Hiring individual mercenaries can be tedious in large volumes, prone to error and hard to assess how much should be enough to provide you with the desired power. This is all easily solved by hiring them as whole Encounters-worth of Combatants instead and makes sense as mercenaries are often hired in bundles.
Of course, powerful single-creature bands can still be generated and individual haunts should be able to do things like "only sole NPC units" as part of their Monster logic.
This also gives bands more identity than just packs or mass-produced, single-serving individual units. Like any Haunt Encounter their alignments should match, organizations should be respected, interesting mix-ins can happen... so basically just leverage all of a Haunt's Encounter Generator logic that is already there.
When it comes to generating the mercenary bands:
1; Generate them only lower than the fight Encounter Level, to represent the underlings left behind.
Generate at any tier level and the player wallet be the limiting factor. This would represent inhabitants that chose not to fight or came to the Haunt after it was liberated.
As with the other ideas, the Encounter Generator can be leveraged here again. Perhaps generate 4 encounters of EL-4 and let the random Difficulty decide whether it should be a rarer, powerful creature.
Hiring individual mercenaries can be tedious in large volumes, prone to error and hard to assess how much should be enough to provide you with the desired power. This is all easily solved by hiring them as whole Encounters-worth of Combatants instead and makes sense as mercenaries are often hired in bundles.
Of course, powerful single-creature bands can still be generated and individual haunts should be able to do things like "only sole NPC units" as part of their Monster logic.
This also gives bands more identity than just packs or mass-produced, single-serving individual units. Like any Haunt Encounter their alignments should match, organizations should be respected, interesting mix-ins can happen... so basically just leverage all of a Haunt's Encounter Generator logic that is already there.
When it comes to generating the mercenary bands: 1; Generate them only lower than the fight Encounter Level, to represent the underlings left behind.
As with the other ideas, the Encounter Generator can be leveraged here again. Perhaps generate 4 encounters of
EL-4and let the random Difficulty decide whether it should be a rarer, powerful creature.