Forking The Culture: Making "New Model Colony" Pt. 1

Having heard Jon del Arroz's plea to focus more on building the forks than bitching about the pozzed, which Brian Niemeier covered today at his blog, I'm going to do something in that vein here this week. I'm going to go about explaining how I made my homebrew Dungeons & Dragons setting, "New Model Colony". I'll be doing this through Friday. Take notes, especially if you're still thinking that tabletop RPGs are some form of storywanking bullshit.

Welcome to the New Model Colony

Premise: You came from another place to this new world. It's a one-way trip; there's no going back. All that you have is what you can carry. It's up to you now to make your way in this untamed wilderness, carve out a place for yourself, and make your fortune.

Setup: This is a setting set up using what is now known as the West Marches model. This is why the Colony is the starting location for arrivals at a new, untamed and unexplored wilderness. Players are expected to go out into the wilderness, seek out locations of interest, explore them, and bring back their findings--often in the form of loot--to the Colony. As characters reach high level, they establish their own stronghold carved out of that wilderness and pacify them into new lands for settlement, pushing back the wilderness and establishing new bases for the next wave of adventurers to do the same.

Accordingly, I have no map as such prepared. There's information on the Colony and its immediate area--about a day or two's ride by horse--put down; in game terms, the hex the Colony is in and the ones surrounding it, roughly half of which are water (coastal) and thus unlikely to be bothered with much. The map gets generated as players push out past the starting area and no sooner, following Ray Winninger's "Rules of Dungeoncraft" as I laid out here in 2016.

As I said in that 2016 post, this is a campaign made to work on an Open Table basis. A consequence of this approach is that, believe it or not, time records actually do matter and must be meticulously kept; the follow-on is that players will have multiple characters in the campaign as they'll want to play when all of their characters are tied up doing something.

The early campaign is all built around getting the Colony's economy up and running. Goods and services will be scarce accordingly, until the players succeed in doing what needs to be done to rectify that problem. The Colony needs more resources than the leadership can provide, so they need to be sought and secured; doing so will involve going into unexplored areas and dealing with whatever they find therein. Available goods and services will increase in quality and quantity as the players' efforts succeed in finding those resources, securing them, and establishing means of bringing them back to the Colony.

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is how classic Real Time Strategy games work, and it's no surprise that it's a derivative of old-school D&D (and Traveller) by way of other videogame adaptations. Having high level characters establish a stronghold equals base expansion in games like Starcraft 2. Playing the Domain Game is a great way to keep characters that otherwise get shelved active in play even if they aren't personally out in the field much anymore, and this sort of arrangement makes expansion of the campaign organic and emergent because it relies on player actions to make that happen.

Which leads to some of my campaign mechanic decisions, which I'll expand upon tomorrow.