Reveries: A Parallel System for Reference Tapping

Page 210-211 of Red Markets outlines not only the rules for tapping references but also the themes that this subsystem is supposed to invoke, as follows:

• Your character gets 1 Reference slot per point of Charisma.
• When, during the game, you fail at an INT or CHA skill roll, you can "tap" (i.e. contact) a Reference, who is a person that will lend you their expertise for a price. You write this reference's name into the Reference slot, mark that they are "Needy," and are treated as having succeeded in the roll.
• You can only keep as many Needy References on a string at once as you have available Reference slots on your character sheet: once a Reference is "Needy" it locks that slot until you settle your debts. Subsequent uses of that Reference advance it to Strained and then Severed.
• You can dynamically swap out non-Needy references at any time. 
• Severed References permanently lock out that Reference slot as fewer people out there are willing to lend their expertise to you, someone who never pays back what they owe
• The rationale behind the subsystem is that outright failure is less narratively interesting, in a tale of economic horror, than success at a price: the question of "can I do the thing?" is thus reframed as "how much is doing the thing worth, to me?" or "how much will I sacrifice to do the thing?"

So far, so good. However, the system as written assumes a dense communication network and/or large clusters of people available for the characters to fall back on, which is not true of some game settings - such as On the Account, my 17th Century pirate campaign which runs using the Profit System. For such situations, I substitute the following rules:

• If you need to succeed at cost AND you actually have access to a reservoir of people who are better than you at the skill in question, just pay the 1 Booty and move on after the necessary roleplay. You don't add the person you contacted to any lists, as you pay them off immediately.
• In all other cases, you experience a Reverie: write the name of the skill in under Reveries, narrate a flashback to some moment in the past in which you were called on to develop exactly the skill that you are currently falling short at, and explain what held you back from doing that (i.e., why you never learned to do the thing you're currently trying to do). The flashback can involve a Dependent if you like (see below).
• Following your Reverie, you achieve a bare-bones ugly success as pure desperation and the memory of your past drives you forward
• Reveries can apply to any skill, not just INT or CHA ones.  
• Only one Reverie per skill per session. Experiencing a fresh Reverie on top of an existing one advances it from Needy to Strained, or Strained to Severed. 
• As with References, you can have as many Reveries as you do CHA. If you draw on a skill more than once, take that Reverie from Needy to Strained and then to Severed.

At the end of the game session, when you're doing Upkeep, each Needy or Strained Reverie that you have accumulated must be resolved in one of three ways:

• Buy a new level in the Skill (this erases even a Strained Reverie)
• Take a Dependent who was featured in the Reverie one step towards Severed as the memory complicates your relationship with them
• Move the Reverie itself one step along from Needy to Strained, or Strained to Severed.

When a Reverie reaches "Severed", erase the Reverie and put a circle or some other annotation next to its associated Skill. No further Reveries can be suggested with that skill, nor can the skill ever be raised in future: the character essentially just turns their back on the painful self-doubt associated with that part of their skillset. However, they don't lose their Reverie slot as they would have for a Severed Reference.