I recently took some initiative in our campaign and decided my character would start up his own free company, with eventual goals of harassing a nearby goblin settlement and providing protection for the local area… for some gold of course.
Background info in case anyone’s curious: We are playing a low-magic campaign, E6 gestalt, 4th level. My character is a barbarian/rogue. Other characters are a barbarian/fighter, barbarian/rogue, and a witch/sorcerer.
I took the spoils from a recent tomb exploration we had been on and invested in a few things. I inquired and hired two warriors (4th level no less, I was impressed) and hired them on for a month at 4s5c each a day (1g/day for both of them).
I bought the two of them horses (and one for myself naturally) I managed to find two light warhorses and a light horse, assigned one of the warhorses and the regular horse to the two warriors and tasked them with recruiting more people while I investigated the goblin-town with the group. To that end I gave them 100g and a circuit of three towns of sizes varying from small town to small city with instructions to meet me in one month’s time at the last settlement with whoever they had managed to gather. The towns in question are in a region with goblin raids happening on occasion.
I know I put a lot of trust in these guys, but the DM threw me a bone and told me they wouldn’t just run off the cash at least.
I explain all this because I’d like to present my DM with a guesstimate of what I might expect to find when I meet up with these two again and let him work from that, rather than ask him to come up with numbers/levels/costs whole cloth.
Anyone done something similar in their campaigns? Have a quick and dirty system you or your group uses for mercenary groups? One that’s super-intricate? Either way share them all!
