OD&D Session 12: Yet Another Snake Cult

     This should catch us up before the game this evening. An eventful session, but one of primarily intrigue and scheming as opposed to danger and adventure. Sets the stage for a lot to happen tonight, but we'll see if they can stick the landing. 

This session we had:

    - Bard the Cleric 3

    - Blony Tair the M-U 2

    - Han the Thief 4

    - Akaviri the MU-2 (Elf)

    - Seamus the Fighter 3

    - Brockhaus the Dwarf Fighter 1

Concerning the New Snake Cult

I swear these guys keep cropping up

    The party was offered substantial reward for finding the location of Siegfried the Wizard a few sessions ago by the Vampire Ramsugra. The pursuit of magic items was high on the priority list for Han the Thief, who in a bold move as a player elected to act directly against the interests of his faction (He plays Siegfried at the Patron Level), and set about a plan to find the wizard and cash that reward with the vampire. 

    I find it somewhat ironic that around the same time I began once again obsessing over investigative games and mystery design, the players organically initiated an investigation. Spending some time and money around looking for clues about the location of Siegfried, they came up with 3 leads:

    1. There have been sightings of Undead in the jungle north of the city

    2. A man claiming to represent Siegfried tried to hire an assassin from the thieves guild last week

    3. There have been snake symbols cropping up, carved into doorposts, under tavern tables, etc. 

    After a great deal of dead ends and cold trails, they gave up on lead two. Whoever this representative was, he has not been seen by anyone since then. Then they turned their eye to lead 3. Lead 3 led to the discovery that a new snake cult had cropped up among chaotics in the town, a secret society that met in houses late at night. Blony Tair, being a chaotic man himself, decided to go undercover and attend a meeting. What he saw there cannot be posted yet, for many secrets unfolded, but while he was there he did encounter some woodsmen who indicated where in the jungle the undead generally are seen. The party set out in the morning to find the wizards hideout. 

    They crawled through the jungle before seeing a scouting party of goblins ahead. They hit the dirt and watched, the goblins vanished from sight as though walking through an invisible wall. Han the thief snuck up to check it out, and sure enough, the goblins had passed into a patch of Hallucinatory Terrain. When Han passed through, what he saw staggered the players. There was a goblin village, with soldiers and patrols, and several cave/tunnel entrances. There, just at the base of the mountain in the centre of the village: the foundation and nearly finished first floor of a tower, being tirelessly worked on by skeleton labourers taking direction from a handful of Dwarvish supervisors. Siegfried was nowhere to be seen, but they felt confident that this was his hideout. 

    More importantly, they had to run. Han poking his head through the terrain meant that a "hostile" had hit the illusion and it was dispelled. Not immediately noticed, but soon the alarm was sounded and the party booked it back to town, got aboard a boat and paddled upriver to inform their undead employer. 

    Ramsugra was quite happy to receive the intel, and informed the party that their rewards would arrive to them in a few days, pending confirmation of the intel. Han attempted to negotiate immediate payment, the Vampire was unflappable. Several members leveled up with the experience they received from the magic items, and as the session wound down they started talking about how they were going to go about assassinating Lord Barotha. That is going to attempted tonight, and I have to prepare some things before the session, so I will let this be the end of the post and I look forward to writing up what happens this evening! Stay tuned!

OD&D Session 011: Force Multiplication

     I've been behind on my logging here, had some REAL WORLD obligations in the last 2 weeks that needed my attention. I'll keep these next 2 posts fairly brief, just to catch everything up to the report that I'll have to write tomorrow, as if everything goes according to plan the players will have succeeded in their attempt to beat the Bdubs Elite Player Challenge tonight. But faction orders are spicy this week, and a lot is going to start happening really soon. So without further ado:

Thursday Night Procedural Dungeon Crawl June 13

    This was a quick little online session with two guys, Thargaret Matcher the Fighter and Claus the Fighter. Thargaret had shelled out for some good advertising and went in with a fairly healthy contingency of men-at-arms (precise details elude my memory). Soon this won't be viable, as the third level of the dungeon is as far as these mercenaries are willing to go, but for now the moral of this story is "Having more dudes is a force multiplier, which is why armies are made up of lots of dudes instead of not a lot of dudes".

    The crawl had two major moments:

    1. An illusory wall hid a giant spider which went down in a single combat round after I rolled 8hp on 6 hit dice. Pain. 

    2. The party found a wyvern locked in a chamber on the second dungeon level. Why is it there? How did it get there? These are questions I'm cooking answers for as we speak. The point is that the party emerged in full force and through overwhelming numbers and careful attacker rotation took down the wyvern with minimal casualties. Thargaret and Claus collected it's poison gland, and checked for treasure. When determining treasure, I let the players roll the % chance for the various categories, and today this procedure had Thargaret's player swearing off virtual dice forever, as despite reasonable chances of gold, gems, and jewelry, all they got was a few thousand copper pieces. Shame!

    This was basically the bulk of the adventure, as a good amount of time was committed to debating whether or not they could fight the wyvern. I'm glad they did, though flying creatures have much less in the way of advantage in an underground environs. 

    Next post will cover the regular IRL from Wednesday, June 19, where INTRIGUE and SCHEMES began to boil over. 

Mystery Design 001: The Fake McCoys

 

   I am trapped, unable to escape the looming spectre of crime fiction that hangs over my psyche like a guillotine. Maybe, just maybe, this will be my undoing, it will destroy my ability to run games and I will go mad in the pursuit of making investigation compatible with genuine player agency. All I know is that for whatever reason, the genre has been held hostage by some absolutely terrible advice and core ideas of game design. I have rambled extemporaneously about my initial thoughts on this subject over on Youtube, and it is here that I will structure more cogent and specific arguments for the core problem with the genre as it has been thus far handled. 

    These first few posts will contend directly with the most common advice given to new referees running the game by the most visible and accessible platform: Youtube. It is here that gamemasters running games such as D&D will go to get advice for their first foray into having their players sleuth about. I watched the top 10 or so videos of "How to Run a Mystery Game". I took some bullet notes on them, but for the sake of brevity we are going to cover just 5 of them, especially considering that there is massive overlap across these channels (Almost like everyone in RPGs is just regurgitating the same ideas over and over and over again or something). Without further ado:

Professor Dungeon Master

    Professor DM makes his video fairly explicitly about running a mystery in D&D or other similar fantasy games, so the advice is coloured accordingly. There is an bit about how, because he likes running mysteries, he barres certain spells from being taken by player characters that could make the investigation less exciting (Speak to Dead, Read Thoughts, etc.). The idea being that if he wishes to include a mystery in the campaign, the offending character abilities are already dealt with. This is extremely common advice and frankly I get it. It's very easy to say "Just design your crime around a killer who knows to work around these spells", but this gets tiresome and arbitrary quickly, and if you are going to stonewall the use of a player ability anyway, may as well not include it. 

    He then brings up Chekhov's Gun as a way to illustrate that extraneous details should not be given to the players. If there is something in a room, it needs to be pertinent to The Plot (get ready to hear about The Plot a lot). So if there is a fireplace there needs to be a clue in it, if there is a painting on the wall there needs to be a clue in it, and so forth. This is, frankly, awful advice. If everything that gets described to you as a player is relevant to the plot, you create the weird artificial feeling to the world where not only everything that happens, but everything that exists only does so to serve the needs of the players and the story they are in. This breaks immersion and limits player options, and ironically ensures that the players are denied the ability to pull their own "Chekhov's Gun" maneuvers. One of the great joys of being a player is catching some throwaway detail that the GM includes to add flavour to a scene and utilizing it to your own advantage. When entering the dungeon the GM describes a tattered standard hanging on the wall, its just dressing, it doesn't have any important significance. But a player later using it as a cloth for an impromptu bandage, or to extend their rope a little further, or setting it on fire to smoke out the room, these sorts of spontaneous player actions are a big part of what makes the game fun. Insisting that all details are relevant to The Plot commits the sin of a foregone intended outcome (We call this a Railroad). 

    Something that did confuse me is that he uses an example from The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to illustrate an example of "irrelevant details". There is a room on the first floor of the house that has plaster on the floor and the ceiling seems weak. Professor DM suggests that this sort of information will simply stall the game as the players poke around at non-essential data. But this example is a baffling choice, as the plaster on the floor and the weak ceiling is itself a clue, letting the players know that the floor in the rooms above are weak and potentially hazardous. This room is a telegraph for crafty players to be more prepared when they enter Rooms 14 and 15, where the floor can give out on them when they first encounter Ned, a key player in the mystery of the house. Saltmarsh was one of the first modules I played as a young lad, and this detail popped into mind immediately, I remember us carefully testing the floor on the second story of the house because of the data we received from this very room!

    He doubles down on this philosophy for NPCs, suggesting things like handouts to remind PCs who is important or avoiding talking in-character as non-relevant NPCs. Not only does this continue to reinforce the artificial feel of the scenario, casting the spotlight only on the things which will drive The Plot forward. This is not a living campaign world, this is a video game with select Essential NPCs.

    He then brings up the Gumshoe method of simply giving players the clues they need. This method has long been touted as the Killer App of mystery design, because it keeps the game from grinding to a halt when an important clue is not found. I have a lot of strong opinions about this, and I won't be expounding on them too much. I have intentions of addressing Gumshoe directly in another post, and also because this philosophy will come up again in the other entries on this list. Suffice to say, this is more railroading. This is no different than a DM in a fantasy game telling the adventurers exactly where they need to go and what they need to do to get the McGuffin and Kill the BBEG. It's a theme-park ride, where the players are simply being led through a series of rooms where they are told more details about the mystery until the reveal of The Climax. I said this in my video, but it really seems like investigation games are still trapped in the mindset of "Playing through a story" while fantasy games have figured out that trying to recreate the events of a Dragonlance Novel is not good game design. 

    He does, when talking about giving them the clues, produce a premise that is strikingly similar to something Brian Renninger posted the other day. He suggests that if the players fail a roll on finding a key clue, instead of having them fail to find the clue, have it take longer to do so. The Call of Cthulhu example is Library Use. If the information is there in the library and a competent academic can find it, and the real question becomes "How Long Will It Take?". Brian makes a similar proposal in his article, where certain skills have a duration cost correlated to the dice roll rather than a simple pass/fail gate. There's a lot of potential here, but I would note that this only matters if the passage of time is consistent and non-arbitrary, otherwise Time is just a magic button the GM can use to punish and reward players, rather than a meaningful resource to be used or preserved according to player intention. 

    Finally, he recommends some modules that are in the genre, but frankly this is irrelevant to the task at hand. The issue with almost all the advice in this video is apparent: The best way to run a mystery adventure is to carefully keep the players on the rails and whenever possible trick them into not noticing this. In the next post we will deal with the advice given by Baron de Ropp on his channel Dungeon Masterpiece.

OD&D Session 010: Humiliated by My Own Dice

     Last night saw the longest combat encounter to date, a staggering 15 rounds broken up into 8 and 7 round brawls respectively, with a small reprieve in the middle. Lotta dice, a lotta deeply PATHETIC rolls from my Chessex set when I was trying to kill the PCs, I will not be using them anymore. Only Gamescience is good enough for me now.

The Plan:

    The players spent some time and money asking around, wondering if anyone had heard of any lucrative rumors. Two came up, some trolls have been seen in the mountains up in Gnome Country, and the Swamp People envoys last week spoke of a wizard in the jungle north of their swamp territory. After much deliberation, the party elected to go troll-hunting. Rolling with a pack of men-at-arms and lair-busting has been very profitable for them, and they like their odds better this way. They loaded up on torches and oil flasks, bought some mules to haul things for them up into the mountains, and set off. On this expedition we had:

1. Dobias, an elf back for his third (NOT SECOND) session of D&D ever

2. James, the fighter with 5 heavy foot and 5 mules

3. Boros the Dwarf, played by the same guy as Akaviri the Elf

4. Sir Gerric the Elf, with 2 heavy foot and 5 mules

5. Figel Narage the Neutral Cleric, with 2 heavy foot and 1 archer

6. Yon the Elf, with 3 heavy foot and 2 archers

    21 men all together, enough to handle small packs but any real warband met in the wilds would need to be avoided. They set off into the wilds in search of trolls and the associated troll cave full of loot.

The Journey:

    They had a few random encounters as they ventured, but in all cases they hid, moved along, or otherwise avoided contact (easy to do in the jungle when encounter distances are up to 240 yards away!). Because of their judicious application of the better part of valour, we will cover them only briefly as they provide world-data, but not play-data yet:

    - On day one they came across a hunting party of ape-like proto-humans. Protruding brows, simian mouths, long hairy arms, these men were not at their home camp, but gathered around a fire eating some kind of roast game. The party retreated into the night and slept without a fire well away from them. 

    - On day three they had to hit the dirt, hiding in the foliage of the jungle as a green dragon circled overhead. The surprise mechanic is such an elegant way of handling stealth I don't know why it got canned from future editions. But it has been established: there is a dragon living somewhere in these hills and this means that there is dragon-treasure somewhere in these hills. The players agree to a vow of secrecy, to tell nobody about this. 

The Trolls:

    On day 5, at around 3 in the afternoon, they found the troll lair. A cave in the side of a mountain, overlooking the sagebrush flats where Pabal the Wizard dwells, outside which sat a hideous troll, surveying the landscape. The searching took longer than they anticipated, and having already crossed the threshold that would put them in time jail for next week's session, the decided to take their time. They set up a watch and simply observed the cave mouth for a few hours. At 5pm the sitting troll returned to his cave, and at 5:30 3 other trolls lumbered out and headed down the mountain towards the sagebrush. It was at this moment the party mobilized to fight. It was at this moment that I was betrayed. 

    The thing with the troll in OD&D is that despite having 6+3 HD, it only gets one regular attack per round. Pair this with a brutal string of very bad rolls from my Chessex set and it turned what could have been a massacre for the trolls turned into the trolls getting massacred. As the party squared off against two, then two more trolls that came as reinforcements, they ended up having a relatively easy time of it. When I rolled the HP for the first 3 trolls, I saw so many 1s and 2s! One troll, despite having 6HD, only had 9 hitpoints! Unforgivable! The party made judicious use of flaming-oil molotovs to keep the trolls from regenerating. 

    We use side-based initiative, and the rule is that the player who rolls for the PCs keeps rolling each round until he loses initiative to me, the DM. The duty of "Initiative Roller" passes around the table clockwise, in theory to concentrate the task into whichever player seems to be luckiest. Well, last night Yon's player beat me in initiative SEVEN ROUNDS IN A ROW before losing to me and passing the initiative die on to Sir Gerric. I persistently rolled lower than 8 on my attack rolls. It was horrible. All I wanted was 2-3 PC deaths, really make them pay for their treasure, but NO they cakewalked me! Terrible. After killing 4 trolls they retreated outside the cave, to set up an ambush for the hunting party that went out earlier (And to get out of the smoke-filled cavern and its stench of burning trollflesh.)

    The 3 trolls that rolled out at 5:30 returned at midnight, and having smelled the smoke and manflesh on the air, attempted to sneak up on the party. Despite successfully evading ALL THREE watchmen from the adventurers, and managing to ambush them from ALL SIDES, I didn't land a SINGLE attack in the surprise round. My life is ruined. In the ensuing melee the party lost a few men-at-arms, but the PCs got away unscathed and killed the three returning trolls and the last one hiding in the cave. They plundered the place and set off back for home. 

    I will say that rolling for lair treasure live at the table is a great treat, I've done it since I ran 5e. Telling the players to roll d100s for each category, having them quarrel over who gets what afterwards, great fun. The players walked away with a good haul of silver and gold pieces, some gems, and two magic items:

    - Figel Narage has acquired a Ring of Invisibility (Woo!)
    - Dobias has claimed a -2 cursed sword (Yikes!)

Afterthoughts:

    The party is plotting and scheming to assassinate Lord Barotha in hopes of creating a power vacuum that will boil over into a Braunstein, pitting humans against the elvish aristocracy that runs things. But they fear that they aren't "Powerful" enough to get away with it, and want to get some sessions in doing lair-busting to level up. We'll see if they can meet the deadline! 

    Gave Dobias' player a ride home after, asked him how he likes the game. My brother and I have known him since we were kids, but this is really his first foray into RPGs. I was very pleased to hear how intuitively he grasped the 1:1 time, if a person doesn't have Conventional Play presuppositions it really is a simple and approachable concept. I do have to brush up on some setting material, he had a lot of questions about the gameworld and the motivations of people therein, and much of this is stuff that I haven't figured out or nailed down yet! 

    We have onboarded more factions, and orders are rolling in with loads of espionage, preparation, and diplomacy. I cannot reveal many details as it stands, to preserve the fog of war, but the things that are simmering now will almost certainly boil over when the next Braunstein occurs. I eagerly look forward to being able to spill the beans on the schemes of my faction and patron players when this occurs. The campaign is picking up steam and I have to be careful not to let it get in the way of my IRL obligations. The energy is palpable, the frenetic enthusiasm undeniable!

OD&D Session 009: Ancient Aliens

 This was a quick little crawl in the dungeon beneath Dschungelberg Keep I ran online last Thursday. Just two players, and the session was beset on all sides by terrible dangers (My children were uncooperative at bedtime). But once we actually got down to play, it was a busy session to say the least!

Take One: Common Pitfalls

    The crew set out with Tnk (Pronounced "Tank") the Elf and Olaf the Cleric. They each had 5 men-at-arms for a clean dozen men delving down into the dungeon. Now, it should be noted that for the online games where players have been crawling the Dschungelberg dungeon, I've been procedurally generating it using Appendix A and some handy-dandy Abduction. So these sessions really are an analogue rogue-like with the dungeon being generated as it is explored. It's been a very good time to say the least.

    So the party set off down to Level 1, stopping off at the one room they've never entered. Almost immediately a pit-trap with spikes culled several of their men-at-arms and nearly killed the two PCs. This was the 6th pit-trap that had been generated on this floor of the dungeon. The dice are a cruel mistress sometimes. They went back up to hire more men, to replenish their numbers, and returned for a new delve. Getting down to the 2nd level of the dungeon, they poked around at some empty rooms, negotiated passage with a cluster of kobolds who did NOT want to tangle with the much larger party of adventurers, and discovered a hidden passage that leads first to the cistern that the keep's well lowers into and then into a room full of 20 brigands! The party, almost certain that they have uncovered a smugglers ring, run some fast talk and good reaction rolls into getting to leave without an altercation. Pressing onward, the dice were ONCE AGAIN a cruel mistress.

    Not to the players, mind you. To ME, the poor beleaguered DM, all I want is for the Appendix to give me some of the cool, punitive, EVIL traps from the Tricks/Traps table. But instead of darts, or a covert elevator that plummets them to a deeper level, the party encountered another pit trap. BORING!!!! This one killed both PCs and several more men-at-arms. Technically speaking, the first TPK of the campaign! We were only about 30 minutes in and I had just hit my stride getting into the flow of running, so I asked if they were done for the night or if they wanted to roll up new characters and try again.

Take Two: Just Another Snake Cult

    After I went and re-tucked the kids in, got back to my desk and the players had whipped up a new party. Claus the Fighter has been here before, and the other player generated the first thief of the campaign, Han. They rustled up some men-at-arms and set down into the dungeon. It was broadly uneventful for much of the evening, in part because the appendix was giving us a lot of long, empty hallways. But not so fast! Some of the table results saw me have an opportunity to connect this dungeon to the other one thematically. 

    The adventurers came across a stretch of hallway, straight with one door after the other. The walls in the final stretch were of polished black stone, and the final door was ornately carved brass. The players heard chanting on the other side of the door. They burst in, a group of emaciated men in loincloths were worshiping at an altar covered in various treasures, and on the ground before the altar: a truly enormous sarcophagus. The décor and atmosphere had noticeable overlap with the snake cultists that have been encountered in the Library of Shuga-Koth. These cultists, unlike the ones in the library, had human heads instead of snake heads. They were no less hostile though, and they drew their Thulsa Doom Snake Daggers and attacked. They were no match for the PCs, and the room was soon being looted. 

    There was a few magic items on the altar, some gems and coinage. But the real treasure was in the sarcophagus. The mummified corpse therein had a huge aztec-style death mask and serpentine jewelry. It was 7 and a half feet tall, with distended fingers, sharp teeth and an elongated skull. 

Looting this guy will not have any far-reaching consequences

    

    Han plundered the Acheronian corpse and the party headed back to the surface to sell their loot and cash in the XP. At first I did a double-take, thinking there was no way this much XP could fall in the hands of the players from a single session. And then I remembered that instead of being divided between 6-9 players, it was instead being divided up among 2. Suffice to say, Han sling-shotted his way to Level 4 in a single session (OD&D has no prescriptions for training or slowing the rate of advancement) and Claus made out pretty darn well himself. They sold the mummy's loot to a suspicious broker who claimed to have a buyer lined up. We'll see how this plays out. Mummy treasure never has any consequences for taking it anyway.

For My Amigos 002: What is a Battle Braunstein?

     Some of you have been a bit out of the loop as to what exactly I mean when I mention Braunsteins in the past or present tense, some were not present for Fortress Orkmerica, some have been out of town or missed sessions. It's all good. The big thing is that there is likely another one of these events looming on the horizon and I would like to drop a quick post detailing exactly what is meant by this term in the context of our campaign.

    Simply put, the Battle Braunstein is a special type of session that emerges when the activities of factions and major players in the gameworld converge sufficiently that they can no longer be resolved as background activity. Instead of "DM Fiat" simply hand-waiving the activities of these major players, the Battle Braunstein brings people to the table in a session format similar to our regular adventuring, but now instead of controlling a character in a moment-to-moment adventure, you control a powerful figure or even a whole faction and dictate the activities therein on a turn-by-turn basis (With a turn generally referring to a single 24 hour period). 

    The two things that make the Braunstein exciting and dynamic is the multiple controlling players working at cross-interests (as opposed to the general cooperation you see in a regular adventuring session) and the presence of a mediated Fog of War. The game plays much like Diplomacy, with characters writing out their orders and having these orders resolve simultaneously. Where it differs from diplomacy is the scope of activity. Orders can include everything from troop movements, ambush tactics, spell-casting, attempts at diplomacy, the construction of fortifications, espionage, assassination, the list goes on nigh-indefinitely. In order to make this work, the DM serves as a referee, taking all the orders, looking them over, resolving how they will all play out, and then revealing the new game-state to players. 

    This preserves a Fog of War where characters do not know if their allies are helping or hindering them, they may not even know where their enemies troops are! In the last Braunstein, the troop movements resulted in more than one instance of the humans not reliably knowing where the orcs were as their intel was rendered useless by some new maneuver of the orc player.  

    For a detailed exposition of how this can look in practice, go ahead and read the Fortress Orkmerica post linked above. The important thing about this post is that you need to understand what a Battle Braunstein is in order to conspire to bring one about via adventuring session activity. The key thing is to think in terms of "How can the state of the world become messy to the point that the major players need to duke it out in order for stability to emerge?" To conclude this post I am going to list some example scenarios from our past campaigns that could have been resolved via a Battle Braunstein if we were using this system at the time:

    - In the Blades in the Dark campaign, the conflict between the Bridge Street Bastards, the City Watch, The Crows and the Lampblacks could have been resolved with a gang-war Braunstein (#GANGSTEIN)

    - In the Star Wars game the hot war between the Hutts and the Empire, with the Black Sun Syndicate trapped in the middle, could have been resolved with a Braunstein (And maybe a space/naval wargame for some BIG BATTLES)

    - When the adventurers in our other AD&D game firebombed a village as a distraction in order to steal magical artifacts from that village, and then framed the Inquisition for the firebombing, and then with one of the magical artifacts accidentally summoned a giant demon lord that resulted in a pitched battle between the demon lord, our previous High-Level PCs, the remnants of the tribe that got burned AND the invading subterranean horde of Skaven looking to capitalize on the chaos? That ABSOLUTELY could have been a Battle Braunstein. 

    Really all it takes to make a Braunstein happen is to think AUDACIOUSLY and aspire to MANGLE the equilibrium of the campaign so badly that it simply must be addressed on the scale of a special Wargaming Event. I have full confidence that you guys will be able to make this happen, because you've done it so many times before without even being told to. 

For My Amigos 001: The Henchman/Hireling Distinction

    There has been some confusion at the table as to the distinction between hirelings and henchmen, so I feel it is appropriate to lay out in clear language the precise distinction between the two in a place that can be easily found and referred back to. We will start with the shared traits, variables that are true regardless of which category we are talking about. Then we'll cover the unique characteristics of hirelings, then the unique characteristics of henchmen. 

Common To Both

    Neither henchmen nor hirelings are directly under the control of you, the player. They are NPCs in the traditional sense, and rather than simply being additional character controlled by the Player, the player gives orders which they may or may not follow. In play this is often expedited by having the players move and roll for their respective hired help, but it must be noted that this is a matter of convenience, not procedure. A hireling or henchman that is ordered to do something exceptionally dangerous, or strongly contrary to his interests, may make a Morale or Loyalty test, failing which would result in him refusing to do the thing which was asked of him. Both the treatment of the hired help by their employer and the general conduct of the employer are factors that impact loyalty. An employer who is of opposed alignment to his troops, or regularly asks them to shoulder the greatest risks, and so forth, will expect lower loyalty. A liege who treats his men well, maintains good discipline, and so forth will expect higher loyalty. 

    Both Henchmen and Hirelings must be ADVERTISED FOR. This is a rule that I missed and will be entering into effect this coming week (With existing hirelings standing, no need to retro-actively make you pay for past missed recruitment). Whether by distributing posters, paying a town crier, or whatever, you need to invest coinage to put out the call for men. This recruitment cost ranges from 100-600GP per week of advertising, and various factors including this investment will determine if there is anyone available and how many answer the call. Because it takes a week for the ads to circulate and pull results, players should indicate at the end of session whether they are putting out advertisements so that the following week the prospective recruits will be available. Advertisments are per-type, so if you need to hire an Alchemist, an engineer, and a group of archers, this will require three separate advertisements. 

    This new inconvenience does come with an upside, namely that other thing we have been doing incorrectly is how many turn up. Basically, there should be more men-at-arms available than we have previously been distributing. It should be at least possible that 20 or more men answer the call of adventure. We'll explain the weeny turnout thus far as having been an issue of not properly advertising. 

Hirelings

    Hirelings are paid a monthly wage, and they cover everything from men-at-arms, alchemists, assassins, animal trainers, smiths, sailors, labourers, spies, and others. These people are the staff that make adventuring at scale possible. The monsters of the world are numerous, so you need extra men. At scale these men need their equipment serviced, you'll need armourers and smiths. Establishing a forward operating base outside a dungeon would allow rest and recovery to happen without factoring travel time into each excursion, this would need guards and camp followers. Hirelings is a broad category, but covers all the logistics of running an adventuring operation. 

    Hirelings are on a fixed wage, but additionally do not progress in level. Sages and alchemists never start to gain levels as wizards or clerics, and men-at-arms do not gain levels as wizards. If you wanted to take an untrained non-fighter and whip them into shape as light or heavy foot, this could be done as a downtime activity, but they would still be 0-level fighters, and never progress to level 1. If you want them to progress in this way, you need to set them up as henchmen, rather than hirelings. 

Henchmen

    These guys gain experience. You give them a portion of your cut when treasure gets divided, and they level accordingly. While still independent NPCs with loyalty scores, the Henchmen serve two key functions:

    1. As your operation expands you will need NCOs, officers, men you can rely upon who are a cut above the rest in terms of competency and ability. The henchmen are the NPCs that keep the wheels of your enterprise turning.

    2. Henchmen are a great solution to the problem of death. If your PC dies, and you have nobody to replace him, you're back at level 1, and that can really suck. While this is somewhat ameliorated by the presence of a "Roster" of multiple characters that you may control, choosing session to session which one to level. The benefit of a henchman is that if you are the sort of person to zero in and focus on playing one particular character as often as possible, you can bring along an assistant henchman that doubles as an "insurance policy" against untimely PC death.