Supply carts?

Forged in the Dark Band of Blades
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Hello:

We’re long time players of BitD looking forward to trying BoB. I’m confused about a few things, one of them is supply carts:

  1. How are they acquired? I assume they are permanent once the quartermaster gets them.

  2. There are 3 lines for food storage in the quartermaster’s sheet. They can fill the 3 lines without having supply carts, correct? Supply carts make all of the lines have one extra slot each.

  3. Not supply carts, I apologize; on the Marshall sheet, each of the 6 squads has room for 5 legionnaires. Only rookies and soldiers can be assigned to these slots, specialists are never part of a squad. Are all the squads initially full? Can the legion have more rookies+soldiers than those 30 slots? Is there any specific procedure or cost associated to reassigning legionnaires from one squad to another?

I’m sure all these questions have replies in the book, but I haven’t been able to find them. Thank you!

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  1. As the carts are on the Quartermaster’s sheet with all the other assets, an Acquire Assets roll would presumably be used to acquire one, or you could buy one as part of the Quartermaster’s initial materiel. In what I assume is an oversight, they are not mentioned as a part of the Acquire Asset action, but I’d guess they qualify as a Fine Asset. Certainly not as rare as an Alchemist, but probably harder to come by than say, saltpork and corn.

  2. When you purchase a Food asset it starts as “full” using your terminology. I don’t think there’s any technical limit on how many Food assets you can have, the sheet just arbitrarily shows 3, and there are blanks for additional room. Yes, supply carts give an extra slot to each of these Food assets.

  3. If you look at the Marshal sheet, the initial setup will answer most of this. The squads are initially full. The Legion cannot have more than 30 rookies and soldiers, but has no limit on its number of specialists. The Marshal has total power over troop assignments, but if your rookies or soldiers earn the Sword of Valor medal, they get to decide where they go in the squads.

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  1. To a similar question, Stras himself answered in July on this forum (just type “supply cart” in the internal search engine above): “Yep. It’s just a bunch of carts. (If you want to make it a bit more spicy it can be a normal asset in settlements like Plainsworth or Barrak, and a fine asset when you’re stuck someplace like a heart of a forest, or a poorly supplied mountain road).”

  2. As Udachnik says. And the “risk” that the QM sheet has need of more than three lines of food is… very, very small…

  3. As Udachnik says. And also, there is no procedure for reassigning Legionnaires. The Marshall decides, and can roleplay this if wanted, invent a ceremony and so on. Costs? They are what the GM wants them to be, in the fiction. This could give rise to problems of mistrust between squad members, of lack of faith towards the command, etc. Those should not come out of the blue but arise from the story you’ve been collectively telling so far.

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Thanks everybody for the quick and clear responses, some interesting details I had not considered in them too. So looking forward to our first game!