OldMansBeard's Henchman System
This system allows any of your player characters to adventure with extra henchmen made from your other player characters. So your favorite characters can work together as a party. There is provision for keeping the henchmen in a database so you can develop the party as you move on from module to module.
New in Version 1.3: After a companion has acquired fame and fortune working alongside you, the player character it was made from can be magically updated to correspond.
Everything works in-game. No HakPaks. No debug commands. No external file editors. Just Install and Play.
It works out-of-the-box with NWN, SoU, HotU and many, though not all, community-written modules.
Requires NWN+SoU+HotU Patch 1.65 or later.
Compatible with (but does not require) CEP 1.5.
Install Guide
This system requires both XP1-Shadows of Undrentide and XP2-Hordes of the Underdark to be installed and patched to 1.65 or later. Otherwise it won't work properly.
The download is a zip file containing four folders: override, docs, database and modules. Copy the contents of these folders to your corresponding NWN folders.
Note: Bioware do not really like us using overrides, not least because it can cause conflicts with the patching process. You must remember to delete all of these files from your override folder before attempting to update to another patch level.
Getting Started
There are two ways to introduce characters: as ordinary henchmen or as special companions. It is best to try out the system first using ordinary henchmen. If you want to go straight in with Heroes and Companions you should refer to the Players Guide now.
Before a player character can be used as a henchman, he or she must sign up for employment by playing the module OHS - The Way of Heroes, visiting the Registry Office (on the left as you begin) and speaking to the Registrar. When the PC completes the registration, s/he gets a nice green scroll and a copy of the character is deposited, behind the scenes, in a database file. It is this copy that will be made available to other PCs in other modules.
You need to register each PC you want to use as a henchman. You do not have to do them all immediately – you can add more later. To get you started, the stock first-level Bioware PCs are already registered for you.
The Registrar is quite happy to visit other modules on request. Just ask your linkboy (see below) to call him for you.
Now start playing as normal, either starting a new game or picking up a previously-saved one and playing as your lead character. While you are taking your first rest, a small boy carrying a smoky red torch will appear from somewhere and attach himself to your party. This is your linkboy. You can ask him why he is there, if you like.
At any time, you can ask your linkboy to call for another henchman. You can choose anyone who has registered and they will appear immediately. You can then ask them about themselves and recruit or dismiss them if you choose.
There is no fixed limit to the number of henchmen you can add to the party, except that you cannot have multiple copies of the same ones so you cannot have more extra henchmen than there are in your database.
High-level henchmen will not work for a low-level PC. You need to have more XP than the prospective henchmen did when they registered. It follows that a new PC with zero XP cannot take any of these henchmen yet.
Generally speaking, the new henchmen will behave like the ones in HotU. You can control them with radial menus, via shouts and by dialogue. One difference you will see straight away is that they do not level up instantly when you hire them or when your lead character levels up. They wait until the next time the party rests. This is to give you time to discuss their level-up strategies with them beforehand.
Henchmen come with whatever equipment they had with them when they registered, less any plot items and gold. Whatever they have is theirs to keep. It is up to your lead PC to provide better equipment for them, at his or her own expense, as play progresses. You can access their inventories to give them new items and re-arrange equipped ones in the usual way.
Your party will try to form up behind you in three ranks but they are adventurers, not soldiers, and are not very well disciplined. As you move around there will be certain amount of jostling for position going on behind you. Try not to be distracted.
If you have very many henchmen (more than about ten, perhaps) the jostling will get quite bad, especially in confined spaces, and you may notice a significant performance hit.
If you want to save your current party so that you can take them with you to another module, you can use the command OHS KEEP (just hit ENTER and type it into the chat window). Then later, you can use the OHS RECALL command to bring them all back just as they were before.
Only the ex-pc henchmen are stored, not story-related henchmen. They are stored, not in the register but in a separate file keyed to the name of your lead PC. Each time you OHS KEEP them, this file is overwritten. When you OHS RECALL them from this, only missing ones are restored so you cannot accidentally get two copies of anyone. You can abbreviate the OHS KEEP and OHS RECALL commands to OHK and OHR respectively.
If you want to drop all your ex-pc henchmen for some reason, there is another command OHS DROP ALL (abbreviation OHDA) to do this. After this command is given, the linkboy will no longer follow your PC around and no further OHS commands will function until your PC either goes back and speaks to the linkboy again or re-hires one of the henchmen.
Play Balance
This system allows you to import potentially unlimited power to your party. This will do even worse things to play balance than importing a single uber-character. With even one or two extra henchmen, some encounters will become too easy. To compensate for this, I suggest you move the difficulty slider up to maximum and play modules with lower-level characters than they were originally designed for.
Web Links
©2005 OldMansBeard. Last Revised: 2005-03-06 with editorial corrections by vkaryl