Category:Mercenary

Description of a Mercenary
Mercenaries, also called soldiers of fortune or sellswords, are professional soldiers who aren't part of any standing army or guard. They may work individually, or as military companies, and be hired for jobs ranging from soldiering and raiding to training, escort and bodyguard duty. While they may also undertake assassinations, they consider themselves paid fighters rather than paid killers - some would even be offended at the comparison. Most commonly, mercenaries will be employed by armies trying to quickly bolster their forces, or private citizens such as merchants or criminals in need of temporary armed forces.

Skillwise, mercenaries range from random blokes with weapons to seasoned career professionals with special expertise in one or more area of combat. Skilled mercenaries will demand higher fees. Since they fight for gold rather than loyalty, mercenaries are often considered honourless, immoral thugs with no ethics past getting paid, and prone to defect to the highest bidder. This may or may not be true; some mercenaries may well be murderous thugs for hire, others may have morals and ideals of their own, even though they choose to fight for gold rather than a cause. Either way, while a mercenary might get respect as a skilled fighter, most tend to assume their ethics and loyalty are for sale, and as such, rather worthless.

Career mercenaries have generally long since stopped caring if they're regarded as honourable men and women by society at large: instead they answer to their own sort of code. Typical mercenary honour usually involves doing the job you were paid for to the best of your ability, respect to one's contract, keeping the contract so long as the employer is honest with you and not fighting a suicide cause. Mercenary companies may be more or less cutthroat in their attitude to their members: some companies welcome a certain number of losses, as it means each man gets a bigger share of the profits - others take care of their own, because as sellsword misfits, who are they going to trust except the other misfits they might rely on for their lives?

What Kind of People Become Mercenaries?
Anyone with the ability to fight and the willingness to take money for it is a mercenary, but most mercenaries have some personal reason to fight for money, rather than joining established armies for a more respectable life. Some may be ex-soldiers dishonourably discharged from whatever army once they served with, others may disagree with the ideologies or establishments that standing armies defend, or just prefer to serve their own desires rather than any single master.

A career mercenary is usually both an experienced and disciplined soldier. Undisciplined, incompetent and habitually disloyal mercenaries find themselves with poor reputations and difficulty getting work - a successful mercenary will be the sort who has discipline and honours their contract, or who works cheap enough to be hired by people desperate enough to risk betrayal.

While most mercenaries are soldiers of the traditional fighting sort, the occasional mercenary mage isn't unheard of.

Special Abilities
Mercenaries as a group are diverse, and depending on their background, may have any manner of expertise. Virtually all can fight and ride, most also have some experience in tactics. Other expertise may include things like demolition, specialist knowledge on specific creature types, knowledge or ability in magic, and so forth.