RPGs with Bespoke Colony-Building Rules

Agamon

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The past 5 years, I've been diving deep into survival colony builder video games. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Norland, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Clanfolk all have 50+ hours of play (30x that for RW lol), so I obviously like this kind of game.

But, I've never really thought about running TTRPG like this. Probably because I haven't discovered a game that does this well out of the box. I know I could try to squeeze the round block of <insert TTRPG here> into the square hole I'm looking at here, but are there any games that do this well? I'm aware that Modiphius' Fallout kind of does this (though I'm not certain to what extent). Any other suggestions?
 

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Not sure what depth of detail you want but...

Blades in the Dark has extensive rules are building an entire faction, complete with location maps, bonuses per location acquired, and adding competent minions and so on. It's hard-coded to its setting. But with little work you could place it on mars...

Apocalypse World as 5 playbooks that make up the "community". So assuming your players chose those, you have a ton of mechanics for Barter, location building and enhancement, and scrounging for resources and so on.

Dune 2d20 has abstracted rules for anything from a suit of armor to full scale planetary invasion. So it has rules on colonies, armies, supplies, trade, contracts, and you can use Traits to drill down from there. With some clever choices of characters, there is enough rules and mechanics here to go from a star colony to a full empire.

Numenera: Destiny is rules on community building from all angles. It has rules on building the infrastructure, the politics, the lawkeeping and more. Characters are geared around these aspects as well. With some clever choices of characters, there is enough rules and mechanics here to go from a colony to a full metropolis.
 





Good point with the negative connotations associated with colony. Tbf, all the video games I play have no displacement, aggression tends to come from raiders that want your stuff lol
 

The Organization creation rules in the True20 Experts Handbook are very good and can be used to build large communities for any genre. Its size table defines tiers of membership that can be as large as 660,480 members - why it caps at that #, only the writers know. :) You could easily homebrew higher tiers following the existing tier progression.

The organization/communities mirror PCs, in that they have Abilties, Backgrounds, Roles, Feats, Skills and Reputations, as opposed to being a bundle of settlement stats/features rolled up from random tables. The Ability scores and feats are a list of those that are most common among members, and skills and skill ranks are the same. With the idea that were you to build a PC/NPC member for an org, you'd look at those features to establish common baselines. The orgs also reflect the core PC roles in their membersip, in that there's Adept organizations, Expert organizations and Warrior organizations. But there's also Ordinary organizations and Mixed-Role organizations, which are what you'd associate more with a community or colony.

The coolest thing about them though, is that Orgs have Combat, Financial and Social attack and damage values. Those can be used for abstract conflicts in which one organization confronts another. So while say a Warrior Org comprising an army could could use the Combat attack to battle another, an organization that's religious could use the Social attack to prothletize against another, and a multi-national corp could use the Financial attack & damage to pull of a corporate takeover. Needles to say a community could use any of those in all sorts of interesting ways. Those play out similarly to Savage World Mass Battles, if you're familiar with those rules.

Orgs also have a Reputation stat that can be used as a bonus by either it, or a member. And there's a Wealth bonus that reflective of its overall financial worth. There's som e emphasis on Org Leadership in how it corresponds to military, financial and social leaders. As well as how leaderhip can play into recruitment and how it influences organizational conflicts. Meanwhile there's narrative and play mechanics whereby a PC can gain influence, or loose influence with an org.

There's no denying they're a fairly crunchy set of rules clocking in a full 8 pages. But theyr'e flexible and able to support interesting roleplaying and diverse settings. It's easy to adapt them to D&D 3e, PF1e or d20, on account of them sharing common DNA. But certainly possible to adapt them to other TTRPGs.

For community building on another world - IME both Traveler and Star Trek Adventures have good rules for that. Albeit both are fairly high level in the details.
 

The past 5 years, I've been diving deep into survival colony builder video games. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Norland, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Clanfolk all have 50+ hours of play (30x that for RW lol), so I obviously like this kind of game.

But, I've never really thought about running TTRPG like this. Probably because I haven't discovered a game that does this well out of the box. I know I could try to squeeze the round block of <insert TTRPG here> into the square hole I'm looking at here, but are there any games that do this well? I'm aware that Modiphius' Fallout kind of does this (though I'm not certain to what extent). Any other suggestions?
The Without Number series of games, particular Ashes Without Number, have excellent rules for building communities in RPGs (and all other forms of worldbuilding for that matter).
 


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