In Dragon Age Inquisition, one of the best parts about the game is building up your forces and restoring/expanding your castles and keeps. Throughout your adventures, you slowly gather coin, renown, new agents, materials for building and crafting, and more.

Is anyone aware of game systems centered around building/leving up:

1. Your Group/Faction

Your group starts off with only a few members, but over time, this expands to dozens and hundreds of agents. As you grow and acquire new resources, you can acquire new research tech and annex smaller groups to bolster your ranks.

2. Your Base

When you first get your base, it is usually tiny and in shambles. By investing your resources on hand, you can expand it to ten times its size and restore it to an impressive keep/starship/whatever.

I think this would be great for a game centered around an underground rebellion in a fantasy world. Maybe it's a group of men and women fighting back against an oppressive government or foreign conquerors.

Does anyone have anything in mind?

The only things that spring to mind immediately are Reign, a particular flavor of the Cortex Plus system from the Hacker's Guide, Savage Worlds Broken Earth, and...I think Fate's Burn Shift setting had these kinds of rules.

Any of those sound interesting at first glance?

Fallout 4 has a feature like this, with settlement building.

Aside from leveling up your group and your base, it would be cool to be able to construct new buildings around your base and manage an actual village/town. Players could be the founding members of the town and see to the day-to-day activities of town maintenance.

Of course, in a game centered around a rebellion, this wouldn't work so well.

---

Thank you, Nintaku. I'll be sure and check those out. Off the top of your head, do you think they would work okay with a play-by-post environment like RPOL?

In PbP, I know for sure Fate works just fine. There's a tiny bit of wonkiness in that you're allowed to spend Fate Points to buff your rolls after you learn whether or not you succeeded and by how much, but that's best handled by the GM simply giving players a given roll's difficulty from the start.

Cortex Plus usually works well, but I can't recall if this faction-scale version of the game uses the fast-paced rolling back and fourth mechanic from Smallville and Leverage, and that can slow down a game real quick.

Savage Worlds works perfectly on RPoL as it is.

As for Reign, I actually don't really know. I sort of skimmed the rules to it, as I knew I wasn't going to have any players and just wanted to mine ideas. The whole premise of the game is to run cities, kingdoms, guilds, aristocratic families, businesses, armies, and all that using a single core system, which sounds like basically what you're asking for, and it was designed for this nearly from the ground up, with only the core mechanic taken from the more traditional game types. It's a One Roll Engine game, and I've only played a couple very short games of ORE here on RPoL something like ten years ago. Hopefully someone else can weigh in with this one with how it actually plays in PbP. I'm all theory here.

Thanks a lot, Nintaku! You're the real MVP.

Thank you. I knew amassing tons of seemingly useless information about a wide variety of RPGs would come in handy someday. :P

The pathfinder Ultimate Campaign also features rules for starting and expanding a kingdom withing the d20 rules. The players have different roles in the kingdom (ruler, spymaster, etc.). There's a few pitfalls in those rules and I've seen a lot of house rulings regarding them. But they can work both as a background to an adventuring group or they might even take the foreground in a campaign.

The Birthright (AD&D) also have rules for ruling a kingdom. There's a 3rd ed conversion somewhere on the internet. The flaw about those rules (if my memory serves me right) is that they are tightly bound to the setting.

The difficulty with empire-building (even on the small scale of a faction or city) is that many players shy away from the workload of bean-counting, and everything takes so much longer in PbP.

If you want to keep your players, go for simplicity.

I can recommend An Echo Resounding (AER). It's a stand-alone Labyrinth Lord supplement, designed by the guy who wrote Stars Without Number.

It's a simple system that provides just enough detail to build yourself up from a group of nomadic adventurers into a fledgling city-state, without requiring everyone to run a spreadsheet each.

It's also scalable - so you use the same rules to create a regiment in later stages as you used to create a handful of bodyguards in the early stages. The actual mechanics can be condensed into a few pages of rules.

The same guy, Kevin Crawford, wrote a simple, abstract mechanic for handling the growth and activity of Factions. Probably not detailed enough to handle the development of 'your' faction, but a useful tool for a GM to keep track of all the 'other' factions that populate your world.

Can't believe I forgot to bring up Stars Without Number. While the faction rules there are very strongly tied to the default sci-fi setting, a quick read of the rules will show you how everything is put together, and it's really easy to reskin it all into anything you need. Sadly, I dunno about AER, but it sounds really cool. At this point I trust Kevin Crawford with basically anything.

If money is a factor for you, I'd also like to point out that Stars Without Number has a free version for download. Only one of the games I listed is free, and that's Fate. Pretty sure Burn Shift itself isn't free, though, just the core rules.

D&D has rules for that via the Miniatures Handbook and the stronghold building rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide and Player's Handbook.

Only thing is the default assumption is the players are to use a 2e idea "name level" ie 9th level.

The rules work at lower levels, but it raises questions like  how did they get the land, how do they get the funds, et cetera.

9th level or so, they have the personal capital to build a stronghold. Unless they get a lucky draw from the Deck of Many Things.

I always thought the concept of "name level" being a starting point for strongholds was less a question of where they get funds and land, but more how they get the reputation and influence for people to come from far and wide to join them. Money's not so much an issue because you could just say "the characters are aristocracy and have family wealth to draw from", but without any great deeds to their name, none of it will attract the soldiers, peasants, and young adventurers to their stronghold.

This was actually the explanation that gave me the idea that a character's "level" isn't a function of how many specific tasks they've performed like killing monsters or such, but how many great deeds they've performed. Most high level NPCs in those early modules had /done/ stuff, and peasants know the name of anyone in their world with a character level of 9. Not because when you hit level 9 people suddenly know your name, but because when more people learn your name you level up.

...Whiiich is just me rambling and is only tangentially relevant to the original question. To bring it back /to/ the original question: if you wanna use D&D's stronghold rules, you can start the heroes off at level 9/10 and have a fun coming up with a history of the deeds that earned them their magnificent reputation, and then extrapolate from that to create problems for them. Like perhaps this rebellion the game focuses on was their doing and they made many enemies, or perhaps the rebellion is /against/ them. Or maybe they're part of the rebellion, but can't let it be known because they have political ties with the organization being rebelled against and have to put on the charm while sending agents to stab them in the back.

Or their history could cause trouble totally unrelated to the rebellion. Maybe they pissed off a dragon. Monkey wrench in the works and all.

Oh I always thought it was clear it was the reputation. Who's going to flock to the banner of a level 4 fighter? But once the fighter is actually a Lord? Hell yeah.

I'm unconvinced though that DnD is a good system for a stronghold game; unless you can find the Birthright rules.

Hey, <b>Wrath of the Autarch<\b> is exactly what you're looking for for kingdom building, role playing, as fledgling rebels from a fantasy empire.. Players run a community trying to establish itself against rising threats from the wilds and the encroaching empire (ruled by the Autarch) that seeks to re-annex the upstart stronghold. Players conduct a mission each season, whether espionage, diplomacy with neighboring factions, warfare, assassinations, skirmishes against local monster threats, conquering neighboring regions for their food or mana supply, etc.

Then you quickly manage the strongholds productivity, invest in various infrastructure options (in awesome tech-like trees), trade, etc. players manage a stable of heroes who might need a season off to recuperate mana, heal from wounds etc. eventually you'll lead armies, fortify strategic points, make allies and enemies, but players can't do everything so they'll have to choose investment strategically.

Every season that passes, local threats may crop up and the GM gains access to increasingly challenging Autarch threats. Choose to invest in war, diplomacy, economics, magic, culture, exploration, but either way it ends only when either the Autarch wins or the stronghold permanently establishes their independence.

Seriously check it out. It uses a derivative of Fate Core, and it plays well over pbp. In fact much of the strategic/macro meta game play testing was conducted in both live play and pbp. It's simple but the strategic decisions for both players and GM are deep and competitive.

Dang, you people are really helpful.

So, first that AER system sounds awesome, sign me up. Second, for the Birthright stuff, here is a link to their wiki.

http://www.birthright.net

In reply to willvr (msg # 12):

Actually remember first edition AD&D zero levels will flock to a succsessful 1st level fighter who can get a squad hired.  It is even possible to have a half size army with a 4th level captain if he can get his army hired.  Fighters only become lords if they gain enough assets, including capturing or clearing grounds fighters are usually mercenary menat arms, officers.