The Ever Expanding Dungeon: Session 15.5 : Administrative Duties

We've been having terrible connection to the Internet lately in the evenings. Which is probably why I find the following so funny: (possibly NSFW)

On Monday nights, Lady Shadowmoss plays the Dungeons and Dragons MMO, and it is also the night I most typically play my solo RPGs. However, the download speed was to the point that I finally gave up trying to access my Google Drive where I store my documents for The Ever Expanding Dungeon and opted to do some offline stuff instead.

I sketched out a map of the area around the dungeon, to help give me a sense of where the other villages are and from whom I can hope to recruit some retainers for my plan to assault the as-yet-to-be-explored section of the dungeon. This might be a bad idea, and I might instead choose to start exploring some of the stairs up and down, but should this method work, it would give my party a chance at penetrating the goblin lair on level A (level above what i call level 1) without the PCs having to advance another level or two before trying (it's been particularly difficult to get beyond Room 17).

Before anyone asks to see it, the sketch is an ugly little thing in a spiral bound notebook - I do a lot of brainstorming with pencil and paper still, despite access to 3 laptops and a desktop PC. I will eventually transfer it to Hexographer and then will post it up here.

I also scribbled a quick method to determine how many villagers might be available from each location, for hiring:

Random Recruitment: A method to generate the possibility of retainers

For each game week, roll 1d6:
1 - Roll to see if applicants arrive and check again next game week
2-3 - Roll to see if applicants arrive but no further checks can be made without posting another notice
4-5 - No applicants arrive but check again next game week
6 - Word reaches you that the your advertising campaign isn't very enticing. Spend some more gold and try again.

To see how many applicants arrive:

1. Roll 2d6 to determine how many possible retainers are in each village in which an ad* was placed (call this the Target Number).  Do this only 1x for each village. Do not repeat this step in successive weeks.
2. Roll 1d6. If the result is an odd number, in Step 3, roll the Target Number or less, an even result means roll the Target Number or more.
3. For each village with possible retainers available, do the following:
• Roll 2d6 - 1  If you meet the criteria from step 2 subtract the smaller number from the larger. The difference is the number of recruits who show up this week.
•  If your roll the Target Number exactly, then only 1 villager responds to your ad.
4. Reduce the Target Number for any village from which a possible retainer comes by the number generated in 3.

* "ad" here means posting notices, town criers, shills to talk up the opportunity, etc.

The hiring process is  run according to the rule book. In my case, that's Labyrinth Lord's section on hiring retainers - just because someone shows an interest doesn't mean they'll accept the PCs offer. Although with Kroyden's 18 CHR, there's a better than average chance.

It's nothing special, but it will work for me - it can easily applied to the base town as well. There probably should be some chance of a classed character replying, as well as the possibility that the number of possible retainers in a given village might increase/decrease over time on their own, but I'll hold off on that for now.

As for replacement PCs, well, they just show up, no matter how unlikely. Just like in many social games.

Finally, I completed formal character sheets for each of the PCs. I've been using notebook paper, with multiple characters per sheet (usually doing a new one each session), but after the error of copying the wrong weapon for Dleggit, I decided I needed a better method.