SWURPG

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The Bounty Hunter's Code

A bounty hunter is not an assassin, and the difference is the whole of the profession. An assassin is paid to end a life; a hunter is paid to deliver one — alive when the posting says alive, dead only when the posting allows it, and always to the being who signed the contract. That distinction is written down. The Bounty Hunters' Guild keeps a code, and the hunters who last long enough to retire are, almost without exception, the ones who kept it.

The galaxy remembers the silhouettes — the Mandalorian on the gantry, the Trandoshan grinning through his teeth, the droid that never stops walking — and forgets that behind the legend is a trade with rules, dues, and a bureaucracy. This is that trade.

The Guild

The Bounty Hunters' Guild is less a single organization than a franchise of them. At its height it certified hunters, brokered contracts, and took a cut of every credit that changed hands, offering its members the one thing a lone gun in the Outer Rim cannot buy: legitimacy. A Guild licence means a planetary government will honor your claim on a mark instead of arresting you for kidnapping, and a Guild sanction means the next hunter who crosses you answers to more than just you.

That unity never lasted. The Guild has fractured, reformed, and fractured again more times than its own historians can agree on, splintering into competing Houses — House Salaktori, House Neído, House Renliss, and others — each with its own administrator, its own contract specialties, its own dues, and its own grudges against the rest. A House is a guild in miniature: a few thousand hunters and many times that number in support staff, brokers, armorers, and slicers, run like a corporation by a chief executive who inherited the seat or killed for it. The old creed of House Salaktori captures the whole arrangement — "we take care of our own, one way or the other."

Membership is not free and not automatic. A hunter pays annual dues, submits to the House's internal justice, and accepts a percentage skimmed from every payout. In return the Guild offers real services: repairs at member rates, a reputation the House actively markets, sanctuary from planetary law when a job goes sideways (the Guild polices its own, and most governments would rather let it than fight it), a retirement that a lone hunter almost never lives to see, and training — because a veteran too old for the field is worth more teaching the next generation than dying in a doorway.

The Code — "No Disintegrations"

The code is not a mystic creed like the Jedi Code or the Sith Code. It is a professional standard, and it exists because the trade cannot function without one. A hunter who takes a job and doesn't finish it, who kills a mark posted for live capture, who turns on the patron or the Guild — that hunter poisons the well for everyone. So the code is enforced, not preached.

Its tenets are plain: honor the contract's terms (a bounty marked alive is worthless dead, and "no disintegrations" is not a joke but a clause — a client who wants a body as proof will not pay for ash); deliver to the one who posted the bounty, not the highest last-minute bidder; do not kill another hunter except in self-defense or under Guild sanction; and never take a Guild member's contracted mark. Break these and the Houses have a long memory and a longer reach.

The line between a hunter and a thug is exactly this discipline. Anyone can point a blaster at a frightened being; a professional takes the right being, breathing if the job requires it, and walks away paid and welcome to work again tomorrow.

The Great Hunters

Every trade has its legends, and the hunters' legends are a rogues' gallery the whole galaxy knows by sight:

  • Boba Fett, the Mandalorian foundling who became the standard the rest are measured against — patient, ruthless, and the only hunter Darth Vader ever named.
  • Bossk, the Trandoshan who hunts because his people believe the souls of their kills accrue to them, and who carried a long feud with the Fetts across two generations.
  • Dengar, the scarred assassin-turned-hunter, as much a survivor as a killer.
  • IG-88 and its kind — assassin droids with no fear, no fatigue, and no code but the contract.
  • Zam Wesell, the Clawdite changeling who could be anyone, and Aurra Sing, the cold-eyed marksman who trained a young Boba in the trade.
  • Cad Bane, the Duros in the wide-brimmed hat, who worked for Hutts, Sith, and the Republic alike and answered to none of them.

They are not role models. They are the reason the code exists — and, more often than not, the reason it gets broken.

Patrons and the Underworld

A bounty is only as real as the being who posts it. The great patrons of the trade are the powers who can afford to want someone gone: the Empire, whose Imperial Security Bureau launders its wetwork through "Legal Authorization for Advanced Containment" postings and whose Most Wanted list is as much politics as justice; the Hutts, whose cartels have paid hunters to collect debts and settle scores since before the Republic fell; the great corporations, who post quiet contracts on rivals and thieves; and the guilds' own clearinghouse, the InterGalactic Banking Clan's bounty registry, which classifies and prices the galaxy's fugitives.

The bounties themselves are graded by payout — from Local and Regional postings worth a few thousand credits, up through Galactic bounties in the tens of thousands, to the Most Wanted list where a single name can be worth a fortune and a target on the hunter's own back. Running those postings at your table — writing the puck, choosing the patron, deciding whether the mark comes in dead, alive, or not at all — is its own craft, covered in the companion guide, Running the Hunt.

Playing a hunter

SWURPG models all of this with content, not a special subsystem. The Bounty Hunter class gives you Mark for Capture, a fearsome reputation, and an arsenal to specialize; the capture weapons and tracking gear in the equipment catalog give you the tools of the trade; and the underworld the hunts run through is statted out in the bestiary — the Hutt Cartel, Black Sun, the Pyke Syndicate, and the broader underworld. Bring a hunter to the table and the whole galaxy becomes a contract waiting to be posted.

Rules click faster with a character in front of you. Build one in the Character Builder — it applies your species, class, and gear automatically, tracks the math these pages describe, and exports a printable sheet.