Tuesday 14 July 2009

House Rules 1 - The Campaign

Marrying up the Warrior Heroes and Warrior Heroes: Armies and Adventures campaigns has highlighted one issue that is giving me a headache. WHAA uses a system where you specify that you are in one area of a kingdom (Border, Inside or Heart). WH uses a system where you move from province to province. So, what happens when a province changes hands during a season as happened in the Summer 987 campaign turn? Brother Cedric was travelling to Ekra to intercept the Treyine army. He had reached the border of Ekra. This should put him in the province that the Treyine army had invaded. The Treyine army captures the province, so we need to decide where Brother Cedric is on the map. Is he on the border of Treyine suddenly, or does he shift to the border of Ekra still? Common sense says that he should now be in Treyine but we still do not know exactly when the province changes hands, which would affect which encounter charts he uses. We have decided to change the campaign movement system slightly for WHAA so that it matches up exactly with the WH system.

WHAA Character Movement
Each campaign turn is now one season. During one season a character may move up to one province. When moving, the player states where in the province the character will finish moving. The character may move to any location within the province. The character will test for an encounter at this location.

Capturing Provinces
A province counts as owned by the nation that began the turn in control of it until the end of that season. Any captured provinces transfer ownership at the end of the season and will begin the next season controlled by their new owner.

Conclusion
This new system will reduce the number of potential encounters for each character. On the other hand, it should keep the campaign progressing more smoothly. At the moment we have potentially three encounters for each character per season compared to one battle per nation., which means that one part of the campaign is usually lagging far behind the other. I hope that these changes solve that. I also think I prefer the map movement for characters, rather than the more abstract WHAA system.

2 comments:

  1. I use the grid map of Talomir downloaded from 2hwg yahoo group. Each hex is one month's move. I created a "heart" for each province using the rule that there must be one hex between a heart hex and a border hex. The border hexes are any that touch the red broken lines that define the provinces. When possible, I made each heart a round cluster of seven hexes, by a body of water if available, but had to make some odd shaped and some smaller (Silver Elves have three, Dark Elves have six). I did this so whenever leaving the heart you have at least one "interior" space to move thru before reaching a border hex. If 75% of a border hex is inside the province you're moving from, encounters are for that province, otherwise they are from the province you are moving into. This makes for some interesting strategic moves. I designated one hex in the heart as the capital and, as an incentive to visit, have some house rules that give an advantage to recruiting there. The capital is also a good place to receive quests and are good destinations when delivering items or messages to another province. I attached the map to cork board and use a push pin to show my PC's current location. I also enjoy using different colored push pins to show locations of discovered dungeons, interesting encounters, and armies.

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  2. I've not responded to this before, for which I must apologise. I like this idea. It does not really work for what we are trying to do, but is a good idea. I also like using push pins to show the sites of things I have found. I have a stash of flag pins that I use with a cork board when I am doing stuff like that. Our current campaign exists primarily in photoshop files though, so I cannot do that, unless I print maps out. The problem there is that the Warrior Heroes massed battles campaign sees constant realignment of the borders, so it is not cost effective to do so.

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