Facilitation Payment

5th-level Procurement & Resourcing

Casting Time: 1 action, though it is never characterized internally as payment for an official act
Range/Area: One foreign government official or licensing body with authority over a permit, contract, or customs clearance your organization requires
Components: V, S, M (a sum of cash or its equivalent, consumed; an invoice from a conjured Local Agent, describing services never rendered)
Duration: Instantaneous; the resulting permit, contract, or clearance persists until formally revoked
Classes: Regional Director, VP of International Operations, General Counsel (retained to describe the arrangement as compliant)

You conjure one Contractor — a Local Agent — whose sole function is to receive your payment and transmit an unspecified portion of it to the target official. The Local Agent vanishes once the payment is transmitted, along with any record of how much of it actually arrived. This spell requires no saving throw; the target official’s cooperation is granted automatically, since the mechanism is structural rather than a test of anyone’s resistance.

Your organization must succeed on a Discovery saving throw whenever a regulator in your home jurisdiction investigates the transaction. The save is made with disadvantage if the Local Agent’s invoice describes its services in specific, verifiable detail, and with advantage if it does not.

At Higher Levels. When cast using a spell slot of 6th level or higher, you may route the payment through one additional Local Agent for each slot level above 5th, reducing the disadvantage on the Discovery saving throw by one step (minimum none) for each intermediary interposed.

Flavor: “Consulting fees paid to third-party intermediaries in certain jurisdictions, in the ordinary course of business.” — 10-K risk factors section, page 34