God I’ve been running Errant 4 years now! Now, to be fair, we do end up taking significantly long breaks at time; usually November-December is off for holiday time and people have other things, but I’d say we’re probably playing 40+ weeks out of the year.
There’s been some really interesting shifts in the tone of play as we’ve gotten into middle level play, and it’s all based on the mechanics rather than me pushing play in any specific direction. We’re still doing the basic loop of “go to dungeon, clear dungeon, come back and blow money on partying”, but the part of “getting tied up in faction level bullshit between dungeons” becomes more and more a focus of play.
Untrusted, Unwanted
First context; Errants are untrusted and unwanted. These are the people you only hire if you have to, for problems you do not want to deal with. That’s the default lens of how society sees them. Yes, you can win people over eventually, yes, you can earn people’s respect… but… it’s an uphill battle. In the best situation you are seen like a rock star; a hero, famous, probably worth seeing, but not the sort of person you want to settle down as your neighbor.
Negotiation mechanics give you a limited amount of chances to make your points before people get tired of you, Errant, trying to waste their time. Institution building mechanics put the odds against you; your businesses, your magic academies, your alchemist business, your smith workshops are constantly beset with problems and delays to profit.
The easiest road is always adventure. Or risking death, if we’re going to be honest.
Renown & Reputation
Roll 1d10 to see if the party’s reputation precedes them; if it’s equal or under their level, the NPCs have heard of them.
As we hit the mid levels, this is pretty common, right now players are level 5 so it’s a 50% chance. For the average citizen, they want to hear the stories of adventure, see the party show off the thing they heard about, help promote their chosen cause, or sleep with them.
The people with power and influence see the Errants quite differently; dangerous. The more powerful deeds they’ve heard, the more they recognize the Errants as walking time bombs. So they want to see the party get sent off to do some quest or deal with their rivals or anything other than stay here, too long, and get ideas.
Our party has been seeing the gulf in treatment depending on how this roll goes. Sometimes they’re nobodies who seem sketchy and are basically ushered along and sometimes a powerful politician seems to know a little too much about them, their proclivities, and maybe sometimes, their misdeeds. NPCs are knowing about them, they’re knowing nothing about these NPCs.
And of course, some of it is quite reasonable why it’s happening. The governor wants to know who the heroes were that stopped the wyvern attack. The noble who collects weird arcane stuff wants to know where this delightful eldritch statue came from, maybe they could find some more? The crime boss wants to know who killed all the highwaymen he stationed along the best trade route. The Guardian of the Palace has definitely done multiple divinations about groups who have done great deeds and arrived to the capital just after the majority of the army has left for war.
It leads players to being entangled in faction drama even if they didn’t go looking for it. As they get a name for themselves, the trouble looks for them.
Leverage
So as I mentioned at the start, Errants are untrusted. So to get favors or resources, you start by taking dangerous, terrible jobs. Over time, you might win some people over. But, as you level up and go further, you get more money, and do greater deeds. And win over more people.
After some point, the problems that plague most villages are minor threats to you. And that means it’s super easy to help them and earn some good will that might overcome that bias against Errants. Or, if you’re less of a hero than that, it also becomes easier to threaten to get what you want. Basically, of normal resources in a village, the party can usually get what they want, one way or another.
Even then, the larger cities will not get won over or pushed around this same way. Yes your band of adventurers killed a wyvern, so what? The town has ballista and well trained soldiers who can do the same thing. It may take 10 times as many people, but they can do it. Oh, you want to threaten people here? You’re not the first person to summon a flaming skeleton in the Duke’s Hall. Larger cities have more people, more resources, and most importantly; more history and a past to have developed countermeasures to many of the Errant’s tricks.
The other issue, which goes back to our first year of play; if you act out or destabilize the large cities; you lose access to what that city offers. Errant has tiers for towns; small towns only have limited resources – the best smith went to the capital, the best healer went to study under the Alchemist’s Guild. All of those people are in the bigger towns. The Errants will accumulate a bunch of “projects” that they’ll want to hire help with. Someone to decipher an ancient book, someone to melt and smith this chunk of mithril into a choice weapon, someone who can train the weird bat stone monsters you’ve captured.
It’s where Errants find themselves having to endure bullshit if they want to maybe have nice things.
In comparison
I think all of this is pretty interesting especially when I compare it to D&D. D&D leaves it up to the group or the GM about what the focus of play is going to be, or how involved the party gets with factions and society. Errant starts you at a very specific social standing (bad) and never lets the foot fully off your neck.
The system structure starts forcing you into larger and larger faction and scale problems even if you’re not directly pursuing those things. Reputation becomes a double edged sword, more power means being asked to deal with bigger problems or being considered a bigger problem yourself.
It’s just been very interesting watching how this has been shifting over our campaign and sort of building up without any extra push on my part or the players.
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