SKM Development: More Strongholds

Now that we figured troop costs out (kind of), or think we did, we start on strongholds. As I said, we’re trying to figure out the basics and one of our aims  here is that the stronghold will pay for itself. So..

 Alright, we’ve established Light Infantry have an upkeep of 2gp per month. Let’s assume that we have 7 hexes, each with a population of 100. We’re doing this for simplicity’s sake. This means that we need 140 Light Infantry. So 280gp per month to provide security for the hex, just in Light Infantry, we chose LI because they’re worth 1 Defense Value, I’m using them as a standard.

So that means that it costs 3,360 per year to keep our realm secured with light infantry. Across five years, this means we’d have to expend 16,800. But our stronghold should provide a beneficial cost overall, so, let’s assume the stronghold costs 12,500. That’s about ¾ the cost that it would cost to just keep Light Infantry around. Ah, but it doesn’t end there.

I’ve decided to toss out all of the ‘additions.’ The laundry list of doorways, portcullises, heights of walls, and stuff that ACKs gave us, isn’t really necessary. We’ll have fewer strongholds, but nobody wants to get that granular in this campaign. I’m going to replace them with upgrades. So instead of needing to worry about every doorway, rock and portcullis, we’ll just focus on the big upgrades, like barracks, stables, and moats. Fun stuff. Essentially, like buildings in a 3X strategy game.

And that brings us to the Basic Fortress. The Fortress will cost 12,500 as decided above, have an upkeep of 40gp, and give a Defense Rating of 100. But Spook, I hear someone say, why 100? Didn’t we already decide that its equivalent to five years worth of the protection of 140 Light Infantry who have a Defense Rating of 140. This is about seventy percent of that. And I answer, yes, that’s entirely accurate.    

Remember back when we decided to have strongholds represent deferred costs? We suggested the concept of providing for covered upkeep through them, and that’s what I decided here. Since we built this facility for our patrol troops to live in, we defer their upkeep costs. So 50 Light Infantry, 100 peasants, or 8 cavalry can stay here for free. No monthly upkeep on those garrisoned units. Now, again, assuming our LI are 1 Defense Rating each, that means that the stronghold is effectively giving us a DR of 150 for an upkeep of 40 gp/mo, or 480 gp/year, which is a decided premium over paying 3,360 per year but did require the rather large up-front output of 12,500gp or 1250 resource, plus the cost of construction.

SKM Development: Matters of the State, More War

Before I get into some nitty gritty, I have to explain a change I decided to introduce. I mentioned earlier how I intended for troops to provide a ‘security rating’ of sorts, but I never quite detailed how that was going to be calculated. Also, the thought occurred to me that certain troops are better at certain things and worse at others.

So..

Alright. Security Rating is right out. We’re calling it Defense Rating right now (DR). Every troop type, and fortification, will provide a DR. Our DR for our entire realm is equal to 20% of the total number of families, rounded up. So, 7 hexes of 100 families each, gives us a required DR of 140.

That part is easy. We just need to make sure our fortification and available patrol troops equal that. And if they don’t equal that, then what we incur isn’t just unhappiness, but an increased chance of banditry (which is represented by just having part of your subsistence, tax, or resource income go down the can). I’ll work on the details to that when I unpack events.

Now, the other part is well, figuring out how our troops do in a fight. How do our peasant’s fair when they’re rolled out against say, a group of giant black widow spiders, or made to attack a neighboring kingdom?

And thus, I discovered, we need an Attack Rating or AR. This pleased me because I realized that an AR vs DR was an understandable thing. An AR higher than a DR could allow for some simplicity in realm vs realm combat, with some rolling on the side based on our stats like shrewd, thew, and the like, to modify the results when our leader is well, leading his troops.  Basically, the difference between AR and DR determines the extent of how likely defeat or victory is, and then we add on a modifier to overcome that difference (or exacerbate it). That’s a later post’s topic though.

Right now, we’re just focused on figuring out two things. Upkeep costs and AR/DRs. I’ll worry about hiring costs later when I unpack the army further, since army prices need to be competitive against patrol forces.

Alright.

Spook hates numbers, but they’re vital to a RPG system. So he hopes he didn’t mess up. I didn’t even consult with the ACKs costs for individual units because as stated previously, they’re well, taxes. Also, the ACKs stuff gets tricky.

Firstly, we’re going to start with some limited troop types to start with.

Seven in fact.

Melee: Peasants. Light Infantry. Heavy Infantry

Mounted: Cavalry & Knights

Ranged: Archers & Horse Archers.

Other categories might get added later, or through tech trees. When we make tech trees.

Peasants

Peasants are untrained shlubs. Their AR and DR are both abysmal.

.2 AR / .2 DR

0.5 gp/mo upkeep

These little jerks are our first decimal on the list to start with. They’re cheap. They’re however pretty damn inferior, especially when we arrive at..

 Light Infantry

LI are our ‘standard.’ They’re a lightly armed man-at-arms. Reasonably trained. Equipped lightly. Professional enough of a soldier.

1 AR / 1 DR

2gp/mo upkeep

Yes, one light infantry man is worth 10 peasants, and only costs what it costs for 4. This will be balanced out later with a higher recruitment cost for them.

Heavy Infantry

Bigger, tougher. These are your tough guys.

AR 3 / DR 3

5gp/mo upkeep

They hit harder. They punch firmer. But they’re expensive. Also, as we’ll find out later, they’ve a hidden fee in their already higher upkeep requirement, but yes, one of these guys is worth a little more than 2 LI and you have to pay for that.

Cavalry

Cavalry will be faster than the other units (when I work out how many hexes I want them to cover in war). They’re lightly armed and armored, but have a horse, and that momentum helps them to run people down or take them out with spears. HOWEVER, when defending, they’re basically just light infantry.

AR 4 / DR 1

8/mo upkeep

Knight

A knight is like a medieval tank. One of these guys is worth about fifty peasants, and it shows. However, they’ll have Role Play issues associated with them, and a greater commensurate recruitment cost. And yes, you could conceivably defend a realm with a population of 700 people with 14 of the guys. Just don’t lose any.

AR 10/DR 10

20/gp month upkeep.

You can see why you’d want one though, they give the best AR and DR values of every unit.

Archer

Archers, despite people’s modern day opinions, were not renowned for their accuracy. What they were renowned for was being devastating in large numbers, and for making attacking fortified locations an absolute horror show.  They do however require a little more training, and a bit more upkeep as they have to expend their arrows in most cases to use their bows.

AR .5 / DR 4

Upkeep 3gp/mo

They cost a little more then our Light Infantry, but defend locations a lot better. Having an entire army of archers might make it hard for your kingdom to be assailed, but well, it’ll make it harder to expand outward unless you have enough of them.

Horse Archer

Ostensibly a specialty unit. The horse archer is currently only available to the kingdom of Kn’saara. As such it’s a good jumping off point for us to examine what future research-unlock troops might look like.

AR 1 / DR 4

6gp/mo upkeep.

Somewhat superior to the basic archer. A little pricier on upkeep. As stated though, they will have superior movement. So it’s not a massive upgrade, but..

Ok, that should be good as a jumping off point. We'll finalize recruiting new troops later, but the upkeep values should let me figure out some stuff about strongholds. 

Campaigns I have run

I sadly can’t remember all of the specific details of campaigns I’ve run in my home brew campaign setting. What I do remember is that they began back when I was a kid, before I was in High School, and tended to be weird and all over the place.

A majority of these games have entered into what I call the Prehistory of my setting. And a lot of the ‘ancient lore’ that players these days dig up come from then. Sometimes some of the events are stuff I came up with, but frequently, its stuff a former player of mine did (admittedly sometimes ‘cleaned up’ to account for the fact I was probably about 12 or so when we did it, and therefore stuff was a bit, well, janky. I remember PCs having a staggering loss of limbs back in those days. A love of B-movies was always a guiding aspect in the world’s design though.

What I do have a better grip on, is what happened after third edition came out. Our initial experiences in college of 3e were bad, mostly because of well, a lot of bad DMs. I’ve had a staggeringly large amount of bad DMs in my experience. But, I was chosen, and so.. I started campaigns. It’d been a while since I’d formed a full campaign so my first one was well, pretty generic.

I have since added titles to these campaigns (they initially didn’t have any) because some of my players, well, started to. They also started to refer to them as ‘seasons,’ like on a television show, something I wouldn’t see for RPG stuff until Pathfinder came out.  I’m going to drop details, because I frequently like to harken back to these things for examples. I might flesh out what happened in them more later on.

“The Black Shrouds”

Season: 1.

Third Edition, Levels 1-19

Party Members:

Gelmir – Purifier Cleric of Loeda

Tar Dardragon – Rogue

Gar Venosh – Dwarven Fighter

With later additions

The Monk Who Was Transparently Based On A Cartoon Network Property

&

Nat Nott – The Sorcerer

Run a game.

Yeah. That’s always a great thing. Here’s a new system. Here are new players. What the hell do you do?

In my case, I cobbled up a quick world guide, gave details on the various countries. Made a bunch of absolutely terribly balanced feats and threw the heroes into the wind.

The first adventure had our first three players, Gelmir, Tar and Gar discover that well, no one in the party was human. This is always a big discovery for some players. The realization that torches and light sources are decidedly less valuable in D&D if you aren’t a human being. They also discovered early on that well, I don’t always use stuff straight from the book, as they had to make their way through a dungeon filled with midget zombies (lower CR for a first level party).

They rapidly discovered how efficient they were at smashing through stuff and declared it was like they were ‘Black ops’ operatives, in how quickly they dispatched their foes and declared their fellowship to be so named. They later changed it to the ‘black shroud’ since that sounded more in tone.

The black shroud mostly dealt with low level crap, made some money, killed some hellhounds and then found themselves hired by Veygo Terel, a member of a powerful magical council in a distant country. He gave them an airship, and tasked them with seeking for magical items, seemingly unimportant and goofy ones.

The ship was named, well, the McGuffin. My personal nod to the fact that the items, innocuous and goofy as they were, mostly served as a means to throw the party into a wide variety of weird situations so I as a nascent 3e DM could get a feel for the way the system worked. It wasn’t high adventure, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Evil temples, forgotten eyries, underground complexes, castles, collectors, thieves guilds, ancient monsters, dragons, forbidden places. They went all over to find these stupid little items and then bring them home.

Along the way they made friends and allies, discovered odd plots and ancient things, gained powers and made names for themselves as heroes, and build a mercantile empire for themselves that started with them selling magical blankets. Dozens of stories they still talk about (well, to nerds) arose from this.

The twist was that Mr. Terel was attempting to gather up these items because they’d been made by the mortal who became the dark lord who sundered the world, and tried to use them to bootstrap himself into that position, resulting in our heroes having to beat him around head and neck. They got to beat up their boss. They got to be great heroes.  

I closed up the campaign, since my school year was over, and headed home for the summer, already planning for the next year.

“The Compass Rose”

Season: 2

Third Edition Levels 1-18

Party Members:

Aramir – The rogue/cleric (Gelmir’s player)

The Stonelord – A mage/cleric with the stonelord PrC (The guy who played the knock off)

Tar Dardragon (Back now, as a half-celestial Halfling mage, because of shenanigans).

The Nameless Spy later The Spymaster – A bard with a focus on being a sneaky spy.

Zerrick Sturron – Paladin of Zean

And about a thousand guest stars

The guest stars were because during the first campaign I’d transitioned into being basically a guy who ran games at the shop that was our venue, so I had people hopping in quite a bit, who’d then transition out. So for parts of the campaign, we had a barbarian, a snide duelist, another mage, a guy who really hated werewolves, an elf cleric who didn’t like electricity, and a few other guys who’d show for a session or two.

The first adventure over here was something more serious, to go along with the fact that this campaign actually had more of a metaplot. The party was hired to rescue a woman from a crionian temple. So, they went forth and did that, and along the way learned quite a lot about themselves. Mostly that a party with that many multiclass people, and that much squish wasn’t quite as burly as last ‘season’s party. They started being a little more cautious. Over time, they discovered a strange jewel in one treasure hoard, and on taking it to be examined, found themselves assaulted by a gaggle of weirdoes. They were assisted by a woman who said she was from the bornan ministries (the same place the bad guy from the previous season was from) and that they’d found something called a ‘Compass Stone’ and told them about how they’d like to hire them as official agents to capture the others.

Another McGuffin plot, except not as much. The hunt for the stones was opposed by, well..

The Compass Rose, the ultimate item being able to be produced by bringing these things together was something that basically let you ask the creator of the world, for a personal favor.

A lot of people wanted it.

So aside from the cosmic hoops of having to fight through dungeons and complexes designed for the express function of keeping these stones (and the rose itself into which you inserted said stones) out of the hands of people, they had to contend against other people who wanted it.

A player in the group literally started keeping an enemies list, it had a collection of over 40 individuals, groups, deities and governments. So, it was less a ‘hunt the McGuffin’ and more a race against an enormous web of enemies, allies, frienenemies, and just plain weirdoes. Sometimes the players would show up at a dungeon to find it was already looted and someone’d stolen the gem. Surprising me, they loved this. It taught me that players loved when their decisions mattered, even the bad ones.

Ultimately, they winnowed the groups down, and had a long, drawn out slobberknocker of a fight against the group that was essentially ‘The Evil PCs.’ They made history, and I closed up shop, since, well, I graduated from college.

“The OVA”

Season: Direct to Video

Third Edition (Epic Level) Levels 21-26

Party Members:

Zerrick Sturron - Paladin

Gelmir  - Cleric

Tar Dardragon - Wizard

The Spymaster - Bard

And

2 other dudes.

I didn’t DM this one. I got occasional updates on it though.

See, some other DM decided he wanted to run an Epic Level D&D game. Unfortunately, he didn’t want to go through the trouble of doing a 1-20 campaign, nor, did this luminary wish for his players to just create epic level characters (although he later allowed it). So when he presented this, the group said to him, “Hey, we have characters available for that.”  So, three of my prior players brought their characters in, brought my campaign setting in because they supposedly liked it so much, and picked up three other players who got to make epic level characters anyway.

The entire debacle was apparently enjoyed by the players, but they enjoyed it partially because the poor DM (I never did get his name) spent the entire time like a madman trying to herd cats because he hadn’t planned for 1.) What happens in a 3e epic level campaign and 2.) The weird shit that goes on in my campaign world.

See, take Gelmir. Her goddess is, among other things, a deity who manages reincarnation. Her prestige class (made by me) granted her an ability, she could touch a dead body and prevent it from being raised as an undead, or returned to life by any means. This is because the soul got kicked down the line to its next incarnation. 

Well, the epic level handbook tells DMs that having your bad guy die is no big deal ™ and therefore, not to worry. So he had a classical BBEG, who got beat up by the party and then had his freshness sealed in by Gelmir. So the DM was left with no plot anymore, and had the rest of the campaign devolve into a sort of fight club with some of my bigger bad guys, most of whom acted wildly out of character and had them explore a new continent while ignoring my world-guide’s constraints on what countries should be like.

All in all, they liked it, but for the most part considered it to be ‘non canonical’ except for broad strokes. Sadly, that was mostly the last hurrah of the ‘college group,’ and with me no longer at college, now in a master’s program, I fell out of DMing for a bit.

“The Sewer” Season: Pilot Only

Players: I honestly can’t remember.

This one ran for a session.

A single session. The party fought lemures in a sewer. It took four and a half hours to resolve one fight, against two lemures, in a 20x20 sewer drain.

I learned that trying to run D&D in a chatroom with no map overlay was the activity of fools. However, I did introduce a guy named H’taed On to the third edition crowd (he’d shown up in some 2e stuff forever ago, on a MUSH).

“The Claw of Klein”

Third Edition

Season 4.

Raoul Denevare – Wizard

A rogue who was only there for two sessions

Yoru – Cleric

Cray – Barbarian/Sorceress

Lukri – Paladin

Dasilietiern – Drowcor Rogue

Toru – Fighter/Rogue Shadowbane Inquisitor

I play on MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucination), essentially the forerunner of the modern MMORPG, except with no graphics and much nerdier. So this time, the players arose from that source. This campaign ran for about two years.

It started off with our party being told to collect a book from a run-down house. The party came together, learning how to operate together, despite starting off as a squishy bunch of squishies (save for the paladin). Similar to the Compass rose campaign, they had some other more normal adventures, and then discovered that apparently someone was waking up the minions of ancient Great Evils ™ for fun and profit. And along the way they discovered an artifact known as The Claw of Klein, which was tied in with one of these Great Evils ™.

The party had numerous misadventures, dealing with the various groups in the world who wanted the evils to return, be stopped, be left alone, and so on, and discovered that the campaign world had a precarious place in the greater meta-planar-political narrative. They dealt with some pretty evil stuff, and were getting close to their end game, when I got booted off of the MUSH I shared with most of the players and the game kind of tumbled apart. A few of the players were upset that they didn’t get to ‘really finish the setting,’ and I was kind of upset too since I’d really enjoyed it.

It’s still in my craw as an ‘Unfinished game.’ But I had to declare how things turned out. I decided the players were far enough along that a good ending was going to happen, but kept the details vague.  

Ironically, this campaign had only a minor‘McGuffin’ element to it. It was mostly about literally fighting the enemies, knocking them down a peg, and restoring order. There were a lot of bad guys to fight though, and the party would have found themselves fighting against a resurgent Klein. Course ‘Klein’s identity was a weird thing.

Once again, after this, I was spent, and kind of just sat around for a while.

“The Resolvers”

Pathfinder levels 1 to ???

Season 5

Party Members:

Jabbar ibn Abdul Qadir (A summoner, Raoul’s player)

Vitor Drell – Paladin

Arkadel Drell – Bard

Adalia – Purifier of Loeda

Garund Veldt – Barbarian

Bae’drin Deghim – Drowcor Rogue

He Who Listens to the Earth – Monk (Toru’s player)

Gram Von Amsel – Magus, later Wizard.

Tycho and Ellard – A gunslinger and psion, dropped by their player and replaced by Arkadel above.

This one is current. Initially, I had too damn many players. Holy shit.

And then one started playing a summoner. Yeesh.

Anyway, their first adventure was breaking out of a sinking ship. They’d been unjustly imprisoned, and well, they had to find out who the guy was who broke the ship, who imprisoned them, and generally ‘what the hell is going on.’

The campaign has gone on for a ridiculous eight year span (mostly because the earlier game sessions ran longer and thus I could cram more in) and is still going strong, with the party having discovered that they’re involved in some galaxy spanning meta-planar crap involving a group of Immortals known as the Prolongers, who inflict terrible things on the world, in exchange for trying to forestall the apocalypse on the part of various divine (but not necessarily beneficent) beings.

Again, an online campaign. Bizarrely enough, started at the impetus of people from the previous game, who were apparently hurting for a campaign to run.

I’m hoping I can stick the landing this time. 

"The Elemental Panoply"

Pathfinder Levels 1 to ???

Season 5ish. Gaiden series. 

Party Members:

Zaigan the Dhampir Cleric

Druss, Fighter

Booker, Fighter/Rogue

Hagbard, Mystic Theurg

Kaya, Sorceress

Erin, Ranger

Also current. The Resolvers are run online, these folks are run in meat space. Their plot is a lot more McGuffiny and is again a return to form for me, with a powerful collection of items, various groups contending for it, and a very confusing plot of bad guys (including Bokrug from Cthulhu fame) being involved in one way or another. 

The group's composition is different and was my first real return to tabletop DMing after online DMing for a long period of time.  

Its also an entirely different experience, since the players, their outlooks, their character design, and their methods for interacting with the world are wholly different. So its been fun. 

//

Spammy post aside, I might explore some things I've learned from some of these.