'Surviving in the wilderness' and 'prospering village' mini-games?

[RangerWickett]

So the main component of my next campaign will be adventuring, exploring, and all that jazz, but I want a component of resource management to ground the characters in the village that is their home base, and in the world that they are ranging through on their adventures. I want them to respect the difficulty of exploration. And I could use some help.

(Note, the village where the PCs live is 30 miles from the nearest other non-hostile community, so trade isn't really a factor.)

Now, I'm playing 4e, but I'm open to any sort of suggestion, from mechanical to narrative.

For the exploration side of things, I could just have them actually keep track of food and water, but even for that, I'd like some guidelines to how hard it should be to get a day's worth of food while on open plains, or in a forest, or in a desert, and so on.

For the village side of thing, what I kinda want to do is come up with a general list of what roles the 300 people in town serve, from farmers to trappers to carpenters. And then maybe some sort of "Settlers of Catan"-esque resource collection, and the ability to accrue resources and then 'trade in' to build new stuff over the course of months or years.

And if important lynchpins in the town die, then they'll have to resolve the sudden loss of, for instance, all the carrots.

Hm, I guess I'll ponder this for a bit. What all does a town need to survive?

 

[Nellisir]

With 300 people, you're going to have only a few specialists. The other 295 are going to be farmers of one sort or another, who do other things in between seasons.

The specialists will be people who need specialized equipment. No store; not enough people. A blacksmith and an apprentice or two, likely his sons. A tanner. A miller. A priest. After, that, frankly, I think everyone basically farms or herds or hunts.

Why does another village 30 miles away make trade "not a factor"? I doubt a town of 300 can survive entirely on its own, not for long.

 

[TerraDave]

For the village, I think you could find so much in Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe.

For wilderness, hmm, ODD had outdoor survival...actually the latest version of OSRIC had a nice section on this. You could probably combine that with 4E (and maybe some 3E) crunch to come up with something.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

Here's Gygax's take on typical thorps and villages (from his Yggsburgh book):

Thorps are little communities of freemen, generally farmers, with dwellings only, they being too small to support any commercial shop. Each has less than a score of houses with barns and outbuildings, and an average population of 120 persons. A small shrine with a non-combatant low level priest serving as a spiritual "guide" for the folk of the thorp is the norm.

Each of the villages are located on a watercourse or else have a deep well. Each village consists of about 40 buildings and all have a religious structure, a large shrine or fane. The average population for these communities is 250-300 persons.

The main part of the villages consists of two opposite rows of 16 stone cottages for the villains. Each row is separated into two parts so that eight families work a single section of the manor. There are separate and larger cottages for the reeve, cowherd, hayward, shepherd, swineherd, and woodward. One to two buildings of somewhat larger size are rented by freemen. One being an ale house or tavern while the other is a smith or general merchant. Each of the row houses has a tool shed and a garden behind it. Further back are four commonly used barns for large livestock and equipment and smaller animals. At one end of the street between these structures is the village fane in which the town's religious leader dwells and holds services. The grounds around the fane are lawn and gardens but of no great extent. Behind this is the local burial ground.

I agree that a village of 300 or so will only have a couple of commercial establishments: probably a "locals" type of tavern and maybe a smithy or a dry-goods store.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

For wilderness, hmm, ODD had outdoor survival...actually the latest version of OSRIC had a nice section on this.

Both OD&D and AD&D had useful sections on wilderness adventuring (in OD&D's The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures and AD&D's 1e Dungeon Masters Guide). OSRIC does have a section on exploring the wilderness, but I don't think it's quite as detailed as the originals. I'd try to get a 1e DMG (they're inexpensive).

 

[Ed_Laprade]

A lot depends on the surrounding territory. You mention three very different types: desert, forest and prairie. First off, you do not, repeat not, have desert and forest together. If the area around the village is prairie or desert they won't have any orchards, otherwise they should. (An oasis will have some trees, preferably fruit bearing types. But good luck living off the land away from it!)

 

[fba827]

Now, I'm playing 4e, but I'm open to any sort of suggestion, from mechanical to narrative.

It depends a lot on 'how much managing effort you want to put in to this'

My natural instinct is to get way too in to the micromanaging here, turning it in to a resource game but i know some players would not enjoy that (more focus on resources other than them)

So two very broad options to consider ...

Something similar to the artifact system in 4e.
Consider the town as an artifact. Give it a concordance chart for stuff like "bad weather for a consecutive week -1" "monster attack on town -2 per encounter" "new renewable natural resource discovered near town +1/resource" "new path blazed through the nearby wilderness +1/path"
and then set up different categories for satisfied/unsatisfied, etc.
And over the course of time, the town could be doing good or bad.

Another option is to consider it like the disease system.
Make a track with several states, and then once a week (or once a month, whatever) the town makes a check where it could move up or down the track. And, again, different states on the track offer different bonuses to the town/citizens.

Something similar could also be done for overland travel... if everything is 'good'/'satisfied' maybe there is a +1 overland travel speed, etc. where as if things are 'bad'/'unsatisfied' there is a -1 to overland travel speed since the horses (or whatever) have been cranky and malnourished from the lack of feed. and so on. (<-- the group i'm in is actually doing something very similar to this right now, it's been working well so far, but it hasn't been used long enough to have a firm longterm opinion on it yet)

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Another option is to consider it like the disease system.
Make a track with several states, and then once a week (or once a month, whatever) the town makes a check where it could move up or down the track. And, again, different states on the track offer different bonuses to the town/citizens.

That's a nifty idea. I'll suggest expanding a bit: The town has multiple tracks like this, one corresponding to , for example, "health", "security", "food/water", "building materials", etc. Each aspect of the town is it's own track, and its monthly modifier to the "town health" checks can change over time. This change can be for a campaign reason (eg, winter is -2 on "food" checks, and hostile orcs in the area is -4 on "security" checks). There might also be some unnamed randomized modifier [eg, 1d4-1d4, to get random numbers -3 to +3].

The PCs also grant modifiers through their actions, sometimes intentional (eg, when they chase off orcs), or unintentional (eg, if their discovery of an artifact unleashes a plague). In other words, this is one way the PCs can mechanistically interact with the overall well-being of the village. As with the orcs that threaten "security", the PCs can go off and deal with the threat, and provide the village with a bonus that month, depending upon their success (+2 if the do a typical job, +5 if they kill the the chieftain & shaman, -5 if they anger all the other neighboring tribes in the process, etc). This puts some responsibility on the PCs not to do something that could adversely affect the village, and if they do, there needs to be a good reason.

 

[LostSoul]

I think you might have to stretch out the extended rests.

 

[jasonbostwick]

A lot depends on the surrounding territory. You mention three very different types: desert, forest and prairie. First off, you do not, repeat not, have desert and forest together. If the area around the village is prairie or desert they won't have any orchards, otherwise they should. (An oasis will have some trees, preferably fruit bearing types. But good luck living off the land away from it!)

Er, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. While there might not be forests in the middle of the Sahara, it is definitely possible to have forested areas in the midst of a desert.

Look at Arizona on Google Maps - dry, brown deserts broken up by swaths of forest along waterways and on the North-facing slopes of mountains and hills.

Tucson gets less than 12 inches of rain a year, but there are Pecan orchards in the outskirts of the city.

With irrigation, it would be possible to have crops and even orchards a fair ways off from a river. This is certainly possible with technology more primitive than that assumed in a baseline D&D campaign and could be further improved with magic.



Irrigation systems could actually provide a fair amount of inspiration for a campaign.

Large systems of irrigation canals might be hard for villagers to maintain in a 'points of light' style campaign, and perhaps there might be canals near the town that have fallen into disrepair with the collapse of an old empire (shadows of China's Grand Canal).

The rebuilding of a canal system by the PCs would be an easy way for them to impact the town through normal adventuring. They could safeguard reconstruction attempts from orc raiders, or exterminate the lizardfolk that are have dammed the canals to make an artificial marsh.

The establishment of proper irrigation could rapidly expand the towns food production and population.