So I’ve got an early alpha draft of Dungeon Kingdom, my Kingmaker-inspired add-on to allow players to portray adventurers building up and defending a kingdom of their own, ready to go. I thought my group and I were going to fire up a playtest yesterday, but we ended up taking things in a different direction. I would appreciate hearing what my fellow Taverners think about it, what might need clarification or alteration and so on. Making this thing awesome is one of my big goals for this year.
Most major thing that isn’t in the rules yet is the compendium classes that you can spend your Contribution Points on. I would like to have a set of those written specifically for Dungeon Kingdom at some point, but for the moment players were going to have their pick of the following civilization-oriented CCs/Specialties from Class Warfare:
Householder
Landed Gentry
Luminary
Merchant
Fence
Captain
War Leader
Thanks in advance for your time, folks!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-iThPh-XlM5c3BMRzBpcVpMd0U/view?usp=sharing
Good on ya! I wish I’d had this back when we made the switch to DW in the middle of KM. I cobbled something together at the time, but it wasn’t as good as this.
Jason Lutes Glad to hear you like it! Let me know if you end up using the rules, I’d be especially keen to hear about actual play experience.
Also: now why can’t you edit links in a post instead of deleting them, Google? Gah. Anyway, here’s a proper link which should actually allow comments if people are so inclined: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17l4WsqiDlf5icdRpFeS0dl89fwymA6vb43Fotr2gFkY/edit?usp=sharing
I’ll definitely check this out soon.
Watching this with interest; my players have expressed a strong desire to shape the growth of the city their adventures are based out of, and this looks to be perfect. I’ll let you know how it goes if we end up using these rules! Great work.
sub
Hot.
Neat!
Impressive. Seems solid, if you need this kind of mechanics in your campaign.
/sub maybe useful in the future…
Great stuff. My rl group might be making a transition towards this kind of thing in the near future. I’ll let you know how it goes if we head down this path.
James Etheridge First off, let me say I really like this!! I’m glad you did it!
Now, that said, I’ve got a bit of a rub with it — specifically, I’d prefer to see something that sort of falls in with the existing concept of steadings… For example, if I’ve already established within the fiction that a city can put out a legion, how does that map to this?
Was it your plan that this replace the original steading rules?
Wow, so much interest; very encouraging to see that people might actually want to use this! And if you do, yezzzz, I would absolutely love to hear how it goes. 🙂
Special thanks to Johnstone Metzger and Steve Wallace for chiming in, as you guys in particular have influenced the project a lot. 🙂
And now, wall of text inbound…
Brennan OBrien I must now be uncomfortably honest and admit that I wrote this without looking at the original steading rules; I’m a terrible low-homework GM and none of my games have gone on long enough for steadings to be important, so I didn’t even realize that they had their own creation rules like monsters do. ._.;
Have read through them now, though, so here’s a preliminary answer which I will flesh out as I think on it…
The rules are mainly intended to be used from the start of a campaign, so the kingdom and its capitol city will only have as much fiction established as your group requires. For your specific example, if your PCs somehow took controlling interest in a steading after the game got started then whatever you had established as true would still be true; you would want to write up your kingdom with that fiction in mind so, for example, a city that can deploy a legion probably won’t be starting at Warfare-1 (though they might, if the legion just isn’t that good at what they do).
If they were to somehow capture a city with an established military force greater than their kingdom’s Warfare score really suggests… hmm. That’s an interesting case, and it speaks to a broad class of events (capturing steadings) which I need to address. I feel like treating steadings like magic items, with tags or moves that they add to your kingdom as they are captured, is a good place to start. More in-depth rules for large-scale pitched battles rather than a single Go to War roll may also be called for (though if and when the upcoming war supplement happens, that will probably do wonders).
Speaking more generally, there are some things that I don’t necessarily like about the steading system for what I want to do, as a lot of it is written with the explicit aim that steadings are pit-stops between where the real adventures happen and I want to avert a lot of that. There are definitely some things I can draw on, however, and I will do that, both on a general inspiration level and perhaps to unify this add-on with the core rules a little more.
A lot of things are going to be essentially subsumed by attributes for steadings that players control (Wealth and Defenses in particular are going to be covered by Resources and Warfare), but I can definitely see working with some of the tags and the conditions starting on 215 as seeds for Projects or Improvements. Most if not all of the core rules can be used for steadings outside player control, naturally. And the type of steading that the capitol is based in needs to be a setting/difficulty dial (I was already planning to do that, as I did know about the different types of steadings, but bringing it up bumps the priority a bit).
Anyway, thank you for the feedback! It’s much appreciated, and even in brevity has given me quite a few things to chew on.
I’ve been thinking my Debtrunner game needs faction rules, but haven’t written anything yet. I was considering maybe next time I ran it I would just use the rules in Stars Without Number, even though I want something more AW-y. So I am happy to see someone else thinking along these lines, too (and actually writing something).
James Etheridge if it makes you feel any better I didn’t even realize DW had steading rules 😀
Johnstone Metzger I haven’t read Stars Without Number, but Urban Shadows’s faction and debt rules are very, very cool; I recommend checking it out if you haven’t already (I don’t recall if I’ve seen you in the G+ community or not; if so, my apologies for forgetting!). They’re actually where I got the idea of having factions from in the first place, though I don’t think I’ve lifted a single mechanic from it.
I might tinker with their faction and debt moves at some point to see if there’s anything worth translating, rather than just having faction strength sub in for other moves, but I’m kind of milling over whether another extra layer of complexity would add to the experience or not. Keeping the number of obligatory mechanics to a minimum seems like kind of a compulsory design goal for PBTA stuff (and just in general).
Steve Wallace Heh, that kinda does actually. I guess we only read as much as we need to! :3
I backed Urban Shadows, so I looked at those rules, but I don’t want to mechanize debts and favours and how the PCs relate to factions (or not in this game, at least). I want a system for the GM (or the players) to role-play the choices of the different factions and then roll dice to see how things shake out. So it feels like a living world and not just the GM making up situations or telling a story.
Adam Koebel has some youtube videos of the GM turns he has been doing for Swan Song, his SWN game on Twitch, that show off the faction mechanics. I like the ideas in SWN, but I don’t really like the hit points very much.