Chapter 12: Strongholds & Dominions campaign - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Chapter 12: Strongholds & Dominions campaign

Post/Author/DateTime Post
#1
FrozenWastes
Jul 29, 2010 19:20:07 I was reading my old BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia stuff for Basic D&D from the 1980s and found the section on PCs building Dominions. Becoming rulers, building fortresses and temples and the like. See Chapter 12 of the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia or the DM's booklet from the 1983 Mentzer Expert Box Set

I was thinking I want my next campaign to have that old school flavour.

So I think the first step is to disconnect Magic Items from the PC's gold economy. No magic item shops, lots of magic items that they would want from adventuring. Basically I want them to not need to spend their gold on magic items so they can invest it in something else.

Building their domains.

I'll probably just use the rules/costs right out of the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia. Some things will be updated to 4E, but the costs seem reasonable enough. As does the very quick calculations to figure out how much money their estates generate for them.

I'm definitely going to keep that simple as I don't want the game to be about managing a vineyard or something. The estate never produces as much gold as a good dragon horde. In fact, run away expenses can often provide the impetus to go adventuring. But once again, the game isn't going to be about balancing the books.

I may also pull out the Birthright Campaign setting from 1995 for it's Domain/Province rules. I don't remember if it's any good or not, so I'll have to take another look.

So at level 1, I'm thinking of starting the world in very much a "points of light" type setting. The largest body of government are the rulers of towns like Fallcrest or Hammerfast. The PCs will likely start out working for one of them and then discovering that something is wrong with them. Either with short sighted policies or with complicity with dark forces, the current ruler(s) will show themselves to be a direct threat to the lives of the people they govern.

This may also work well as an unaligned leaning towards evil campaign. Starting the stated goal of bringing the Nentir Vale under their dominion.

My thoughts are that in a points of light setting, if you do something heroic and defeat horrible monsters or slay a dragon, you're better to be around than the safety of a walled town. I could see followers flock to the PCs even at an early level.
#2
FrozenWastes
Jul 29, 2010 22:23:03 darkdungeonsblog.wordpress.com/get-it-no...

For those who want to see the type of thing I'm talking about, you can find it in Chapter 13 of Dark Dungeons, an OGL Retroclone of the Rules Cyclopedia. Starts on page 159. You'll find construction costs on page 118.

The PDF does not open properly in a browser plugin window (wordpress doesn't serve up 20 meg PDFs properly, there's nothing wrong with the actual PDF). So right click on the PDF link and down load it to your hard drive and then open it with your PDF reader.
#3
sfurtwangler
Aug 02, 2010 7:48:07

So at level 1, I'm thinking of starting the world in very much a "points of light" type setting. The largest body of government are the rulers of towns like Fallcrest or Hammerfast. The PCs will likely start out working for one of them and then discovering that something is wrong with them. Either with short sighted policies or with complicity with dark forces, the current ruler(s) will show themselves to be a direct threat to the lives of the people they govern.

I am currently playing in a campaign where the DM is doing something similar to this. It is a standard POL campaign (running through H1-3, P1-3, and eventually E1-3) but he has added some homebrew rules that we use as kind of a level-up minigame once a level, that allow us to control locations that we discover in the world, and run towns, build armies, etc. He has sort of a random-encounter table of interresting events that might have taken place over the last level that we (or our followers) would need to deal with, and those are usually handled as skill challenges.

We started out with some of us working for Lord Marklehay of Fallcrest, or as apprentices to Nimizaran the Green, and now (late paragon) we've sort of made our own stakes in the world - Marklehay's men have been knighted, and granted land outside of Fallcrest (Goldvine Mannor, which we cleared at level 1, and Raven's Roost), while others of us have picked up smaller areas dotted across the map that our adventures have taken us.

Everyone seems to really enjoy it, and its a nice reminder, between levels, that our characters are influencing the world in big ways that don't show up in whatever random dungeon we happen to be going through. One of the really key things, I think, is that the two are fairly seperate things. On an adventure, the monsters don't care that we are big-shot homeowners... and we don't have NPC followers tagging along on our adventures - so making the PCs barons or kings or archmages won't necessarily make their lives trivial while adventuring.

Another cool thing is that the DM uses the challenges to represent some abstract amount of time that has passed while we're off on adventure - even if our PCs were not necessarily home when it was taken care of. So, if we level up in the bowels of some dungeon, we'll still run the level-up minigame, with the assumption that our cohorts and followers are handling most of the problems as per our last instructions. While it hasn't come up yet, I think this could be a good tool for foreshadowing - like a cutscene. Imagine if while we're on some quest to take down a BBEG at his fortress, we level up, and switch to a scene where the BBEG's forces are marching against our fortresses as well.

Another RPG worth looking at, if you can find it or want to pay for it, is Song of Fire and Ice (www.greenronin.com/sifrp/) which reminded me a lot of birthright, in that part of the character creation process was creating the noble house that your character is from, and there are rules for building up your strongholds, and hiring people to work for you, and handlign random events that might affect your lands.
#4
FrozenWastes
Aug 02, 2010 11:42:27

Everyone seems to really enjoy it, and its a nice reminder, between levels, that our characters are influencing the world in big ways that don't show up in whatever random dungeon we happen to be going through. One of the really key things, I think, is that the two are fairly seperate things. On an adventure, the monsters don't care that we are big-shot homeowners... and we don't have NPC followers tagging along on our adventures - so making the PCs barons or kings or archmages won't necessarily make their lives trivial while adventuring.

I've run games where it does mix. Where the players did have all sorts of minions and henchmen on the battlefield. It makes the combat longer, so you have to only do this for big, big moments. For example, the party was defending Hammerfast from an undead horde. So they had a bunch of minion warriors to help (not a lot of them survived).

Another RPG worth looking at, if you can find it or want to pay for it, is Song of Fire and Ice (www.greenronin.com/sifrp/) which reminded me a lot of birthright, in that part of the character creation process was creating the noble house that your character is from, and there are rules for building up your strongholds, and hiring people to work for you, and handlign random events that might affect your lands.

Cool. I'll check that out.

One thing I'm doing for this game for sure is group character building. I usually just tell people to show up with a character, but for this game I'm going to have them make characters together with them all from the same area with real connections to the area.
#5
FrozenWastes
Aug 02, 2010 18:24:54 I popped over to my friends and borrowed his Song of Ice & Fire book.

Wow.

The Noble House generation process is amazing. It's definitely going to be what I use.

Step 1: Everyone collaborates to generate their Noble house (with SoI&F specific stuff replaced with more generic fantasy stuff-- there's not a lot of it in there so that'll be easy).

Step 2: Character generation as a group with everyone starting as either being a noble of the house they designed or one of their loyal retainers/heroes.

I'm going to have to limit race choices for this, I think. I don't think the campaign would work as well at all if the party ended up being a Shardmind, a Minotaur, a Genasi, a Warforged and a Wilden.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 FrozenWastes Jul 29, 2010 19:20:07	I was reading my old BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia stuff for Basic D&D from the 1980s and found the section on PCs building Dominions. Becoming rulers, building fortresses and temples and the like. See Chapter 12 of the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia or the DM's booklet from the 1983 Mentzer Expert Box Set I was thinking I want my next campaign to have that old school flavour. So I think the first step is to disconnect Magic Items from the PC's gold economy. No magic item shops, lots of magic items that they would want from adventuring. Basically I want them to not need to spend their gold on magic items so they can invest it in something else. Building their domains. I'll probably just use the rules/costs right out of the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia. Some things will be updated to 4E, but the costs seem reasonable enough. As does the very quick calculations to figure out how much money their estates generate for them. I'm definitely going to keep that simple as I don't want the game to be about managing a vineyard or something. The estate never produces as much gold as a good dragon horde. In fact, run away expenses can often provide the impetus to go adventuring. But once again, the game isn't going to be about balancing the books. I may also pull out the Birthright Campaign setting from 1995 for it's Domain/Province rules. I don't remember if it's any good or not, so I'll have to take another look. So at level 1, I'm thinking of starting the world in very much a "points of light" type setting. The largest body of government are the rulers of towns like Fallcrest or Hammerfast. The PCs will likely start out working for one of them and then discovering that something is wrong with them. Either with short sighted policies or with complicity with dark forces, the current ruler(s) will show themselves to be a direct threat to the lives of the people they govern. This may also work well as an unaligned leaning towards evil campaign. Starting the stated goal of bringing the Nentir Vale under their dominion. My thoughts are that in a points of light setting, if you do something heroic and defeat horrible monsters or slay a dragon, you're better to be around than the safety of a walled town. I could see followers flock to the PCs even at an early level.
#2 FrozenWastes Jul 29, 2010 22:23:03	darkdungeonsblog.wordpress.com/get-it-no... For those who want to see the type of thing I'm talking about, you can find it in Chapter 13 of Dark Dungeons, an OGL Retroclone of the Rules Cyclopedia. Starts on page 159. You'll find construction costs on page 118. The PDF does not open properly in a browser plugin window (wordpress doesn't serve up 20 meg PDFs properly, there's nothing wrong with the actual PDF). So right click on the PDF link and down load it to your hard drive and then open it with your PDF reader.
#3 sfurtwangler Aug 02, 2010 7:48:07	So at level 1, I'm thinking of starting the world in very much a "points of light" type setting. The largest body of government are the rulers of towns like Fallcrest or Hammerfast. The PCs will likely start out working for one of them and then discovering that something is wrong with them. Either with short sighted policies or with complicity with dark forces, the current ruler(s) will show themselves to be a direct threat to the lives of the people they govern. I am currently playing in a campaign where the DM is doing something similar to this. It is a standard POL campaign (running through H1-3, P1-3, and eventually E1-3) but he has added some homebrew rules that we use as kind of a level-up minigame once a level, that allow us to control locations that we discover in the world, and run towns, build armies, etc. He has sort of a random-encounter table of interresting events that might have taken place over the last level that we (or our followers) would need to deal with, and those are usually handled as skill challenges. We started out with some of us working for Lord Marklehay of Fallcrest, or as apprentices to Nimizaran the Green, and now (late paragon) we've sort of made our own stakes in the world - Marklehay's men have been knighted, and granted land outside of Fallcrest (Goldvine Mannor, which we cleared at level 1, and Raven's Roost), while others of us have picked up smaller areas dotted across the map that our adventures have taken us. Everyone seems to really enjoy it, and its a nice reminder, between levels, that our characters are influencing the world in big ways that don't show up in whatever random dungeon we happen to be going through. One of the really key things, I think, is that the two are fairly seperate things. On an adventure, the monsters don't care that we are big-shot homeowners... and we don't have NPC followers tagging along on our adventures - so making the PCs barons or kings or archmages won't necessarily make their lives trivial while adventuring. Another cool thing is that the DM uses the challenges to represent some abstract amount of time that has passed while we're off on adventure - even if our PCs were not necessarily home when it was taken care of. So, if we level up in the bowels of some dungeon, we'll still run the level-up minigame, with the assumption that our cohorts and followers are handling most of the problems as per our last instructions. While it hasn't come up yet, I think this could be a good tool for foreshadowing - like a cutscene. Imagine if while we're on some quest to take down a BBEG at his fortress, we level up, and switch to a scene where the BBEG's forces are marching against our fortresses as well. Another RPG worth looking at, if you can find it or want to pay for it, is Song of Fire and Ice (www.greenronin.com/sifrp/) which reminded me a lot of birthright, in that part of the character creation process was creating the noble house that your character is from, and there are rules for building up your strongholds, and hiring people to work for you, and handlign random events that might affect your lands.
#4 FrozenWastes Aug 02, 2010 11:42:27	Everyone seems to really enjoy it, and its a nice reminder, between levels, that our characters are influencing the world in big ways that don't show up in whatever random dungeon we happen to be going through. One of the really key things, I think, is that the two are fairly seperate things. On an adventure, the monsters don't care that we are big-shot homeowners... and we don't have NPC followers tagging along on our adventures - so making the PCs barons or kings or archmages won't necessarily make their lives trivial while adventuring. I've run games where it does mix. Where the players did have all sorts of minions and henchmen on the battlefield. It makes the combat longer, so you have to only do this for big, big moments. For example, the party was defending Hammerfast from an undead horde. So they had a bunch of minion warriors to help (not a lot of them survived). Another RPG worth looking at, if you can find it or want to pay for it, is Song of Fire and Ice (www.greenronin.com/sifrp/) which reminded me a lot of birthright, in that part of the character creation process was creating the noble house that your character is from, and there are rules for building up your strongholds, and hiring people to work for you, and handlign random events that might affect your lands. Cool. I'll check that out. One thing I'm doing for this game for sure is group character building. I usually just tell people to show up with a character, but for this game I'm going to have them make characters together with them all from the same area with real connections to the area.
#5 FrozenWastes Aug 02, 2010 18:24:54	I popped over to my friends and borrowed his Song of Ice & Fire book. Wow. The Noble House generation process is amazing. It's definitely going to be what I use. Step 1: Everyone collaborates to generate their Noble house (with SoI&F specific stuff replaced with more generic fantasy stuff-- there's not a lot of it in there so that'll be easy). Step 2: Character generation as a group with everyone starting as either being a noble of the house they designed or one of their loyal retainers/heroes. I'm going to have to limit race choices for this, I think. I don't think the campaign would work as well at all if the party ended up being a Shardmind, a Minotaur, a Genasi, a Warforged and a Wilden.