Outlaws and Bounty Hunters

Some hired adventuring bands go rogue and de¬cide to keep the lands and properties they seize for their own. Once this activity is discovered, the perpetrators are denounced to local rulers, who usually declare such bands outlaw (unless they are bands who are covertly working for those same rulers) and send other adventuring bands out to deal with them. In 1400 DR, a shift in public attitude toward bounty hunters began. In that year, the Masked Lords ofWaterdeep issued a decree known as the Tarnsmoke Proclamation (after the wronged mer¬chant Lorigo Tarnsmoke, but publicly referred to as “hardhand justice”), by which it became legal in Waterdeep and its patrolled environs to hire bounty hunters (usually adventurers, but some¬times out-of-work caravan guards or sellswords) to go after outlaws whom you see as having wronged you. These bounty hunters attempt to get your property back or at least eliminate the outlaws and so “repay the debt in blood before the gods.” This practice became very popular over the next decade, and is now legal in most places along the Sword Coast, though many faiths still frown on it.