2024-11-07
In volume III, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, OD&D has rules about castles (page 15). In conjunction with other rules bits from the three little brown booklets (3LBB), these rules lend themselves to flesh out a whole complex campaign setup, including political tension lines.
I’m tinkering with this top-down procedure:
Done, everything else can be handled using the generic encounter tables and procedures. The players can start anywhere on the map.
I’ve set up a couple of baronies this way on the southern shore of our campaigns main continent. Here are two of them:
A coastal fortified harbor ruled by a lawful Patriarch supported by 10 Treants, 50 crossbowmen and 50 light foot soldiers. They have two galleys (one large, one small) with 50 archers and 20 heavy foot marines in total. The barony has 2,600 inhabitants outside of the castle, spread out over 8 villages. Cashflow of this barony is 34,480 gp per year.
On an Island off the shore lives a chaotic superhero (level 8 fighting man), supported by 4 Ogres, an Evil Curate (level 6 cleric), 50 crossbowmen, 60 heavy foot. The superhero has two large galleys under his command, with 60 archers and again 40 heavy foot marines. This barony has 1,000 inhabitants in 5 villages. The cashflow is -12,860 gp. That’s right, the dude is losing money!
This already shows how and why (!) the lawful patriarch’s barony might be in imminent danger of a pirate raid from off shore. But there’s even more going on on the other islands: two neutral Wizard’s baronies, one with positive, one with negative cashflow, and furthest off the shore an Evil High Priest. His coffers are almost empty after he equipped a viking style longship with 65 archers, but he’s got a fabulous yearly cash flow of 41,760 gp. What will he do? Sure enough build a couple of more ships asap. Also that chaotic superhero (number 2 above) looks interesting … conquer or collaborate?
I feel this approach yields so much useful and relevant information, ready to use at the table, I almost wonder if I’ll ever need to prep anything else to run not only a game, but a whole campaign. Of course I’ll work out some of the lairs to be proper dungeons. After all players need gold to eventually establish their own domains. One of the major castles might have a mega-dungeon underneath. Welcome back to Blackmoor!
Low level characters could as always go for their usual dungeon adventures and just watch how the world around them unfolds, but they’ll learn about the goings on around them soon enough. Time to take up some covert mission for the one or other faction? Or gather and sell some intelligence? Found a map to a promising place far over the mountains? This world is wide open, with untamed wilderness and foreign lands. And it’s all in those three 50 year old digest size booklets.
Happy campaigning!
Please send any comments or questions to wandererbill@betola.de or @wandererbill@tabletop.social
Copyright: ~lkh • Fr 8. Nov 00:54:21 CET 2024 • License: CC BY-NC 4.0 • Hosted by: SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - https://sdf-eu.org