Mercenary Compendium

The Mercenary Compendium is a sourcebook for the Lands of Exile setting, published by Bad Badger Games. It is written for fifth-edition campaigns and is built around a list of one hundred unique mercenaries, each with a detailed background, characteristics and personality; some come with side missions in which they act as quest giver, ally or enemy.¹

The mercenaries

In the Lands of Exile there are many mercenary guilds, each with its own way of doing business, its own preferred jobs, style and philosophy, which vary from guild to guild and from place to place. Besides the guilds, many freelancers work alone.²

The creators say that they walked alongside most of these hundred characters in past adventures, fought beside others, played a few themselves and became adversaries of some.³ The list runs alphabetically, and is followed by the ten guilds: The Scarlet Spears, the Grimbolt Cripplers, the Brine Blades, the Servants of the Moonlit Circle, the Morenar, the Warmongers, the Eagle Brigade, the Shortstack Stranglers, The Black Veil and the Freelancers.⁴

Other contents

The later chapters hold systems for running the game: lasting battle injuries and scars, an expanded armoury that adds flintlock firearms, siege weapons worked by a small crew and missing weapon types, and tables of boons that each come with a burden.⁵

Credits

The book was created by Fatih Şahinbaş and written by Ahmet Cem Alemdar, with visual design by Yiğit Ergül and illustrations by Toprak Serdar. Its foreword recalls that Shadow Over Vansreik was funded in the autumn of 2023 with the support of 683 backers, the latest step in a journey the team began about a decade earlier.⁶