Help with balancing a Sellswords & Spellslingers village raid?

[mikedemana]

Hi everyone! I want to design a raid on a village scenario in which the players take on the role of raiders and control about three figures each. I want the scenario to be flexible and take anywhere from 2-6 players. The actual setting will be an Anglo-Saxon village with Vikings being the raiders, but I know there are likely a lot more folks here on the Fantasy boards who are more experienced with Ganesha Games Sellswords & Spellslingers.

So, the thought is to put a Saxon church in the center of a 4'x4' board. In addition to that as being a place to get loot, throughout the board there will be homes, animal pens, and women and children to capture to sell into slavery. Lots of choice. The players are all on the same side, in essence, but competing for seizing the most loot.

If the players are given three characters worth about 60 points or so, how many enemies should start on the board? I was thinking of having the enemies be ordinary Saxon villagers (weakest), Saxon lower class warriors, and noble's house guards (strongest). I was thinking of adding a bit of randomness to the scenario, too. When a Viking player's character enters a home, he rolls on a chart to see who is inside. Could be no one (family cleared out) or a number of men, women, or children. Obviously, the men would fight to defend their family. The women would fight, too, but have a lower Danger Level.

So, if anyone has suggestions for this scenario, which I hope to run at conventions this year, I'd appreciate it. Should I tailor my number of enemies beginning on board to the number of players? So many single enemies, hordes, etc.?

Thanks in advance for your help! And thanks, Graham (Sunjester) for all the SS&SS questions you've already answered!!

Mike Demana

[Burgundavia]

So my balancing rules are basically this: 1 Loner foe per Player, 1 minion or group of minions per PC to start. There's a spearman minion and armoured guard loner that we used in a scenario the other day (along with some longbowmen). They were tough, but beatable with my rough rule of thumb above.

I like the idea of the "who's in the building" jeopardy, but I would probably do it as a deck of cards rather than a random roll. This lets you have some randomness (not sure what you're going to get) without having dice luck make every house be full of innocent children or angry Saxons.

[fred]

I like that idea - having some foes who scale to the number of players (the longer and minion group) and then who is the houses, which scale to how many houses the players explore.

The figures that scale to the number of players could always spawn from the church (if the number of players may change during the game).

[Kikuchiyo]

Sounds cool, I've been wondering about a low fantasy/darkage approach to Sellswords for a while

[Khusru2]

If memory serves me correctly, you could use the ambush by bandits scenario. This gave me no small problems with bandits jumping out of bushes with even an assasin. You could start with a varied group of villagers to wet the appetite of the raiders.

[mikedemana]

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I appreciate you helping out a newbie to the game! I’m a week out from running the game, so I will keep you posted with how it’s going…

Mike Demana