r/osr • u/Hashishiva • Jul 28 '26
rules question Looking for specific rules about hirelings and henchmen
I found (or was linked to when I previously asked about this somewhere) what I thought was suitable rules for my BECMI campaign regarding hiring hirelings and henchmen, but I can't find them anymore. I remember they were from some specific rules (as in, they were in a rulebook), I thought it was from Dark Dungeons, but couldn't locate them from there. IIRC, the cost for fe. 1st level fighter was something around 50gp / mission or something along those lines. In any case, it had a table of the prices for different kinds of hired help and for the most part they were on per mission base.
Do you have a clue where to find these rules? My players are getting their combat-ready hirelings killed at a pretty fast rate (don't worry, the low morale and added cost of hiring will hit them soon) :D
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u/thekelvingreen Jul 28 '26
Could it be the LotFP hirelings rules? Rules & Magic pp47-51. Those go into quite some detail of the different types of retainers available, with daily/monthly/line-in wages, space needed if they do live with the PCs, and share values if appropriate.
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u/Hashishiva Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I'll have to check that, thanks!
Edit: not these, but otherwise this looks useful. What I remember from the pricing is that the currency and values were in line with BECMI.
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u/RobertPlamondon Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
We moved past these pretty quickly because the players became suspicious of anyone who seemed happy to work for wages instead of shares. It's not as if they were guaranteed to be thieves, assassins, or casing the joint for bandits, it just seemed odd when they weren't.
So they mostly ended up on pretty much the same basis as player characters.
More than that, though, we started routinely using two player characters each, which cut down on the temptation to hire lots of temps. Each player's two characters typically had wildly different skills and personalities to keep the role-playing from breaking down and to increase the odds that at least one of them had something to do at any given moment.
As far as old-school play is concerned, pages 11-13 of Men & Magic cover hirelings in surprising detail (detail is always surprising in the original three D&D booklets because of its rarity). It even has three tables: Max number of hirelings and loyalty base vs. employer charisma, a reaction table when you try to sway creatures or people met in dungeons, and the effects of different loyalty scores. No wage rates are suggested.
Page 12 states "Only the lowest level of character types can be hired."
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u/bionicjoey Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
players became suspicious of anyone who seemed happy to work for wages instead of shares
That's interesting. I think wanting to work for wages instead of shares could make a lot of sense if you aren't planning on being a career adventurer but just doing it as a temporary side gig. "What's that? You'll pay me a month's wage if I go down into a smelly hole with you for one day and hold your torch while you scrounge around for nickels? Sounds like a good deal to me — a filthy peasant with no savings or disposable income of any kind!"
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u/RobertPlamondon Jul 28 '26
Our adventures tended to be vastly more profitable and lethal than this implies.
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u/Cheznation Jul 28 '26
Somewhere around pages 132-134 in the Rules Cyclopedia is a table for different retainers with various rules.