Realm management RPGs

Hi guys, what RPGs and supplements do realm management well? Starting what will probably be a 5E campaign soon and a couple of players expressed an interest in developing these elements organically as time goes on, so I'm interested in games that excel at these mechanics for either ideas or simply playing instead of 5E.

Reign is the usual answer, but I don't like it much.

Cryptomancer has its own communal character sheet for a safehouse, which can be refluffed to "stronghold" pretty easily. That's a bit smaller scale, but better suited to actually telling stories and RPing.

Look up An Echo, Resounding, by Sine Nomine press. It's part of their Red Tide line of books for Labyrinth Lord (a clone of Moldvay/Cook Basic D&D).
It has excellent rules for running nations and other large entities, and tracking interaction between them. Using it with 5e shouldn't be too hard.

Is Labyrinth Lord as a system decent? An OGL OSR game sounds interesting, not sure my players are ready for old school fatality though.

Thanks btw.

Look up the Birthright D&D campaign setting.

Would that be available in the PDF master thread, or is it out of print?

I want to like Birthright but, well, it's kind of gamey. I really hated the way ASoIaF RPG handled realm-building too.

Labyrinth Lord is excellent, IMO. B/X is my favorite edition of D&D, and LL is a solid clone with a lot of nice material out for it. The Advanced Edition Companion lets you grab the bits you like from AD&D and bolt them onto Basic easily. Though I'm partial to doing straight basic, it's nice to have the option at hand.

I don't know where it would be in the PDF share thread, but you can get it in the OSR General's Trove. I forget if it's under Sine Nomine or Red Tide, but it's in there.

>OSR
So it's a fairly retro system?

Yeah, it's simple, with few player-facing mechanics, plenty of tactical dungeon crawling, and pretty lethal at low levels. Back in the day I knew a lot of folks started at level 3 to skip that part, but it can be fun too.
(Someone in the OSR general just described it like "Okay, I'm a guy with no measurable skills or abilities. I'm going down into a dungeon. Welcome to Jackass!")

Another OSR game to look into is Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS), which focuses heavily on realm management and the like

If you don't go with the other options, using the Pathfinder kingdom rules with 5e would be trivial.

They're not amazing, but they're decent.

I've never had a chance to try them, but Angel (Unisystem) has rules for running factions/organizations, and Mongoose Runequest has rules for both running nations and factions. Maybe someone can chime in about them.

2e Birthright lacks good mechanics.

1. The "starting domains" for PCs have no sense of balance to them whatsoever. In Anuire alone, you could choose for your PC to start off as regent of the small little "recommended" domain of Roesone... or you can start off in control of "the most powerful church in Anuire," the Western Imperial Temple of Haelyn, or the massive megacorporation that is the Heartlands Outfitters (which also has its own city-state).
Another massively overpowered "Recommended for PC use" starting domain is Danigau, in the Western Reaches of Brechtur. You start off in control of *eight* moderately-developed provinces, many Law and Source holdings, a huge amount of pre-accumulated Regency and GB, an elite army with considerable fortifications, and the inexplicable ability to raise defensive militia extremely efficiently.

2. Wizards are actually underpowered here. They are mistrusted by the populace to start with, their realm spells start off middling, and by the time said spells become strong, they are hamstrung by the fact that developing provinces reduces magical source ratings. (This can be circumvented by playing an elven domain, but elves are locked out of temples.)

3. Priests, on the other hand, are godlike for their ability to wield priestly realm spells (many of which, especially those from the supplements, are on the level of wizard realm spells) without having to deal with magical source reductions. They are also necessary for investitures.

4. Some classes are objectively superior than others at the domain management subsystem. For example, fighters collect Regency only from Law, while rangers collect Regency from Law and Guilds (and have overland map mobility benefits), and paladins collect Regency from Law and Temples. Halfling ranger/priests can collect Regency from Law, Guilds, *and* Temples (while keeping the overland map mobility benefits), and are probably the single best character type at domain management.

4, continued. Characters of the following classes gain Regency from the following holdings:

>Guid: Thief, Ranger, Bard (only half)
>Law: Warrior, Priest (only half), Thief (only half)
>Source: Wizard
>Temple: Priest, Paladin
>Province: All
>Trade Route: Thief (1 RP per GB produced)

"Warrior" includes fighters, paladins, and rangers, so fighters receive the short end of the metaphorical stick here.

Multiclassed characters count as members of all of their classes.

It costs 1 GB for a party to "relocate to any province or holding in their domain," but bards and rangers can do this for free because they "have a knack for traveling quickly and being near the action."

Priests have access to priestly realm spells, and they do not have to contend with declining Source ratings, unlike wizards.

In Birthright, only halflings can be ranger/priests, and as far as I am aware, this is the single most effective possible character type from a domain management standpoint. It also helps that halflings, as a race, have a host of inexplicable benefits, including Detect Evil, Detct Undead, Detect Magic (necromancy only), Dimension Door, and Shadow Walk.

The ideal way to game Birthright is to choose to be the teleporting halfling ranger/priest regent of the almighty domain of Danigau.

5. The game claims that a government type wherein the province-owner delegates Law holdings to others is viable (and indeed, this is the case in the Rjurik Highlands), but this actually screws over province loyalty tremendously (and makes the Rjurik Highlands ironically quite disloyal despite the delegation of Law holdings, which goes against the lore).

Not only do the rules for law holdings make the Rjurik Highlands' system of delegating Law holdings to thanes completely unviable, but Khinasi's wizard-kings are undermined by the way province levels screw over Source holdings, and the civilized domain management rules make little sense for Vosgaard's savagery and primitive "might makes right" society.

The base rules only handle Anuire and Brechtur well. Even then Brechtur is feasible only because they later introduced a relatively well-thought-out set of trade expedition rules.

Of course, we come to the issue that the base rules are poorly-written even for Anuire and Brechtur.

6. Some domains have less detail than others, which is a bad thing for a GM who has to manage a massive world. Some domains have listed treasuries, Regency accumulated, armies, and fortifications, while others go into no detail at all on such things. In fact, the writers were so lazy with some domains that they declared their holding values to be "unknown" and up to the GM to decide.
We are looking at *31* domains for Anuire alone, and that is just the southwestern peninsula of the game's main continent. That is a tremendous burden for the GM to fill in the blanks for.

7. The action economy is screwed. No matter how expansive your lands are, you still have the same allotment of actions (and scale for those actions) as you did when you were starting off. This means that your lands are bound to spiral out of control once you start expanding... unless you make *every* new land you expand into a vassal state under your control (because then they get your own set of actions). However, since vassals can be disloyal and/or passive-aggressively be unhelpful, the DM is the one to control them; this means that eventually, the DM is playing out the majority of your little empire's actions.
Alternatively, if *each* PC controls their own domain, then the action economy is stacked tremendously in their favor, because they and their vassals receive many more actions than the DM ever will.

Action economy is poorly thought-out in Birthright. In the event that, say, four player characters each have their own domains (not impossible given that regent characters are the default in Birthright), they already have four sets of actions each domain turn compared to the DM's three sets of domain actions for *the rest of the entire world*.

If the players all choose the strongest of the "Recommended for PC use" domains, they will be even more unstoppable, at least until their domains expand to the point wherein they are forced to rely on vassals for reasonable action economy.

8. The DM controls only a few other domains each turn. Every other domain is just assumed to be zero-summing itself and not accomplishing anything, but also not losing anything. In other words, the PCs' domains and their DM-controlled vassals get to steadily improve, whereas the vast majority of the rest of the world is completely stagnant for no good reason.

9. I have not studied it too in-depth, but I have not heard good things about mass battle.

I do not recommend AD&D 2e Birthright at all.

GURPS
All the details needed and other details you wouldn't even think about

GURPS

GURPS has kingdom management rules?

Does it also have faction management?

What source?

That all seems very damning

Adventurer Conqueror King and An Echo Resounding are the only half-way decent domain systems i've seen.

>GURPS has kingdom management rules?
I too would like to know this.
I don't doubt it, but haven't encountered it before.

Found this comparison of AER and ACK.
Didn't get a chance to finish reading it yet.

There's a book on group management but not anything for a country, IIRC, which is a bit funny considering all the other minor bullshit that gets books.

Anyone got a PDF floating around for these?

Another reasonably solid idea would be Hellfrost, though note that there is the "No competent npcs problem" that many of these systems have.

Last time I tried to make it fit, I recall, the Low Tech Series, Social Engineering Series and Boardroom and Curia (which I think is the one you're referring to) has most of what one would need. Throw in Mass Combat, and you could put together a game.

Which is the trouble with GURPS (and what I love about it) - all of the pieces are there, if you put them together.

Which makes some sense - There's a big difference between a game where players are all Kings from different domains, Diplomats from different domains, a King and his Lieutenants, or just the Lieutenants.

OSR Archive

They're both in the OSR General's Trove. AER is under Sine Nomine, I think? ACKS has its own folder.

+1 to ACKS and AER

>An Echo, Resounding
Keep in mind that AER is a high level abstract system and quite flexible so can easily be overlayed onto any other system such as 5E.

This is in contrast to ACKS that is very low level and far less abstract and so is tightly integrated into everything in the system. It would be difficult to remove the domain system from ACKS and port it over to 5E as it requires the fundamental world building assumptions made in ACKS. ACKS revels in its nitty gritty details.

You might want to also look at Blacky the Blackballs port of the BECMI domain system to 5e. I think he called it the Immortal Companion. It's a free download.