Followers: Your PCs are Adventurers

Followers - henchmen and hirelings - represent the sort of people who would follow a rootless adventurer into danger, and the limits on them in the One Page system reflect this.

One principle I'm following is that player characters have the class of "adventurer" modifying their role as a fighter, wizard, priest or whatever. NPCs are not playing by the same rules as PCs; they don't get experience the same way, shouldn't develop a raft of hit points on the basis of 30 years of scholarly research, may have skills and talents that adventurers never have the time to develop. So, I ended up limiting PC background skills so that adventurers don't become the craft mavens, alchemy brewers, and whatnot of other systems. You are adventurers, you pay other people to do that. If you were brought up as a beekeeper you might be able to get a discount on beeswax, but you're a failed beekeeper so your time is not best spent running a hive.

Likewise, when it comes to leading small armies around at 2nd character level, you won't really get a horde of hundreds following you unless you're backed up by some larger assurances. Maybe you're a captain in a governmental army, or the son of a duke. Maybe you're a bandit leader who started out as a rootless adventurer, with only a few henchmen and hirelings, but your successes, and your ability to offer a steady and relatively risk-free living, attracted more and more men.

The nuts and bolts of recruiting will be covered in the One Page village and town supplements. I see those as a way to codify some of the generic assumptions of what you can get in small and large campaign settlements.

The Bard as Hireling

So ... if all a bard character does is strengthen your morale and make you feel at home in the wilderness and know lots of semi-useful trivia, maybe you're better off having a bard as a retainer instead of playing one?

Think of the precedent. African kings with their praise singers ... Brave Sir Robin's bard. Xena's sidekick Gabrielle was a bard, and it's hard to think of the roles being reversed, isn't it?

The bard, then, can be seen as a luxurious accessory for a pretty accomplished party of adventurers. Wages for a bard are a base 100$ (gp) a month, with an additional 50$ for each bonus point the bard's Charisma and Intelligence scores give. What do you get for all this? Well ...

• The bard can sing in a wilderness or dungeon camp. This increases the natural healing rate by 1 for characters 2nd level or higher. (I houserule that you only heal 1 hp/night in camp, but 1 hp/level/night in a safe location such as an inn).
• The bard with exceptional Charisma, can sing and play at any time to give all other hirelings and henchmen a Morale bonus on 2d6 equal to Charisma bonus; if no bonus, a bard's playing still negates 1 point of any morale penalties in effect. 
• Some bardic traditions instead give enemies a like Morale penalty. These are the ones that come equipped with bagpipes.
• The bard can create a spectacle of entertainment as the party enters or wanders around a settlement. This creates a certain notoriety, both for good and bad: urban encounters are twice as likely to happen, and the party is twice as likely to come to the attention of local authorities. This also gives +1 to reaction rolls in situations where a song is appropriate and the audience is receptive to the bard's style, but -2 if the style is disliked. Finding out the king's tastes is very important.
• The bard can sometimes act as a sage on matters of history and legend for the cultural tradition he or she knows. This translates to a 50% chance of answering a general question in that field of history or legend, 20% of answering a specific question and 5% of answering an exacting question, plus 5% per bonus point in Intelligence the bard has. Chances are cut by 1/5 for a cultural tradition that only borders on the one the bard knows. 
• If using the carousing rules, the bard increases by a factor of 1.5 the amount of money that can be converted to experience, as people flock to the party trail.

Mere musicians can also be had for 50$ a month, with none of the "sage" or "morale" abilities, and thus no bonus for exceptional scores. Musicians, however, often show poor morale when heading into danger (2d6 morale score 1d6+1) whereas bards are more inquisitive and made of sterner stuff (morale score 2d4+2).