Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D keeps us company on the long roads we travel.

Sometimes, when an adventuring party loves an NPC very much, they start traveling together and setting common goals. We’re going to talk about the companion characters, those NPCs with their own goals and sidequests, that we love from CRPGs, why you might want them in your campaign, why you might not, and how to make a standard NPC feel like a companion character.

The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide distinguished between henchmen and hirelings. Hirelings were paid a set rate to do a specific job, while henchmen were somewhat like apprentice adventurers who were given a lesser cut of all treasure found. One of the things your character was expected to spend gold on was recruiting henchmen or hirelings for dangerous situations to make it less likely that the player characters would die. An additional purpose listed for henchmen was to act as a bodyguard for the player character against the plans of the other player characters. AD&D 1st edition dungeoneering sounds like a hostile workplace.