Miscellaneous Rules needed in the Players Companion

Whilst looking at Chapter 10 of the main rules it occurred to that there may be certain misc rules that need to be included in the Companion.
Specifically Starting Age and anything else that is based on the Class directly.
Wandering NPC parties might also warrant a mention, but perhaps that falls under the Class Demographics umbrella.
If there are others, perhaps post them here to gather them up?

since the discussion in lethality, ive been delving into 0 level henchmen creation.
i really love the templates and we spent yesterday rolling characters on the templates, what about adding a henchman chart to roll their gear and such up quickly just as an optional rules table.

Not a NEED as such but could be helpful - Templates for Conqueror and King level PCs for slipping into mid-session. We came up against this during a session where I thought a cut-scene would be fun and did it without stats etc as I hadn’t done any pre-gens and didn’t want to lose the moment by detailed char-gen. Maybe 3 or 4 at king level (religious/martial/arcane background).

I’ll ditto the request for 0 level commoner table…preferably a d100 one! We hit that problem our first session.

Here’s one I made for rolling henchman proficiencies – I know the book says that they don’t get adventuring, but I decided to give them a fair chance. It’s an amusing table to tweak: do you want your henchies to be inveterate gamblers and lechers?
d100 Proficiency

1-15 Adventuring
16 Alchemy
17 Animal Husbandry
18 Animal Training
19 Art
20-21 Bargaining
22 Caving
23 Collegiate Wizardry
24-25 Craft
26 Diplomacy
27 Disguise
28-29 Endurance
30 Engineering
31-50 Gambling
51 Healing
52-53 Intimidation
54 Knowledge
55-60 Labor
61-63 Language
64 Leadership
65 Lip Reading
66-67 Manual of Arms
68 Mapping
69 Military Strategy
70-71 Mimicry
72-73 Naturalism
74-75 Navigation
76 Performance
77-79 Profession
80 Riding
81-82 Seafaring
83-86 Seduction
87 Siege Engineering
88 Signaling
89-90 Survival
91 Theology
92-93 Tracking
94-95 Trapping
96+ Extra rank in another proficiency

Nice, pair it with equipment and it begs for a DCC-style Funnel option

Maybe an example of a Traveller-style lifepath for more randomized King+ level PCs and NPCs, with skills replaced by proficiencies.

on the D100 table, maybe adding the a random piece equipment to go with the proficiency. ie…
Trapping, rusty bear trap 1d6
Signaling, signal flags
Seduction, bottle of perfume
Leadership, fine cloak
Labor, chisel and hammer, saw and measuring rope, chalk
along with some basic equipment
such as
1-23 dagger, cloth, 10 torches etc…
24- 57 spear, short-sword, leather etc…
but all in the same table. i could see this as an appendix of sort of quick easy henchmen similar to the treasure tables, but them again, i really and my players like random alot, thats why we are excited about the templates in themselves.
another thing that i really would like to see in ACKSPC is a page of sample constructs for the dwarven machinist, both as personal and or larger built stated out to give a clearer view of the constructs. i know alot of that is judges choice on what is allowed for the constructs in the build rules. im really looking forward to the art in this book

ok, i cant find where it says henchmen cant have adventuring or proficiencies. can someone point out a page

p. 64. “Normal humans and demi-humans (non-adventuring 0th level characters) do not begin with the Adventuring proficiency or any class proficiencies. Instead they begin their careers with four general proficiencies.”

(Obviously if your get leveled henchies they may well have Adventuring.)
See also p. 115: 0th Level Characters and Experience from Adventuring – you can run across henchmen that still have a bunch of their non-adventuring proficiencies.

On the other hand, I don’t think you’re breaking anything if you say that the adventuring proficiency counts three times- that is, you can find a spear-carrier who knows how to ride a horse and when to light a new torch, and has one general proficiency that probably indicates what the parents who are ashamed of them do for a living. Then the bump from 0th to 1st level is the henchman gaining a class proficiency, and you could choose something based on what happened to them in their initial adventures.

I really don’t think handing out henchmen three general proficiencies plus adventuring breaks much anything either.
Eg. a rakish ex-corporal:

  • Adventuring
  • Manual of Arms
  • Seduction
  • Gambling
    (I’m not really sure if the book actually means that no 0-level henchies have adventuring, or that if they do it counts as one of their general proficiencies.)

The thing that breaks from giving them three proficiencies instead of one is that, after leveling to the first level, they have 2 more proficiencies than a player character at level 1, and no drawback. The adventuring proficiency is supposed to be the thing that distinguishes a PC from a NPC, so you’d need to take that into account if you were assigning it to the henchmen (especially since a leveled henchman may become a PC).

As it happens, Alex talked through this issue a while back: http://autarch.co/forum/topic/0-level-npcs-clarifications#post-2003

Hm. Good point.
I think I’ll conceptualize Adventuring as being a package deal of:

  • Dungeoneer (finding traps, etc)
  • Outdoorsman (making camp, using rope, etc)
  • Man About Town (riding, appraising, etc)
    or something along those lines, and give henchies one or more of those.