Bounty Hunting

[Bullgrit]

The current OotS storyline has made me think of this.

Has anyone run or played in a campaign where the PCs were dedicated bounty hunters?

Has anyone run or played in a campaign where the PCs had a bounty on their head, and they had regular run ins with bounty hunters coming to cash in on them?

How'd the campaigns go?

Bullgrit

 

[Oryan77]

My very first D&D character was a Fighter/Thief in 2e Dark Sun. He became a bounty hunter. I would do side quests to earn extra money by collecting bounties. One time I even got the entire party involved in my quest to hunt down a guy. The good thing about playing a bounty hunter was that I could always involve myself in adventure.

I also created a plot for a PC in our current campaign where a Mercykiller bounty hunter tried to capture a PC rogue. The sketch on the wanted poster looked just like the PC, but the name was different. The PC investigated it a little bit and learned that the guy that looks like him was wanted for stealing relics from local churches.

Unfortunately, the player barely involved himself in this scenario (the little bit of investigating he did do was only because another player was interested in this situation and began investigating on her own). But the idea was that he first thinks he's a wanted man but finds out it's just a guy that looks like him. Then as he tries to find this guy on his own (and find his hidden stash), the PC learns that he actually is the guy in the wanted poster. The entire time, the same Mercykiller keeps trying to capture him to collect the bounty. The idea was that in his past, he was betrayed by some Yugoloth's and they threw him into the River Styx. He lost a good chunk of his memory, including his real name. That was my way to play off the fact that the player named him "Jackal" and that he never wrote up a history.

The PC died before the story went anywhere, but I doubt the player would have done anything on his own to progress the storyline. He was the type that just wanted to be railroaded into an adventure and would just enjoy the ride.

 

[Umbran]

In D&D? No.

But what you're talking about is pretty standard Shadowrun - you get paid a fee to recover X (X is a person, or data, or something). People then get cheesed at you, and are willing to pay to either re-recover the thing your party got, or kill you because you know too much

 

[Jack7]

Not an entire campaign where the only or main thrust was bounty hunting, but one character in the party, a Ranger, was a bounty hunter, before he was killed in combat.

In my world the Ranger is more like a Frontier's Lawman. Often they work alone, especially when hunting. He also worked for the Byzantine government so he would hunt for them sometimes, sometimes hunt for bounty, and sometimes just hunt criminals and outlaws and invaders and Dragoons because he was good at it and wanted to and it was justice to him. These situations made great "lone adventures" although occasionally the Ranger would work with the Basilegate, or the entire party. If the mission was big enough, or the he was ordered to by his employers. These situations almost never involved an entire caiman, but hunting down others, for bounty or otherwise, was often a big part of some campaigns. For instance once they spent a large part of a campaign hunting down Goth raiders who had kidnapped an Abbot's niece, and were enslaving people, and they were paid handsomely for it by the government.


In the very first world I ever created a Lich employed three brothers (one was eventually killed by the party, the other two hunted the party for years) to hunt and harass the party. The brothers actually assassinated a high level player character (brother of a Paladin) in the party, crippled one up so bad he had to retire, and badly injured a couple more. The brothers paid lots of different third party agents to do their work for them, and every the party was sufficiently crippled or hampered the Lich paid bonuses to the brothers (usually in the form of magic, some rare service, and antique or valuable item, valuable information, and occasionally in hard treasure - but he paid bounties in other ways because slowly over time he was enslaving hem psychically and transforming them magically, so his bounties had a double intent). Eventually the party had enough, found out who and what was hunting them and went after the brothers. That led to a really nice set of encounters, combat and otherwise, between the brothers, the party, and eventually even the Lich. That set of campaigns turned out really nicely. Though also deadly for more than one character and NPC.

Bounty hunting done right makes for good adventures and campaigns I think.