Month: August 2020

Review: Domain Building by Third Kingdom Games

Domain Building

By Todd Leback (Patreon Page), Cover Art by Jen Drummond, Cartography by Todd Leback, Interior Art by Patrick E Pullen, Dyson Logos, Rick Hershey, David Lewis Johnson, and Miguel Santos

49 pages including Cover and OGL thing

Designed specifically for use with Old School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome, but useful for virtually all fantasy role playing games.

The book is divided into chapters which I will break down here. I won’t go into too much detail, as a lot of work went into making this product and I think you should purchase a copy.

Introduction

These mechanics are an exploration of higher level domain building for the Fighter class. Other classes will have their own higher level activities described in future supplements.

There is a helpful glossary for specific terms used throughout the text; Civilization Rating, Domain, Garrison, Infrastructure (important because this improves value and ultimately Market Class see: below) Land Value, Market Class (this is perhaps the most important to game-y stuff as it determines the availability of goods and services and population size), Resources, Resource Step, Retainers, and Urban Center.

Chapter 1: Retainers

Retainers, henchmen, minions, etc are vitally important to building up hexes and protecting domains. While the player character is off doing high level adventures adventuring, their trusted and loyal Lieutenants are protecting their domain, clearing nearby hexes of low level dangers, and managing various other things on the player’s behalf.  This chapter explains how to recruit retainers with a thorough but elegant system, then shows you how to keep your retainers happy.

Chapter 2: Domains

Characters at this point should have already cleared the hex they wish to build a domain in, using the mechanics described in the previous volume; Hexcrawl Basics. Now, the character(s) must do additional things/meet requirements before the domain can actually happen. These include creating a garrison to protect the hex and people and building or taking over a stronghold.

Chapter 3: Developing your Domain

Once your domain is founded its time to acquire money and power! This chapter contains rules for populating your domain hex, growing and improving it over time, details about the very important Market Class, and growth of your domain’s borders.

Chapter 4: Maintaining your Domain

The chapter title summarizes what’s in this chapter pretty well. It contains detailed systems for determining land value and extracting value from the hex, like mining or livestock. Gaining wonderful income from the hex.  Then Leback hits us with the dreaded expenses and bills!

This chapter also details and explains how to create and build up Urban Centers; the villages, towns, and cities of your domain. There are even rules for gaining Experience Points just from building and maintaining your domain, albeit much slower than going off on adventures.

Chapter 5: Domain Supplemental

This chapter has some more rules to consider for morale of your people/subjects, the size of your domain, and trade. The trade section makes a good point separating trade the player-characters conduct themselves on a first person basis, versus the abstract mass trading that goes on within a domain or with other domains. Leback has really mastered the skill of taking complex ideas and gracefully explaining easy to use mechanics for addressing those ideas.

Chapter 6: Domain Building Extended Example

Here Leback takes us through, step by step, the building of a domain using all the rules in the previous chapters.

Each of the previous chapters had numerous detailed examples already, but this one puts everything together. Even though each of the individual rules in the previous chapters were clearly explained, it is extremely helpful to have a full example where everything is put on the proverbial table for all to see. 

The Extended Example takes the domain from humble beginnings as a wilderness hex, 150 miles from the closest civilization, to a two-hex domain with a thriving village, within a year of game time.

The extended example really showcases the almost mini-game aspect of domain building.

Conclusion

I’ve found this document to be very well written, concise, and informative. It seems very game-able to me, and in fact almost like a mini-game, making domain management much more fun than it felt with the dry descriptions from old school DnD/AD&D.

I’d also like to add that I REALLY like the cover art for these Third Kingdom Games products.

Review: Hexcrawl Basics

Hexcrawl Basics by Todd Leback (Patreon page), editing by Tim Bannock, Cover art by Jen Drummond, Interior art by Bruno Balixa, Dean Spencer, Rick Hershey, Jack Holliday, Matt Forsyth, Matthew Richmond

Published by Third Kingdom Games

Hexcrawl Basics is written for use with Old School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome.

26 pages including the cover and OGL license info

As the Introduction by Todd Leback states, “There’s a ton of literature out there – both published and on the internet – dealing with hexcrawling. But there is precious little information on how to mechanically run a hexcrawl.”

I couldn’t agree more!

The book is divided into 6 Chapters. I’ll give a brief synopsis of each.

Chapter 1: Hexes

Hexes themselves are defined as being 6 miles from face to face, with sub-hexes (smaller hexes  within the hex) being 1.2 miles from face to face. A six mile hex is standard as far as I’ve ever known, but Leback takes the time to give a brief explanation as to why that is the standard and why this is useful to the game master.

There is a difference between travelling through a hex and travelling within a hex. The next section describes these differences and provides useful information like how to determine distances using hex features. Lots of maps are used to illustrate the information as provided examples.

Travelling through one hex to another is pretty straightforward and Leback shows how to have the player-characters do this by following terrain features.

Travel and exploration within a hex is next described and provides, to me, great info right off the bat with a breakdown of the time it takes to explore a hex depending on the terrain, if an aerial spotter is present (which is a GREAT idea that I have overlooked in the past), and how many sub-hexes can be explored in that time frame.

Next is a section detailing more on actual exploration, such as movement rate, noticing tracks, encounter frequency, how long an encounter takes to resolve and how that effects the time it takes to explore the hex, and camping.

Chapter 2: Random Encounters

This chapter begins with Leback explaining the ranges of monsters; the range is the amount of space (number of hexes) a monster needs to do its monstering. Larger monsters generally need more space to get the resources they need to survive. Leback provides ingenious rules that use the monster descriptions from B/X or Old School Essentials or AD&D.

Random encounter tables are explained based on what creatures have lairs in that hex.

Restocking lairs is an oft overlooked or forgotten aspect of hex crawling. If the player-characters explore a hex, wipe out the goblin tribe operating out of the cave they found, and then move on. What happens to the cave? Someone else is going to move in, that’s what! Leback once again provides simple and easy to implement rules for doing this, and includes some optional ways of handling random tables as well.

Chapter 3: Features and Lairs

Leback begins this chapter by defining the number of features and lairs each 6 mile hex will have, and then defining the terms of Features and Lairs. It is another simple and useful idea that is often overlooked.

Leback doesn’t spend a lot of space talking about features, which is fine. Most of this chapter is about Lairs; the difference between a lair and a dungeon, how to determine if the lair is defended or not, what it really means if the monster is determined to not be in its lair when the player-character’s discover it, and rules for monster types and how they relate to their lairs.

Chapter 4: Getting Lost

This chapter provides handy rules for when player-characters are exploring within a hex and lose their way. It also makes the distinction between getting lost and being delayed. Even an experienced team of explorers with aerial support and local trackers can be delayed, no matter how unlikely it is that they would get lost.

It’s also important to note that the Referee rolls to determine if the party is lost or delayed. The party doesn’t realize they are lost until they succeed on a roll or come across a landmark they’ve already seen – just like in real life.

Chapter 5: Random Weather

This chapter has simple rules for determining the day’s weather and how it affects the player characters. This is four step process utilizing easy to use random tables. Daily Outlook, Chance of Precipitation, Precipitation Severity, and Unusual Weather.

Leback notes that there is another publication called Random Weather Generation that has more complex rules that can be used for those that want a bit more detail.

Chapter 6: Hexcrawling in Action

This chapter brings all of the previous chapters together and explains how to use all of the information together in just a few steps in order to flesh out a hex. Each of the previous chapters has examples within it, but this is a massive example that brings it all together to show you, the reader, how it all works.

Conclusion

Hexcrawling has long been of interest to me in a sort of long distance, abstract way. Like, I knew it existed, and it sounded cool, but I never experienced it first hand nor had any idea how to run it myself. I’ve read lots of blog posts by various people extolling the wonder and glory of the hexcrawl, but like Leback says in the intro, there has never really been any mechanical means of conducting a hexcrawl campaign until now.

If you want to conduct an overland wilderness campaign, I think Hexcrawl Basics is definitely something you should check out. In fact, I’m planning on using it to sketch out a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign setting.