Rules for Ruling Domains: Which is the best set?

Okay, I'm running a campaign where rulership could become an issue (as well as mass/army combat). I've already picked out my mass combat rules (Cry Havoc!), but I'm having a tough time deciding on what system to use for rulership of domains. Now, I have three systems at my immediate disposal: A Magical Medieval Society, Empires, and the system from the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I've decided to write off the first and the last of those as they have too little detail, and (in the case of the last one) rather unbalanced. Though I kind of like Empires, I have some serious reservations about it- it doesn't seem to mesh well with the assumptions of the DMG, and much of it seems really incomplete (and almost incoherent).

So, if I need domain rules, I see the following options-

-Try to "fix" Empires.
-Shell out for Fields of Blood or Strongholds and Dynasties (neither of which is carried by a store in my city, and I haven't been able to find a PDF version to preview, so I'd be ordering blind...) (and didn't Mongoose or another publisher have a D&D setting coming out that was basically a knockoff of Birthright? What ever happened to that?)
-Use the 3e Birthright conversion, with some serious modifications.

Any help here?

I don't think that any product has everything you want yet. I have used S&D a bit, and it has no rules for creating the nations and provinces with their resources. On the other hand it has very good mass combat rules, espescially in conjunction with Book of the Sea. The trade and resource rules are good, but without the rules to place those resources it involves a great deal of work by the DM.

You may also want to take a look at A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, which is available as a PDF from RPGNow or in print.

Mongoose has a system in the works called Bloodline which sounds perfect, but it got pushed back till 2005.

The Auld Grump, who liked Birthright...

Being somewhat biased, the Birthright 3.0 (BRCS-playtest) is by far the best.

And its free.

It is currently being updated for 3.5.

The one thing missing from the BRCS-playtest is how to create domains from scratch, but that will be added in the revised document.

D&D Companions Boxed set.

Gee, thanks Diaglo- the D&D Cyclopedia rules are basically the same as the companion rules, and I already wrote them off.

Auld Grump- as I pointed out, I already have MMS- it's good for running a few manors, but I wouldn't want to try to run a whole kingdom off of it- it doesn't seem to handle it well enough...

Hmm, maybe I will just modify Empires a bit, or the 3e Birthright rules, unless someone else has a better idea...

I don't suppose my old thread comparing all those systems got archived ?

I had done a comparative discussion of each of the systems in those books.

Overall, Empire *is* incomplete, but is a decent foundation. Its problem is scaling; because the land does not scale at the same rate as the population, adjust up or down causes funkiness. Just change the land scale to match the population and resource scales, and that will be fine.

Fields of Blood is a fine system, but also incomplete. Its issue is that it relies on the hexes being fixed at 12-miles across, and 1 hex = 1 province. Creating a world from scratch with that in mind works well; adapting a previously-mapped world to fit that pattern can be quite frustrating.

Fields of Blood and Empire both have resource management rules that relate pretty strongly to the "unit building" rules in their mass combat systems (ie., the balance is tuned with those in mind); trying to use Cry Havoc with them might be difficult.

Strongholds & Dynasties is great for building a new town in the wilderness. However, although the rules claim to support "provinces of any size", they really don't. The resources do not scale well, and it is relatively easy for the population to exceed the land's ability to feed it. I found the system breaks down when trying to place a Large City. The domain rules are... iffy. Lots of jobs for PCs to hold (12 ? 15 ?), and rules for them to act in their domain.

What I have always found to be missing from these books, though, is the non-landed power bases. The religious, mercantile, and arcane guilds/organizations that wield power without necessarily having to rule land as well are not present. Fields of Blood comes closest, but even there, these are not independent political entities as much as they are simply additional resources WITHIN the domain of a ruler.

Personally, I'd recommend trying to "fix" Empire and using MMS:WE to provide the details on the PC's own little holdings (assuming they start with those). Check the Expeditious Retreat press' web site for my Word document that describes how to use Population Density to describe a larger area. I wrote it with BirthRight provinces in mind.

Fields o' blood is worth the cash. It contains not only how to run a system of rulership, it has how fast you can produce armies (and rules for varying according to your wishes as a DM), what resources and buildings come into play for each, and how magic, monsters and other factors like weather can affect the game. I have designed my entire campaign around it as it gives a great feel to how many villages, sizes, and capacities of production for each.

It can be very rules-lite for easy record keeping (like mine) or you can work up a simple spreadsheet for those micro-managerial DMs. It has examples, and stats out land-effecting spells. It has a great mass combat system which includes monsters as part of an army or as stand-alone foes, including the tarrasque (sp?). New spells and PrCs for battle and rulership are included as well. I couldn't pass it up and it has become the single best resource for my game, and that's after knowing the Companion Set by heart and having a thorough look at Cry Havoc.

Silvaras, the FoB system doesn't have a 1 hex = 1 domain system per se, but uses that as a start. The rules can be changed per how you want to run your game, and they note that villages and towns dotted the countryside, and to account for each becomes a record keeping hassle. The scale can be ramped up to cover a kingdom easily, and you can leave holes in what you want to cover and just stat out what's important. I agree it doesn't include the political intrigue and influence from churches, guilds, other sources, but this is up to the DM to put together as political pressure on the rulers. I find that it has enough free form with a loose skeleton of rules that you can read 1/4 of the book, understand less, and still introduce and run with it in your game. Should the players become interested enough to become rulers simply give them the book - there is nothing super-secret and they can do as much of the stats as they wish.

TheAuldGrump said:

Mongoose has a system in the works called Bloodline which sounds perfect, but it got pushed back till 2005.

The Auld Grump, who liked Birthright...

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Now I know what I was thinking of when I made the comment on possible plagerism (without confirmation or reading the material) when refering to Fields of Blood. It was actually Bloodlines based on the product description.

The life of the common folk is assailed from all fronts and, while adventurers may prove a solution to invasion by monsters and an oppressive governor, they are in no position to help them against a harsh winter, a poor harvest, plagues or, in the most extreme cases, war. Such protection is the responsibility of the people’s liege, be it chieftain, king or emperor. It is the liege upon whose head weighs the consequences of a poor decision, upon whom the responsibility lies to protect his land from invaders and who can muster the power of that same land in a spiritual bond that legitimises his rule.

Wielding the power of his ancient bloodline, a true liege inherits the heavy responsibility to dictate the fates of his subjects, to place his mark on the weave of history and ultimately to pass down such noble heritage to his successors, so that they may rule with wisdom and strength.

In this boxed set, you will find everything you need to create and manage enormous kingdoms, to wage war, to forge trade and diplomatic alliances which will last centuries and to ensure your character’s places in the records of history.

The three main books give players all the tools they need to create powerful characters whose actions determine the fates of thousands as well as provide rules to help players manage whole kingdoms in fantasy worlds. The rules for characters and kingdoms can be separated so that they can be used in any pre-existing campaign, with an easy to adapt system for managing resources and direction the actions of an entire population, all the while leaving the door open for old-style adventuring. The third book deals with Tarasen, the official campaign world of Bloodlines, as well as its six great nations which provide a fertile ground for political as well as military conflict, the bread and butter of a liege’s life.

The boxed set also contains a set of cards detailing the units of an army, usable in the Bloodlines epic combat system, as well as maps of battlefields in which to stage the clash of armies, in addition to the larger maps of Tarasen and its territories.

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The direct comparisism to the orginial Birthright setting is pretty much unmistakeable.

Ancient bloodlines that give the power to rule.

War Cards

6 races (Birthright had 5 human races and one that was extinct).

I could make a guess as to why the publishing date was shifted

irdeggman said:

The direct comparisism to the orginial Birthright setting is pretty much unmistakeable.

Ancient bloodlines that give the power to rule.

War Cards

6 races (Birthright had 5 human races and one that was extinct).

I could make a guess as to why the publishing date was shifted

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and don't forget
"the liege ...who can muster the power of that same land in a spiritual bond that legitimises his rule."

can you say Regency? how about direct Ripoff!

MarauderX said:

Silvaras, the FoB system doesn't have a 1 hex = 1 domain system per se, but uses that as a start. The rules can be changed per how you want to run your game, and they note that villages and towns dotted the countryside, and to account for each becomes a record keeping hassle. The scale can be ramped up to cover a kingdom easily, and you can leave holes in what you want to cover and just stat out what's important. I agree it doesn't include the political intrigue and influence from churches, guilds, other sources, but this is up to the DM to put together as political pressure on the rulers. I find that it has enough free form with a loose skeleton of rules that you can read 1/4 of the book, understand less, and still introduce and run with it in your game. Should the players become interested enough to become rulers simply give them the book - there is nothing super-secret and they can do as much of the stats as they wish.

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I said 1 hex = 1 province, not 1 hex = 1 domain. The author, Matt Colville, and I discussed this when the book came out and I made the same comment. He had thought he had set the scale to be the same as a BirthRight province; however, measuring on the map says no. A 12-mile hex is a little bit smaller than the smallest BirthRight province: Ilien.

Problem 1: I have a campaign world with a 20-year development history. This includes 512 provinces already set up in BirthRight-style descriptions. No, I do not feel like re-drawing the maps to conform to Fields of Blood's sense of scale.

Problem 2: Assuming I wish to adjust to Fields of Blood and re-define my Provinces with "counties" or the like on the 12-miles-across hex scale of Fields of Blood ... the maintenance costs escalate at a realm size of 7 hexes. 7 hexes just barely converts 1 of my larger provinces. True, I can adjust the point at which the maintanence begins to ramp up, but that's just more work to achieve the balance I already have. Additionally, now the armies in Province 1 are not the same distance away (in terms of movement required to reach the nearest "enemy" province) than they were before -- most are considerably more "distant".

Problem 3: Assuming I scale the area of a FoB province up to something closer to the size of my existing provinces, I then have to think about how the movement scales. Movement is tied to province size. Also, the tactical movement when 2 armies meet is scaled specifically on the 12-mile campaign hex size.

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Now, before anyone goes and says I am unfairly trashing Fields of Blood, please remember that original comment was:

Creating a world from scratch with that in mind works well; adapting a previously-mapped world to fit that pattern can be quite frustrating.

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Someone seeking a good, thorough system for describing the military and politics of a new campaign world cannot do better than to pick up Fields of Blood. This is especially true if the DM wants questions of "logistics" to be part of the design: how many troops *can* the city support, etc.

However, someone looking to add Fields of Blood to an existing campaign world, especially one that already has a lot of these relationships mapped out in another system, is in for a lot of work.

Empire, in that sense, is "better", because it is more abstract and scaleable "from the ground up". Empire has its own shortcomings, though, in that it *does* very much feel imcomplete. In another of my threads discussing domain books, a couple of us started talking about how to add things to Empire ... like trade guilds, and making organizations into their own power bases instead of just "accessories" in settlements.