Part III: The Birthright Campaign
That's Angela Lansbury back when she was hot. Also, you should watch The Court Jester instead of playing Birthright.
You know what? Leaving aside the fact that you left off the supposedly co-equal “guildmasters,” those are very good questions that you should have had answers to before you started writing this book. And probably put those answers on page 1.Birthright wrote:What do kings, queens, high priests, and archmages do when an adventure comes their way? How does the DM handles a player character group that may be escorted by dozens of bodyguards and henchmen?
AncientH:
To be fair, this is an issue that even actual novelists and story writers struggle with. You just don't normally see the Council of Barons get together and go have an adventure. In fact, the only time I can think of this working is Steven Brust's Dragaera series, and even they sort of hang a lampshade on the fact that it only really works because everybody is nobility and pretty much nobody actually does anything administrative. So, like everybody has a title but the actual fief is over on the other side of the map so nobody cares. Or I guess you could make an argument for King Conan in Phoenix on the Sword - that actually provides two good examples, since Team Evil is a bunch of evil kings and a super-evil lich working to conquer Aquilonia, and then it's basically Conan "well, I've lost my kingdom and need my loyal barons and this convenient high priest of Mitra." But in neither case do the characters ever really "level up" in any real sense, even when they conquer territory.
Really, the only way this shit actually works is if the PCs have a) some common interest in working together, b) a goal to which they can all contribute, and c) some factor that requires them to do shit themselves rather than delegate it. C is the really tricky part. Conan the Barbarian is an aberration. Most thrones are not occupied by the highest-leveled Fighter/Thief/etc. in the kingdom. In fact, you cannot even play Conan effectively in a Birthright setting, since he doesn't have a Bloodline.
FrankT:
This chapter is tasking itself with the monumental undertaking of presenting a set of guidelines for how you would go about actually playing this fucking thing. And so it begins by squandering 8 of its 24 pages on rants about the various gods and demons that people of the setting worship and the minimum ability scores required to be a priest of such and such a god. I don't care that you need a 14 Constitution to be a Priest of Erik, you don't care that you need a Charisma of 12 to worship Sera. No one fucking cares about any of this shit.
I'm not saying that the regional religion isn't valid setting material. It is. The setting has people in it, they have various religions, and that's somewhat important. This material could – generously – find a place in the Ruins of Empire book. It has no place in the Rulebook. Also it's shit. Maybe it's something about the format, but this crap looks the same as the “lists of gods” in everything from the 3rd edition PHB to the Eberron setting, and I don't think I've ever managed to read through any of these. The format is deathly deathly dull and most of D&D's gods have historically been crap. I can't recall a single D&D setting that had a pantheon that was even a little bit interesting.
The closet D&D has ever had to a decent pantheon of “gods” are actually the demon lords. Which is probably why Paizo spends so much time jerking off to what the demon lord of fungus or whatever the fuck is doing today. But demon lords only get a cursory mention in the last paragraph of this eight page section and this was all a giant waste of time and space.
AncientH:
These are pretty much the default settings that appeared in all the fucking Forgotten Realms deity books and Monster Mythology and an unknowable number of Dragon Magazine articles. The guys at TSR had singled in on this format and Erik bless their stupid little heads, they were determined to keep using it religiously.
One thing I never figured out about Birthright: why there are like ten separate churches for Erik and whatnot. I mean, I can kind of see this shit in a game where the origins of gods is lost in antiquity and you've got competing pantheons and shit, but seriously, Erik should just totally tell the god-damn priests to work together. I seriously have no idea why the resident Thief God doesn't run his fucking church as basically an extension of the thieves' guild.
FrankT:
The book drops six pages of science on your ass about Realm Spells. I mean, there's some obligatory fapping about how Elves can use True Magic and shit, but the only thing anyone gives any fucks about is Realm Magic. Elven True Magic is just the regular D&D Wizard class, restricted to blooded characters or elves because Colin McComb was involved. Realm Magic is different, and you get it from tapping lands. Now, stop me if you've heard this one, but you get different kinds of mana from plains, coasts, swamps, forests, and mountains.
It was the 90s.
Mages get jack shit from Plains, and the best magic sources are in mountains and forests. So we have established that realms mages in Birthright are Red/Green.
Ramp it. Ramp it hard.
The actual spells are accounting for power. You spend your domain action for the month to cast them, you pay out a bunch of gold and regency points, and you do a thing. The thing is like, summon up a bunch of mercenary gnolls for a few months or reduce the fortification level of an enemy castle or something along those lines. Most of these are directly comparable to regular domain actions, though usually with a slightly bigger set of costs and effects. If these were refluffed and hidden in the regular domain actions you would not notice. Like, if the Priestly “bless land” spell that temporarily boosts the output of the holdings in a province were called like “organize bureaucracy” or something, you'd totally do it sometimes – but it wouldn't feel out of place or weird. The Demagogue spell is probably the best, because it's 15 RP to shift a Rebellious province to High Loyalty (or vice versa) and at fucking level five you can pay that twice to hit two provinces. But while that's clearly superior in most cases to the cheaper and less effective “agitate” action that does one loyalty level in one province at a time, it's not out of place among the other domain actions.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we are now 14 pages into this chapter and not one fucking word has been spared for how this shit is supposed to be remotely playable.
AncientH:
Notably absent: psionic enchantments 10th level spells. I don't know if the writers forgot about these or wanted to pretend they didn't exist, but I'd believe either.
The whole thing about Realm Magic is that the writers acknowledge that the D&D magic system does not actually translate well to an admin minigame. It does not, actually, translate very well to a large-scale battle either; it's the same issue Warhammer Fantasy faces with whether mages on the battlefield are too powerful or just high-cost targets that can't do shit and are likely to get shot.
We get a little more information on Sources, which basically amounts to "magic and civilization don't mix." We've already noted that the higher the level of your Province, the lower your Source level can be (unless, of course, you're an elf). Now we get some additional restrictions: the higher your source is, the fewer actions you can take in a Province. This is...problematic for anyone that was hoping for an Eberron-style industrial magic setting. Fuck, it's problematic for playing goddamn Lord of the Rings, since it basically means Saruman fucks himself.
Look, if you can't build Orthanc, you've basically failed as a system for wizards.
Not all the spells suck, but some of them are sort of the thing that's a button-press on Lords of Magic or Dominions IV. Like, the Alchemy spell lets you convert RP into GB at a 4:1 ratio (and costs 1 GB to start off with, so you need at least 8 RP to see any benefit).
Some of these spells just haven't been thought through. Like, Death Plague kills hundreds or thousands of people in multiple provinces. In DomIV you'd do that to generate corpses for your necromancy. In this game it...uh...well, you don't actually need corpses to raise dead? Seriously, Legion of the Dead lets you raise a mixed group of 200 zombies, monster zombies, skeletons, and giant skeletons, but it doesn't specify you need that many corpses.
Then you have shit like the Scry spell - how is this different from a crystal ball? Well, obviously, it costs more and does less. The writers just didn't think through crystal balls at the Realm level. DomIV handles crystal balls pretty easily, since it just assumes they cast a scry spell, and a scry spell has a nominal cost and clearly defined effect which is different from the opportunity cost for sending out a bunch of spies or shit.
Priests have their own Realm spells, which amazingly enough suck harder and there are fewer of them, but they don't have to fuck with Sources, just temple holdings. The only one you actually care about is Investiture, which is necessary to conquer a new province.
Napoleon takes a level in Cleric.
FrankT:
The Monsters and Elven Gibberish Monsters takes just four pages, and is mostly dedicated to telling us which monsters in the Monstrous Compendium we can actually use. It's a pretty fucking short list. There are 92 entries on it, but for fuck's sake this is 2nd Edition – so that list includes dolphin, wolf, and sea lion. Fucking hell.
The only useful piece of world building is that Birthright has an Upside Down called the Shadow World. The use of verbal space is not good. They talk about parallel terrain features, but they namecheck only forests and mountains. Are there shadow world parallels of castles and houses? I dunno. They also offhandedly mention that maybe some spells like Dimension Door use the Shadow World somehow and might be more dangerous in Birthright. That seems kind of important and maybe this section should have explained that a bit more. But it doesn't. Because fuck you.
That being said, the fact that Birthright has a Shadow World, as in fucking one, makes it like a million times cleaner than Greyhawk with its Astral Plane, Ethereal Plane, Ordinal Plane, Mirror World, and whatever the fuck. People who care about Birthright can have discussions about cosmology and shit that absolutely are not and could not be done about most of the other D&D settings. Simplicity is a virtue sometimes, and when it comes to alternate nightmare planes of existence, it definitely is.
But yeah, we set the “not getting to the nominal point of the chapter” counter to 18.
AncientH:
Birthright doesn't actually like the default D&D setting assumptions. Anything interesting is so rare you're never going to see one. There's literally only half a dozen dragons in the fucking setting. That's not acceptable. The game is Dungeons and Dragons. You need a dragon as a challenge for every fucking level.
What it is, Birthright is jerking off harder to Lord of the Rings than normal. The whole thing with fapping to Elves and rare dragons and strong Goblin nations isn't predicting Eberron, it's just the equivalent of all those 80s cheap fantasy trilogies that were trying to be Tolkien without getting sued.
There are a few exceptions. Sortof.
The setting faps to the awnsheghlien - that's apparently plural and singular, and should be a proper noun with capitalization but apparently isn't because fuck English - which are eeeeevil bloodlines. Like, not just characters that are scions and evil, but actual "dark power" bloodlines and monsters with bloodlines. I have no idea how these assholes work, and they give no actual rules for them; they're basically supposed to be special one-off make-up-the-stats-as-you-need villains-of-the-week. Bah, humfuck.
FrankT:
So the part of the chapter called “The Birthright Campaign” that is actually about telling you how you might actually try to set up a Birthright Campaign gives itself about five pages. There are six pages left in the chapter (and the book), but some of that is appendix. For a game as out-there as Birthright is trying to be, that is not enough space. They are attempting to create a new theory of role playing where players play characters that don't necessarily ever interact directly, and then create cooperative storytelling where different players are playing continuous characters or one-off hoodlums at different times. In short, they are trying to be the thing that Ars Magica was also trying to be. And you know what? Five pages is just sort of insulting for something that ambitious.
The vision they have is, barring some obligatory 2nd edition horseshit about how D&D is whatever your DM wants it to be, that different players are going to be rulers in different parts of the continent and that in any particular story the uninvolved players will be gifted with shitty throwaway characters. That might actually work. But it would need a lot more infrastructure that this game bluntly does not have.
AncientH:
That's one option. Other options presented include "fuck it, no PC regents, you're just playing D&D in Cerilia," "Only One PC is Regent," "All PCs are Regent, but One is High King," and "Everybody has Overlapping Domains and Is Stepping On Each Other's Dicks."
None of these are terribly good premises for a campaign, they're just sort of styles of play. How about "Okay, you're a scion but dad/mom hasn't died yet, so you're all a bunch of princes/princesses who are sent off on an important mission because you have blood powers and character levels?" Or "You're a bunch of low-level regents suffering under an evil overlord, but you get wind of an artifact in a dungeon and need fellow scions to help you get it."
Power is one of the key things here. This is really a game that benefits from having PCs start out at a power level high enough that they can handle threats NPC henches cannot. That won't work for all styles of play - I've dealt with too many PC Necromancers at this point - but if you're going to presume the PCs can do shit that others can't, then you can get into some serious chosen one/special snowflake territory, and you might as well double down on that.
The other key thing is...goals. And in a game where it's Good to Be the King/Queen, you need them. Badly. But there's not really anything to...ramp up to. You can be High King and still be level 3. You can be a hermit wizard and level 20 and still not cast any fucking Realm spells worth fucking bothering with. This game doesn't really address this. Instead, we get completely bullshit "logistics of travel" rules, where you move about 10 miles per day when you have an entourage. This is also unacceptable.
FrankT:
The lazy “aw fuck it” proposals to handling large numbers of retinue soldiers fighting larger numbers of gnolls are crap and are a waste of the small amount of space they are given.
AncientH:
He ain't wrong. The appendix has the rules for Domain Design, and that's two pages of...meh. Basically, you get a random number of points determined by your Bloodline strength and type (tainted 2d6, minor 2d8, major 2d10, great 2d12); which you then spend on province level and holdings (with discounts based on class), assets are bought with GB (which you buy with domain points, so wtf?), with a non-optional terrain cost on top of that which adds more restrictions to the whole thing. You spend that on each province, which means you either end up with a lot of provinces in which you have jack shit, or one province where you own everything...I guess?
I feel I should get more options than this. I do, in fact, want an entire GURPS book devoted to this shit. I might never use it, but it will be fun and useful and carefully thought out.
