Hey guys! Inspired by Kaushal Avan Spellfire's own Battle for Korvosa rules and "war game," I decided to try my hand at my own version. Now, this isn't an attempt to subvert or one-up Kaushal's system, but more of an exercise for myself to see if I could take that same basic idea of a large-scale rebellion and turn it into a fun and relatively streamlined mini-game. I'd like this to be an alternative to Kaushal's for anyone interested in this sort of thing, because I think the more options the better. Curse of the Crimson Throne is an awesome campaign, but the denouement comes a bit quickly and with a bit less thunder than I think it deserves. I would highly recommend for any GM getting near the end of their campaign to read through this and/or Kaushal's own system (or make your own!) and consider closing things out with something big and explosive like this.
Having used Pathfinder's Army Combat and Caravan Combat systems, I've come to the same conclusion that I think a lot of people have: d20 doesn't really work for large-scale combat. The more I tried to squeeze the rules into something like Risk the more I felt like I should just play Risk. That's when I decided to pretty much adopt the fairly rudimentary dice rolling system that Risk uses and apply it here. I also really enjoy games like Pandemic and the Pathfinder Card Game, where players race against a clock that is on auto-pilot and get to work together. Here, though, I wanted that auto-pilot to be the city and things that could happen in a city in the midst of a massive political upheaval, and for the players to be teamed up against Ileosa and her forces. I'm also an avid Magic: The Gathering player, and decided to see if I couldn't just go ahead and throw some of that in there too, while I was at it. After a lot of tinkering, testing, re-testing, brainstorming, and scouring the internet for fantasy art that wasn't ridiculous, I came up with a final product, and...
The game was designed to be 5v1 and uses a lot of campaign choices and events from our own story. Some of the cards won't make sense, and that's to be expected, but they're easily adjusted for your own campaign. In fact, if you're into it, I'd recommend really customizing the thing for your party. I did design a lot of the effects to work mechanically regardless of what the flavor or art looks like, so in many cases you'd just need a new piece of art and a new name for the same effect. The game should work just fine as 4v1 or 6v1, but in both cases you'll want to adjust numbers just a tiny bit unless you want it to be harder or easier, respectively.
I've posted links to the Cards, Rules PDF, and Map PDF. Fair warning: this does take a bit of setup and is much, much more involved than Kaushal's version in terms of extra-curricular DM activity. Overall, once I had everything set up, it cost me about $20 US between FedEx printing, card sleeves, poster board (not required), and other bits and pieces, not to mention the time it took to cut everything out and put it all together. It may take more for those with less arts and crafts stuff lying around, but a pair of scissors and some glue will get you there. I also have a ton of card sleeves from MTG, but penny sleeves ($1 for 100) are all you really need, though that's another thing to take into account.
- The cards can be printed off of any printer, really, though there's a lot of color and ink involved. In my opinion it's more efficient to just take it to your local copy center and print it there to be kind to your own color printer. I used a pretty basic version of my MTG proxy process and threw the cards together on Magic Set Editor.
They'll fit in any card sleeve that a Magic card can, and I use a tiny, tiny piece of double-sided tape to hold them onto the advertisements that come in Magic packs. If you aren't familiar with them, you can ask any store that regularly sells and hosts Magic events and they may have a jillion of them lying around, because they can't actually do anything in the game and are, literally, just adverts. "Basic Lands," too, will work, and are very cheap to come by if you're desperate for a cardstock backing. The hero cards went into toploaders (more rigid collector sleeves), but that was just a fun, very unnecessary touch.
- Rules are just the rules. I tried to make it easy to read and colorful, as practice for designing the game, but. Y'know. Whatever man.
- The map is 17.5" x 22.5" (approx. 44.5cm x 57cm). Many thanks to the player of Mickey of the Docks for doing all of the Photoshopping necessary to turn the Korvosa map into a board. I printed this on fairly light cardstock and used a few pieces of sticky Velcro to hold it on a poster board backing. It's a bit squeezed, but if it's any bigger it loses some of its resolution. Feel free to make it bigger if you aren't too worried about that. We tried using Risk pieces and they worked, but were cluttered. Eventually we started just using dice to represent units and it worked very well. I'd recommend that, especially if you have a lot of those little 12mm d6s lying around.
It may need some trimming, but it's good to play off the press.
Any questions or comments, let me know. Especially if a link is broken or something doesn't work. And thanks again to Paizo for making a great campaign, Kaushal for inspiring me, and to my players for putting up with my GMing.
I'll make sure to give it a thorough read; I've been musing over it for a while already and it looks very nice. The downloads work for me.
Awesome, thanks for giving it a look! I'm glad the downloads are working. Google Docs decided to go to town on the formatting for my rules page, so it looks a lot less like a rule book than it did when it published... I'd love to hear comments and criticisms!
If gone over your rules, I'm not a game board player, although I know Risk and this seems like a Risk plus game. It certainly fascinates me.
I suppose you actually played it, how did it turn out for you? Was it balanced? Did your players manage to get the upper hand?
I have two questions for now:
- How many reinforcements does Ileosa get, first you say she gets 15 and then you say 10?
- Can troops cross diagonally when four quarters touch or can they only go to the two touching quarters?
It was actually pretty well balanced from what we played. Ileosa did end up losing the upper hand, but that was mostly a factor of me setting the initial reinforcements too low (10, which I upped to 15 and forgot to change in the second instance where I mention this: I've since adjusted that in the rules) and some really, really bad rolls on my part that changed the tide of battle. Mavrokeras also got an updated ally ability as his old one basically did nothing and the Grey district was the easiest for the players to get ahold of.
The players enjoyed being at a disadvantage, and they used the Hero cards quite a bit in order to help one another out. The dynamic worked well, and there were some pretty nasty battles for the docks. Ileosa mostly kept control of The Heights (Orner Reebs' ability worked exactly how I wanted it to) but by the time we hit the end of turn 5 she was effectively surrounded.
We noted after playing that there were times where things hinged on one good or bad roll, and the players were on the razor's edge of getting routed a few times. It was pretty tense, and Ileosa getting 2 or 3 edicts on a turn made her counterattacks brutal. We did figure out that 10 was a little too low for her reinforcement count and she was barely stretched too thin, to the extent that the inevitable inertia of five players was able to remove some of the tension in the last turn or so. With my design trying to make the game difficult for the players to win I felt like that was a good area to "buff" Ileosa.
As far as crossing diagonally, corners don't count. The intent is that there has to be a noticeable length of the district lining up with a length of the district in question. So that huge district right outside of Castle Korvosa wouldn't be able to attack the one at the very top of the West Shore. Part of it is the limitations of trying to line up districts with streets. I do see a couple spots where that might be in question, though, and if you have specific locations that you think might need to be addressed let me know.
Mechanically I find it interesting, and the card thing is very cool. I appreciate all of the work it takes to throw this kind of thing together, and I'm happy that you have shared it. If I am ever lucky enough to find a third group of players to run this game for, I will strongly consider doing this (obviously, the players' interest in a mini game would be the biggest determinant).
I have a few questions: Approximately how long does it take to play? Now that you have played through it, is what did you like most about the game, and what did you like least?
From a story perspective, I have an issue. You are very possibly removing Sabina's redemption story, which also means every Grey Maiden dropout stays locked up, and the party doesn't have as much information about Castle Korvosa itself (although Neolandous can give them a lot of info from before he fled). In that spirit, if I were to make one suggestion, it would be to allow a city card (if you like random) or maybe a turn count (if you don't want the event happening too early or too late) to trigger Sabina's desertion of the Queen and destruction of Zarmangarof--to that end, you can make the dragon a much deadlier and dangerous card with the knowledge that it will be removed at some point. It could even be the major turning point of the game if suddenly the party had to maneuver their armies to free the half-trained (but still better trained than peasants) Grey Maiden prisoners. I suppose now that I've thrown that out there, maybe secondary objectives would be a neat idea, possibly incorporated into the decks somehow--or maybe they would just over complicate things...
Anyway, the whole thing looks pretty neat, and I like that fact that you thought big and avoided the d20 system for a type of scenario it is clearly not well built for (not that it was ever supposed to be, of course).
Thank you! I think it'd also work as just a different sort of Risk game too, if people want to try it out without going through the whole campaign (though obviously it's much more fun when you have the backgrounds all there).
It took us about 2, 2 and a half hours to play. Though me creating the game probably made the process a bit more streamlined, so take that for what you will. There was also a pizza break somewhere in the middle.
First, what I liked most about the game was that it kind of did what I wanted it to do. It abstracted the epicness of large-scale battle or revolution, an epic that is really hard to do with the d20 system. It also tied together a lot of the loose ends in a nice way and I think really made the players feel that, while some things were under their control, they were major players in something bigger than themselves. Honestly, the narratives we got into in the course of "What happened in this week of battle? Holy crap..." were also really fun, to the extent that the epilogue included a plug describing rebuilding efforts in the docks districts as well as memorials to fallen allies and bloody battles.
What I liked least was trying to place the little miniatures we had on the board. It seems like an eternal problem with games like these where massing troops always fills up the board more than it can handle. Once we started just using dice to represent numbers things started becoming much smoother. There were also a couple of effects (two on cards, one on Ileosa's ally Mavrokeras) that didn't really do anything. I've since adjusted those for what I submitted here. Also, if I had to find something that wasn't really a problem with the game itself but the creation of the game, it was finding pictures for the cards and the decorations on the rules. Finding good fantasy art is really, really difficult, especially of women who aren't in thongs or using their cleavage as armor. That was definitely frustrating and took me a long, long time.
As for the story, I'd say it's pretty easy to really adjust things however you need. We actually did have Sabina's redemption story, in that once she was defeated and Cressida replaced her I went ahead and triggered Sabina's surrender and attempt to aid the players. By this point the players really didn't think they needed her help and didn't trust her, so they locked her up until the revolution's end. In my mind "defeating" Sabina on the board was essentially the point where she decides that she's had enough, that the bloodshed has gone too far, and that she needs to relinquish control to Cressida and the heroes. "Defeating" lieutenants or even the heroes' allies can mean a lot of different things, and the DM can definitely do what they feel is right for the sake of the story they want to tell. I liked the idea that NPCs could die, and I remember my players being afraid that Vencarlo would be killed and hoping that Arkona would die (in our campaign Bahor had worked out an agreement where he would help the players defeat Ileosa and keep Neolandus alive, which is in his interests, so long as they agreed to make him king of Korvosa afterwards).
I specifically made it so that each round is a week in game time for stuff like that. This gives the players plenty of space to do side quests if they want, for narrative things to happen, and for things like crafting magic items, etc. before going to face Ileosa. Having a short quest to save the Grey Maiden prisoners is exactly the type of thing that the DM could do with the party once Sabina's defeated in her district. We didn't do much in that vein, because the players had prepared extensively for revolution and had a lot of allies; taking down Ileosa was the only thing left. But I intentionally left a lot of room for DMs to set up side missions, "tactical strike" encounters, skirmishes, stuff like that. Even more, I also chose the card game aspect and included the set editor I used so that people can make their own cards to tailor things to their own campaigns. Taking out a card, putting one in, printing off more, whatever, is all possible and I encourage it. There's obviously some potential balancing issues, but if you were to throw in one card that said, "I Surrender!" and put it in the City deck that basically removed Sabina from her district (either replaced by another Lieutenant or leaving the district Ally-less) would mean that, at some point, Sabina will surrender. A good way to visualize it is that City effects will happen, Edicts probably will happen, and Hero cards might happen. So if it's something you absolutely want in your game, make a card for it and pop it in the city deck.
On that note, if anyone sends me a PM or posts here requesting some cards I'll definitely get on that. I had pretty specific settings on color and format for the cards in the set editor, and I'm at the point where I can crank them out pretty quickly
I think the point here is that the game itself is the abstract mechanics of the revolution, while what the players themselves do can be as explicit or vague as the group wants, or the DM is willing to prep for. If that makes sense. Thanks for the comments! I'm pretty proud of what I came up with and I'm glad to hear that at least on a conceptual level it works.
Puna'chong
I've been experimenting with the Magic set editor to make my own cards. It's fun. I really like the option of adding campaign-related special cards to the 'Risk' game for storytelling flavor. I would like to playtest this version of the Battle for Korvosa and see how it plays out. It will be years in real time before my players get to the final installment of the AP, so I have more than enough time to try it out.
I have some questions/remarks:
- Isn't the queen at a disadvantage when you allow redistributing troops during the Fortify action? If there are five heroes, they can redistribute in five places per turn, while the queen can only do that in one. Seems like a serious strategic disadvantage.
- Do you actually place each hero on the board and does he move with the troops, or is the hero the commander who 'stays in his base camp to order the troops' and who is not actually represented on the board? Because I'd love to see the hero present as well. The hero's boon could only work in the quarter in which he is present, or each hero could have a general boon and an extra boon for the units in his quarter.
- You have one ally per district who - I'm not 100 % clear on this - stays in the landmark quarter(?). Would the game also work when you'd just mix the allies with the troops and allow them to move across the board. Their boons would only work in the square in which they are present. Heroes could unlock certain allies when they free a certain square or district, other allies could be added from the beginning (this would actually have to be decided based on the story so far ...) It would allow for a more dynamic use of allies. When attacked, normal troops would be targeted first, then the ally and then a hero (if present). You could also rule (on a storytelling level) that allies are not destroyed, but rather captured (or maybe even forced to flee).
Awesome, the set editor is actually pretty neat. You can do a lot with it. I found that simple formatting always appeals most to me, so I tried really hard to make the cards succinct and really low on wordiness. Any play testing is welcome!
Fortifying is a way for the players to create a sort of unified front. Since only one district can fortify to another on each player's turn it's more of a way for the individual to redistribute their forces if, for instance, they find their main force in a quarter that doesn't touch an opposing quarter. For Ileosa, since most of the board at any given point will be her front, having only one chance to fortify is just a way to balance her reach and a way to challenge the player to prioritize threats. Ileosa's challenge is to leverage resources and strategy to stop multiple opponents. The heroes' challenge is to overcome overwhelming resources and take ground without being spread too thin. It is something that you can try, though, and I'll definitely keep it in mind!
Heroes are not placed on the board. The idea is that the week timeline for the turn gives the PCs enough time to command, lead, strategize, and move around between forces and one another. The controller of a given army lends their expertise to their force as a whole, primarily to keep things simple and streamlined. That said, it would be very easy to put the player and their abilities down on the field as a movable unit. The only problem with this becomes what happens if that unit is destroyed, which would involve the player having to replace a unit, explain what happened, or something else. Mostly, it was a simplicity call.
Allies are like hero abilities except they only work in their district. So Arkona only works in Old Korvosa, but every quarter in it. To defeat an ally the landmark has to be captured with the rest of the district, just like you would need to in order to capture a district normally. It's part of capturing or losing the area. I made it this way in case something weird happens with cards, actions between multiple players, and to adjust for any changes players might make for their own campaigns that could do something I'm not prepared for. It's a contingency thing. Just like with heroes, they could be embodied as a unit as well, and I could easily add in optional rules for this if you'd like. Essentially, think of allies as "District Effects" that take the form of a character from the campaign. They're there to balance the game and make every fight different based on which commanders are squaring off. If they got to move around a lot things could become imbalanced and less simple: static is easier to keep in mind than dynamic for rules, and the Allies are inherently designed to be static. Something that makes Risk kind of "eh" sometimes is that if you're fighting in Asia, the fight is the same as it would be in South America. I wanted it to be more interesting here and really be something that can be tailored to suit specific needs and, really, to make the game fun.
I'm glad to have the questions, and I'll take the comments into account! I'm fine putting out rule sets that I think are a balanced and can do things that appeal to individual groups. If having your hero lead the charge and be a unit is appealing, that's a thing that can happen.
Bumping this real quick, in case anyone is at this point in their campaign.
Puna'chong, this is fantastic work! I love it.
Puna'chong, this is fantastic work! I love it.
Thank you!! Is it something you're able to make use of? If so, I'd love to hear results!
Here's a more printable/better formatted version of the rules. Google Docs does weird things when it gets its hands on documents.