Call Ally, Sidekick, Ally, Minions (from League of Heroes, pages 23, 28, 38). 

Last edited by michaeltaylor (10/05/2016 3:19 pm)

I think your idea is a good one, and I can't see why you shouldn't be able to improve your followers at a later date as well. However, I think a career for the followers should cost another point.

The GIT! wrote:

So, my players are getting pretty hooked on BoL and we are now progressing in to the realms of the heroes spending (losing) their hard-earned wealth to gain APs.

One of the options for APs is to gain 10 rabble followers for each AP spent. These followers each have 1 lifeblood. NPC rabble normally have lifeblood of 1-3 and a career of 0-1.

My question, is how do heroes gain better quality rabble followers? Is it reasonable to spend an additional AP to increase the lifeblood and career rating? Is it reasonable to spend the AP to improve the rabble at a later point in the game?

e.g. 2 AP = 10 rabble followers with 2 lifeblood each; 3 AP = 10 rabble followers with 3 lifeblood and 1 career.

Admittedly thread necro (Arise!  For I am a Sorcerer-King-Poster!) but I was just considering the same thing after discovering the game very recently.   I was trying to figure out how to balance a character having a tough follower/companion/whatever with other characters that do not as it seems like the simple AP cost isn't really enough.   I came to the same conclusion that the initial cost only gets you the lowest stat in each category on the table rabble or tough.   If you spend more AP then you can bump up each column entry by one if possible (so a 2 AP tough has 1 attribute/combat and 6 life but still 2 career points since it can't go up).   A fully maxed out rabble of 10 would then cost 3 AP to get the max 3 lifeblood in situations where space is limited and having better rabble is preferable to more.   "Companion" style character builds are a personal favorite of mine and I always check out the possibilities when I look at a new system.

Gruntfuttock wrote:

Necro is no bad thing if you bring something new to the party, and also people looking at a post from 10 (Ye Gods!) years ago might now disagree with their stated opinions back then. So raise the dead Pit Fighter!

When it comes to companions....as people have moved away or even died (!) my group finally disappeared. This however is no problem with BoL or Everywhen, as the BoL mechanics work very well in 1 GM - 1 Player games. Also, when it comes to sword & sorcery, the original source material often featured a single hero, plus 'hangers on'. My wife and I run games for each other, turn and turn about, aiming to play every Sunday.

*snip*

I requires a trusting relationship between player and GM to make this work, but that's necessary for any game, not just a single player game.

Thanks!  Ironically, I actually started RP'ing in a one on one fashion with a friend with D&D 2e but it didn't work out very well as neither of us knew what we were doing.  About an hour into the first game, my elven bladesinger got knocked out by an orc in the very first combat (don't recall if it was the first or second hit) and captured and my friend/GM didn't know what to do next!   We played a short "try to escape the orc camp" session the next time but it was about as clunky so we stopped after that.

I'm glad that someone else is a fan of companion builds whether by preference or necessity. 

Thanks and I'm definitely scouring it for resources.  I figure I'm probably not the first person to have particular questions so I usually try to search first.