Don’t Worry, I know a Guy- Contact Expertise Dice Optional Rule

One of my favorite parts of character creation in Victoriana is creating contacts. Contacts fill out the PC’s connection to the rich Victorian world around them (You’re a respectable country squire, how do you know so many criminals?), but players new to the idea of contacts may be hesitant to use them.
A contact is an NPC the player characters know and trust who can help in course of adventuring. A contact could loan money or equipment, give the word on the street, or drive the getaway coach. Aside from their place in London’s class structure, there are no stats for contacts. Making full stats for contacts at character creation would bog it down horribly, but it would be nice to have some sort of “how helpful can this contact be” number.  

Contact Expertise Dice 

Aside from asking for rumors, begging for equipment, and enlisting their help, players can also ask for advice. The advice’s helpfulness is dependent on the Contact’s Expertise Dice.

When a player creates his contacts, the player has a pool of Contact Expertise Dice equal to their Presence attribute times two. The player assigns a number of dice to his contacts in a single area of Expertise that each contact has. This is not a skill, but a broad job or hobby description.

Example: Rene Abattoir (ogre harpist) is making her contacts. She has four Contact Expertise Dice and three contacts, Timothy Panhandle (halfing beggar), Alistair Grub (dwarven reporter), and Karl Hoffman (human composter). She decided to give three dice to Timothy Panhandle, two to Alistair Grub, and zero to Karl Hoffman.
Timothy Panhandle’s dice are assigned to Burglary, and Alistair Grub’s to Journalism.

When a PC visits a contact, they can consult the contact about an obstacle they except to encounter. If the Gamemaster thinks the contact’s Expertise is appropriate to the situation, the PC adds the contact Expertise Dice to a single skill roll when trying to overcome the specified obstacle. If the roll fails, the Expertise Dice are lost to any subsequent attempts.

Example: Rene needs to quietly break into the warehouse storing the sets for the opera to see if the actor’s death was an accident. The door to the warehouse is padlocked. Rene is not very good at lock picking, so she visits Timothy Panhandle for advice. Because Timothy has three Expertise dice in burglary, he tells Rene about a gap in the constable’s beat, and a tip for dealing with that kind of lock.

Later when Rene tries to pick the lock, she rolls her 1 Dexterity Die + 2 Lock Picking dice + Panhandle’s 3 Expertise Dice.

With 2 successes, Rene unlocks the door, and sneaks behind a backdrop painted to look like an Italian villa.

Contact Expertise Dice cannot be added to a skill roll if the PC's skill dice (not attribute, just skill) exceed the contact’s dice. The PC already knows all the tricks, and could potentially advise their contact.