My Artificer player has stated they want to be a "Landlord" and "Buy land in Villages they save" to make "Passive Income" among other ideas to use for their magic item crafting.

One of my players is an Artificer, and they’ve decided that their long-term character goal is have passive income to fund increasingly expensive magic-item crafting.

Their first idea was becoming a landlord. The party saves a town, they buy damaged or cheap property there, repair it, rent it out, and then collect passive income while the party is off adventuring.

But apparently that was only the beginning.

Some of the other ideas they’ve floated:

* A village they went to was recently almost destroyed by a dragon. The artificer offered the villagers reconstruction loans to rebuild their homes and businesses. The goal is the loans eventually get paid back with interest.
* Buying businesses in places the party regularly visits and hiring NPCs to run them while they’re gone.
* Financing merchants or caravans in exchange for a percentage of the profits.
* Buying land around settlements they expect to become more valuable after the party makes the area safer. This is a big one! They want to do this one in combo with their other ideas.
* Investing in mines, lumber operations, farms, etc. to secure cheaper raw materials for their own crafting.
* Eventually establishing some kind of bank or moneylending company where NPCs can deposit money or take out loans.
* Offering towns development money after disasters, wars, monster attacks, etc., and then making money off the recovery.
* Buying warehouses and charging merchants for storage.
* Funding new taverns or shops in recovering settlements in exchange for partial ownership.
* Creating an adventurer insurance scheme where people pay regularly and receive compensation if they lose equipment, get injured, die, etc.

I like these ideas in theory, because it gives them something to care about besides adventuring and creates a ton of potential plot hooks. At the same time, I don’t really want every session to become Fantasy Accounting Simulator, or for passive income to completely trivialize the normal D&D economy.

How would you handle this mechanically?

Would you just abstract investments into downtime rolls and periodic income? Actually track individual properties, businesses, and loans? Put risks on them like defaults, destroyed property, corrupt managers, bad harvests, monster attacks, economic downturns, etc.?