Other things you could implement:
- need to come up with some penalty for your involvement in a deal being detected. Maybe just -5, -10, -15 etc to next role escalating in steps or something, or some effect that restricts what you can trade or access on the gunrunner market (maybe if you are detected too many times, you can only trade pistols or melee or something)
- My preferred approach in rpgs is to never use +10000 gold or credits etc, I prefer the barter exchange of narrative symbols or favours instead (these tend to be more memorable than: you find 300 credits or gold etc). Not sure if this works in a pseudotrading game though.
- obviously need some giant megacorporations or mercenaries, I had this in my lore from the futuristic Invultua and Golgotha games, Paribus Foundation, CONTOR, Axiom Galdra, Urthekau Sylabari, Stranded Sons/Warlords of Lotan, etc. For a more real world mercenary feel Raufoss vs Chernaya (Red Waterfall vs Black River, it ties into all my lore about the Red Lord Of Ruin and the Betrayer etc). Not sure how to translate faction lore into mechanics though. I was a bit wary of just converting everything into a +5 +10 etc. Maybe a faction affiliation is like a one-off supporting 1d100 re-roll?
- The working title for this setting is
The ISONOMY.
This was the opening text (me in bladerunner mode lol) I imagined for the setting. The Kardashev scale references that sci-fi megastructure star engineering thing, of how a civilisation is measured against its abilities to capture the output of a stellar system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale(...)
