Camp Followers: Social Realist Dungeonsploitation

Weenix

This is a dungeon crawling game where you play as Camp Followers, civilians who accompany a party of NPC Adventurers on a dungeon expedition. You can play it with the system and dungeons you already have. I'm using OSE Advanced Fantasy for mine and I'll try to offer examples any time I say to grab something off the internet. The social dynamic between the Followers and the Adventurers fits any setting from the bronze age to the early modern period, or their fantasy equivalents.

 

CHARGEN

FOLLOWERS

Each player makes three Followers. Followers are noncombatants who do essential support and logistical work for a party of Adventurers. The majority of Followers are women but a few may be men too young, old or disabled to participate in dungeon combat. Fighting age men without a disabling injury would probably be conscripted into the Adventuring party as Fighters and would not count as Followers.

 

Followers have the standard ability scores, saves, etc for classless Level 0 characters in your chosen system (in OSE that's a normal human). Followers with especially low statistics are either elderly, children or have some permanent injury.

 

Followers are competent at laundry, cooking, basic wound care, maintenance of weapons, looting bodies and managing animals. These tasks are time consuming, physically demanding and can always go wrong, but under normal circumstances you don't have to resort to a skill system to do them.

 

Camp Followers are human, unless your setting has a sizeable Elf underclass or something. Even then they can't cast spells. This is a game about depending on unpredictable violent assholes for your physical safety so being able to Sleep all the monsters at Level 0 would defeat the purpose.

 

Followers have hand weapons like cudgels or daggers for personal protection. You can use the DCC generator or other random item table to start each character with interesting trinkets. Adventurers have the items spat out by the generator (weapons, rings, potions, scrolls, etc) and you can also use a starting equipment generator (roll for each adventurer) to make a list of stuff they leave at camp. Here are two. Unless the group is poor or the terrain is totally unsuitable, each Adventurer has a horse or mule to carry them. Add pack animals and, if the region has trails or open space, a wagon with oxen. 

 

ADVENTURERS

The DM creates a group of NPC Adventurers who the Camp Followers work for. I use the OSE generator for this. This game mode works better if you use the 3 by 3 alignment grid and a mixed alignment and level party. There are lots of "rival adventurers" out there premade. Goblin Punch and the Elfmaids blog have some. Adventurers can be any age, sex and race.

 

The Adventurers should be just numerous and just barely high enough in level to take on whatever dungeon you'd like to run. They point is for them to suffer, and for the Followers to suffer as a result.  

 

Everyone is either an NPC Adventurer or a player-controlled Follower. Ignore gradations of Hireling, Retainer, Mercenary, etc. The ones who fight are Adventurers, the ones who don't are Followers.

 

von Bayros

 

GAMEPLAY

The arc of the game is your standard dungeon crawler. The Adventurers go into the dungeon for a day of exploration, press their luck until they've cleared it or their resources are depleted, exit to rest and recover, and do the same thing. The difference is that the Adventurers in charge of dungeon exploration are NPCs and the players are the Camp Followers who work for them.

 

Players only play one of their characters at a time. Followers not controlled by the players are under DM control. Their behavior is subject to Reaction Rolls, the Morale system and ability scores (see below under Adventurer Behavior).

 

The first session starts in the wilderness outside the dungeon, or at the entrance if the module you chose doesn't have an interesting wilderness area where travel is fun. The Adventurers play through the dungeon while the players control the Followers, either at the camp or in the dungeon. The Followers are exposed to danger when things happen in the camp while the Adventurers are gone, when they accompany the Adventurers into the dungeon to do support activities, and when the Adventurers return to the camp and take out their frustrations on people who can't defend themselves. 

 

There aren't any rules for the Adventurers playing through a dungeon outside the players' field of vision. You have probably read a dungeon before and imagined a party of characters playing through it. This time you get to do that and then report out to a captive audience. While the Adventurers are gone you can use aggressive scene framing to cut between interesting moments that happen to the Followers at the camp. Wild animals or weather events or problems they encounter with their work that could spell trouble for the expedition (or for the Follower who gets blamed by the Adventurers).

 

Adventurers take Followers into the dungeon with them because it's dangerous outside and they don't want to split the party guarding the baggage train, because they need help with non-combat tasks in the dungeon, or because you've exhausted everything interesting that can happen while the players wait for them to come back. When the Followers accompany the Adventurers into a dangerous area, play everything using the normal rules of the game. Use dungeon turns and wandering monster tables and turn based combat and everything else as normal. You should use a Death and Dismemberment table for both Followers and Adventurers. Try the first page of this one if you don't have a favorite.

 

Burton

  

TASKS 

Here's a list of Camp Follower tasks, for use in framing scenes.

• Animal Husbandry
• Clean animals
• Feed animals
• Maintain equipment
• Armor/Weapons
• Clear fouling from firearms 
• Darn cloth/leather components
• Polish/oil weapons
• Sharpen blades 
• Body Servant
• Bathe/wash/shave
• Care for wounded 
• Help don/remove plate armor 
• Camp
• Dig latrine 
• Empty slops
• Mend tent
• Tend fire 
• Dungeon Activities  
• Casualty evacuation 
• Finish off downed foes 
• First aid
• Haul goods out of dungeon 
• Hold light 
• Loot bodies
• Map routes
• Move earth/stone 
• Reload weapons 
• Food
• Boil water
• Brew coffee, tea or other beverage 
• Cook food in pan or pot 
• Process cereal grains/flour into edible state (bread or porridge)
• Process fruit/vegetable (peeling, shelling, 
• Process meat (scales of fish, feathers of fowl, bristles of hog) 
• Serve food 
• Laundry
• Boil water
• Hang clothing
• Scrub clothing
• Raw Materials 
• Cut wood
• Draw water
• Gather plants
• Trap animals
• Hunt game
• Sutler
• Fence loot 
• Keep track of stores
• Purchase supplies in town 

Rubin

 

ADVENTURER BEHAVIOR 

Alignment, ability scores, class and the players' actions determine how the NPC Adventurers behave. If you have strong character motivations you don't need game mechanics to decide what to do, but even well written characters will run into situations where it's not clear how they would react. Use the following as a fallback.

• Good aligned Adventurers don't abuse Followers and will defend them from those who do (though this may require a morale test if the perpetrator looks tough)
• Neutral Adventurers are indifferent to the abuse of Followers, and will participate or defend victims based on the example set by others.
• Evil Adventurers happily take their frustrations out on people who can't defend themselves. They beat, rob and rape followers when they can get away with it.
• Lawful characters expect Followers to observe cultural mores, use proper terms of address, etc. In public they treat Followers according to society's laws.
• Neutral characters are sensitive to tone rather than formal professional rules or societal norms. They arbitrarily get upset if they feel disrespected in some immutable way.
• Chaotic characters don't demand elaborate displays of deference from their Followers, but don't maintain or respect boundaries.

Everyone has bad days. Drunk adventurers behave worse and basically everyone wants to drink after a bad day in the dungeon. 

 

Ability Scores affect behavior as follows

• INT determines how hard an Adventurer is to convince. High INT adventurers detect lies but accept reasonable explanations. Low INT characters are guileless but hard to convince unintuitive truths.
• WIS is used for impulse control. Low WIS adventurers are more likely to lash out and go too far. High WIS adventurers still do bad things, but wait and preplan. 
• CHA is used internally in adventurer-to-adventurer reaction rolls. CHA serves as a tie breaker among the highest level Adventurers in the party to determine who leads the group. 

Camp Followers can "manage upward" during exploration or downtime and change the course of a dungeon delve, if they can sell their ideas so that the Adventurer thinks he came up with it. Even Good aligned adventurers do not like to be "humiliated" by a woman who knows better than them. Contradicting the party leader in public is a great way to get hit. 

 

 

Alekseev

 

INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE

I thought about a system for generating character relationships, sanity and sanity damage from abusive treatment... I decided that the tension was not necessary to mechanize and can emerge naturally through player behavior. Players want their characters want to survive but are also resistant to their characters being maltreated and humiliated. 

 

Adventurers demand things that are not part of the normal employer/employee relationship. Since 1975 even so-called Good adventurers have clouted their hapless henchmen forward into traps and ambushes to spare the "real" members of the team. Dark sorcerers and Evil High Priests demand blood sacrifice or body parts for their magical workings. Even Lawful and Good adventurers hold a tacit assumption that women (and potentially young men) who accompany Adventurers into the field are sexually available. 

Things that prompt Adventurers to beat Followers (modified by alignment, exhaustion, inebriation, etc)

• Bad food (regardless of whether the Follower fucked up the preparation) 
• Being refused alcohol while drunk
• Disobeying a direct order in the dungeon 
• Equipment failure (whether the Followers' fault or not)
• Having a bad day in the dungeon 
• Infidelity (real or imagined)
• Jealousy
• Paranoia 
• Refusing sexual advances
• Running out of alcohol

In OSE an unarmed attack deals D2 damage. With a death and dismemberment table in effect, being dropped to 0 by such an attack is unlikely to inflict permanent disability. Most Adventurers stop at that point, but drink, sadism and poor impulse control make it worse. The Followers are welcome to switch to turn based combat and defend themselves whenever they want. Real world domestic violence often escalates to a "real fight" when the victim goes for a weapon or the attacker goes for the kill. The Followers' odds aren't good but it can prompt other Adventurers to intervene. Beating servants/women/children/slaves is normal but attacking one of them with a weapon can spur indifferent observers to action.

Adventurers don't allow the abuse of Followers with whom they have a romantic or transactional sexual relationship, who have an essential skill that they need, or who are blood related. Taking on someone higher level than them takes a morale test. Reaction rolls determine if the perpetrator backs down or escalates the situation to a brawl or full on lethal fight. Alcohol increases the odds of a confrontation. 

 

Other things that can positively dispose Adventurers to Followers, enough to intervene on their behalf

• Sharing a language, religion or culture nobody else in the party does
• Saving the Adventurer's life previously
• Making good food

Followers can deliberately sabotage Adventurers by messing with their equipment. The ingenuity of the player and the Intelligence of the Adventurer determine if they get caught before something bad happens. If the consequences of sabotage occur offscreen, give the Adventurer a save and a roll on the dismemberment table to see if they are killed, injured or escape danger.

Gentileschi

 

ADVANCEMENT 

Followers don't level up. They use wealth to purchase goods and services in pursuit of safety and a comfortable life for themselves and their family, not to become more powerful physically. If a Follower learns magic from a wizard, becomes a fighter's squire and gains class levels, etc they become an Adventurer and are controlled by the DM for the rest of the game.

 

When the Adventurers clear a dungeon or get so beat up they can't continue further, the group journeys back to a populated area to fence the take and load up on supplies for the next delve. Followers are often put in charge of shopping. After a successful delve the Followers can encourage the Adventurers to invest the money in something besides more dungeon exploration and pursue a safer career. Good luck with that.  

 

Once shopping and downtime activities are complete you can do another dungeon. Advance the clock months or years if you please, allowing relationships to produce children who will become Adventurers or Followers. Add more characters if someone's Followers died, bring in more Adventurers if too many of them died, remove Adventurers who didn't get along with the rest of the group and prefer to take their money and run.

 

If the Adventurers get wiped, the players are now in charge of getting back to town alive.

 

Tusenfot

 

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Is this actually fun? I know from past experience that players like slice of life bullshit, family drama, fantasy domestic violence and playing the slaves of violent men. Is it still fun when the plot is driven by the actions of NPCs and the players don't get to adventure on their own?

 

What dungeon should we play? Something dangerous where the Adventurers can get mutilated, have a reason to take the Followers into, and supports multiple sessions of play. That describes hundreds, maybe thousands of adventures so I should just pick one.

 

Should some players be Adventurers and some be Followers? With a normal sized group I'd do this on a rotating basis, where everyone gets an Adventurer and a handful of Followers. With a big group (10+ players) you could have half the group play Adventurers and the other half the Followers on a permanent basis. Could be fun for a convention game, but if you played it in public you'd have to dial back the domestic abuse aspect and then you'd be left with a plain vanilla dungeon crawler.

 

What's the right ratio of Followers to Adventurers? I picked three Followers per player because I think that's the largest number of recurring characters a player can realistically be responsible for. DCC gives you four expendable idiots at the start but the assumption is that they're going to get wiped fast and leave you with one character who develops a personality.  

 

Should Followers be able to learn special skills? Retainers in most games have wage rates for professions like engineering, alchemy, animal handling, sailing... Allowing the Followers to master skills in order to make themselves essential to the expedition creates a divide between characters who can safely be abused and those who have to be left in a fit state to do their job. Enduring maltreatment at a shitty job so you can afford to learn better skills is more modern than medieval but if you read my adventures you already know that I like the early modern period better.

 

What is the goal? We can come up with individual motivations for the Followers (survive, protect family, become wealthy, escape pain/hardship, genuine romantic relationships and love) but what are the players trying to do? Do they have a goal or do they just portray their characters through a dungeon crawl?