Do the Hirelings of Clargarser Still Want to Work for the Party after a Party Member Shot and Killed one of Them by Accident

So in the last session one of the PC’s fired his bow into a melee and killed one of the hirelings. Normally there is a paladin in the party and these things don’t happen; but this time there wasn’t and it did. The question is how this effect morale and the ability to attract hirelings in the future.

The first thing we have to figure out is whether the other hirelings saw the death of their comrade. Now it was dark and the hallway was pretty crowded. There were about five figures in between the hirelings. So, I am going to assign the base chance for a hireling to see a friend getting shot by one of their bosses at 15% and I am going to make that cumulative. So three hirelings have a 45% chance on noticing the OSHA violation.  Then I am going to subtract 5% for each intervening character. There was a pigman, two magic users, a mule and an orphan. That is minus 25%, so there is a 20% chance that henchmen saw the death.

Let’s Roll. I Got a 79. Everything is good so far.

The next issue is that after two hirelings were killed they were then raised from the dead as zombies along with a bunch of goblins by the evil magic-user in the party.  This creates two issues:

1: It provides ample opportunity to notice that one of the dead hirelings has an arrow sticking out of him that looks suspiciously like the arrows that one of the PCs use.

2: Seeing your former comrades animated into hollow mockeries of life and forced to do battle along side the goblins that killed them is unsettling (I would imagine).

I am going to say that each hireling had a 30% chance to notice the arrow over the course of the rest of the adventure let’s roll:

Ok I rolled a 20,

            

27,

and a 38. Two guys noticed. That’s not good.

Next we need to figure out how much these guys care about their comrade dying. Unfortunately, the henchmen in Clargarser have a lot of solidarity because they are all in the same religious cult and they also have class-consciousness because of the teachings of the Marxist paladin. On the other hand their cult is called the Corpse Worshippers so this might actually be a mitigating factor. I am going to say there is a 70% chance this is a good thing. 

I rolled another 38; that means corpse worshippers like being raised as zombies.

In conclusion: murder is bad but being raised as undead is good. The three surviving henchmen also got paid 238gp for their trouble. I am going to call it a wash and say that henchmen will not get harder to recruit unless it happens again.