[Homebrew] Hirelings and Retainers

    

The party sets out in search of the unkown.

    One of the things I really like about old school D&D is the large party size.  Something about large groups of adventurers, mercenaries, laborers, and specialists travelling together in search of adventure really appeals to me much more so than the modern style of fantasy where 4 characters are able to accomplish pretty much everything.

    Going off of B/X, hirelings have 3 categories: Retainers, Mercenaries, and Specialists.  In addition to these, I also use the term hireling for general laborers but for the purposes of my game those kind of fall under mercenaries.  Generally speaking, retainers are your fellow adventurers that are willing to adventure alongside you both in and out of dungeons.  Mercenaries are primarily for guarding locations, such as strongholds, as well as doing battle in the wilderness.  Finally, specialists refer to special NPCs that are skilled in a particular craft such as an armorer or a sage.

Negotiating terms of employment

    In order to facilitate the hiring of these NPCs I've come up with some rules that make searching and hiring NPCs fairly simple.  My rules can be found here.

Equipping the retainers

    For a character to hire a retainer, the first thing they would do is choose various recruitment methods.  Each of these methods adds a chance of finding a retainer to the base chance that is determined by the local region's level of stability (war time, peace time, borderlands).  After spending some gold on recruitment methods, the DM will check the settlement type that the player character is in and that will determine how many retainers are there.  Once the amount of retainers is generated, the player character is free to interview each one and make offers of employment.  The length of time this takes is left up to the DM.  If the character wants to hire a mercenary then they would follow the same steps but instead of looking for retainers they would specify which type of mercenary they want (heavy foot, light cavalry, etc).