Who carries it
Tally-Keeper is the goliath custom, one of ten kindred traits added in 2.1.9. Only goliaths roll it, and the sheet marks it “Goliaths only”.
Recruits draw two or three traits by weight: common 100, uncommon 45, rare 14, legendary 3. A custom has a fixed weight of 150 for its own people and 0 for everyone else, so about one goliath recruit in eighteen (roughly 5.5%) has it. It cannot be chosen as the founding term that gives every delver one shared trait.
How missing delvers come back
Since 2.1.7 a delver lost on a quest goes missing rather than dying outright. At the turn of every month (each 30 days) the game rolls once for each missing delver. The chance that their story resolves that month is
15% × 0.8 for every year they have been gone (counted in fractions of a year), with a floor of 2%.
A game year is 120 days, so that is four rolls a year.
When it resolves, half the time the delver comes home (worn out: low condition, high stress and fatigue, and about 12% of their ability lost), and the rest of the time you get word of them, find them among the wanderers, or find their remains. A delver who would come home stays out if the hall has no free bed, and tries again the next month.
What Tally-Keeper changes
In the hall. If any Tally-Keeper is on your roster when the monthly roll is made, the resolution chance is multiplied by 1.5:
| Time missing | Normal chance per month | With a Tally-Keeper |
|---|---|---|
| Just gone | 15% | 22.5% |
| One year | 12% | 18% |
| Two years | 9.6% | 14.4% |
| Five years | 4.9% | 7.4% |
| Ten years or more | 2% (floor) | 3% |
That is the chance of any outcome; half of those outcomes are the delver walking back in. Added up over the first year (four rolls), a missing delver comes home about 29% of the time with a Tally-Keeper on the roster, against 22% without one. Over two years it is 40% against 32%.
One Tally-Keeper is enough. A second adds nothing.
On the road. When a quest party comes back having lost someone, every Tally-Keeper who returned with it loses 10 morale. They counted them out and could not count them back.
Is it worth having?
If your guild runs a lot of quests, people will go missing, and the delvers who go missing are often good ones you sent on hard jobs. A Tally-Keeper on the books gets them back sooner. The morale cost only lands when the Tally-Keeper was on the failed trip, so the cleanest use is to keep them as a hall regular and send others on the dangerous postings.
As a leader at a fork
A Tally-Keeper leader leans +1 toward the known way, so they take a side room only about one time in three, fresh party or hurt.
The goliath lean
Goliaths roll Sure-Footed, Hardy and Unforgiving more often (×2.5), and Easygoing and Frail less often (×0.4). See the goliath page.
What it does not do
No combat coefficient; the Leadership link on the sheet is descriptive. It does not make a delver less likely to go missing in the first place.