Domain Rules

[Thaluikhain]

Historical kingdoms had functionally independent enclaves within them all the time. If a regular baron could stop paying scutage and flying the flag of the king, and that didn't shatter the realm, a vampire baron can do the same thing. If a brigand group can hole up in a swamp and kill any tax collectors who stick their noses in without being recognized by external political entities, so can a troll family. Historical kings and nobles had a lot of things they wanted to do and limited resources, and it was very frequently more trouble than it was worth to put down every minor rebel, especially if the lost income they represented was bullshit.

While that is true, I'd also mention the possibility of places that are officially (or semi-officially) recognized as semi-autonomous. It might be easier to leave the trolls alone, but it also might be easier for the trolls to nominally recognise the king of Zhent and not venture out of their fens.

To extend that, your vampire baron might pay taxes like the rest of them, and thus the king turns a blind eye to their monthly tribute of youths they take from the peasants. Adventurers wanting to do away with the evil would also be upsetting the status quo enjoyed by a great many people who weren't local victims.

Anyway, on skeletons. Yes, zombie labor should be as good as human labor and you don't have to pay it.

Should it, though? On the one hand, skeletons and zombies can work 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, and aren't killed by a lot of things that'd kill humans, but they cannot think for themselves. Anything requiring any skill or initiative or experience is beyond them. I'd imagine it'd be infuriating trying to get any useful work out of them beyond "pick this thing up and carry it over there" when you explicitly tell them to.

And, like you say, there are humans that can work as well as humans already, though skeletons would be useful in places that can't support large numbers of people, say really nasty deserts or arctic regions.

[Chamomile]

It is easy to imagine the limits of skeleton intelligence such that they can work a mining operation, and equally easy to imagine the limits of skeleton intelligence such that they cannot. The only question is whether or not we want skeleton miners. And in addition to being totally awesome in general, this is also an obvious domain power for the necromancer to have, so clearly we do want skeleton miners. We don't want them to be available in such numbers that the necromancer's domain is clearly superior to any non-necromancer domain, but we want them to be available at all.

[Username17]

To a first approximation, you own a province only after you've beaten the troll lair and slain the dragon. In the advent of rebellions, new monsters showing up, bandits, vampire barons declaring they aren't paying taxes anymore, and so on, the domain management game should be able to zoom in and show exactly how much income and manpower is lost while you lose control over one hex or four hexes or whatever the monsters or bandits are cutting you off from. Then you should be able to have a mini-mission where you go stab some trolls and calculate how your regional income goes up.

A small 4x7 hex domain like Corinth or Nottinghamshire certainly has enough hexes that they could have a zombie uprising or an outbreak of merry outlaws that cut off a number of hexes and still have an economy that produces things. That's enough of an encouragement to go fight the zombies or robbers without crippling things or bringing the game to a halt if you need to do something else for a bit.

On the skeletons thing: if you have an ability that affects the domain minigame, the domain minigame should be noticeably affected. Raising the coverage of a single farming hex from 40% to 50% should give you about 100 people in spare manpower. Raising a hundred zombies to go cut sugar cane is barely noticeable once you zoom out from a single plantation to a hex view, and becomes virtually invisible once you have a domain of any particular size. A Necromancer Bishop or whatever needs a lot more than 100 zombies to make their necro-manpower thing be something that feels like a real ability.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

It is easy to imagine the limits of skeleton intelligence such that they can work a mining operation, and equally easy to imagine the limits of skeleton intelligence such that they cannot. The only question is whether or not we want skeleton miners. And in addition to being totally awesome in general, this is also an obvious domain power for the necromancer to have, so clearly we do want skeleton miners. We don't want them to be available in such numbers that the necromancer's domain is clearly superior to any non-necromancer domain, but we want them to be available at all.

True, but if you do that, doesn't that make your basic undead a bit smarter than a shambling horde type, which impacts the way your low level adventures work?

And, give them too much intelligence and they become people rather than mindless mooks to kill off, though I don't know where that happens.

[Chamomile]

They only need enough intelligence to do things like differentiate ore from junk stone, and put the former in a mine cart. We're talking about menial labor here, very basic instructions like "when this cart is full, push it to the end of the tunnel, unload it, then bring it back" are sufficient. I don't see how that level of intelligence would prevent them from being used as necromancer trash mooks.

[Grek]

As a very simple model, suppose that a necromancer could build a Death Gate which caused any corpses passing through it to rise from the dead and obey the necromancer who created the gate. These undead retain all of the knowledge and skills that they possessed in life, but are enslaved by the necromancer until either they die, the necromancer dies or the gate is destroyed. People, but people who it would be an unambiguous moral good to kill and who would thank you for it if they were allowed to have lungs.

[Username17]

As Cham and Grek have pointed out, moral models in which chopping the heads off of zombies is a praiseworthy or at least non-condemnable moral act are not particularly hard to come by. The larger question is whether you want domain-level necromancy to be clearly evil or not.

My personal preferences would be to allow good guy necromancers with modest industrial armies of undead and also create a space for atrocity where evil necromancers can increase the size of their industrial (or actual) army of the dead through senseless and over-the-top villainy. But if you wanted to have it be that every pile of undead large enough to show up in manpower statistics carried the [Evil] tag, I would understand.

I just personally feel that there's space for honored ancestors working the fields after mummification and such. But there's no game mechanical reason you couldn't make Court Necromancer be exclusively a council position for Team Evil.

It does bring up the broader point that there should be atrocity actions that provide real benefits (or at least real tradeoffs) that are very obviously bad. Like mass executions to regain control of a rebellious region or human sacrifice to increase crop yields or whatever. Stuff that can allow team Evil to compete even though they are doing things that the player characters would never do as they've read the rules.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

but I should still think that you'd be better off chopping Rohan into at least two and probably three or more domains.

This is your first stop on the way to crazy-town.

How do you justify having 3 ruling councils for Rohan?

I get that it is large enough to have an area they refer to as the 'West Marches' which is where the ability to extract resources from the territory becomes much more limited - in domain terms it is 'disputed territory' - the Rohirrim patrol so they don't have to lose the domain resources that matter closer to the capital, but there aren't enough resources to make truly incorporating it into the domain necessary. In any case, from a Domain Management standpoint, someone spent a 'military asset' to patrol that area so they didn't have to deal with 'bandit uprising' on any of the adjacent hexes or something, but there isn't a council for the West March separate from Edoras.

[Chamomile]

How do you justify having 3 ruling councils for Rohan?

Two of the councils are ducal demesnes subordinate to the third, royal, demesne.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Rohan is literally divided into three pieces: King's Lands, East-mark, and West-mark. Each has its own Marshal, who is in charge of that area's fighting men – which fundamentally makes them the ruler of that area, even if they don't usually do much governing.

[deaddmwalking]

How do you justify having 3 ruling councils for Rohan?

Two of the councils are ducal demesnes subordinate to the third, royal, demesne.

Yeah, I get how saying 'there are 3 domains, so there are 3 councils, deal with it' works, but I don't see how that's JUSTIFIED. When Theoden is asking the people 'who shall be regent when I ride to war', people don't respond 'Duke so-and-so' or 'that other Duke what's his name', which you would expect if the society had a federated system of rule. Instead they suggest Eowyn of his own house.

From first principles, the domain management game is going to have to recognize larger and smaller domains. If I have a domain like Rohan, and I capture Emyn Muil, is that ANOTHER domain, or does my domain increase in size?

If I divide Rohan into 3 domains, and then by conquest I lose half of one domain, is my other half still a domain? What about my opponent? Does his domain increase in size by absorbing my lands? Or does he now have 1 and a half domains?

A domain is going to be a collection of hexes; hexes are going to provide resources. You should be able to answer the question of 'if I drain the swamps on my eastern border and add 3 hexes of farmland, how does my domain resources change'. Likewise, if you have a 400 hex domain and someone plays 'foment civil war' on you, you should know what happens when you treat that domain as two separate domains of 200 hexes each.

[Username17]

When Theoden is asking the people 'who shall be regent when I ride to war', people don't respond 'Duke so-and-so' or 'that other Duke what's his name', which you would expect if the society had a federated system of rule. Instead they suggest Eowyn of his own house.

Isn't that just exactly what you'd expect if Eowyn was already a council member of the King's Lands province of Rohan? I mean, the Marshal of Eastmarch might also be a member of the King's Lands council, but it wouldn't be weird to give the nominal leadership role to someone whose position was more directly tied to the running of the King's Lands.

Tolkien had a hard on for the unitary executive, which this system would deliberately and explicitly reject, so there's going to be some tension. But modeling Rohan as three large provinces that each have their own councils seems like it fits pretty well. You can even decide how much damage a specifically traitorous councilor can do, what with the whole Wormtongue situation.

If I have a domain like Rohan, and I capture Emyn Muil, is that ANOTHER domain, or does my domain increase in size?

This is a good question. The answer has to be "either one." That is, absorbing conquered lands into an already existing province is something that has a cost (largely paid up front), while having a subordinate domain also has a cost (largely paid over time). The absorption cost can be higher the more people and hexes are involved, leading to people naturally deciding to expand counties when conquering small areas and add new counties when conquering large areas.

A domain is going to be a collection of hexes; hexes are going to provide resources. You should be able to answer the question of 'if I drain the swamps on my eastern border and add 3 hexes of farmland, how does my domain resources change'. Likewise, if you have a 400 hex domain and someone plays 'foment civil war' on you, you should know what happens when you treat that domain as two separate domains of 200 hexes each.

No disagreement there.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Forgive me if I missed this, but under this hypothetical system is it possible to have players double up on their roles? Could my Court Necromancer also be the Spymaster and send out diabolical invisible ghosts to gather information for him? This might be more desirable for smaller scale games, where one job doesn't consume all of your daily duties because you're ruling over 10,000 people instead of a million.

[jt]

My personal preference for the morality of a necromancer raising a skeletal labor force is the same as one building a golem factory. It's not necessarily evil, but everyone is still suspicious because they expect this to go all Frankenstein / Sorcerer's Apprentice at some point. Also zombies smell worse than golems.

As far as domain effects, I'd suggest something like:
As an X-level domain necromancer, you can fill Y hexes to capacity with unskilled skeletal labor. All the mining/farming/hauling are handled, and that leaves a big chunk of surplus labor to become artisans or levies. It's cool because it's an absolute effect, but it's still bounded by the amount of labor you can find in Y hexes.

---

A couple nice things about domain-level magic:
[*]It's entirely cliche that the party will spend their first several levels fighting against an evil necromancer with an army of undead. When they get to his throne room, we want him to summon skeletons to defend himself, but not fill the entire room with a summoned army. Separating the magic available on an individual scale with that on a domain scale solves this.
[*]Knowing you can put the necessary world-shaking magic in the domain level lets you not put it in the adventurer level. Your adventuring version of Animate Dead can summon one beefy zombie that doesn't bog the game down, while your world still has entire armies of zombies.
[*]Martial character concepts have a way easier time keeping up with magical ones at the domain level. Summoning a horde of skeletons is not better than having an equally large army loyal to you. Staffing a mine with tireless golems is on par with making a treaty with the formicids.

[Chamomile]

I've always liked the perspective that necromancers are basically like golemancers, except that in times of emergency the necromancer can convert living people into obedient drones. That isn't normally a smart idea because living people produce more living people on the way to becoming dead people that you can turn into obedient drones, but if there's a necromancer in yonder castle, everyone's always worried that if times get desperate enough, that necromancer will massacre the village and turn them into zombies for an immediate boost to their forces.

[Username17]

Forgive me if I missed this, but under this hypothetical system is it possible to have players double up on their roles? Could my Court Necromancer also be the Spymaster and send out diabolical invisible ghosts to gather information for him? This might be more desirable for smaller scale games, where one job doesn't consume all of your daily duties because you're ruling over 10,000 people instead of a million.

In this hypothetical system you would only have one council title. You could still take whatever domain actions you wanted with gold, koku, manpower, mana, and whatever special resources you happened to have. But you'd only get special bonuses from a single hat. So you could initiate fortification improvements if you were the Court Poet or the Beastmaster or whatever just by setting aside manpower and spending gold. But if you were the Engineer or the Castellan you'd have a title power to invoke when doing that. You could take the raise troops action if you were the Guildmaster or the Physician by spending manpower and gold, but if you happen to be Beastmaster or Marshal you have a title power to invoke when doing so.

Similarly, Prestige Classes should give you abilities that matter on that scale. No one should hit paragon and get slightly better at hitting people with knives. No one should hit epic and get 3 hit points. If you have a prestige class concept and it doesn't do anything to running duchies and wars, it's not a prestige class concept.

But just as you don't need to be the Admiral or the Dockmaster to commission a ship, so too do you not need to have any particular prestige class to own land or take basic actions.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

So rather than having hats, maybe you have a pool of 'domain abilities' that require you have a domain (or maybe not, whatever) and players select them.

The bard could take 'Engineer Powers' and the Wizard could take 'Cultural Expansion' powers. And if your domain is run by one dude, he won't have as many domain powers as a party.

This could be like a pool of feats you get in addition to the ones you normally get. Nobody sacrifices a Domain Feat for Weapon Focus, but everyone who is 9th level or higher (or whatever) gets a Domain Power at level-up.

[Username17]

So rather than having hats, maybe you have a pool of 'domain abilities' that require you have a domain (or maybe not, whatever) and players select them.

The bard could take 'Engineer Powers' and the Wizard could take 'Cultural Expansion' powers. And if your domain is run by one dude, he won't have as many domain powers as a party.

This could be like a pool of feats you get in addition to the ones you normally get. Nobody sacrifices a Domain Feat for Weapon Focus, but everyone who is 9th level or higher (or whatever) gets a Domain Power at level-up.

Why? It's legitimately cooler to be the "Dungeon Keeper" and have an eclectic set of bonuses to improve fortification, raise special troops, and break rebels than it is to have "Ability Set 43A" or whatever.

Yes, you could give all the characters boring names for their ability sets, but why would you do that? Being "Court Poet" is obviously a cooler name than "Cultural Expansion Powerset." Plus, by making these titled and themed sets you can easily have hybrid ability sets without having to get weird terminology. The Dungeon Keeper, Executioner, and Inquisitor all have an ability to get extra effect from the "Quash Rebellion" action, but the rest of the Dungeon Keeper's abilities are military and the rest of the Inquisitor's abilities are religious.

It would be kind of the same thing to tell all the players that they can select three (or however many) domain actions to get a title bonus on, but that wouldn't be as cool as writing up fifty hats to wear. Because when you're writing up fifty hats, some of them can have specials that aren't just static bonuses but are instead weird replacement effects or incomparable bonuses. The beastmaster isn't just that you get more when you raise troops, it's that you can get special cavalry at a more advantageous rate when you raise troops. The necromancer isn't just that you get more magic troops, it's that you get more undead troops when you raise magic troops.

Making things generic isn't always making things better. Sometimes flavored choices are better choices.

-Username17

[jt]

My initial writeup of domain classes was much more shorter than Frank's, due to being templated.

[*]Monarch/Steward: Nominally in charge, designated person who maintains spreadsheets. Controls the domain's levies and regular armies. Does things like investing in infrastructure, sending settlers to regions. Has roleplaying hooks dealing with other monarchs. Has quest hooks generated by coveting a neighbor's hex. (The only one of these that's not templated)
[*]Emissary: In charge of dealing with an important ally, sub-population, or enclave. Manages to get them to send elite troops to aid in battles. Secures domain-level boons from trade and shared knowledge. Has roleplaying hooks dealing with their ally's customs. Has quest hooks generated by requests from their ally. (Templated by who they're talking to: Elves/Dwarves/Centaurs/the trees/whatever)
[*]Minionmancer: Somehow creates an army of minions. Uses said army as an army. Supplies a bunch of supernatural labor. Has roleplaying hooks dealing with society's unease about their methods. Has quest hooks generated when this inevitably goes all Sorcerer's Apprentice. (Templated by minions: Golems/Zombies/Djinn/Demons/etc)
[*]Sage: Learns spells with domain-level impact. Directly contributes to mass combat by casting spells that are just that big. Magically benefits domain management. Has roleplaying opportunities about being inscrutable. Has quest hooks generated by needing to go grab rare ingredients or books or whatever. (Templated by kinds of spells: giant versions of Fireball, Entangle, Cure Wounds, Summon Monster, etc)
[*]Adventuring Company Leader: Mentors a group of mostly mono-classed people who go out into the world on adventures of their own. Gets to drag them into mass combats. Directs them for the good of the realm. Roleplaying hooks should be obvious. Quest hooks when their company finds something they can't handle. (Templated by the company's class: Amusingly the structure behind a thieves' guild that sends rogues out to steal things isn't very different from a holy order that sends paladins out questing.)

But that templating is mostly for organization. Some versions of a theme will be fairly similar: the Emissary To The Dwarves gets them to lend elite heavy infantry and trade a whole bunch of quality steel into the kingdom, the Emissary to The Elves gets them to lend elite horse-archers and trade a bunch of artisinal food products into the kingdom. But the Emissary To The Trees is a person who talks to trees until they decide to uproot themselves and whomp invaders, and suddenly every fruit tree in the kingdom is weirdly productive. And some would intentionally blur the lines: a Sage is usually somebody holed up in a tower working on the spells that make people fall down, but they could easily spend that time talking to grass, or cast a mass summoning spell that makes their mass combats look more like a minionmancer's. You'd almost certainly write all of these as separate classes, and maybe show the template versions in the GM's guide.

[deaddmwalking]

@Frank

You misunderstand me. I am not objecting to cool thematic powers with evocative names. Following your design criteria, you are going to consider what a counsel looks like if there are 4 players, 2 players, or 6 players. You're going to make sure that necessary domain actions are attainable by larger or smaller groups.

Some groups will have a Court Necromancer but not a Court Wizard, some will have both (but not a scout Jester or a Poet Prince).

[Username17]

@Frank

You misunderstand me. I am not objecting to cool thematic powers with evocative names. Following your design criteria, you are going to consider what a counsel looks like if there are 4 players, 2 players, or 6 players. You're going to make sure that necessary domain actions are attainable by larger or smaller groups.

Some groups will have a Court Necromancer but not a Court Wizard, some will have both (but not a scout Jester or a Poet Prince).

The point is that you don't need any particular position to do basic actions. All of the council bonuses are bonuses. So you don't need an Admiral to make ships, you don't need a General to raise an army, you don't need an Engineer to build a castle, you don't need a Poet to produce propaganda, you don't need a Minister of Agriculture to irrigate farmlands, you don't need a High Priest to make offerings to the gods, you don't need a Guildmaster to invest in urban development levels, you don't need a Sheriff to quash rebellions, you don't need a Keeper of the Aerie to recruit flying monsters, you don't need a Court Alchemist to trade gold for mana crystals or vice versa, and so on and on and on.

A party with less players has less player character council positions and thus there will be less actions they could take with a bonus. A domain with every council position being overlapping and similar has less wide of a range of things it can do with bonuses, but they can still do all the basic things because they don't need specific hats to do any of the basic actions.

This is the core advantage of conceiving of the council positions as non-essential bonuses rather than dividing up a fixed set of powers between positions. If you needed a Culture position to take Culture actions, then any party too small to have a Culture position just couldn't take Culture actions at all. But since all the Culture actions are available regardless of whether you have a Poet or Historian or not, you can have a small party or an Ogre Kingdom where all the council positions are Marshal, General, Executioner, and Champion. They can still do urban and agricultural development, it's just that none of the councilors have a bonus to doing it.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Do these rules also support "random encounters" in enemy domains? Like this hex will have a X chance of Y

[Username17]

Do these rules also support "random encounters" in enemy domains? Like this hex will have a X chance of Y

An important part of any domain game is creating a domain out of a pile of hexes. That is, you should be able to conquer some Orcish villages and take over some actual wilderness and sparsely populated plains and carve out a domain from uncontrolled borderlands hexes.

As such, it should be something that can grow organically out of a hex crawl, which also means that there should be a random hex crawl creator appended to it.

-Username17

[Username17]

•Martial character concepts have a way easier time keeping up with magical ones at the domain level. Summoning a horde of skeletons is not better than having an equally large army loyal to you. Staffing a mine with tireless golems is on par with making a treaty with the formicids.

From the standpoint of game balance, this is precisely why 'high level' should be primarily concerned with challenges which are socially large and involve large areas and populations. Magically creating food isn't better than being able to organize on-time harvesting or reducing food spoilage through superior logistics when you're talking about months and cities rather than minutes and small groups of people in the wilderness. At a larger scale, most of the spell effects that D&D players get ranty about aren't even a big deal and you could easily imagine a mundane ability being as-good or better just by propagating across large areas or groups via leadership or organization. Force multipliers can easily be bigger than individual force additions once the underlying forces are large - meaning that the ability to create new forces 'by magic' ceases to be particularly difficult to balance.

The Realm Magic of Birthright is pretty much all stuff that you could imagine being refluffed as non-magical economic, military, or political acts. There's no conceptual reason why a Guildmaster or General couldn't do actions of comparable cost and import. And that's with the Realm Magic being almost universally much bigger in absolute terms than what AD&D Magic Users can manage with normal spell slots. The reference frame inherently makes 'magic' actions and 'mundane' actions operate on an acceptable scale with respect to each other.

Even specific actions like summoning demons do not have to be the exclusive province of wizards. The fact that there is time and mana gems and gold and manpower and stuff means that people can just hire demonic mercenaries without violating their non-magical idiom.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means.