Hello and good afternoon all!
My party have just taken over the caverns from the Children of Stone and have now made a more permanent home for all their NPC's.
Now, they are talking about having certain NPC's scouting, some with constructing etc and it makes me wonder when and how I can implement the militia system.
So! Any recommendations from anyone? Is this a good time to start using the militia system rules instead of the survival rules in book 1 or is there a better opportunity to use the militia system in a later book?
Many thanks!
Up to your players. There is a certain amount of bookkeeping and you really want to delegate this to your players as much as possible.
Mine weren't that interested so I did most of it narratively. They found the overhead of the survival rules a bit too much like work so when the time came to delegate them to the now settled refugees they did so. We had some of the PCs spend time training NPCs while others were crafting, but nothing more than that.
There are other simplistic rules in later books if you don't implement the militia system.
If you do then book 2 ramps it up and book 3 expands on it more - so you can start now if you want and have it build up over time.
Book 4 and 5 are essentially not using the militia for any on-camera action, and book 6 only has it as an aside if you want for the first part.
Earlier this week erucsbo and I had a discussion with pl4t about the militias trained from villagers in the Fangs of War thread, comment #80. I was a little off topic at first, because I had forgotten about the simplified militia system in the Ironfang Invasion Player's Guide.
Training militias is totally up to the players. The GM's role is merely letting the players know that the rules allow it and roleplaying the responses of the NPCs to the suggestion.
My own players trained civilian militias and then left them behind to protect settlements. They did not like the idea of rescuing a village or city and then leaving it as defenseless as before when they departed for the next module. Thus, they made sure that the settlements had better defenders. To them militias were a storytelling element rather than a combat element.
As for Misthome itself, the future name of the caverns formerly occupied by the Children of Stone xulgath cultists (I converted my campaign to PF2, where troglodytes are renamed xulgath), I set up trade between Misthome and the deep gnome trader Novvi (see the sidebox on page 46 of Trail of the Hunted). Their main stock in trade was wood, which is rare in the Darklands. They were salvaging the wooden stockade from Camp Red Jaw rather than cutting their own wood.
Novvi eventually left the Misthome trade to her apprentices, because she appeared again in Siege of Stone page 26 "EVENT 3: TRADER IN THE DARK." You can find her stat block there, but she leveled up from rogue 2/expert 4 to rogue 5/expert 4.
However, in Fangs of War I gave the players information that let them rescue the village of Radya's Hollow from conquest. Ordinarily, the party would reach Radya's Hollow on page 11 of Assault on Longshadow after the Ironfang Legion had conquered it and sent its people to work to death in a dangerous mine. The party helped improve the defenses of Radya's Hollow before fighting off Dargg's Ironfang army, and then they returned to Misthome to lead the humans there to Radya's Hollow. The goblin refugees in Misthome (long story that I won't tell here) liked caves so they remained in Misthome, continuing trade with the deep gnomes.
Following the discussion that Mathmuse refers to, I've decided to rebuild the militia system to suit the needs of my campaign. Specifically I've changed the rules so that the number of actions the militia gets depends on its number of teams - every team gets one action, and is represented and led by a named NPC. This means that I can hide the militia mechanics from my player while still letting her make the decisions, something she specifically requested. It also seems to reflect the way that Nirmathas militias work.
The four NPCs (other than Aubrin, who I'm using in another way) who can be rescued in Part 1 will lead the first four teams, according to their speciality. Of course, they can't all be rescued, but the Ironfang will keep their prisoners in the area as slaves, and the PC and/or militia can rescue them.
I plan to start the militia out pretty much immediately, at the Hemlock Banner event. But initially, two teams will be permanently occupied just dealing with basic survival, so they'll only have one team. They'll gain another when the food situation is sorted, and a third when they have a permanent home.
If I was using the vanilla rules, I would probably say that doing the survival mechanics for a week takes an action, and that their initial training is the number of people the PCs saved. So if they saved a lot of people, they might start with a level 2 militia and be able to spend one action doing other stuff, while if they didn't save so many people they're going to spend all their time surviving until they have supplies to last for a whole week.