Partnerships and Adventuring Companies
Of all the ways people band together for a common purpose, the partnership is the simplest and the most flexible - and the way most adventuring companies are first put on a legal footing.
The Partnership
A partnership is an arrangement of a business nature - that is, an organisation formed to make a profit - between two or more people, whose purpose is to divide among its members the profits, the losses, and the responsibility that fall upon it. All that is needed to form one is an official document setting out who the partners are and what their business relations are: what roles each takes, how profit and loss are to be divided, and so on. This is called the Document of Understandings.
Every partnership keeps a copy of its Document of Understandings - or several copies, if the partners wish - and a further copy is held by the court in the city where the agreement was signed, though the partners may ask the court to transfer the original to another city. A partnership may be dissolved in part, if one partner demands to leave the agreement, or wholly, if all the partners (or all but one) agree to void the document. Its core terms may be changed by the full consent of all who have signed it, by signing a new Document of Understandings in its place. A partnership is subject to the political laws of the place that holds its original document, and most often it earns certain tax reliefs and other incentives from that state.
Adventuring Companies - the Complications
An adventuring company is harder to register than an ordinary organisation, for a few reasons.
States do not, as a rule, trouble to tax adventurers in the ordinary way. Adventurers are not in the population rolls; they have no fixed income; and they die half the time. Instead, states simply take a fifth of every “great achievement” an adventuring band accomplishes, and leave it at that. The trouble is that an ordinary organisation owes ordinary tax and is meant to receive reliefs upon it, while adventurers owe no ordinary tax and already enjoy reliefs that are substantial in themselves. The resolution is that adventuring organisations pay ordinary tax but receive larger benefits than other organisations - which, in turn, makes it harder to register as an adventuring organisation than as a common one.
To be recognised, a company must prove that it truly is one. It must show that it has completed a minimum number of contracts (the law says three, but in practice the figure is five; three is the “nobles’ threshold”); that it intends to go on adventuring for the foreseeable future (usually meaning clauses in the Document of Understandings that set out the band’s aims and how it means to operate); and that it has the means to meet the coming year’s taxes - so a band of penniless adventurers will not be accepted.
Home States and Conscription
An organisation has a home state, whose laws apply to it. This is almost never a problem, save for one law: forced conscription. In time of war, both Clairnia and the Republic may conscript any lawful citizen into their armies. Jaknia does not conscript at all (though its tax laws are a headache in themselves), and the Theocracy keeps no general conscription - the state compels nothing upon its regions, nor the regions upon their cities. Yet each region may vote conscription upon itself, democratically, with every citizen holding a vote; and since only the Children of the Empire hold the status of citizen there, the risk to most adventuring bands is much reduced. One might think simply to file the Document of Understandings in a state that does not conscript, but each has laws of its own to trouble adventuring bands: the Theocracy’s Steel Reins, which only tighten with time, and Jaknia’s taxes. International law is a developing field, owed largely to the Hub; what it means to be an organisation based in the Hub barely exists yet, though there are solutions - for a little money - that can keep a band clear of conscription in most situations.
The Standing of the Twisted Races
The law speaks of “human beings,” and this is no accident. Many adventuring bands include members of the twisted races, and the law, on its face, does not regard them as human; in the Hub in particular there is a legal anchor that expressly defines the twisted races as a separate kind of being, with fewer rights. Beyond the plain bigotry of it, this throws sticks in the wheels of registration and calls for an unusually flexible judge.
The Masks Law
The Masks Law allows a sentient being capable of giving consent - most often a convicted criminal - to be taken into the ranks of a willing, named organisation in place of serving their sentence, provided a set of conditions is met on both sides.
Of the criminal:
- They must be of adult age and possess the skills the organisation requires.
- Their potential contribution must outweigh the harm they have done and could yet do, as weighed by the rules of the Stone.
- A criminal whose sins are beyond all mercy may not use the law to escape their punishment.
Of the organisation:
- It must bring a clear contribution to the life of the community, and be known for making that its chief purpose.
- It must show that it can take responsibility for the criminal’s deeds and prevent any return to old crimes or the working of new ones.
- It must be able to provide proper training, where needed, and basic living conditions.
- It must give a clear account of how the criminal will contribute to the organisation’s work.
The law may be invoked whether the criminal petitions the judges to join a given organisation or an organisation seeks to recruit a given criminal, so long as there is clear and admissible agreement between them as to the terms of service. Every such agreement must come before the court and takes effect as a contract between the parties. Once granted, partial legal guardianship over the criminal’s deeds passes to the organisation, and holds from that moment until the day the criminal dies.
That last clause is open to reading: some judges hold the guardianship to lapse if the organisation dissolves; others hold that every member takes it upon themselves personally, so that dissolution changes nothing. Either way, a judge who suspects that a band means to dissolve itself in the foreseeable future, or that it was raised only to exploit the law, will not grant its use - so petitioners do well to come before the court whole-hearted, purposeful, devoted, and optimistic, ready to sacrifice themselves (on paper) for their chosen cause. In all its history, only a single organisation is known to have used the Masks Law: a knight order centuries old - the Masked Bastion.
Appendix
See Also
- The Lexalian Republic - home of the Masks Law and the Mask Knights
- The Holy Theocracy of Olympus - the Steel Reins
Sources & Attribution
- Primary lore: an in-character lesson on partnership and organisation law (worldbuilding document), translated from the original and archived privately.