Welcome to #Lore24!

We're currently 2 weeks out from the end of 2023, so it's high time to start talking up a writing challenge for 2024. You've been working on your #Dungeon23 or #City23 project (here's a look at Fellport, my project), but what about the world that lives outside the dungeon or city?

That's where #Lore24 comes in. Entries can cover specific items, weird people, odd holidays, organized groups, why a sect of monks are violently self-flagellant, curious terrain, unique plants, the origin story of your world, building materials, a sunken ship, spicy rumors overheard on the street, or whatever strikes your fancy.

The point? Make stuff. Every day if you can. Fill your world, one piece at a time.

[Classics Return] Birthright Domains in 4e.

Submitted as part of the Classics Return Blog Festival hosted by Daily Encounter.

What's my favorite classic D&D setting? Birthright. I love the backstory and I love the rulership mechanics.

Most PCs have the blood of gods in their veins, which gives them powers beyond the rest of humanity. This extra power boost worked out better than AD&D psionics, so I think the designers of Birthright learned a sense of balance.

In Birthright, if your PCs worked hard and got lucky, they could eventually control various holdings or even rule countries. To support this style of play, Birthright introduced Provinces (a piece of the countryside roughly equivalent to a county, usually 30-50 miles across) and the Domain Turn, which occurred every three months where leaders could grow their population, build a city, develop their holdings, trade, spy on rivals, or go to war.

This is the start of a system for inserting Provinces and Domains into D&D 4e. I won't get into taxation and gold bars and regency points, nor how Magical Holdings and Province Level limit each other. I will explore a framework for describing the area the PCs inhabit and how it might interact with neighboring provinces.

Provinces and Power Sources
Provinces in Birthright have an overall Province Rating and various types of Holding Levels. In thinking about how to describe those numbers in 4e, it seemed like Power Sources would provide a usable structure.

Since there are six power sources and six ability scores, the analogy maker in my head mashed together this table:

Power Source	Birthright Equivalent	4e Ability	Useful For
Martial	Law Holdings, Fortifications, Armies (Temp Score)	Strength	Defenses, Army/Town Guard Effectiveness
Primal	Province Level Limit, Province Terrain	Constitution	Natural Resources, Food Production, Citizen Health
Shadow	Guild Holdings, Roads, Trade Routes	Dexterity	Trade Strength, Black Market Availability, Spycraft
Arcane	Magical Holdings, Ley Lines	Intelligence	Technology Level, Spell Availability, Magical Effectiveness
Divine	Temple Holdings	Wisdom	Church Organization, Citizen Welfare, Religious Strength
Psionic	Province Level, Courts	Charisma	Propaganda, Entertainment Effectiveness, Citizen Happiness, Loyalty

With this table you can describe provinces using the six power sources, or as characters with the six basic abilities. I'll focus on power sources for the remainder of this article, since characteristics only make sense if the province somehow tries to act. This table was built using D&D 4e concepts, but this idea can be used in any system.

About the Analogies
Each power source for a particular province has a score from 0-10, ranging from no presence at all to the premier center of power for that source. The following table gives a rough idea of what each score means.

Power Source	Score 0-2	Score 3-5	Score 6-8	Score 9-10
Martial	Outpost	Small Fort	Castle	Citadel
Primal	Barren	Natural Abundance or Basic Farming	Developed Farmland	Magically Enhanced Farms
Shadow	Local Peddlers	Thriving Market	Urban Hub	Merchant's Paradise
Arcane	Hermit Wizard	Small Guild	Large Guild	Magical Academy
Divine	Shrine	Temple	Cathedral	Holy Site
Psionic	Frontier Village	Established Town	Powerful City	Metropolis

These scores are guidelines meant to fuel your imagination, not hard-and-fast rules. A high Primal score with zeros in every other category could mean an Eden of endless resources, for example.

Example Province: Bardmoor
Let's say your PCs are travelling across a swamp that you haven't developed yet. You want to quickly generate a thumbnail of the area which you know doesn't have a huge population, so you could assign numbers or randomly roll 1d6-1 for each Power Source. For larger provinces, you could roll 1d10 or 1d8+2. Let's say you get the following scores for Bardmoor:

Power Source	Score	Notes
Martial	5	Strong garrison. Bardmoor Castle sits in the middle of the swamp.
Primal	3	Good hunting, not much farming. Gator steaks a specialty.
Shadow	5	Well-developed trade hub. Riches from trading with Lizardfolk?
Arcane	2	Either a small cabal of wizards, or one strong/famous one in the area.
Divine	0	No established divine presence. Possibly anti-religious?
Psionic	1	Minimal government presence. Very few commoners - mostly military and traders.

Bardmoor Castle, center of trade.

From these results, we can paint an interesting picture of what Bardmoor looks like when the PCs arrive. Along the well-constructed wide road they'll see merchant caravans and numerous cavalry patrols. Everyone cautions the PCs not to leave the road, as there's nothing out there but endless swamp. Roadside inns will look like mini-fortresses: well-stocked with game and able to withstand anything short of an army. Inns and villages can accommodate merchant caravans easily, but they conspicuously lack any center of worship bigger than the odd shrine or two. The leader of Bardmoor Castle is a wizard of some repute. He makes a point to welcome fellow arcane researchers, but does little to govern the few workers in his province. Bardmoor boasts several bustling trade routes. Are these merchants passing through or is there something worth trading for in the swamp? Maybe the last tribe of Lizardfolk in the swamp have bought their freedom by mining a cache of emeralds.

You can get a sense of Bardmoor's typical classes based directly on the power source score. If we bend the rules and move Rogues from Martial to Shadow, we'll see mostly soldiers, mercenaries, and traders of varying honesty. Scouts and Druids are fairly common, but people would talk about the rare Clerics or Paladins passing through their town.

Changing the Scores
If the PCs or other leaders in a province start making changes, then the scores will change. Changing a score will take money and time. If there's a sudden push to build defenses, the PCs will see construction everywhere for the next few months as walls are built and towers fortified in every town in the province. The new Wizards' Guildhall is sure to raise the Arcane score of a province, but the money to pay for construction needs to come from somewhere.

Similarly, if a disease is ravaging a province or a natural disaster occurs, then scores may drop. Losing a war may drop a province's Martial score. That earthquake may have destroyed a temple and killed several priests, lowering the Divine score. If a leader acts like an idiot and alienates his people, then the Psionic score will drop to reflect the new lower opinion of the province in general.

Provinces in Conflict
When one province decides to invade another, or start a trade embargo, or hold a competition of festivals to curry favor with the High Priest of Bahamut, you can use this system to compare Power Source scores and determine who would win. The higher score has the advantage in most cases. If the scores are far apart, then the side with the lesser score may not even put up much of a fight.

A Martial 6 province in action.

For instance, a province with Martial 6 marches against a neighboring wilderness province with Martial 1. The wilderness province may be able to inflict some losses through a guerrilla campaign (especially with a high Primal score), but they'd be crushed in a fair fight. Similarly, a province with Shadow 2 wouldn't have much luck enforcing a trade embargo against a Shadow 8 province. Provinces with higher Divine or Arcane scores would be able to field more assets to help with conflicts in those areas, either humanoid or supernatural.

Feel free to use the Amber Diceless idea of changing the fight to a more advantageous arena. If a province is attacked with an army (Martial), stage an economic coup by ruining their trade goods (Shadow), or start a guerrilla war across the countryside (Primal), or call in favors with allies to counterattack on a different front (Psionic). There's more than one way to win a war, especially if you control food production in a province.

But Wait, There's More!
As I said, this is the start of a system that only covers how to describe provinces. I may develop this idea more as time permits. I've got a rough idea for handling an economic system in slightly more detail than just numbers, and there's plenty of room for development in having provinces act, both in conflict and in cooperation with each other.

I hope you can use this idea to think of your campaign world on a slightly larger scale. If you use this idea, I'd love to hear about it, either through the comments below or directly through Google+ or Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

[May of the Dead] Deadweed

This is my entry in the May of the Dead Blog Carnival. True to form, it's also a crossover piece that gives a taste of the fantasy setting we're developing over at The Gamer Assembly. How can you possibly go wrong with undead symbiotic plants?

Deadweed

(Note: I have copied the relevant passages from a letter read in a recent Cabinet meeting. Headings have been added for my own benefit. -Tobias)

Greetings and long life to Speaker Tobias and the rest of The Cabinet of the Confederacy of the Silver Charter. I trust this letter finds you in fair disposition.

Per your request, I have assembled a team of Corps researchers to study the remains of the unknown attackers recovered from the trade cog Fair Winds. We have transferred the bodies to a mountaintop facility to better utilize what magical talents we have at our disposal. The remainder of this missive summarizes our findings, though we eagerly await your summons to discuss the situation in more depth at The Cabinet's convenience.

An Undead Plant
The nature of the threat has been misrepresented. These attackers are not a new form of waterborne plant creature, at least not entirely. They look like animated humanoid bodies made of black seaweed, but we discovered two organisms in a symbiotic relationship when we started our examination: a sea devil wrapped in an almost-impenetrable casing of a strange seaweed.

So this is not an ocean version
of a Shambling Mound.
(Image from Forgotten Realms Wiki.)

We found two things of note when separating the plant from its aquatic humanoid host. First, the sea devil displayed signs of decay prior to the damage caused by the seaweed's attachment. Since these creatures were encountered far out to sea, they were too far from a controlling lich to keep them animated, especially given the magic suppression effect of the open ocean. Some of our team concluded that these are the more powerful, ritually-created Draug Zombies that can operate far from their animators. This worries us since the components for the Draug ritual cost far more than all but the richest privately-operating Necromancer can afford, especially given the overwhelming numbers reported in later attacks. If these are Draug Zombies, then there must be a well-funded nation bankrolling these attacks.

Second, the seaweed moved on its own even though we could detect no life. It seemed to seek out sources of necrotic energy, as it attached itself to a skeleton we had animated purely for experimental purposes. Immediately after the seaweed covered the skeleton, the combined creature broke free from our control and attacked us in an attempt to escape the room. We defeated the suddenly well-armored skeleton, but the seaweed appeared unharmed as it reached out for its next undead host.

Other Experiments Performed
Cyril, whose sense of humor has obviously been affected by his time spent in the experimental chambers deep under Hallowdeep, took to calling the black seaweed "Deadweed". A more proper name will be assigned to this newly-discovered organism at a later date, but for now the common name of Deadweed will suffice.

Is this a variant of a
Yellow Musk Creeper?
(Image seen at Giant
in the Playground)

From our experiments, we found that Deadweed will only bond with an undead creature. It feeds off the necrotic energy that animates its host but provides many benefits. Deadweed seems to exerts its own will, which some of our team thinks would allow control to extend far from an undead creature's creator, much like a Draug Zombie. We have no way to definitively prove which is correct, and the debate still rages at the time of this writing, so I present you with both ideas. Neither idea brings anyone much comfort.

I have sailed the Elven Sealanes in my youth, attaining the rank of Captain, and I have bent magic to my will after retiring to the land to study. Never before have I seen an intelligent necrotic plant like Deadweed. If an intelligence has created Deadweed to extend the reach of an undead army, then we must find and eliminate this threat at our earliest opportunity. Deadweed subverts the natural order of things and will strike against every living thing at will until we no longer have the strength to fight back.

I now believe Ana-Lesh sent me her warning dream about this situation. I beseech you to treat this new threat with the utmost seriousness and quickly organize as many Corps teams as possible to find its origin before we allow this blight to spread any further. I am no longer a young elf, but I gladly volunteer to aid in this endeavor.

Yours in service to the Corps,
- Capt. Oni-Talash, Research Team Leader

Game Notes for D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder
When bonded with an unintelligent undead creature, Deadweed provides increased defenses (+2 to AC and saves, plus DR 5/piercing) and resistance to fire (fire resist 10) by feeding on the negative energy animating the undead creature (-10% hit points). As an intelligent undead plant, Deadweed controls the undead creature, allowing its creator to give verbal commands (obeyed 75% of the time) while uncontrolled. This also makes the undead creature harder for anyone else to control, granting a +4 bonus on Will saves against Control Undead and similar effects. In D&D 3.5, this effect also gives a +4 level bonus against turn attempts. In Pathfinder, this effect grants a +4 bonus to Will saves against Channeled Energy and no damage on a successful save.

Deadweed can inflate or deflate internal air sacs to move itself and its host creature vertically in the water and maintain any desired depth. Patches of Deadweed can be found floating in salt water, attracted by the residual necrotic energies given off by dead creatures at a shipwreck or battle site. A large patch can attach to a freshly-dead corpse and animate it as a free-willed zombie in 10 minutes. Any Deadweed-bonded undead creature that kills a creature smaller than itself will break off a piece of the Deadweed and animate the corpse as a free-willed zombie in two rounds.

Check out the other entries in the May of the Dead Blog Carnival!