I know I'm bouncing all over the place with books. At the start of The Monks of War, deep in The Religion, and finished the first short story in Brunner, not to mention whatever RPG books I'm messing with as well as various digital comics through Marvel.
But I love me some bounty hunters. One of the first times I remember them in AD&D was a Non-Player Class in Dragon. They loved to pull that. Here's a class so awesome and overpowered, but so limited in scope, that it makes a great NPC but should never be used as a player class. My other reference to them is from The Complete Adventurer, a book from Bard Games, the people who did the Atlantis trilogy, by the guy who later went on to do Talislantia. I owned at least two different printings of the game, one with a green outline, and one with the solid green border as seen here at Troll And Toad.
Bounty Hunters, like Mercenaries, to me, make perfect sense as a default for an adventuring party. The initial goals are already there. The targets of said goals allow the GM to pull an enemy of the week deal and allow the players to go where ever they need to in order to find and capture their foes.
In terms of Brunner, the opening sequence has one part that makes sense in a setting where so much relies on having a skilled operative.
"I agree the Tileans would certainly discover an armed force sometime before they themselves were in peril. But a single man? One man could discdover their hiding place, infiltrate it and recover the child."
And there's one perfectly valid reason why sometimes a small group of adventurers may be better than sending in an army. And of course the other reason? Unlike a standing army you may need in a few weeks that you could suffer serious losses on should you attack the goblin caves, the mercenaries are 100% disposable! It's a double win.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment