The Domain Game Take Two

Plans for a “face-to-face” second round of the Domain Game are rolling right along. The official count of players opting in is now at ten: two “lord” players and eight “casual” players. (Space for casual players is still open.)

The campaign will come back to the extra-planar wilds of Nowhere, this time centered around a foothold colony that has been clinging on to a section of the southern continent for almost a decade.

While it's a decidedly rough-and-tumble frontier society compared to Elsewhere, a trade town has developed near the obelisk gate and rough trappings of civilized society—and resulting intrigue—are starting to bloom. Players will be navigating through less of the Jamestown-like experience of the Domain Game 's first phase and more of a take-off period.

The Three E's

Although there are still a lot of angles to be developed, I am envisioning the campaign as a “deep sandbox” with a meta-theme for player motivation that boils down to: Exile, Exploration, and Expansion.

All of the PCs, indeed all the denizens of the Lands Beyond, have been exiled from Elsewhere. The players are part of the last recent wave of exiles pushed through the gates and have been effectively abandoned to their own devices. The lords will take the bittersweet reigns of their new manor-holds and the other player-notables jockey for the limited positions of power and influence in the fluid borderlands society.

While heavily-sanctioned trade continues back and forth to the motherland, the few traders and officials that make it through the gate are forbidden from sharing news from back home.

Hemmed in by the wilds and mysterious bordering sentient races ranging from the indifferent to the hostile, the hold has remained stable and self-contained--until now. The last wave of newcomers has pushed that containment to a tipping point; pressure for land, ambition, and the sheer boredom of frontier life are pushing the colony to look outward. "Grow or die" is the watchword of the day.

How Gameplay Will Work

The lion share of the play action will be in the monthly session. True to the campaign/off season conception of Borderlands each campaign season will take place over 1-3 sessions. The off-season in which most administrative, training, and other non-adventuring activities will be covered in brief emails between.

After a campaign season and off season is completed the calendar will be advanced from 1-3 years. Thus it's conceivable that players, like in Pendragon, may end up playing descendants of their original characters if we go a real-time year or more.

OD&D vs. Stormbringer

I left the decision open to incoming players and low and behold mirroring the two-party system is some good old fashioned gridlock with votes even divided between two systems.

It beckons...

Personally I lean toward the fresh start of Stormbringer—with a possible deal-breaking qualification. That being the singular fact that Borderlands as written and conceived is heavy invested in core D&D concepts: experience points and treasure as key motivators and the power arc of low/middle/high-level play (all of which map back into the premises above to boot).

Many portions could float autonomously and be adapted pretty readily, but there is a big stumbling block in that Stormbringer barely even has a mechanic for character improvement, and what it does have is the kind of bean-counting system (limited improvement when skill and attributes are checked) that I dislike.

Long and short is that I would have to hothouse an “emulator”, experience/improvement rules that approximate the carrots of D&D and the campaign's themes. Not an insurmountable task, but something I haven't wrapped my brain around completely.  

There and Back Again with the Domain Game

Maya Angelou once said that achievement was its own anti-climax. Hitting that last final control-S and closing out that nagging master document that has been sitting open on my desktop for more than half a year makes me feel a lot more out-to-sea than it does triumphant.

Yes, there's a lot still to do on the backend of the Hill Cantons: Borderlands project--editing, editing and more editing, art direction, layout, and promotion—but the longest truck haul is over. I should feel like breaking out the bubbly, instead I keep hearing the call of a little red pitchforked scamp on my shoulder whispering, “keep trucking, Chris.”

I am restless by nature and this entire project was built on exploration of a little-traveled area—domain-level play. The play of the Domain Game itself--supercharged with the ramped-up imaginations of the 20 players that touched it--generated the contours of the Borderlands, much more than the refining and revising playtesting of the last few months (valuable as it was).

Plain and simple, now that I have gotten to the edge of the map I want to go on to the next edge.

To be sure there's a lot of off-road play to still be had with this stuff, I kept dumping sub-sections like ballast to get the whole project done on a reasonably timely basis. The cutting room floor has a number of things I still would like to see hothouse and there were paths opened in the first round of playing never even explored.

I am especially interested in getting a holistic thing going—putting the Middle Game/Pendragon D&D whirly bits together with the domain-ruling and mixing it with some ideas I have about deepening sandbox campaigning.

Now here's the open invitation to come sail off with Mad Captain Kutalik again. Based on past experience I am going to start on the modest and low-key end see what builds from there.

The nitty gritty:

Monthly “face-to-face” game. The main play arena will be a monthly video-conferenced game run on G+ with a rotating cast of four-six at a time.

Two levels of involvement. At the higher commitment end I am looking for one or two (maybe three if there is interest) players who will be the “primary cast”. These players will need to be able to make most if not all the monthly games and will play high-level “lord” characters. They will be the “deciders” around a limited range of domain rule and there may be some limited email exchanges about inter-session housekeeping with me between sessions.

The second level is for more casual players and here I am taking a more-than-merrier approach number-wise and are invited to play as much or as little as they like. Players here will make a mid-level character that will be either inactive or run as an NPC at the session proper.

Both levels will play together in the monthly sessions.

Co-Creation. We are going to start with a relatively blank slate type carved-out-of-the-wilds domain—though one that has been able to sink enough roots to harbor some intrigue. One thing I learned that if you let some of you maniacs loose with creating the details you come up with some jaw-droppingly fun and interesting details, so this we will repeat (albeit on a more collaborative, lesser scale).

Rules. Here I leave it up to the will of the readers—at least as bounded by my two-party duopoly.

Blue Party: The stolid old warhorse choice. OD&D plus Greyhawk possibly with some choice bits from Adventurer Conqueror King.

Red Party: The odd-ball party of “change”. Stormbringer, first edition with a raft of house rules naturally.

Both parties will of course make use of the Borderlands existing and cutting room floor sections.

There is of course a lot more to be said. If you are interested or have questions drop a comment here or email me at kutalik at the gmail dot com.  

Moving on Up: Social Advancement in the Borderlands

It's been a while since I've peeled back the veil on what's happening with the Hill Cantons: Borderlands sourcebook, in the main because I have (finally) learned my lesson about keeping my trap shut and my fingers flying.

A ton of work has been going on nonetheless. A merry band of beta-testers has been kicking the Seven Hells out of my poor, overworked draft in the playtest arena and the draft is finally settling into fighting shape as the necessary rewrites, clarifications, and elaborations follow in the wake.

One area that has been majorly revamped then revamped again is Chapter 8, the chapter that handles how player characters rise through the ranks of institutions in their home campaign.

Why so much revision? Simple: they hated it.

Not the idea, to a man (and woman), they loved that. They liked the general concept of providing mechanisms and guidelines to give players “entry-level positions” to the supposed endgame at low and mid-levels. They even liked a number of the core concepts about how to implement them.

But they hated my execution—oh, the vanity of our most beloved half-baked notions—which mostly was a series of large-scale mini-game much like the ones found in those classic old warhorses of this kind of game: En Garde, Heroes, and Flashing Blades. In a nutshell each particular institution had a high level of detail and unique mechanics for it's own peculiar advancements, perks, obligations, etc.

Players objections basically boiled down to a. it was too chart-heavy and distracted too much from the traditional core mechanics and play areas of classic D&D; b. that it defined too much of the detail for how institutions worked in people's campaigns (ok this was more mine, an old pet peeve, but it seemed close to some of their own objections) ; and c. most damningly that it felt too much like work and life in the real world. Egads.

So I swung to a different pole and with great, shuddering reluctance cut the lion share of all those many pages down in a sub-system that:

• provides a more simple and universal system tied closer to traditional D&D concepts.
• instead of mandating and pre-shaping institutions for GMs, it provides 12 sample templates for them to riff off (one such is at the end of this post). Guidelines, suggestions, and a campaign question check list are provided in the rest of the chapter's text to help their templates to their own unique needs.
• drops much of the stick in favor of the carrot by removing the rather onerous system of PC obligations (off-season service time, tithes, etc). Thanks to Tavis in particular for pushing me to let this go.

Backstory finished, here is the draft product (with some explanatory paragraphs and examples stripped out, ask away if it is unclear). As always I am an eager beaver for thoughts, feedback, constructive criticism.

Would you use such a system? What would you change or add?

Note while a beta-test draft the following text is copy protected. Any misuse of said text will be promptly followed by the parachuting of a crack team of ninja-suited, wavy-sword-wielding lawyers into your home domicile.

[Excerpt from Chapter 8: Rising Through the Ranks]

Rank and Title
Each institution's hierarchy is divided into progressively influential ranks.

On the surface, ranks are much like the old stand-by of character level—each rank conveys a title, some of which are similar to matching level titles. They are however a power-rating system independent, though influenced by, a character's level.

Unlike levels, characters are not limited to starting at the first rank in a hierarchy and working their way up sequentially—they may attempt to enter an institution's ranks at any point. Note that if the Charisma variant rules [a cleaned up version of this here]are being used that fourth level can automatically enter certain ranks as shown below.

Promotion

Each rank has a target number--which varies by the type of the institution--that a player must roll over in order to advance. Players can try twice a year, but may only advance once in that year.

The number of dice used is determined by class level and modified by Charisma, inducements, prior-held ranks, and success in actual, in-game sessions.

Levels 1-3	1d6
Levels 4-7	2d6
Levels 8-11	3d6
Levels 12-15	4d6
Levels 16+	5d6

Modifiers:

Charisma

3-6	-1
7-12	0
13-15	+1
16-17	+2
18	+3

Inducements

Ranks 1-3, Per 500 gp (or equivalent magic item)	+1
Ranks 4-6, Per 1,000 gp (or equivalent magic item)	+1
Ranks 7+, Per 2,000 gp (or equivalent magic item)	+1

Prior Held Rank (must be in same institution):

Rank 1-3	+1
Rank 4-6	+2
Rank 7+	+3

In-Game Successes

Major Publicly-Recognized Success	+1
Minor Success that Benefits Institution	+1
Major Success that Benefits Institution	+2
Minor Success in Mission Assigned by Institution	+2
Major Success in Mission Assigned by Institution	+3

Perks

Rank has its privileges and characters receive progressively more as they rise.

Note on all charts that characters are entitled and obligated to the perks of all lower ranks—with the exception of political positions (character can only be head of one institution at a time).

Example Template:

The Temple of Law Clergy

Rank	Title	Target	Perks
1	Acolyte	2	Room and board
2	Adept	4	Free access to minor healing magic once a month
3	Priest	7	Head of rural parish, 50 gp income/month
4*	Vicar	9	Head of small temple, 150 gp income/month, Free access to clerical spells up to 2nd level/month
5	Curate	12	Head of medium temple, 300 gp income/month
6	Bishop	15	Head of medium temple, 300 gp income/month, Free access to clerical spells up to 4nd level/month
7	Lama	19	Head of large temple, 300 gp income/month, Free access to clerical spells up to 5th level/month
8	Patriarch	23	Stronghold, Collect Domain Taxes
9	High Priest	27	Automatic Ruler Rank of 9

* If CHA rules are being used, fourth level character with CHA 15 and over are entitled to an automatic position here. 

Let the Games Begin

A scant few miles north of the house where I spent my grade school years stood the butt-ugly, blue- white, concrete-and-steel pile called Arlington Stadium, birthplace of crappy sports-arena nachos and then home of the Rangers. (And not to be confused with its foo-foo replacement the Ballpark in Arlington).

Though it was a major league operation, there was always a decidedly minor league field to how the park was run—perhaps in keeping with the performance of the team in the 70s. Around the fifth inning the ticket-keepers near the bleachers section would just up and leave, leaving the turnstiles wide open.

Upshot was between mid-game sneak-ins and later my step-dad's season tickets, I spent an ungodly amount of time in that ballpark. I loved everything about the experience: the spandex-strutting of my heroes on the diamond; the yankee-baiting frothing of the bleacher fans; the sour smell of spilled beer; the sudden visceral feel of a foul ball or homer that I just knew was coming straight for my glove...straight for my...nah.

Not surprisingly I loved any excuse to introduce sports back into my gaming. My earliest proto-rpg experience was perhaps the crude d6 rolling games we played with baseball and football cards. I  played the gamut of sports games from those plastic figure, vibrating football field games to the clunky, over-complicated paper-and-pencil monsters.

Of course, that other great time-killer of those years, D&D, didn't escape this twin-obsession either. I used every opportunity to work in spectator sports inside a session, whether it was a hippogriff race, zombie arena, Goblinball, or what. My first miniatures rules, the incredible five-volume set that was Heritage's Knights & Magick, fueled this hunger further with its long sections detailing rules for tournaments, jousts, grand melees and the like.

I was thus pleased as the proverbial punch when the Companion set of Mentzer-flavor D&D introduced a number of mini-game-like rules for running grand tournaments in a player-owned dominion. Though we were 12-year old AD&D snobs at the time, I leapt at the chance to kit-bash all those domain-level rules into our campaign.

I loved mucking around with what we now call mini-games, all the subsystems that hung around each of these ludic events.

Of course one of the very first things we did—the line was intensely blurry between players and DM at that time--in a little barony carved out out of the Suss Forest in Greyhawk's Wild Coast was host a massive array of games literally everything in the book and more. When Oriental Adventures came along at the end of my first tenure in gaming, I would even add the bizarre-seeming such as calligraphy contests.

Nowdays I don't watch much baseball anymore, my football urges are safely channeled into my fantasy-football league (now in its ninth season, go Fightin' Mensheviks), and I play soccer instead of watching it. But every once in a while that mood strikes me.

That itch will probably be expressed in a few reports here on a Roman gladiator mini-campaign I am running solo using Red Sand Blue Sky. Stay tuned for the exploits of that wily lanista Kutalikus Cacophonus as he runs a gladiator school on the edge of civilization, Britannia. [Editor's Note: Ed Teixeira, the co-writer of RSBS, ran a session of that and the linked Charioteer at our Mini-Con this last weekend, thus the sudden, abrupt inspiration.]

Also on the cutting room floor of the Hill Cantons: Borderlands sourcebook (now thick in beta-test and rewrite) is a unfinished heap of similarly-themed work. Keeping my eyes on the appropriately-metaphoric ball, you ain't going to see them in the first effort.

But you just might see in a follow-up supplement a wide range of appropriate mini-games: jousting, tournament melees, wrestling/boxing contests, gladiator spectacles, wizard duels, bardic face-offs, and up to the massive and fantastic like the naumachia pictured all the way above--and stranger.

As always, there are no limits, no borders to what can be done...

Borderlands Draft Done, But Wait There's More...

Fortunately for my eye sockets, I have successfully resisted the urge to shove steaming red hot pokers into them since finishing A Dance With Dragons late last night.

But unfortunately, I seemed to have picked up some bad habits from George R.R. Martin over the past few weeks of reading his novel, namely the inability to stop writing. If the great secret to life is knowing when it's time to go, then the secret to writing is knowing when enough is enough.

Unless an editor manages to kick some sense into me, you can look forward to—at the least—these new sections to supplement the ones laid out in the table of contents:

Ships and Maritime Matters. A longish list (and description) of pre-Renaissance and fantastical naval vessels with accompanying rules for naval combat, weather, exploration, and ship-building.

Investments. Originally a short section under domain income, now a meatier menu of choices. Strong inspiration from the First Fantasy Campaign.

Campaign Scenarios. One thing that felt missing was a list of possible themes and ideas for set-ups for existing or new campaigns. Playtest players will see some portage of ideas over from play in Nowhere. (May brainstorm this on the blog.)

Fantasy Elements. One disappointment to me about the attempts to do domain-level play in D&D post Blackmoor is how utterly mundane the play options seem at times. I have been going back through and trying to add more touches of the weird and wonderful in several sections to “fantasy it” up a bit more. More floating cities in the sky, golden battle barges, weird/magical resources and the like.

Self-castigation aside, I think these will strengthen the overall product and thus feel like it is a good choice. And I am pleased as punch to say that I finished the existing sections of the draft manuscript this morning as expected.

Even with the additions and a week (or two) of tightening and such not, I expect to have the beta version into people's hand right on the August 15^th deadline. Yay.

But please, please stop me before I add again.  

ACKS Gaining Momentum

The Adventurer Conqueror King designers have been busy beavers these last few weeks. 

The "second-wave retro-clone" project just peaked the second fund-raising goal of $8K which means backers (now up to 155) will be getting copies of Domains of War, the mass battle rules and other goodies. The big Gen Con demo roll-out is coming this weekend, and this snazzy little “infomerical” was put out this week. 

Although there is a perverse, underdog part of me that balks a little at being part of a full-court press effort--albeit a quirky sideshow part--the more I align certain sections of the old Domain Game with ACKS in the Hill Cantons: Borderlands sourcebook the more respect I gain for the design of that system. (Barring day job demands, writing on the draft manuscript should be done by tomorrow and heading into the tightening-up stage this week before I head off to Cali.)

The “economic naturalism” of ACKS is, of course, a big winner for me, but there are little bits here and there throughout the rules that I like very much such as an inheritable reserve fund for experience points (tied to an Arnesonian spend gold for exp. option), rules for handling criminal schemes, guidelines for going from apprentice to journeyman to master in a craft guild, and more.

I am an awkward huckster even in the best of times, so I will stop short of selling you on this. Interested parties can dialogue, quibble, and otherwise put in their two cents in the open design part of ACKS evolution here and here. And if you want to see the draft rule for yourself you can also kick in $5, at the minimum, and get the draft rules as a download here.

The Playtesting Crucible

One of the original goals of the Domain Game wasn't just to design the game  in a vacuum from the bottom-up concept-wise, but to build it up through actual play.

Looking back at two of my greatest inspirations for the project, Tony Bath's Hyboria and Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, you see long-running campaigns that evolved through the twists and turns of where play was leading them. Not just adjustments or house rules, but iterations of the written rules themselves followed in the wake of what was happening on and off the table between the players and the free-form rulings of the referee.

When we started the first PbP playtest I tried to put my money where my proverbial mouth was and hold back on presenting many of the rules concepts a priori. Instead I wanted to see where play went and evolve the sub-systems out of that.

Occasionally, I would simply use whatever system I had thought I had might use perhaps with a tweak or two, the hunting and gathering rules changed very little, for instance, from what I had imagined. But more often than not I would either scrap the intended ones or shape entirely new ones that I would never have imagined being necessary: guidelines covering a nomad's band's migration or what difference between hard and soft wood would make for lumber.

It was exciting, stimulating, and just felt right. And it was a hell of a lot of work.

The resulting sourcebook, Hill Cantons: Borderlands, is way beyond that open-ended phase now, but as we get closer to print I am starting to look around for the next round of beta playtesting.

Noting that Dangerous Brian and a few others have been kicking around introducing domain play into their homes games, I would like to make the following pitches:

Beta-Test in Your Home Campaign. If you are interested in experimenting with the “plug-and-play” subsystems of the Borderlands I would love to recruit your game table to the cause of the beta-test. You don't have to use the entire system, in fact, I am interested in seeing what pieces you do adopt and how well (or not) they fit into your existing campaign.

Beta-testers ideally will be using any older pre-3^rd edition D&D set of rules or a comparable first or second wave retro-clone.

If you are interested, I will make available by mid-August both the draft of the sourcebook and a select collection of supporting material intended for future publications.

Play in A South Texas Mini-Campaign. At the end of August I am going to start up a new once-a-month campaign in the San Antonio area to play second fiddle to the ongoing Hill Cantons campaign. I am imaging that the game will feature 2-3 regular players (one entirely new to role-playing games) but allow any number of drop-ins with a playable supporting cast of NPCs.

The game will begin play at 5^th level and use both the first and second layers of the Borderlands rules. Players will essentially be playing a high-end political game close to the same setting. Events in either game may inform what happens in the other.

If you are interested in either beta-test, drop me a line at kutalik at gmail dot com.

(BTW there a number of interesting cross-conversations going on various nooks of the ether on ACKS, Borderlands, and the promise of second-wave retro-clones. One stop to check out is here on the Mule Abides.)

Borderlands: Table of Contents

I have been blathering a good deal lately about this piece or that piece that will be coming out with the Hill Cantons: Borderlands sourcebook as of late, but realized I haven't done a general overview of where the draft version was at in a good, long while.

The recent spate of writing has me feeling a little cocksure about having the draft out by my first deadline (ominously I picked the same day that the United States may become a junk-bond trader of a country). Barring that by the end of the first week. A lot of the pieces have clicked into place and I now have at least some writing in every planned section which is a fine feeling.

Keeping with the open game design process we've been running with for the past seven months, I'm slapping up the draft table of contents as a PDF download here.

Note the sub-headers and section orders are highly likely to change--and you may see an addition or two in there--but overall this bad boy is heading down to the finish line.

Feel free to ask any questions if anything looks particularly tantalizing or mystifying. 

Where the Borderlands Meet the Conqueror King

For those looking to see an expansion of domain-level play options, this may be great summer. Both Hill Cantons: Borderlands (née The Domain Game) and the Adventurer Conqueror King System  will highly likely see the light of print day—and hopefully will set off the kind of homebrewing and kitbashing around that arena we all love in the DIY corner of our hobby.

Earlier this week, I mentioned briefly that I was in talks with the ACKS design team. Although I believe that most people interested in this kind of campaign play would cherry-pick pieces of either systems and spindle, fold, mutilate them into their home games, there was still some concerns on my part that we would overly-duplicate efforts.

After all both games had a bottom-up, granular design, a layered approach to the power arc of player characters, and posited themselves as trying to make good on the “Arnesonian” promise of the very early days of this great game.

Having read the recent draft of ACKS, I can say that while we started in similar places that each project has some interesting—and divergent—answers to the same questions. In fact, I feel that in a number of areas they complement each other with different strengths and thus expand the cherry-picking options greatly.

Skipping to the punchline here, ACKS provides an open-gaming license of its own by which a product can be labeled as a “compatible product”. Borderlands will become such a beast.

What does this mean in practical terms?

It doesn't mean that Borderlands will dramatically move much in it's main goals and execution. You will still see a modular collection of sub-systems to maximize the plug-and-play aspect of the sourcebook. The three layers of domain-level play I have been talking about: the mid-level campaign play, the early name-level play of wilderness clearing; and the high-level play of kingdom-ruling will still all be there.

It will mean, though, some adaption to play to the strengths of both publications. In particular it means you will see a heavier emphasis in HCB on the first and second layers of play—and the accompanying more free-form “narrativist” play style alternative. Expect to see meatier social advancement charts/play suggestions, more options for characters 4th-11^th level, an expansion of the epic campaign season concept, more fledgling settlement-subsistence work, and more.

Because the unified economic system inside ACKS is a really inspired piece of work you will also see a little less emphasis on the third layer and a general referring back to ACKS for certain pieces. Likely there will be more little changes here and there when we pass around the completed Borderlands manuscript in a couple weeks.

Lastly, before I sign out I wanted to make it clear that I haven't budged from my personal, non-commercial goals for this project. Though there is obviously a lot of talk about “licensing compatibility” and a “product identity” for HCB, I remain committed to this being a not-for-profit venture.

I intend on having the money move through the Pulp Fantasy Society, a non-profit organization. Additionally, I will strive to keep prices down on the consumer end while making sure that “profits” cover current and future production costs.

It's all about love of the (domain) game here at the Hill Cantons. Now back to work on some fun non-related posts (like a mechant-adventurer player class inspired by a recent Hari Ragat blog post.)