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Message: <blockquote data-quote="cptg1481" data-source="post: 1765380" data-attributes="member: 5360">Classic InsurgencyI love this question….Basically, you are facing an insurgency.  The monsters are the insurgents and the PC’s and their mercenaries are fighting a counter-insurgency operation.  This is the most complicated and frustrating operation in warfare.  There are few if any examples of a successful counter-insurgency to reference.  However, think Viet Nam, The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, El Salvador, Peru, etc.  Large unit operations are largely unsuccessful for many reasons.  They make a lot of noise, telegraph their movements by having large encampments, supply lines and simply opening themselves up to easy observation by insurgent forces.  Company size operations will fail when looking for small groups, period.  Enough said on that, I think I made the point.  That should be enough of a reason to give your players.  Let them figure out that they need to employ smaller sized specially trained units to track them down, attack with surprise, quickness and violence of action to successfully remove them.  You could have one of the mercenary commanders make these suggestions to them after a period of unsuccessful actions.  He surely would be aware of these facts as a professional soldier.  On the positive side I do think that they would have some success against creatures that have a fixed base of operations, goblins, kobolds, orcs and other humanoids with villages lairs etc.  However, the larger the group the more likely they are to have advanced warning, finding abandoned camps might be the norm.  Eventually, the baddies will just leave the area rather than risk the confrontation with a larger better-trained force.  Single monsters with a fixed lair and a lower intelligence would be easy targets, i.e. owlbears, bears, and other animal types.  Special and intelligent monsters might stay and fight if they are especially powerful.  This would be a conflict to save for the PC’s i.e., dragons, sphinxes, etc.  Nymphs and fairies types might even be tempted to cooperate in exchange for amnesty, favors or cash.  They could provide early warning and further intelligence gathering assets for the fortress.  Likewise, any tribe group or family could also be tempted to do so if you follow the hearts and minds strategy.  This could provide lots of role-playing interaction with unusual type characters.  Remember that evil is not stupid, even orcs know when they are outgunned.  Sure you may have rogue type incidents even after you make the deal but it is a lot better and cheaper to deal with the adolescent orcs who don’t accept the rule of the elders than to deal with an (relatively) organized orc tribe who feels their way of life is threatened.  Any group will fight really hard for those reasons.  Let them know you just want to live in peace and that they are free to live as they wish as long as they don’t raid your lands and you might even end up with an ally in times of war.  For when your lands are threatened so ore theirs if they live there in relative balance.  Anyway, worse comes to worse, you can have the mercenaries deal with threats appropriate to their level and just give the PC’s some challenges appropriate to their level to deal with when you want to.  That way your game stays in balance.  The PC’s have to spend some $ on protection for the peasants through mercenary employment, payoffs etc, and they get to fight challenges that are appropriate.  Hope this helps….CPTG <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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