Heads now carry a price in Lyonesse. Is yours one of them?

A House is a franchise: any clan can stand one up, appoint a Factor to run it, and start taking bounties. It's a physical, in-game location patrons visit to place lines and collect payouts — the "bank" of the bounty world. How well it's run — trust, fairness, turnaround time — is on that House, not on this project.

Yes: every House is effectively a franchise. Anyone can become a Factor and start one; how well it's run — trust, fairness, turnaround time — is on them, not this project. This project's goal isn't any single House's success. It's providing a reusable means: the bot, the mechanics, and a set of recommended guidelines, not a guarantee. If a House runs badly, patrons are free to take their business elsewhere, or stand up a rival House of their own.

The Factor runs the House and is its sole financial authority: ratifying lines and handling payouts. Clerks review claim evidence and vote on it during probate, but hold no financial authority. An underwriter is anyone who places a line; a quarry (or mark) is whoever it's placed on; a bounty hunter is whoever collects. A patron is the umbrella term for anyone with a chest at the House, in any of those roles — most people will be both an underwriter and a hunter at different times.

You apply to a House through Discord, and its Factor coordinates an in-game meetup to place your chest and link your avatar's name to your account. It's not self-service yet — Pax Dei doesn't expose the permissions needed to automate that link. Alt-avatars and separate hunter identities are fine; the link just has to exist, it doesn't have to be your main.

A chest is your personal, secure box at the House — where a line's funds come from and where a payout lands. Everyone gets exactly one, whatever role they're playing at the time. In Pax Dei, a privately-flagged chest is only accessible to you and the plot owner, which is what makes it work as an account without anything fancier bolted on.

An underwriter places a line — gold, canonite, and/or ambergrasp — and tells the House who it's on. Once the House ratifies the deposit, the line moves into escrow and the bounty goes public with a running total anyone can see — first come, first served, no way to "call" it ahead of time.

Gold can't be looted in Pax Dei — only inventory can. A line funded purely in gold would be completely safe to carry. Canonite and ambergrasp are real, lootable materials, so hauling a line in to place a bounty, or walking out of the House with a payout, is itself something worth intercepting — part of what gives Lyonesse's danger somewhere to live outside the Mournwood tree fights.

Possibly, yes. Any candidate has to stay highly stackable, or the House runs into a storage problem, and the list of accepted items has to stay narrow, or it runs into a different storage problem: too many item types spread thin across too many chests. Tattered sigils/lockets and crimson runic leashes are the most likely future candidates, but nothing's decided. Community feedback is welcome on this, and will actively be solicited.

Clerks, and the Factor, each cast a vote to ratify or reject a submitted claim, changeable any time until probate ends. A Clerk connected to either party recuses — not voting counts as recusal. At the end of probate, a simple majority of votes cast decides it; a tie defaults to rejection.

Nothing sits in escrow forever. If a bounty hasn't resolved within a configured window, the line refunds — it returns to the underwriter's own chest and drops off the public total immediately, so no hunter's chasing money that's already gone. If that refund then goes untouched through a second window, it escheats to the House, on the read that it's an abandoned account rather than just a hard-to-reach quarry. An underwriter who's still around just notices the refund and re-places the line.

Every settled payout pays the House a base rake, which is how the House compensates its Factor and Clerks for the time they put into ratifying lines and reviewing claims. That rake escalates if the same hunter↔underwriter or hunter↔quarry pairing repeats within a rolling window — a cost on reusing the same relationship to farm the leaderboards, not a penalty on genuine repeat rivalries once enough time has passed. A repeat hunter↔underwriter pairing only raises the rake on that underwriter's own line; a repeat hunter↔quarry pairing raises it on every line in the bounty. The escalation schedule is published, not hidden, so a patron can always predict their own rake before placing a line or claiming a bounty.

The rake escalation, probate voting, and evidence requirements all exist to blunt abuse, but none of them are airtight. Some amount of abuse is going to get through, and this project accepts that as the cost of doing business. The goal isn't zero abuse: it's keeping it rare and small enough to become a story someone tells later, instead of a reason the whole system stops being fun. That's a known weak point of this project, not something being hidden.

No. A quarry is just the exact name of any avatar in the world — they don't need a chest, an account, or any relationship to the House at all.

A leaderboard of bounty hunters by lifetime settled payout value, a leaderboard of underwriters by lifetime amount placed on settled bounties (both currency-normalized to a gold equivalent), a directory of every House across every server ranked the same way, and a per-House ledger summary: lifetime payouts, lifetime rake, and what's currently at stake in active bounties.

Mainframe, the studio behind Pax Dei, might eventually ship an official killmail system, better permissions, or something else that does part of what this project does. That's a good outcome, not a threat: if it happens and this project has real adoption by then, the plan is to move quickly and build on top of whatever Mainframe ships rather than compete with it. This project exists to fill a gap in the game, not to become dead weight once that gap closes on its own.