Third Kingdom Games

Review: A Guide to Thieves’ Guilds by Third Kingdom Games

A Guide to Thieves Guilds

By Todd Leback (Patreon page); Editing by Brian Johnson; Layout by Tim Bannock; Cover art by Jen Drummond; Interior art by Daniel Comerci, Chad Dickhaut, Rick Hershey/Fat Goblin Games, Jeshields, Patrick E Pullen, Dean Spencer

43 pages including cover and OGL page

Written for use with Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials, but definitely useful for most fantasy role playing games.

This book is a guide for both GM and player on how to create and run a thieves guild. Much of it is geared toward the player side; high level player characters gain followers and are able to start and lead their own guild. To use this book, you also need the Domain Building book.

Chapter 1: A Guide to Thieves’ Guilds

We begin with the basics of the guild. Remember in the Domain Building review when I said that Market Class is extremely important? This is why. Market Class determines the number of guilds an urban center can support without conflict, guides the type of activities a thieves’ guild can pursue, and limits the number of guild members. We’re also given a brief synopsis of the various types of guilds, like assassins, beggars, con men, spies, etc. There will be MUCH more about them later on.

Chapter 2: Guild Traits & Operations

This chapter describes the structure of the guild and profits and losses. The first section describes Guild Structures by breaking down the membership into a flow chart.

There is also a section dealing with player-characters who are guildmasters as well as adventurers. PCs are not going to want to sit around and deal with day to day business of the guild instead of adventuring. So Leback has provided some easy to follow rules and guidelines on how to incorporate these conflicts into your game.

Revenue and Expenses is a longer section with a number of charts. Once again, Market Class shows up as the Market Class determines the maximum amount of possible revenue per month. Revenue is modified by a number of factors including the type of guild, the number and class of guild members, boons, banes, morale, and conflicts. This gets you the gross profits. Then you work on the expenses which include bribes to authorities, pay outs to members, and maintenance on the guildhouse/hideout.

The next section is Guild Focuses, and deals with the various different types of Thieves’ Guilds. The types are as follows; Assassins, Beggars, Burglars, Con Artists, Fences, Smugglers, Spies, and Thugs. Each type has a description of what they do and any modifiers to the standard guild stuff (for example, a Beggars guild have a larger maximum membership than other types, and the guildhouse/hideout costs less), as well as tables showing the amount of monthly revenue that type provides, a table for boons specific to that type (good stuff that happens every month) and banes (bad stuff that happens). While this section is very long, a player is only going to have one or two pages to look at dealing with the type of guild their character runs. The tables are also concise and easy to use.

At the end of the chapter is a nice example of a Burglars’ Guild that breaks down membership, profit, and loss.

Chapter 3: Conflicts

Here we have descriptions of two types of conflicts that affect Thieves’ Guilds; External and Internal. External conflict describes what happens when there are too many guilds or thieves in a settlement. Internal conflicts are those that happen inside the guild itself; membership exceeds Market Class limits, failed morale checks, etc).

Something cool about these rules is that the player character’s thief skills are used to resolve a lot of the conflicts in ways that make sense.

The first section details External Conflicts; a d100 table is consulted whenever one of more items on a list is triggered. Results can range from a street fight between your gang and a rival or an all out assassination attempt against all of your guild leadership!

The next section examines Internal Conflicts. Like the External conflicts, Internal conflicts are triggered when a particular event happens. When that occurs, you roll on a d100 table. Results range from dissension in the ranks that leads to low morale (which can snowball into further conflict later on) all the way to an assassination attempt against the player character!

The last section in this chapter is Mass Conflict, which occurs when two or more guilds fight or a guild splinters and fights itself. These rules are simple and straightforward and would probably work with little variation for any kind of mass combat.

Chapter 4: Running a Guild

Morale is the first section here and it measures the happiness and loyalty of the guild members. If morale gets too low, you’re looking at mutiny. There are a number of modifiers that affect the Morale Score, and the Morale Score affects guild revenue and Internal Conflicts.

The next section is Experience and Gaining Levels. While running a guild does provide a character with experience points, it doesn’t provide that much which means the character must still adventure. However, the various NPC members of the guild also gain experience and can level up over time, which improves revenue.

Franchising is the title of the next section and details an option you can use when your guild has grown to maximum capacity in the settlement it started in. You can franchise your guild to another settlement! This has benefits and drawbacks but overall seems like a good idea and a fun part of this whole mini-game.

The last section of this chapter is a summary entitled, Order of Operations. Essentially, running a guild requires you to do certain things at the beginning of the month, and certain other things at the end of the month. So, at the beginning of every month, you pay your expenses, recruit new members, roll for banes and boons, and roll for Conflicts. At the end of the month, you collect revenue, pay recruiting costs, add/subtract members, roll for Morale changes.

Chapter 5: Guilds and the Referee

This final chapter uses the previous material to show what a game master can do to easily create and run thieves’ guilds in cities the player characters may visit, and how those guilds interact with the player characters. It’s also useful because just creating these NPC guilds can create conflicts that can be exploited to add depth to the city location or even make the basis for adventures for the player characters.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a wonderful game supplement. It is highly useful and utilitarian, easy to read and comprehend, with clean layout, non-distracting art, and rules that don’t get in the way of the game. In fact, the rules here form a mini game that you and your players can break into while playing your normal session. Keep in mind, you do need the previous supplement, Domain Building, as well as Hexcrawl Basics.

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.