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