Adventuring Companies Who Needs Them?

Adventuring companies in rpgs, who needs them, I mean why have them in the first place? All those years of playing AD&D and 3.X, I remember only one group that actually came up with an adventuring company name and stuck with it, Zora’s band. Most times, the players could either not come up with a name,  or would die, or retire PCs so the “company” would cease to actually have a recognizable face to the NPCs in the world. For example, with Zora’s band, after three years of gaming, the group had three players left out of original eight. Five out of eight players had changed, or retired PCs, or had moved on to be replaced by new players. I found adventuring companies were great for labeling antagonists – the NPC Party, but that did not help the PCs in the world, unless they fought such a group, or stole from them. What I found to work better for game mechanic was an underground world wide and extra-planar group called the Black Shirts.

What inspired the idea for the black shirts was the AD&D Planescape setting in the 90s. In Planescape they had many, many factions and factols, and a neat philosophical undercurrent that inspired role-play and story while players adventured out in the planes. Planescape still lives on today at Planewalker.com. Anyway Planescape influenced the black shirts as did Shadowrun’s fixers. Fixers in Shadowrun are the guys that help players get things in the game. At least I think it was the fixers, I have not played the game in at least ten years. Anyway, I jumbled together the factions of planescape in with the mechanic of the fixers from Shadowrun, and ended up with the black shirts.

What I found was that, players needed a way to find out information and get special items to help them play the game. I also needed a way to hook players into adventures. For starters, in Alidor I added the gold piece limit to towns so players knew approximately what they could purchase, or sell while traveling. The gold piece limit was one of the better game ideas from 3.0 that I held onto. If you look at a town in Alidor like Yatton, you will see the GPL and you will also see a place on the city map called the Smelly Keep (Fence); the Smelly Keep is where players could meet and talk with “Steve” about getting gear for the game. Steve was the code to get get in touch with the black shirts. Now the black shirts are not a thieves guild, they are just a built-in neutral mechanic to add dynamics to the game. The players never knew much about “Steve” and his gang of “Steves”, but that did not matter, they just wanted to buy stuff, or get info, or sell stuff; “Steve” was the contact they had to find to do it. I have had whole sessions dedicated to finding “Steve”, because sometimes it was not so obvious on how to reach a representative of the black shirts (Yatton being an exception).

Steve could be a guy or a girl.

Adventuring companies did not work so well, and I found that not giving players access to information and magic, also did not work so well either. The black shirts were my compromise that made adventuring outside the dungeon fun, and made the PCs really start to interact with NPCs in the World of Alidor.

Adventuring Companies don’t seem to do much for the game. After the first session of a new game, most players and PC’s bond to the story, or store bought module, and work to see it through. Whether their group is named Bob’s Band or Gretta’s Grenadiers does not matter. What is important is how do these guys get the stuff they need to survive the game. Building in a neutral entity as a player contact has helped my home game immensely. Having a party decide on a adventuring company name… Not so much.

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