Squad Goals

Battle of Kilrush Woodcut

Basic D&D allows characters to have a bunch of retainers (leveled hirelings that accompany PCs on dungeon adventures). With average Charisma, you can have 4. With max, 7.

Standard Charisma Chart

I've never played at a table where players ran anything like that number of retainers. It's almost impossible for a DM to resolve actions for 3 to 5 players, each with up to 8 characters. Players with manners don't try it. 

The game offers high charisma characters a coterie of retainers. The realities of play make it impractical, and that sucks.

My fix: run a small group of fighters as a single unit. 

Handmade sheet. Sections are sized for post-its & index cards. Printable version.

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Why are D&D towns filled with apothecaries? Are the desperados gleefully hurling themselves into haunted necropoleis and beast-infested ruins concerned about their wellness routine or self-care rituals?

Whatever the reason, there they are and your players will inevitably send someone in and you'd best have something ready... It's been on my to-do list for a while, but now, printed and glued into my notebook, I have what I need to run a quick scene and give them something to spend a few coins on.

Tacuinum Sanitatis

Weirdos

• Herbie: Tall & thin-framed with a pot-belly. Eager to tell you about "mushroom dreams". An expert on local wildlife.
• Fern: Shaggy and shuffling. A big hugger, with horrific body-odor. Wanders the woods regularly and, if asked, will draw a map to any well-known landmarks in the nearby wilderness. 
• Dr. Stooper: Fastidious and florid. Always tries to upsell patent aphrodisiacs. Feuding with local witch or faith healer, eager for someone to "do something."
• Erma Prunebottle: Weathered and withered. Usually stoned. Knows a shocking amount about local history.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen

Wares

• Tea — Requires a fire, water and a teapot to brew. Advantage on rolls to regain hit points from meals if you have a hot drink.
• Chamomile — Relaxing & calming. Basically the same as tea (I'm sure my UK readers agree).
• Tobacco — Regular users can get a boost (d4 hp) by smoking a full pouch, but they must smoke some every watch or become Deprived. It's a beacon for any creature that hunts by smell.
• Pipe Weed — Takes the edge off (d4 hp) but penalizes alertness & response time (disadvantage on defense rolls). Healing doesn't stack with tobacco. 
• Garlic — Prophylactic. Wards off illness; reputed to ward off undead (efficacy is limited).
• Willow bark — Pain killer. 1hp restored, effective once per watch.
• Sage — Burn to reveal incorporeal spirits.
• Wormwood — Steep as tea or burn. Vivid dreams; some users report spirit contact or prophetic glimpses.
• Aloe — Burn treatment. d6 hp restored, fire damage only.
• Poultice — Eleven secret herbs & spices. Applied to bleeding wounds: advantage on death save. Applied during rest: d4 hp over a day's rest.
• Poppy — Pain killer. d6 hp restored. Intoxicating, addictive. Dangerous with alcohol. Very precious. Only a small number of vials will be available, perhaps d3, maybe just one.
• Spell components — An apothecary will carry the basic stuff.

A note on mundane healing: In my homebrew system, Ultra Bastard, characters can eat to restore d4 hit points every watch (a slightly hand-wavey 4 hour period) and can engage in other vices e.g. alcohol, smoking etc. to restore an additional small number of hit points. Effective once per watch for any category of vice. For example, a character could eat, drink and smoke to restore 3d4 hit points but would be drunk, smelly and addicted to nicotine. 

Deprivation is also an Ultra Bastard mechanic. I use it to apply penalties to characters who are hungry, tired, cold etc. For a smoker, I'd impose level 1 after a watch without, level 2 after a day, and clear the addiction if they tough it out a few days. Deprivation is pretty hardcore, so you really don't want to run out of cigarettes. You can substitute whatever your system uses for similar penalties. 

Deprivation
Level 1	No mundane HP recovery
Level 2	Max HP halved
Level 3	Max HP =1
When no longer deprived, effects go away.

If the characters are visiting an apothecary hoping to harm someone rather than heal them, I've got a whole post on poisons. 

If your game is more high-magic, let me proffer these potions. 

Pricing & Perishability

Maintaining a price list is too much book-keeping for me. Generally, I aim for a scale of 1sp = $10 and 1gp = $100. Assume that most of the apothecary items cost equivalent to a few meals per dose. This excludes the poppy (basically a mundane healing potion & you can borrow that price) and spell components (which I use to tax wizards that don't need much gear).

Assume anything but the poppy will expire in a week. I recommend picking a day of the week on which all perishables go bad for ease of book-keeping, or, alternatively, every time the party comes back from a delve. This doesn't need a spreadsheet.

Spectres

Rules as written, the official D&D spectre is mostly just a copy-paste wraith with a couple more hit dice and an attack that drains 2 levels (the horror!). It will come as no surprise to readers of previous entries in this series that I want my Spectres to be more distinct. 

Rather than position Spectres as another undead, impersonal void, I've opted to make them larger than life characters. They are the souls that have somehow dodged the Reaper and by intensity of personality or drive have maintained ego cohesion without corporeal form. 

Maybe they were snagged by a witch-bottle in transit to Gehenna or the assigned Valkyrie got waylaid by demons before fetching the fallen warrior to Valhalla. Perhaps the magical-warding on a criminal mage's prison (I'm picturing Magneto in X2) kept the Anubian soul-couriers at bay. It is not a good thing when your friendly local psychopomp is putting up Missed Connections listings on Craigslist.

An Anecdotal Interlude

Over all my years as a player, I can only recall one memorable encounter with a Spectre. It was in the long running Arden Vul game that I've mentioned before. 

This spectre was a named ancient archon guarding an ostentatious tomb at the bottom of a deep descent and so when we woke him, it was difficult to escape the way we'd entered. We lost a few characters and he became a bogeyman for us for several months.  

He stands out because he was:

• Extremely dangerous
• Kept popping up at unexpected times & places
• Was a persistent obstacle along a route that we wanted to travel
• Had just enough of a personality that we could hate him specifically
• Had a cocktail of abilities that made it very difficult for us to deal with him at all at the level we were when we encountered him.

Eventually, we defeated him by leveling our cleric until we could come back with "Dispel Evil". The "fight" was almost an anti-climax. He appeared, got spell-nuked and it felt like a real arrival for our party. Spectral undead were no longer a threat. We found another incorporeal undead shortly thereafter, "Dispel Evil" was already on the list and he got zapped like a mosquito. Never learned his name or cared about him even a little.

All this to say, there's a rich niche here for a terrifying challenge with high-mobility that can hold a whole dungeon-region under threat. Personality, and near-invulnerability on first encounter cultivate player-hatred. Ultra Bastard doesn't have "Dispel Evil" on the standard list so we will need another victory vector.