Category: Setting

Setting ideas, background, culture, whatever.

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.

Podcast about world building

If you look to your right, you’ll see a widget with a podcast in it. Unless you’re on mobile in which case you probably see nothing.

Click it. Listen to it. Tell me if you like it. Share it to the world. Subscribe to it so you don’t miss a thing.

Even if you hate it, you should still pass it around and share it to your circle of gaming geeks.

And no, I don’t get paid a thing. There is no advertising, no patreons, just two dudes who are barely functioning adults talking about games and world building. 

Hubris – a setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics

I’ve decided that the next game I run will be DCC using the Hubris setting.
To start with, I’m just going to use the funnel adventure in the Hubris book, of which I have the softcover version. Looking forward to running it in the next 2 to 3 weeks.

I asked Mike Evans, creator of Hubris, for some clarification/guidance on some issues I had with character creation and he was nice enough to give me some pointers.

I’m still playing in a Savage Worlds game set in the Sundered Skies that has gone on for half a dozen years now. It’s a great campaign that will be concluding soon. My character is a drakin, basically a humanoid dragon baby, who is on a quest to become a real deal gigantic dragon with a huge treasure horde!

The growing into a dragon part is going well, but the treasure horde part has so far escaped me.

On Tuesday’s we have been recording ourselves playing Magic the Gathering. We play Commander/EDH format, which is new to me having been out of the Magic scene for a decade, and then only briefly. I still have all my old cards from High School (3rd edition, The Dark, and Fallen Empires, mostly) and most of those are GREATLY outclassed by the cards nowadays.

Those bastards at WotC really know how to squeeze their audience for cash.

Anyway, I am currently using “Moldrotha, the Gravetide” as my commander. It’s the first deck that I’ve won with since I started playing again back in November. The last game I played it saw me using a Nevinyrral’s Disk to board wipe everything except lands, then used Torment of Hailfire like 12 times (it has an X cost) to do 36 damage to the last remaining opponent; Chuckleberry Finn.

It was a good win.

The more we record, the better the recordings get. We hope to get a podcast up and running very soon. It is tentatively titled, “Timmy and the Kid”

The podcast will be centered on gaming. Witty banter while playing a game, and actual-play broadcasts of RPG sessions. Edited and formatted to be informative and fun for the listener.

I know I sure as hell skip the 4 plus hour podcasts that consist of a bunch of nerds giggling at Princess Bride quotes. Ugh. No thank you.

So I’m Timmy, and Mike is The Kid, and sometimes we have special guests who we interview while we game. 

The Hundred States Generator

So while working on the Strathos setting one day, I thought, “Man, this would go quicker if I used a random table to generate kingdoms for the Hundred States area.” So I looked and looked and couldn’t find a generator on the internet for building kingdoms! Lots of dungeon generators, lots of name generators, but no kingdom generators.

So I made one.

Actually, I made two!

The first is divided into seven parts.

  1. Type (Kingdom, Regency, Union, Collective, Principality, Duchy, etc)
  2. Name; Names are kept simple. How it is named is up to you, the user of the document. For example, rolling a 7 and reading straight across can give you the Enlightened Republic of Ibesh, or the Enlightened Ibesh Republic, or the Republic of Enlightened Ibesh.
  3. Title of Ruler; Roleplaying games always have a hard-on for naming rulers, as if the player-characters would be on a first name basis with the ruler of a kingdom. However, the title of a ruler adds flavor and inspires ideas as to the nature of the kingdom. 
  4. Type of Government; is it a feudal kingdom? an anarcho-socialist collective? A matriarchal plutocracy? 
  5. Economy; what is the economy based on? wines? sheep’s wool? beans? silver mining? beer brewing? 
  6. At War With; what other state is this one at war with?
  7. Allied With; what other state is this one allied with? 

You can either roll once and use everything in a row to make a kingdom, or roll separately for each column. In this way, you can make thousands of different states.

The second kingdom generator is a bit different. It too has seven columns.

  1. Kingdom Type; basically the same as the first document.
  2. Name A; along with the next column, these two columns combine to make more possible names for your nation-state.
  3. Name B
  4. Title of Ruler
  5. Type of Government
  6. Language; this was the big change. I decided I wanted to Hundred States to be the vestiges of the Old Elbonian Empire, which united many smaller nations and tribes under one banner. When that fell apart, the people balkanized and formed their own communities based on shared cultural and language heritage. 
  7. Economy

Since creating these documents, I have made some changes to the setting, but I thought I would share them with anyone interested in using a handy Random Kingdom Generator.

Elbonian Empire culture

The old Elbonian Empire unified numerous smaller cultures under the umbrella of a single government. After the Empire fell and chaos reigned, these individual cultures separated once again. In some instances, old regions reverted to their old ways, army units who identified mostly with a particular culture imposed that culture on the area around which they were stationed, or a past kingdom went on a conquering spree before itself falling apart.  In this way, neighboring kingdoms can be very different from each other, while sharing similarities to kingdoms they do not border.

Some cultural quirks instituted by the old Empire are still common among all the kingdoms, and serve to keep at least some amount of cultural unity among the people of the continent.

Among these quirks are social class and identifiers of one’s social class.

Borrowing from TMNT: Mutants in Avalon, social class is divided into five levels, based on a rating system. The rating system is based on individual occupation, and is identified by an animal type. In ancient times, the people were divided into various clans who held animal totems. When the Empire rolled over the continent and united the people, these animal totems gradually indicated the social status of descendants of those clans. The leaders and allies of the Empire formed the highest classes, while the lower classes were composed of those clans that fought against the Empire. Eventually, the lower classes were integrated and formed the mass of laborers, farmers, and unskilled workers of the Empire.

This continues to this day. In most kingdoms, individuals are required to wear some identifying mark to show their social class. This mark is in the shape of the animal that represents their class. This can be conspicuous jewelry, a patch, an armband, a flag, a tattoo, embroidered clothing, etc.

Social Rating

Each rating has dozens or hundreds of sub-ratings within it. Player-characters may roll on the appropriate table (by occupation) to determine their social class animal.

E: slaves, criminals, tramps, hobos, most foreigners (from outside the kingdoms), pretons.

  1. Rat
  2. Weasel
  3. Magpie
  4. Adder
  5. Frog
  6. Lizard
  7. Newt
  8. Toad
  9. Tortoise
  10. Wolf
  11. Skunk
  12. Raccoon
  13. Possum
  14. Porcupine
  15. Aardvark
  16. Bat
  17. Vulture
  18. Flounder
  19. Eel
  20. Lamprey

D: serfs, laborers, artisans, travelling merchants, mercenaries.
  1. Mouse
  2. Goat
  3. Hamster
  4. Hedgehog
  5. Rabbit
  6. Sheep
  7. Shrew
  8. Squirrel
  9. Chicken
  10. Crow
  11. Duck
  12. Goose
  13. Gull
  14. Bluejay
  15. Pidgeon
  16. Sparrow
  17. Turkey
  18. Beaver
  19. Boar
  20. Monkey

C: skilled laborers, soldiers, wizards, squires, wealthy merchants.
  1. Woodpecker
  2. Robin
  3. Puffin
  4. Heron
  5. Horse
  6. Seal
  7. Lion
  8. Pig
  9. Mole
  10. Donkey
  11. Cow
  12. Cat
  13. Trout
  14. Bass
  15. Catfish

B: military officers, clerics and priests, courtiers, land-owners, knights, extremely wealthy merchants.
  1. Dog
  2. Fox
  3. Otter
  4. Dove
  5. Falcon
  6. Owl
  7. Pheasant

A: nobles, royals, high priests/clerics, generals/admirals. 
  1. Elk
  2. Eagle
  3. Peacock
  4. Swan
  5. Mink

Species and Race in Elbonia

The old Elbonian Empire was founded by dwarves, taken over by humans, and infiltrated by halflings. 
  • Dwarven history starts with the founding of the Empire and its spread from the Sunward mountains and across the fertile plains. 
  • Human history starts with their pledge of unity with the dwarves, and the rapid expansion of the Empire throughout the continent.
  • Halfling history is long, going back before the dwarves appeared. However, halflings love keeping secrets and never discuss their origin. One of their favorite secrets is how they tricked the dwarves and humans into thinking the Empire began with them.

Fall of the Elbonian Empire

The ancient Elbonian Empire was the largest of the human kingdoms at its height. It’s fall began with the conquest of the land known as Pretonia. The native Pretonians were a savage and barbaric race said to cavort with foul gods and bestial demons. When the Elbonians came in their triremes and built colonies on the coast in preparation for an invasion, the Pretonians united their various tribes to drive off the invaders. This war lasted for generations, sucking up vast amounts of wealth and manpower from the Elbonian Empire. Eventually, when the Elbonians thought they finally won, the last of the Pretonian shamans appealed to their gods and brought forth a great disaster in a suicidal attempt to finally defeat their enemy. Bankrupt, in political turmoil, war-weary, and beset by enemies in other parts of the empire, the once-great Elbonian Empire crumbled and fell. Today, in its place, are dozens, perhaps hundreds of petty kingdoms and city-states fighting not just amongst themselves, but with the remnants of the ancient pretons who still rule the deepest forests.

Free Cities Bar Association

In the Free Cities, law and order is maintained by an elite corp of attorneys. The Free Cities Bar Association is the guild that controls the pricing of the services of attorneys. While the people of the Free Cities call them attorneys, the rest of the world considers them to be duelists or assassins. Free City Attorneys do not argue cases in a court of law, rather they are paid to duel on a patron’s behalf. They are also rumored to take payment in exchange for quietly eliminating anyone a wealthy patron wishes. As such, the wealthiest attorneys are also the most deadly, feared, and expensive to keep on retainer or hire.

Some of the eldest attorneys have created partnerships, where successful attorneys pay younger attorneys with little to no reputation to take on cases for them.

The Ship in the Trollands


On the Dark Side, in the Trollands, is a ship. This ship fell from the sky years ago and lodged itself into a hillside. No one has ever been able to gain entry to the ship. It’s smooth metal surfaces are seemingly impervious to any axe, pick, or battering ram. Strangely, since the ship crashed here, the native life to the area has… changed. The trolls and giants native to the region have mutated in strange ways. Multiple heads, hunchbacks, bestial limbs, and extra eyes are all common with even stranger mutations rumored.  

The Silt Sea

The Silt Sea is a shallow sea, named for its bed of silt formed from the runoff of hundreds of rivers and streams that empty into it. The body of water is also called the Gold Sea, as small gold nuggets are frequently found by sifting through the silt. Prospectors have formed boom towns all around the sea, and theft and murder is a common occurrence among the prospecting towns. Fortunes can be made at the Sea, but getting that fortune out to real civilization, past the other prospectors, pirates, and highwaymen, not to mention monsters, is easier said than done. Vast caravans travel by land to and from the various towns selling wares and trading for gold.