The use of hired NPCs is heavily implied across the various OD&D rule books, but of course, a heavy amount of ambiguity regarding these "hired hands" meant that it wasn't all too obvious how to approach such a matter. The problem was however, addressed in a little more detail in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide and my initial attempt at producing a set of rules for both solo and group play to handle NPC recruitment was heavily based on the DMG. However, I have since rediscovered a set of "Advertising" rules included in the Judge's Guild Ready Reference Sheets (published in 1979), which provides an alternative (and slightly simpler) method.

OD&D Hiring Non-Player Characters

As the JG Ready Reference Sheets, as well as other OD&D third party products by the Judges Guild were popularly used throughout the mid to late seventies, it seemed appropriate to look at these rules in more detail and revisit my own rules to see how they might then be improved. To do this I jotted down every sentence I could find from the OD&D books pertaining to recruitment of NPCs and threw out anything stated in the Ready Reference Sheets or the DMG that was contradictory. What I was left with was then an amalgamation of potential approaches, which I have attempted to elegantly draw together in a way that compliments (without adding too much extra) the OD&D rules.

These recruitment rules of mine are designed for solo play in the sense that they provide enough robustness to be relied on directly without too much interpretation. The rules are also a great tool for group play as well.

Screen-shots from the Solo Dungeon Crawler Solo Rollplay Podcast Episode 4

Here is a link to a PDF of these rules, which you are of course free to use as desired, but please just credit myself, my blog or my YouTube channel and mention where they came from originally, i.e. Ideas drawn from Judges Guild Ready Reference Sheets and the AD&D DMG.