Fantasy Merchant Race based on Ferengi, how would they be organized?

[Scalenex]

I am a big fan of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, especially the Ferengi centered episodes. I like the idea of a greedy people that stops short of outright theft due to a salesmanship code.

I am fascinated by Japanese folklore on Tengu and I like the D&D Kenku but think they could be fleshed out more.

I've sort of reinvented the Kenku as Tengku. They are still crow people good at mimicry but unlike the D&D 5th ed official Kenku they do have a pathological lack of creativity and they can talk normally if they choose. According to legend the Tengku lost their ability to fly as punishment for their avarice

For the most part, I've just tossed in Tengku NPCs running a lot of specialized shops with the high end gear that adventurers like. The Tengku are dispersed among the human, dwarf, and elf nations but I'm thinking maybe I should make a Tengku nation somewhere.

How would a merchant race set up their own government. If you have a Tengku city they cannot ALL be merchants. If they have an equivalent to the Ferengi Grand Nagus, how would a Tengku leader assert his will over geographically removed subjects around an entire fantasy world?

Maybe the Tengku shouldn't have a centralized government or home nations. What do you guys think.

[Damon_Tor]

You could have a hierarchy organized by debt: who ever is owed something by someone else has power over that person, which sets up bankers as the defacto government, with the chairman and board of directors of the central bank the highest authority.

[LibraryOgre]

So, the Pueblo Corporate Council in Shadowrun might be a neat model.

Every citizen of the country has some shares in the government. Your first share entitles you to a single vote. I don't have my references handy, but after that, I believe you get additional votes based on the log of your shares... so getting a lot of votes means investing a ton of money in the nation. There are also non-resident shares that let you visit the country, but don't give you any voting rights.

[RedWarlock]

You could also look at the Goblins in World of Warcraft. They're arranged into cartels, each led by a Trade Prince. In function, they're more like mini-corporations. They're highly competitive, and some cartels are more moral than others.

[Scalenex]

Most of my larger nations are fuedalistic but my smaller nations have a wide variety of government types. I like the idea of a fantasy take on an old company town.

[JeenLeen]

How would a merchant race set up their own government. If you have a Tengku city they cannot ALL be merchants. If they have an equivalent to the Ferengi Grand Nagus, how would a Tengku leader assert his will over geographically removed subjects around an entire fantasy world?

Maybe the Tengku shouldn't have a centralized government or home nations. What do you guys think.

Does Star Trek flesh out how the Ferengi existed as a society before space travel? Even if they are all merchants now (doubtful), they could not all of have been prior to spaceflight.

If you decide no central government, you could have something like trade caravans that share a sense of community or loyalty (even if based on literal debts or phrased as metaphorical debt to one another.) I've usually seen that trope as non-violent, traveling merchants who are generally disliked by townsfolk as untrustworthy, but you could turn it a different way.

[Grim Portent]

What about a guild council? Each city is governed by guilds who elect a leader from their own membership to represent them on a council consisting of every guild, perhaps leaving out smaller guilds. They aren't a nation so much as a collection of city-states with treaties to help each other out in times of conflict. Small towns are either freeholders with no direct ties to the cities or guild-towns founded and owned by a guild to exploit a resource or maintain something important to the guild's trade like a bridge.

Non-guild members aren't normally allowed to own shops within the cities or guild-towns, don't have a vote or representation in the councils and are generally treated as second class citizens.

Some cities have voting blocks of certain guilds that have agreed to alliances in the council that allow them to crowd out other guilds. Butchers might make deals with Tanners, Grocers and Candlemakers, Miners, Smiths and Masons might have their own deals and so on. There's also factional differences within each guild, people who own shops near the port will want low tariffs on goods shipped by water, people with shops near main roads would prefer to have high tariffs on water shipments and low tariffs on land shipments and so on to engage in competition with other businesses within the guild.

Children, non-professional spouses and other dependants are nominally part of the guild of the family provider but with no voting powers. If a child grows up and takes up a profession different from their parent/s they leave their old guild and join the new one. The retired remain as voting members of a guild until they become mentally or physically incapable to showing up to vote in person. Leaving your guild as a practicing member and joining another is very taboo, so a working Blacksmith who decides to learn to be a Silversmith instead after ten years is going to be shunned by their old friends and colleagues and treated with suspicion by their new colleagues.

[LibraryOgre]

Does Star Trek flesh out how the Ferengi existed as a society before space travel? Even if they are all merchants now (doubtful), they could not all of have been prior to spaceflight.

They're not all merchants... just a lot are, and the socially defining goal of attaining profit is best met that way, so the elites tend to be.

Look, for example, at Rom. Rom was a waiter in his brother's bar for quite a while. He had investments, sure, but his primary work was as a waiter (and Quark had several other Ferengi bartenders, as well). When he went to work for Deep Space 9 as a technician, he was still investing and building up a sizable nest egg (he could drop 5000 bars of latinum at the end of the series to buy Quark's bar when Quark thought he was going to become Grand Nagus).

[Nifft]

Make it so Merchant is a background, which the race gets free as a bonus racial trait. It includes math and some specific kinds of diplomacy / bluffing / persuade perks.

The race isn't restricted to being merely merchants, rather they are all merchants in addition to being rugged / stalwart / cunning / mystical / witty / etc. adventurers.

They're not the cabbage guy from Avatar, they're Sinbad the Sailor, and they're off sailing the seven skies.

So, how would they be organized? Parties. Each trade mission is an adventure for a party, and each adventuring party would have some kind of "social contract" for what they intend to do, and how they intend to split profits.

The sorts of things that PCs tend to do in search of experience and profit are plausibly identical to the sorts of things a "merchant adventurer" like Sinbad would have done.

I'd suggest making the "merchant race" just a class or caste of that race, not the whole race -- "planet of hats" and all that -- but it'd be the most visible caste since the others might stay in their own lands, so it would be reasonable for outsiders to see a merchant-adventurer of that race and think that the whole race must be merchants, since they don't see any other examples.

[Segev]

You could crib either the Neogi from D&D or the Ferengi from Star Trek; both have the "pretend you're engaging in trade when you're really just scamming and extorting" thing going on. Their structures are a bit different, though.

The Neogi (which have a good writeup in 3e's Lords of Madness) are all about debt and ownership, with their hierarchies based on slavery of each other and of how many slaves - both neogi and non- - they own.

The Ferengi are a hillarious mercantilist dictatorship which has no free market whatsoever as their highly bureaucratic government regulates every aspect of a businessman's decisions wrt his businesses, and even determines if he's allowed to stay in business by setting fees he must pay for permission to operate. Their governmental positions seem to be purchased from one holder by his successor, essentially making it government-enforced monopolies both in practice and in writing, with who controls the monopolies having some political infighting.

[LibraryOgre]

The Ferengi are a hillarious mercantilist dictatorship which has no free market whatsoever as their highly bureaucratic government regulates every aspect of a businessman's decisions wrt his businesses, and even determines if he's allowed to stay in business by setting fees he must pay for permission to operate. Their governmental positions seem to be purchased from one holder by his successor, essentially making it government-enforced monopolies both in practice and in writing, with who controls the monopolies having some political infighting.

At the end of DS9, Zek passed a rule outlawing monopolies, which is part of what had Quark up in arms.

[Segev]

At the end of DS9, Zek passed a rule outlawing monopolies, which is part of what had Quark up in arms.

I’m sure it did!

The monopolies I’m talking about, though, were never acknowledged as such; they were done via license to do business.

Quark almost lost permission to have his bar in DS9 at least once as an episode plot, for example.

[Eldan]

For real word inspirations, I would look at Republican city states or early quasi-forms of same. Rome, Athens, Carthage, Venice, Florence, Pisa. Also trade leagues like the Hansa.

Important basic take aways, I think:
The more or less officially acknowledged importance of either money or property: there are property limits (often owning a certain amount of land) to entering into politics or holding any kind of office. If you don't own land, you can't vote.

The importance of family relationships: money stays in the family, and family look out for each other. The business is a family business, mostly owned by a family head. On the other hand, if you go more Roman, adoption of suitable heirs is entirely acceptable, see also Japanese family companies today.

Clientage. In Rome, especially, a landlord could also be responsible for feeding his tennants and farmers, for outfitting them, for investing in their businesses and many other things. In exchange, they'd get a share of profits and would get their voice (and vote, if such existed) in elections and debates. Meaning legal matters can entirely devolve into shouting matches as shows of popular support.

Duty to the state. The state is entirely or mostly built from rich citizens taking on duties (and also profiting from these). Public buildings, military units, ships and temples would often be sponsored by rich citizens, who would be either required to do so (for example, in Athens, rich citizens could occasionally be obligated to sponsor warships, not being able to do so was an admission of poverty) or would do so as a show of wealth. Similarly, priethoods, public offices like tax collection or judgeships, governorships of distant provinces and military command were given to established citizens as duties, and could then mercilessly milked for profit and political gain.

Bribery. Endemic, widespread, inherent in the system, sometimes even quasi-accepted. As a matter of fact, there were no salaries for most offices in these societies (because those holding them were already rich), so the way to profit from them was either abuse of power or bribery. This could of course become problematic: some sources claim that Hannibal had to get quite draconian against Carthaginian bribery, because so much money was spent on bribes, it was crippling state finances and making it impossible to wage war.