Every large settlement in the fire cave shares a problem. There are a lot of creatures and some people too who can cut right through the ranks of a regular town guard. When a visiting Ogre goes berserk or an adventurer picks a fight with a whole town, the answer is a Slayer Team. Slayer teams are more experienced than the standard town guard and very well equipped with magic. That said, they are no match in a stand up fight with most of the creatures they get called out to fight. They generally try to engage at distance with overwhelming force. If a high level adventurer is allowed to have more than a few seconds to respond to an attack the results can be devastating. They are also trained to minimize property damage, though in most Towns a slayer team’s goals are, in order, stop the threat, survive, don’t damage property. If they have to drop a building on a beholder, then so be it. A Slayer Team works best when pitted one team against one opponent. They don’t generally have the equipment or staying power to take on multiple opponents at the same time and most towns have no more than four Slayer Teams.
Sanctuary’s Slayers are called Dragon Slayers after an event two hundred and fifty years ago where a shape-shifted red dragon was brought down by the combined efforts of every slayer team in the city. In the end, one eight of the city lay in smoldering ruins and only six of twenty four slayers survived the fight, but the final damage was much less than it would have been.
As the largest in the Fire Cave, Sanctuary manages to field between five and six Slayer Teams. They tend hold themselves aloof from the Guard who they see as unskipped idiots who are more likely to get themselves killed than do any good in a real fight and from the Order of Steel who they hold to be mercenary scum, show boaters, and worst of all, undisciplined. Of course, the Guard does things like hold a target in place long enough for a Dragon Slayer team to get there and take it down, and the Orger of Steel tends to have more experienced and powerful members than even a Slayer Team and depending on their threat assessment, the City Government has been known to hire the Order to do jobs that they believe would be too hard or dangerous for the Dragon Slayers.
Currently Sanctuary fields five six man teams, each assigned to a different region of the city. The average responmse time for a team within its own region is less than four minutes. If several Slayer teams are needed, they can usually converge on any point in the city within fifteen minutes.
Currently there are teams stationed at the North and South Gate Watches, The Tower, City Hall, and the Watch at the Steam Pavillion. Edge Watch stands abandoned until the Council decides to fund the reformation of a team.
Each team has access to an assortment of specialty gear including a number of permenant devices that provide ranged touch spells a few times a day, True Strike Tokens, and a broad range of potions and minor magical geejaws. They have trained elite units of the guard to provide limited support with tactics like saturating an area with tanglefoot bags and thunder stones.(In cases where they use Guard backup, the Guard is supposed to surround the target, throw their weapons, and then run the hell away before the target kills them all. Then the Dragon Slayers move in to D&E (Distract and Engage) their hopefully weakened opponent. The Dragon Slyaers are one of the only forces in Sanctuary that are allowed to use poisons. They use repeating crossbows loaded by the City’s main alchemist with bolts coated with constitution draining poisons. A whole squad will use their True Strike Tokens and their poisoned crossbows to pepper a taget with bolts that make it harder for them to resist further attacks.
Each squad has certain specialty gear. Tower Watch has three items that let them use Polar Ray twice a day, North Gate carries adamantite great axes that they use to rapidly drop buildings on their targets. South Gate has a dozen bound wraiths under their nominal command, City Hall Watch Works extensively with the town Guard and has set up several catapults with unusual loadouts to act as backup. Steam Pavillion has a werebear grappler in their ranks. Outfitted with items that make him stronger and larger, he can immobalize humanoid opponents who are otherwise much better fighters than he is.
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