Bounty Board

By: Jared B.

How I made jobs for an Adventurer’s Guild’s job board.

For this article, I am reflecting on how I put together jobs for a job board I had made for the Adventurer’s Guild, which I had based the campaign out of. This campaign is set in a large medieval fantasy port city with all of its politics and undercurrents. The Adventurer’s Guild is a funnel for all the odd jobs from the guild leaders and the like in the city. The guild consistently has anywhere from 5 to 15 members. Most are purely NPCs or are NPCs of former PCs. With that, I felt the need to come up with 4-5 jobs at a time, so that the party always has options.

To begin with, I used a document called DM Narration Roll Charts. A very useful document overall, I chose to use the Quests/Plots/Jobs/Omens table. Seemed appropriate, but with single-word entries for each rolling option, it gives DM/GMs options of how to interpret the outcome.

How the table works is that there are 4 columns to roll on. Task, What, Where, and Reward. It is a 1d100 table with 25 rows of options for each of those columns. Let me run an example here, and I can show how I use the table for the aforementioned job board.

Example: rolls 46, 14, 52, 80

Task:(46) Defend

What:(14) A curse/spell

Where:(52) Forest/Jungle

Reward:(80) Safety

Hmm, interesting, so “Defend” is doable; the Curse/Spell seems dubious to pull off. The location in the Forest/Jungle is doable, just putting it outside the city, which is fine. Reward is “Safety”… Hmm, that could be lackluster for a reward, but another tool I use may resolve that. 

Back to our options here. Taking advice from my first GM, “If you don’t like a result on a roll table. Look to the options above/before and below/after the initial result. This preserves the randomness but allows you to tweak things to either fit your intended plot or simply make it make more sense.

So, looking at those other options, we now have:

Task: Hide | Defend | Foil

What: An Evil Plot | A Curse/Spell | An Area

Where: City | Forest/Jungle | Grasslands/Plains

Reward: Bring Hope | Safety | Prosperity 

Now we have some options to work with. So it does not look like “Hide” will really work with anything, so “Defend” or “Foil”. “Foil” could work for “Evil Plot” or “Curse”. “Defend” could work for “Spell” or “Area”. For “Where”, “City” is usable for any mission inside the setting city. “Forest” and “Plains” both work for anything to be outside the city. I think we can use “Safety” or “Prosperity” with any of the previous options.

I will use this as an opportunity to make two jobs. So the first will be “Defend” “An Area” in “The Jungle/Forest” to bring “Safety”. Those are our keywords from which I can flesh it out.

“A Merchant Lord on the City’s Council of Lords is looking for Adventurers to defend their merchant caravans coming through the Clover Forest just East of the city. There are reports of bandits in the forest attacking the Caravans. The adventurers are to defend the caravan wagons and bring back proof of the bandits and, if possible, information on where they are based out of.” This will bring Safety for the Merchant’s Caravan.

For the second option from the same rolls. “Foil”, “Evil Plot”, “City”, and “Prosperity”. With those keywords, I will weave it into: “City Council Lord of Public Works has information about a plot to sabotage the newly constructed docks. The Council Lord wants the Adventurers to investigate this information and do everything they can to preemptively stop the sabotage.” The new docks being built will bring more merchant traffic to the harbor, so it brings more “Prosperity” to the city and the patron of this job. 

Now for the actual reward for these jobs. What I normally do is take the loot tables from the Dungeon Master’s Guide(DMG). For this, I use the single-person loot tables based on the level of the party. With this setting/campaign, I often had a party of mixed levels, so I would either figure the average level of the party or take the level of each member of the party as a separate roll on the table and add it together.

Example: 4-member party of 1: level 4, 2: level 3s, and 1: level 2. 

The average here would be level 3. So, roll on the level 0-4 table and multiply it by 4.

Rolling a 74 on the Individual Treasure table(Page 136 of the DMG) for Challenge 0-4 gets us 3d6 GP(gold pieces). Rolling that gives us 11gp. Multiply that by the number of members of the party, in this case 4, gives us 44gp for the job. Now you could just round this up to 50gp if you wanted, or include some gems or art objects as well. A note here also, this is what the patron is paying for the job. Any loot that the party happens to pull off defeated foes would be in addition to this. It is sometimes good to remind your players of this if they feel the pay is too low. 

In this case, it does not break over into the level 5-10 table. But if it did, such as with 1: level 5, 2: level 4s, and 1: level 3. Then it would average as level 4, so still in the lower table roll, or 1 roll at the higher level table and 3 on the lower level table. So we roll that. A roll of 6 on the higher table and rolls of 46, 71, and 66 on the lower table. That gives us the following currency sets: 4d6x100 CP(Copper pieces), 1d6x10 EP(Electrum), 4d6 SP(Silver pieces), 3d6 GP, 3d6 EP. Rolling all those, we get 1900CP+60EP+16SP+5GP+10EP for a total of 60GP, 6SP. Again, you can always round this up or down. If you want it to be simpler, you can certainly take the average numbers offered in the DMG. Which, for the curious, would give you 40GP in the first example and 47GP 5SP for the second. You can also make your own table based on the party level that makes sense for the costs in your world. My rule of thumb here is you want your adventurers to be able to make no less than 30-50GP a month in-game. Preferably more. 

Probably the hardest part of all this is the fleshing out of the jobs once the players start on them. I have leaned heavily into my ability to improvise a lot of my planning. That has served me well most of the time, but it is not for everyone. For those who need a plan, try doing what I have done above and use placeholder names for the people involved and the places. That way, you can mostly flesh out the jobs and then customize them at a later date to fit the needs of your campaign. I hope this method is useful for other GM/DMs who need to fill out the Bounty Boards for their player groups. Game on!

If you want to know where you can find the DM Narration Roll Charts PDF, either from a Google search or from this website link: https://www.scribd.com/document/398105888/DM-Narration-Roll-Charts