Domain Game: What To Do?

Part of the Domain Game series of articles. Jump to the main page.

We've explored a simple way to describe provinces in the first article in this series. Now that you have provinces, what can you do with them? And how often?

The Domain Turn
In the original AD&D Birthright rules, a domain turn lasted a season (3 months), but you could do three actions or more during  this time. For the sake of simplicity, let's say a turn in the Domain Game lasts a month of game time.

I'll stick with the D&D 4e design philosophy for now. During a domain turn, you can perform three actions: Standard, Move, and Minor. I'll call these effort descriptors. You can use slots to perform a lesser action, so you can use your Standard slot to perform a Move or Minor action if you want.

Action Types and Scope
Different actions take different levels of effort, and some can only be done every so often to prevent a revolt. To model this, actions have a refresh descriptor: Yearly, Seasonal, or At-Will.

Every action affects a single province. If you want to expend an action to affect every province or holding type you control, raise the refresh descriptor one step (At-Will to Seasonal to Yearly). I'm thinking about requiring 2 actions of the same type in a single turn instead. That may model the extra effort better, but we'll see in playtesting.

Action List
Below is a list of actions. This is not exhaustive by any means, so if you see something missing or something that strikes you as odd, please let me know in the comments. The Domain Game is very much a work in progress, so feel free to chime in.

Actions are grouped by effort descriptor. The title is followed by the type of holding needed to initiate the action (or "Any" if its' nonspecific), then the refresh descriptor. The description covers the game effect of the action plus how it might look to a PC in the province.

"Crowning the King"
by ReptileCynrik

Standard Actions

• Claim Province (Psionic/At-Will) - Lets you take charge of a province. The previous leader will probably object, so there's a dice contest that needs to happen to see what happens. The government changes, which could be caused by a coup, or someone else assuming power, or an invasion from the country next door.
• Create Holding (Any/At-Will) - Creates a holding of score zero in the province. You charter a new group to work on your behalf in a province. PCs may see an announcement or hear about job opportunities associated with the new holding.
• Inquisition (Any/At-Will) - Uses a holding to attack and destroy a different holding. You must successfully perform this action twice in a row with the exact same holdings to destroy the target. Depending on the source you use, this action can take the form of an inquisition (Divine), a series of arrests (Martial), bankruptcy (Shadow), magical attacks (Arcane), or simply the rejection of the holding's authority (Psionic).
• Invest Authority (Any/Seasonal) - Creates a lieutenant, minister, or other named official with the authority to act on the leader's behalf. You must give control of a holding to the newly-anointed lieutenant, and the lieutenant can perform Move and Minor actions from that holding without your permission. Lieutenants give your province more actions, but too many lieutenants can lead to intrigue and rebellion.
• Oath of Fealty (Psionic/Seasonal or Yearly) - This action officially turns over power so the province is ultimately working for a different leader. It takes time to adjust to the new order, from a season for a single province to as much as a year for a larger domain.
• Redistribute Resources (Primal/Seasonal) - You can plunder natural resources or pull peasants from the fields to bolster a holding in a hurry. Permanently reduce the Primal score of a province by 1 and add 1 to any other non-Primal holding in the province. Symptoms of this action include strip mining, clear cutting forests, and crops left to rot in the fields.

Move Actions

• Muster/Train Troops (Martial/At-Will) - You can create as many units of troops as you can afford, or retrain troops with upgraded weapons and equipment, if available. This action requires plenty of money. You can muster or train only as many units as your Martial holding's score.
• Trade (Shadow/At-Will) - Removes goods from the province and ships them to a different province in exchange for different goods or money. You can trade as many trade units of goods as your Shadow holding's score. Trade caravans or wagon trains will seem common when this action happens.
• Produce Goods (Shadow/At-Will) - Takes goods and transforms it to a more finished product, like manufacturing padded armor from wool, or spears from wood and iron. Requires money and raw materials. Goods may be used to improve military units. For instance, upgrading a conscript unit to a regular infantry unit may require a trade unit of leather armor, shields, and a unit of weapons that are better than pointed sticks.
• Agitate (Divine/At-Will) - The clergy have developed the skill of influencing the emotional state of the people. Use this action to change the people's loyalty for better or worse, or to get the people on board with a particular course of action. Can cause a popular uprising if used well. PCs may notice more prevalent handbills and other propaganda on the streets, and they may hear pointed messages delivered from the pious followers of the Divine holding.
• Research (Arcane/At-Will) - Spend money and effort into finding some new knowledge, either technology like the secret of making steel, or a new magic spell. I hope to keep the technology tree very player-designed rather than a rigid structure. Different technologies will have different requirements and will require a variable number of successful Research actions to discover.
• Explore Province (Any/At-Will) - This action can uncover a wilderness's raw statistics or give you a report of all holdings in a province and who controls them. PCs may notice a survey expedition or hear people asking questions about holdings, or be counted by an official census bureaucrat.
• Harvest (Primal/Seasonal) - Gathers raw materials from the province. Most of this is food, but other resources can be developed as the province grows. You may gather one trade unit of resources per point of Primal score. Food and resources will be covered later.
• Increase Holding (Any/Seasonal) - Increases both the score of a holding and the associated score of the province. PCs may see building projects and recruitment efforts involving the holding.

Minor Actions

• Decree (Any/At-Will) - This action covers anything from holding a festival to declaring war (or peace) to bestowing honors and rewards on war heroes. Government deals with so many mundane decisions, that this action is reserved for proclamations that impact people throughout the entire province.
• Mission (Any/At-Will) - Hiring adventurers to perform a specific task. Tasks include information gathering, infiltration of a holding, stealing things, removing a military unit from active duty, sabotage, assassination, 
• Military Campaign (Martial/At-Will) - Invading a neighboring province takes at least a minor action. If the leader is present on the battlefield, it may take a Move or even a Standard action to properly execute. Defending your provinces and moving troops around to fortify or garrison defenses can be done at any time without spending an action. Moving troops into hostile territory takes some effort to defend supply lines and proceed in good order.
• Domain Magic (Usually Arcane or Divine/At-Will) - Domain Spells are large rituals that change conditions in a province. Domain Spells will have their own economy to be discussed later. Alternately, ignore Domain Magic entirely for a simpler and more realistic version of the Domain Game.

As I said, this is incomplete, but I hope it gives you a sense of the context for the Domain Game.

What actions am I missing? What actions are unclear?

[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!