What can an adventuring group do to protect their items/money while questing?
I'm starting a new adventuring group with my friends. I live in a fantasy world with predictable levels of danger in certain areas. We're part of an adventuring guild. Everyone in our group has a different "role", and each person in the group is theoretically replaceable. We're splitting the profits as evenly as we can.
We can accept quests from any town, but most quests, we've found, are located a day's travel or further away from one. We don't have horses, for monetary reasons, hence our long travel time and being forced to carry our belongings on us.
The problem is when we're about to enter a dangerous situation, where one or more of us could be left behind. Ideally, we only want to bring the items that are necessary with us into these situations, but we don't have a good place to store the items and money. 183
We could split them between ourselves, but then if someone gets left behind, then as a group we lose that portion of our loot as well.
Why not use a bank of some kind? Or create a home base? Well, because the quest locations are spread so far out, if we were to store things in one place it's likely we would often need them in another. A day's travel or more just to get the items we need is a PITA.
With all of that in mind, what can we do with our valuables before entering a dangerous situation? Can you help my adventuring party solve this logistical nightmare?
Note: Obviously, storing our valuables needs to be in a way that someone else can't just come along and find them and take them for themselves. We trust each other, but quests are public information, so leaving our stuff lying around is just asking to have it be stolen.
Note: Magic exists in our world. In fact, we currently have two mages in our group (a damage dealer and a healer). However, our spells are simplistic and tend to be solely in those two categories. Enchanted items are also very uncommon and tend to be expensive (usually out of our price range). We would prefer answers without magic, if possible.
Note: Tag help is appreciated. 227