Saturday, May 9, 2015

Hirelings and Henchmen for Neo School Hack

One thing which was typical of old school D&D was hirelings and henchmen.  Roughly speaking, hirelings are minor servants and guards, but henchmen are more like the sidekicks to your hero.  So for Old School Hack I'd borrow from the given monster classifications as foundations for building these two types of companions.   An easy approach is to make hirelings a type of "minion" and henchmen like a weaker PC class character.

Hirelings
HP: 1
AC: 8 or 10 (light armor) when hired, but can be equipped better by the characters
Attacks: 1 x 2d10 (but no Face Die)
Weapons: only cause 1 wound no matter the actual weapon type

Henchmen
HP: 2
AC: 8, 10 or 12 depending on class and may have a shield if appropriate for their type
Attacks: 1 x 2d10 (do get a Face Die)
Weapons:cause damage normally for their type
- Henchmen have a race and class, usually selected from those available to the players for PCs; however they start with only one talent instead of the two a PC starts with.
- Henchmen attributes come from an array of one being -1, one being +1, and the rest being 0; the +1 is usually in the attribute most useful for that henchman's class.
- Henchmen advance in class level whenever their patron PC goes up one; however, unlike PCs the only increase on gaining a level is to take a talent from their original class or race; once all the class talents and race talents have been taken the henchman may no longer go up in level.



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