that one by having the party bard and psion basically re-enact the "gold standard vs. silver standard" debates from the 1800s in several major cities while the rest of the party faked a lycanthrope infestation to make the outlying towns see silver as more valuable and tilt public opinion toward switching to a silver standard.
"Almost a century ago, the dragon made an investment to short-sell guild X [a House Cannith-esque "magical architecture" organization], but they're doing better than ever, the deadline is approaching, and the dragon doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay out; sabotage the guild just enough so that the dragon doesn't have to pay out, without totally screwing their finances because we need them and want to keep them around." The party solved that one by impersonating a noble they didn't like, contracting the guild to build "him" a fancy stronghold with all the bells and whistles, attacking the stronghold in such a way as to make it look like all the magical defenses were useless ('cause the party obviously knew exactly how to bypass them), and loudly proclaiming that the guild was a bunch of incompetent frauds, tanking the public's confidence in them...then, when the deadline passed, coming in to investigate as themselves and "discovering" the whole inside-job plan, thereby restoring the guild's reputation, throwing the noble under the bus, and putting that stronghold on the open market (which the party then bought and repaired).
"A different dragon is trying to frame the dragon for dereliction of duty so she can come in and take his hoard; prove the allegations false, without revealing the dragon's current vulnerable state." That one was basically James Bond meets Ocean's Eleven as they infiltrated places to steal evidence, assassinated agents of the other dragon, blatantly lied to other bank officials about their patron dragon, and stuff like that.
*sigh* Man, I miss that group....

[Messenger]

I've used banks run by dragons in several campaigns to very good effect:The last part of your description: reminds me of the Iron Bank of Braavos from A Song of Fire & Ice/Game of Thrones trying to collect from the Iron Throne. The difference being that the Iron Bank has to go the roundabout way of financing enemies of its debtors to reclaim its debts, but your dragon banks have the power by themselves to take back what they're owed or to simply destroy notoriously delinquent debtors. Your idea is very cool, sir.