Sellswords

Gold can buy you steel. A sellsword is a company of hired soldiers you pay in Gold to strengthen one fight — a holding you’re defending, or an invasion you’re running yourself. This is the only thing Gold buys anywhere in Ashenmarch that touches power; everything else in the Market is cosmetic or convenience. And because it touches power, it is bounded on every side: a sellsword is help, never a substitute for the road. The governing law is simple — a mercenary augments a real action, never replaces it, exactly like a War Banner. Hired steel makes a march you actually ran hit harder, or a hold you actively keep stand longer. It never fights on its own, and it can never out-fight steel you earned by running. Find the authoritative costs on the Game Reference.

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The two kinds of steel

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The defensive garrison

Hire a garrison for one holding and, for the length of the contract, it adds to that holding’s defence — extra bite an invader has to grind through before the land changes hands. Think of it as paid reinforcements standing the wall while you’re away. Crucially, you can hire a garrison for a holding that is already under siege. That’s the intuitive moment to want defenders — someone is at your gates. A mid-siege garrison starts blunting the in-progress invasion from the next tick onward. But by design it’s a modest reinforcement, never a rescue: its strength is clamped below your own weakest earned wall (see the caps below), so it buys you time, not immunity. The way to actually break a siege is still to lace up and run your contested ground.

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The offensive company

An offensive company sharpens an attack you carry out yourself. You hire the company, then go run a qualifying invasion march — a real route, of at least the minimum distance, that crosses into the target holding’s ground. When that activity syncs, the company’s strength is added to the effort your run brings to the siege. It’s consumed on use.

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The Sellsword’s Mark

The moment you hire — offence or defence — your house takes the Sellsword’s Mark, and everyone can see it. The Mark has two layers, and the first is guaranteed:

• Visibility, always. Buying power is never secret. The pennant on the map and the Herald’s tiding are the flat, certain social cost of hired steel — you’ve announced to every rival that you leaned on Gold, and that alone invites retaliation.
• A bounty that scales with the heat. While marked, your holdings are a slightly richer target — rivals who capture from you loot a bonus (find the current ceiling on the Reference), and it self-scales with how contested your ground already is. Hire steel on a hot, hotly-circled front and the bounty bites — you painted a target exactly where rivals were already gathering. Hire a quiet garrison in a calm corner and the bounty is negligible. The Mark punishes leaning on Gold where it matters, not a careful defensive hire out of harm’s way.

The Mark is deliberate: it’s the counterweight that makes bought power a gamble rather than a dominant move. Using it invites exactly the retaliation it advertises.

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Upkeep — feeding your steel

Sellswords don’t fight for one payment. Beyond the hire price, a company costs Gold per day to keep, drawn from your coffers for as long as the contract runs (the daily rate is on the Reference). Upkeep is the leash. Gold flows in from your holdings faster the more land you hold, but only sublinearly — while upkeep is flat, every day, per company. So there’s no standing army to be had: keep too much steel on the payroll and the daily drain outruns your tribute. Sellswords are for a fight in front of you, not a permanent garrison you forget about.

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The caps that keep it fair

Ashenmarch is not pay-to-win. Gold itself is earned by running — it’s never purchasable with real money — so literal pay-to-win is off the table before we start. These caps close the internal risk: that a wealthy house could simply out-spend a hungry one. Between the below-the-wall clamp, the equalizer, upkeep, and the Mark, a hire is a bounded advantage: strongest for the house that needs it most, weakest for the house that needs it least, always beatable by effort, and always visible.

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Counterplay

If a rival flies the tarnished pennant, they’ve told you two things: they felt they needed help, and they’re worth more to raid. A Marked house carries a bounty for whoever strikes it, richest where the ground is already hot. Reading the map for Marks (see Reading the map) is real intelligence — it points you at houses that are both pressured and profitable. And against a garrison at your own gates, the answer never changes: run. Any genuine defensive march restores more than a clamped garrison holds, and the garrison was capped below your weakest wall to begin with. There is no siege you can be spent out of — only one you can be out-run in. Effort is the floor no purse can buy past.