GM's Tip of the Week

Since I don’t really have a lot of experience actually /playing/ one of these two classes, I thought I’d go over a little bit of what you could theoretically do with them, provided you weren’t running the kind of campaign where one could traditionally expect to find a lot of druids or rangers, or any variants thereof.

The stereotypical Guardians of Nature are frequently druids or rangers. But when you, as a GM, would like to use one of these two archetypes, and your campaign is based in a city, what do you do?

There is of course, always the raging guardian looking to tear the city to flaming shreds. There are ways to do this that aren’t predictable, but the fact is that it has been done, and most likely, your players are savvy enough to see it coming for miles. Or they’ll blame the fey.If that is your desired outcome, go for it; everybody loves a good red herring, right?

If not, though, consider this; there are, in some systems, set ups for urban druids and rangers, and even set ups for dark druids, who blight and twist nature. Either of these might fit in a city setting; the former could be seeing a change in the city’s ecosystem, signaling an attack from below, perhaps. Subtle things that most people wouldn’t notice are often the fore-runners of an epic adventure, and who better to go to, when the guards and the city’s ruling council members won’t listen but the plucky, insanely lucky group of Self-Propelled Trouble-Magnets who are, coincidentally  looking for work…?

The urban ranger can be a lot of things; a tracker, an investigator – his talents may be uniquely suited to detective work, in fact – or a stable master. Horses remain a valuable resource in most medieval cities, after all, and they are not the only animal that will be found within a city’s walls. Where a druid might be more effective at convincing the rats to find greener pastures – or at least, be more discreet about raiding the pantry! – a ranger probably has dogs that kill rats, and may or may not also have a vested reason to do so. Rats carrry fleas, fleas carry disease, and noone wants a plague….

Something for the scrambling GM to consider.