Henchmen, Hirelings, Faith, and Heresy

[webrunner]

Two of the missing articles have just been posted:

Henchmen and Hirelings
Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Henchmen and Hirelings)
Rules for player-created modular hirelings (minions) and DM-created character henchmen (standard monsters)

Faith and Heresy
Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Faith and Heresy)
Mostly fluff article about the origin of divine powers, and a ritual to align or re-align a subject with divine power back to their god (or to a new god)

 

[Badwe]

I loved the henchman and hirelings article. It does a great job of balancing the desire for more simulationist aspects of gameplay while still trying to keep things at a level of 4e complexity. It has done a good job of calming some of the angst I've had about march's article release rate.

My players will be stumbling upon sigil at level 11 fairly soon, so it seems appropriate that in sigil they would be able to find (and probably need) some appropriate hirelings.

My only wish is to have a list of more suggestions for what you might use a specific hireling for outside of the raw in-game mechanics. sadly, my players are not very creative and i don't like to lead them along into ideas.

 

[Zaran]

Nice articles. I will use the Hirelings and Henchman article for sure.

Still no mule though!

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I absolutely love the Henchmen and Hirelings article. Great stuff!!

I have never bothered with them under previous editions, but I might now.

 

[NexH]

I enjoyed "Faith and Heresy"; it was full of excellent ideas for both players and DMs.
I found noteworthy the advice of setting aside the clichés of light versus darkness in the explanation of radiant damage, and, as a DM, was delighted with the ethically representative religious quests.

 

[IanB]

Hirelings strike me as overly expensive for what you get out of them. 15g/day for a level 1 minion linkboy? I realize there's some 'prevent the group from just hiring 20 dudes' math going on here, but I don't know if I'll be using that stuff as-is.

 

[Obryn]

Henchmen and Hirelings is one of my favorite articles in ages. Between this and Jubilex, I got my money's worth.

-O

 

[bganon]

15 gp is only a fraction of the average reward for even a single level 1 encounter, so it seems rather cheap to me. It's double the price of a lantern, the same price as an adventurer's kit, and cheaper than a cart. The D&D economy doesn't tend to make sense when you look at it too hard, but this seems ballpark.

 

[IanB]

Yeah I'm sure most of it is that 4e economics make my neck hurt in general, so seeing it cost 125,000g a day for Super Level 30 LinkBoy really makes me reach for the Advil. (And yes I know, why are you hiring a level 30 linkboy instead of a lower level one in the first place.)

It's really one of the few things that truly bugs me about the system.

 

[Obryn]

Yeah, at high levels this system seems even a little bizarre to me. But hey, I can imagine epic-level mercenaries pretty easily, hanging out in the City of Brass.

-O