Turn 2: Second Half, 32 BBY
You're laughing, and you're pretty sure that you're unnerving the intern that's standing opposite your desk. You can't help it, though, and the poor hapless intern's face just makes things more funny. The datapad that you've been handed is wonderful news, the sun is shining, the stims are working, and the markets are stabilizing. Slowly. Rush Clovis' face stares out at you from the datapad, dressed in carceral outfits and looking almost penitent – you're pretty sure that he crossed Senator Palpatine in the wrong way sometime on Coruscant.
One doesn't simply argue with one of Hego Damask's proteges and then slink away to take glitterstim and worse in a Coruscanti dive bar. Even you weren't that stupid, not even when you ran Hutt Space Collections and Security with nothing more than a squad of Iotran Special Forces on standby.
Speaking of Damask's protege – the Senator has made it clear that there aren't any hard feelings about the IGBC opposing his plans. But he did remind you of that one favor. Something about the information that's landed in your lap about Kamino and the Pyke Syndicate, something that he's got an unusual interest in.
You stop smiling, the grin wiped off your face. One glare sends the intern out the door, and you're left staring at a datapad that has no more good news. You really wish you had nothing more than a trader's desk to run and a mercenary team on standby. Sometimes, at least.
Eh.
Who're you kidding. This job is your life.
Market Stability: 25/100: Incipient Collapse: Board Opinion will drop by 20 unless Stability reaches at least 35 by turn end. At Zero Board Opinion you are fired.
Board Opinion: 40/100
Profits: Healthy
Forces: 2xIotran Intervention Unit, 2xDroid Collections Unit
You Have the following action categories, in which you have two actions each. You may double down for a d100+20 rather than a d100:
Legal: The Legal Division of the IGBC is at present headed by Dr. Fina Sell, formerly of the University of Muunilist and notorious for being a class-action lawyer before the IGBC hired her. There may have been blackmail involved, or there may have not. You do not know. She has a predatory look in her eyes, as if waiting for you to make a misstep.
Lower DC for internal legal action and lawsuits against private parties/governments.
[]Debt Arbitration: Legal will have to step in to make sure that the planets that are unable to pay get an extension. Creditors will have to take a haircut. The problem is one of ordering – nobody wants their money being used to pay someone else's loan, and that means someone has to take the hit before the deadlock is broken. It's what's called an 'honest broker', or rather, some poor fucker who gets his wallet swiped to pay for another bastard's drinking binge. You still remember when that Corellian tried to steal yours. Corellians. Can't trust them.
Stabilizes markets at the cost of Profits. +10 Market Stability for Profits moving down one level for one turn. Roll determines publicity impact.
[]Deadlocking: The Republic's new relief laws put the bulk of the burden of allocating relief to the Treasury, but at the same time it forces the IGBC to take the biggest haircut on debt simply due to our size, along with forcing us to take bad banks into receivership. That means we lose the most, simply because according to the Republic's rules and regulations we're the ones that can most afford it. The IGBC is not just a corporation. It is the issuing authority for the Republic Credit. We are not some High Street Bank. We are the ones that will wind up taking them into receivership. We thus need to sue, as a public interest suit to stall this legislation while we find our feet and make sure we can absorb that much of a loss while also absorbing the bad banks.
DC50. +10 Market Stability. Stalls Palpatine's legislative push in the courts.
[]Public Interest Litigation: The freer the markets, the freer the people. Since so many of the dictators on the Rim have taken on bad debt and are seeking to default, we need to deal with them. That means actions in the Core World courts and the Republic judiciary to make sure we have the right to collect, then using Collections and Security to take what we're owed and install a more representative government. Democracies are better for the market and for long-term returns on investment, after all.
DC40, if failed will move Profits down one notch, if succeeded +5 Board Opinion, increased PR, +5 Market Stability. Will commit Collections and Security's Iotran units to enforcement.
Sentient Resources: The IGBC values its workers and employees, for they are its most precious resources. The IGBC cares about all of its sentients. The IGBC is there by everybody's side. That's what Goven Cipird likes to say. He smiles at you with blazing sincerity that you're absolutely sure is false. He has the dossiers of the entire Outer Rim Desk as his fingertips. He has Security and Special Tasks on speed-dial. You are informed that he gets excellent sleep each night.
Lower DC for internal purges.
Morale in the Outer Rim Division is: Shaky
Morale in the Mid-Rim Division is: Shaky
Morale in the Core Division is: Confident
Morale moves from Collapsed->Low->Shaky->Stable->Confident->High
[]Extraordinary Rendition: Some of the more recalcitrant members of the Hutt Space cartels and some of the IGBC's own staff who have been trading in illegal substances on the side in the Rim can be dealt with in the Core. Simply by transferring them to the custody of state authorities that can charge them with suitable crimes – such as trespassing – we can ensure that they do not destabilize things further. We can also interrogate them at leisure by building a proper personal rapport, since the rendition allows us time to use more intelligent, effective methods.
DC30, removes potentially destabilizing elements from the IGBC's Rim and Mid-Rim Desks. Lower morale in Outer Rim and Mid-Rim Desks. Potential to accelerate dark money tracking on success.
[]Vetting and Petting: The staff are troubled, and in need of reassurance. The markets are tanking, the other banks on Muunilist are laying off staff, and the executives are holed up in their towers. There is no word from above. The head of Sentient Resources has a number of solutions – foremost among them the novel suggestion of an all-hands briefing every month for the senior and midlevel staff, to let them know the situation and give them a stake. Not
everything, of course, but enough to make them feel important. And, of course, to check who leaks things.
DC15, boosts morale if below Stable. Potential for new talent to rise. Potential for embarrassing leaks.
[]Nepotism: Some of the Core Five have contacted you with word that they want certain people promoted and sent up the ladder. Those people tend to either be imbeciles, inbred, or worse yet they tend to be Nemoidians. You don't like all three, and you're careful enough around Sentient Resources to avoid mentioning the third. Get the division to shuffle off these hires where they won't do any harm, and hire them as the Core Five want. That gets your major shareholder nicely placated.
DC20, +10 Board opinion, if failed will wind up with idiots in the middle tiers of the bank.
Political/Lobbying: Sarakel Carbrow is a very bland human. She's spent twenty years in the Republic civil service, embedded in the one branch that works – Treasury and Taxation. She's spent ages working over Senate tax reform and liaising with the Galactic Senate's economics committee. Contacts with the Senate, contacts with
tax lawyers, a network in the civil service. As for dealing with the politicians themselves? Just like the Rim. Granted, the idea that the Senate is similar to the Rim is ridiculous – for one, the Senate has better drugs – but the principles for Care and Feeding and Intoxication of Politicians ought to hold up.
[]We Didn't Start the Fire: The Trade Federation started this when that degenerate diseased squid Gunray crawled out from under his landfill and went to blockade Naboo because his late-stage syphilis hallucinated him into it. Hammer that message in harder than the Nemoidians got their asses handed to them – they caused this because they're so incompetent that a
ten year old handed a Trade Federation blockade fleet its ass. Of course it's all their fault. The Outer Rim Desk believed in their competence, and that's what took all of us in. It was not at all the IGBC here.
DC10. +10 Board opinion on success. Failure means a backlash.
[]Public Relations: There's word that a few of the more obviously connected Senators that are tepidly speaking out in favor of Palpatine's plans for a more equitable relief bill are making use of their position to land government jobs for their relations. That makes for leverage and a foot in the door. As for the rest? Director Carbrow knows some good tax attorneys, and there are a few board memberships for Senators on corporations that have ties to the Outer Rim. We'll see burning bridges here, but someone else set them on fire before this - we're just letting it continue.
DC45, on success partially sabotage Palpatine's relief effort and slightly boost Valorum. On 60 or above, +5 market stability.
[]Networking I (0/100): Director Carbrow is in accord with you on this one, that you need a better network in the republic civil service that can tell you how and where the money's going. You're the central bank in all but name and that means you have a claim on Treasury data, but that also means they don't like you. You're bureaucratic competition. So that means you need a network of friends of friends who get paid off, and you need it to be tight enough that you know whenever a tax attorney so much as farts in the Senate Building.
Gain more information on execution of Republic legislation every tier.
Finance: This is the preserve of
you as the IGBC head, where you sit at the head of the table in a conference room high above Muunilist. It is also the preserve of your old buddy Pors Tonith, who has a lively vacation habit and many friends among the Iotran Guard who make up the bulk of the IGBC's combat arms. He meets your gaze and grins easily, eyes cold as a credit-chip's gleam and fingers drumming a death-march rhythm on the conference table.
[]Conservation: The IGBC can buy up distressed assets at paper value and take some of the larger banks into conservatorship – this might cost us in short term profits but will stabilize the markets and placate a Board that is terrified of what might happen if we continue on this trajectory of market collapse. It will, however, make an implacable enemy of the Senators who believe that the IGBC has too much power already. Senator Palpitane of Naboo has made his name on that issue, and taking the great names of Coruscant's banking sector into receivership will give him a great deal of ammunition.
DC35, +15 Market Stability, +10 Board Opinion, move Profit down one notch.
[]Some Of This is Bad Money (Progress 45/100): So we'll take it off their hands. Task Legal and Accounts to set up a better, more thorough system of tracking dark money that flows through the IGBC's financial system. It's the labor of decades or at least years, but we can eventually track most of it. For now, we'll be happy to stick to those transactions that might have 'jeopardized the market'. Such as the transactions in bad colonial debt printed by criminal affiliates, and the ones that are owned by the Trade Federation – we owe those squids, and we're goddamn well going to collect. With interest.
Dark money tracking options unlocked on completion. +10 Board opinion on completion.
Collections and Security: Captain Riklan Tost is an Iotran, here on 'loan' from his planetary government. The Iotran Armed Forces are operating under IGBC command and act as an elite, sentient cadre that backs up the high-grade droids and mercenaries that make up the bulk of our forces – and then there are, of course, the Muun guards here on Muunilist. Forces-wise, we have enough.
Bonus to large-scale interventions.
[]Collecting Debt: The IGBC needs money to stabilize the markets, and we can buy up bad debt before collecting on it. That means, of course, doing what a war-fleet would normally do to a world and doing that on a near industrial scale, but it nevertheless needs doing. The worlds of the Outer Rim have started this fire, and it has begun to spread to the Mid-Rim. For all that the populists such as Palpitane in the Senate and people such as the Board might dislike this, we need the money and the stability.
+10 Market Stability, greatly destabilizes Outer Rim and Hutt Space. Political consequences are high and unpredictable. Politically unpopular. Popular in the corporation. DC40.
[]Kamino, Kamino: The money trail that the IGBC's IT and Cyber arm followed has led us to Kamino. Something about a bioengineering project, a big one. An expensive one. The authorization code was the same one that the IGBC handed off to the Jedi for emergency spending, and we're now standing guarantee for a massive expense. This has to be resolved. At all costs. If that means sending an auditor and negotiation team to Kamino, so be it. And there's always Hailfires on speed-dial if the Kaminoans don't talk.
DC40. ???
[]We're Good People, Honest: It has come to the attention of the Board that some of the Outer Rim Desk have been using extralegal means of dispute resolution in the Outer Rim. Some of these contractors have become far too familiar with the methods used by the IGBC and are able and willing to name names – we have to clean house. We have to restore our image. Sadly, that means a little bit of collateral damage.
DC40. Cleans up the Outer Rim Desk's mercenaries and bounty hunting arm.
[]Heads Off Pykes: The Jedi whose authentication code was used to open up the line of credit we're investigating was one Sifo-Dyas, whose trail ends somewhere in the Outer Rim. There are whispers that the Pyke Syndicate killed a Jedi, and we have to investigate that. Sifo-Dyas knew what was going on with that spend, and more importantly he can positively tie it to the Jedi. Who will them reimburse us for this, or we'll have to take it to the courts. The Pykes are heavily armed by Rim standards, and that means we need to spend to bring them to heel.
DC40. Commits all available forces. ???
