Alternative Use of Charisma: Allies & Enemies

A small house rule which I've been using in a slightly modified form in my recent Victorian horror campaign (which reached an unexpectedly explosive conclusion this week).

This rule works especially well for campaigns which are somewhat story-oriented (in that the PCs are involved in a fair amount of town based activity, and interaction with various NPCs and factions plays an important role), and campaigns where little or no use of the standard D&D henchmen rules occurs. Personally I've found that the henchmen rules are virtually never used in campaigns I run, so I thought it'd be good to come up with some alternative use of the Charisma stat (in addition to its role as a modifier to reaction rolls, of course).

Here's what I thought:

Using the standard B/X ability modifiers (3 = -3, 4-5 = -2, 6-8 = -1, 13-15 = +1, 16-17 = +2, 18 = +3), pluses in the Charisma stat mean that the character has a useful contact or ally, while minuses mean the character has an enemy.

Of course, the exact role these allies/enemies play in the campaign, and how much impact they have is up to the DM.

In the Victorian campaign we were just using the allies rule, which worked out really well. It occurred to me yesterday that the rule could be mirrored to give enemies to PCs with low CHA.

Updated Savage Worlds hirelings & henchmen PDF

I've just updated the PDF of my guidelines for Hirelings & Henchmen in Savage Worlds fantasy campaigns. Not a big change, but I've just removed the stuff that was specific to my own campaign (names of deities and magic-wielding Elf warriors). Oh and I also changed the guidelines for henchmen gaining XP to match the rules in SWEX (which I'd not noticed previously).

So everything in the sheet is now fully 100% certifiably compatible with SWEX + the Fantasy Companion ;)

Next thing I've got in mind is adding some random tables for interesting bits of background and quirks.

Hirelings & Henchmen

Hirelings and henchmen play a significant role in old-school D&D, and I wanted to encourage their use in my Savage Worlds campaign. I thought this was an especially good idea due to the Savage Worlds system being able to so smoothly handle large numbers of characters in combat. However, unfortunately I couldn't find any details in SWEX or the Fantasy Companion relating to the hiring of allies - not even a rough "cost per day / week". So I worked out my own tables, specific to fantasy settings, with guidelines for the costs of locating and hiring mercenaries and neophyte adventurers to join a party.

The PDF can be downloaded here: Hirelings & Henchmen.

It includes a random table for determining an adventurer's profession (Fighter, Wizard, Thief, Cleric, etc), and stats for them all. All the adventurers' stats are created with 5 points in Attributes, 10 points in Skills, and no Edges except those granted by racial background. So they're a step behind starting PCs, which is appropriate.

At present there are no guidelines or tables for hirelings' background, personality or motivations. The table in SWEX can provide a basic hint at personality, but I'd like to add some tables with small snippets of background, motivations and interesting quirks or features. A simple roll on the Minor Hindrances table could add some flavour as well.

The document is somewhat idiosyncratic to my campaign, with a setting-specific list of deities for Clerics, and the assumption that all Elves have supernatural powers. These things can easily be ignored though.