What Are the Guards Doing?

1 December 2017 dnd tables rpgs

In preparation for my new campaign, I’ve had to scrounge together a lot of random tables from old notes. Here’s a list of 20 things that the city guards could be up to whenever your PCs run into them as they inevitably do.

1. Harassing a local shopkeep for trivial city code violations.
   
2. Escorting a noble across town.
   
3. Collecting payments for their neighborhood protection racket.
   
4. Off duty, armed, and getting drunk.
   
5. Meeting up with a Thieves Guild contact to inform on their superiors.
   
6. Arresting a traitor to the crown and ransacking their house.
   
7. Taking a bribe from an aristocrat.
8. These guards are undercover, attempting to operate a sting on a foreign smuggler.
9. Pillaging a house and raping its inhabitants
10. Openly brawling with bandits in the streets
11. Taking tolls to cross this street
12. Holding the line against a mob of rioting peasants
13. Covering up an affair of the crown by silencing a scorned lover who is generally making a scene in the street
14. Undercover and guarding a secret meeting of oligarchs
15. Escorting tax collectors from house to house
16. Forming a phalanx around a hated religious group in prayer while a mob swarms around them
17. Lost in a hostile, seedy neighborhood, taking fire from the rooftops and windows
18. Fighting a rampaging monster in an alley, several are dead and no backup is on the way
19. Stopping and frisking anyone who passes by, ostensibly looking for contraband but actually looking for a secret letter from an anti-crown conspiracy
20. Torturing a confession out of a suspect in a back alley