A friend of mine is writing a really great game centered around mercenary guilds and how to handle them in an Old School RPG kind of way. His name is Felipe Pep and his game is called Mercenary Guilds of Belmonte (which I am working with him to bring it to the English language). One of the many things I like about his game is how he creates some guild roles for players and let them earn points to be used in the game by them. I know this is not completely new and innovative, but it was put together in such a cool way that I would like to talk about it and create some new stuff with it for my own games.
What he has done is clearly defining roles and respective tasks associated with them that players can take and earn what it’s called Legacy Points (which we will discuss its uses in a bit). There are roles that very well can exist within any adventure party or mercenary company. Players who perform these roles in a session earn 1 Legacy Point to spend in any way they desire. The roles are:
- Cartographer: Draw maps of the places the party is exploring, like dungeons, cities, forests, so players can orient themselves within the game world.
- Secretary: Responsible for scheduling the game and passing important messages from the Referee to the players, helping getting everyone on the same page.
- Chronicler: Takes notes of names, places, NPCs, rumors and any information the group might find useful so the Referee don’t need to keep reminding the group of the things they have already said.
- Accountant: Responsible of taking note of all the treasure the group finds, how they divide it amongst themselves, how to spend and invest it in benefit of the whole group.
- Medic: The one responsible for noting the HP, conditions and other depleting resources of the whole party.
- Barrister: The one responsible to be the rules consultant for any players doubts, especially new ones who are just getting started.
- Battlemaster: The one responsible for taking care of initiative order and effects durations, like spells, potions and whatnot.
- Sargeant: Responsible for taking care of the party’s NPCs stats, HPs, Resources and whatnot.
- Troubadour: Responsible for retelling what has happened in the campaign so far, helping everyone at the table to get on the same page at the start of the game.
- Cook: Responsible to taking care of the food and beverage arrangements for the session.
Naturally not all roles would fit every group, and some of them might not make sense for every game. But these are the ones I could think of the bat that could be assigned to a single player. Not only this helps unload the Referee with all these responsibilities, but makes players more engaged and committed to the game.
Performing any of these roles for a session gives a player a Legacy Point. This is a player resource, independent from their character. So they could change characters, their characters could day, and they would still have this Legacy Point.
You can use Legacy Points in the following way:
- Trade it for a Hero Point, Daring Point, Inspiration (or whatever your game of choice calls it) or a simple Reroll for your current character.
- Each point allows you to make a Roll to improve a character Attribute by one point in the character creation process (that means you can begin with potentially more capable characters).
- Two points can be traded to be counted as a single Adventure for purpose of the necessary number of adventures needed to Level up in SS&SS, SB&CS or DS&DS.
- Two points could be translated into 1000 xp for other more traditional OSR games.
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