Labyrinth Lord Compatible Hirelings Generator and Record Sheet

I was really inspired by Lord Kilgore's draft of a "Labyrinth Minions" maker. I've been meaning to do something similar for a while, now that my campaign is well underway. So, lifting (er, heavily borrowing!) from his draft and working out my own house rules, I came up with a Hireling Generator and combined it with a Hireling Character Record Sheet. I formatted these to fit nicely on 4x6 index cards to go along with my PC/NPC cards. I'll never go back to 3x5, that was making even me blind. I suspect there's only a few who'd be interested in this since most folks use larger record sheets, but for anyone who is:

You can download it here.

(update: you can customize this with your own house rules by using the fillable version of this available here. see also the S&W version.)

A few explanations: obviously your own house rules may differ. I didn't want to necessarily guarantee the success of finding hirelings, esp. in small towns. In my setting, anyone seeking to go dungeoneering is considered seriously loco. Accompanying adventurers is generally something that's done by the desperate, crazy, and eccentric. In a village or small town, where there may be only one inn or tavern, success is not a given. In a larger town it is, but there's a limit as to how many you can find in a day. I think Lord Kilgore's 5gp per attempt seems reasonable, but decided to limit my players to one attempt per day (btw, all of these house rules are not written in stone anywhere even though they're printed on paper).

In terms of weapons and armor, I tend to agree with Robert Lionheart's "Random Hireling Generator" in Knockspell #1. Most potential hirelings are poor, and poorly trained. Thus they aren't equipped with shields, and are prone to having spears and leather armor - if serving as only porters or other non-combatants, they will be armed only with a club or dagger, and only "attack" in self-defense. One of the tables is a bit squinty (you try doing decent layout on a 4x6 index card!), but it won't be used too often.

I included an attack table and saving throws based on 0-level fighters, and tried to leave a little space for notes in case I felt like using anything from the aforementioned Lionheart article in particular. Fonts used were Calibri (Regular & Bold) and Blackmoor LET. I was going to use Blackletter instead of Blackmoor, but it seemed less readible at this size. The Blackmoor font is embedded in the PDF, but if it doesn't display the header correctly for you, you may need to install that font seperately.

Update: Having given this some thought, I changed the hit point distribution table so that hirelings are a little tougher (after all, what 1hp freak would be able to carry your treasure, let alone watch your back as a man-at-arms?). I also re-named the card as "Labyrinth Lord Compatible", which makes me more comfortable as it's certainly not anything official and I wanted to be in full compliance (the thumbnail pictures don't reflect this though). I probably should do something similar with the PC cards, but it doesn't seem as important given that there aren't any dice tables involved...