- Settlements are found only for the first case, when entering a new hex. They consist of a village or encampment, which might form a trade agreement with you, but also might become hostile and threaten your existing trade routes. If they aren't conquered, they become a future source of...
- Patrols, which are smaller groups of wandering natives. Patrols sometimes come from a settlement, but often are just random encounters with wild beasts (or magical ones, in a fantasy setting). Hostile patrols interfere with trade routes, and also launch constant attacks on your expedition until you eliminate them (or the settlement spawning them).
- Events are miscellaneous problems or opportunities that either give you extra resources, or cause you to lose existing resources. I've tried to make them mostly positives, since "you lose your whole turn because of these two lines of flavor text" isn't much fun as a mechanic.
For the fantasy-mod rules, I'm intending to add a fourth type of encounter: monsters' lairs. These represent the kind of places that magical creates live, or guard the great heaps of wealth that you're trying to obtain. These have a fairly venerable pedigree in fantasy literature, dating back to the cup stolen from the dragon-hoard in the final act of Beowulf, or even to Jason's similar theft of the golden fleece from the Colchin dragon. A lair is essentially a fixed location with a permanent encounter that is resolved by a personal act of heroism.The appeal of this is that it helps to better define the various leaders of the expedition (like Jason here) as monster-slaying heroes in their own right. It's a little anti-climactic when the solution to every wave of dive-bombing hippogriffs is to bring along dozens of archers to shoot them down. At some point, you want your little plastic hero figurines to go mano-a-mano with them in a dark cave, rather than beating them down with your mercenary budget. This also justifies the use of personal statistics (like strength and dexterity) which add color but otherwise don't have much effect on mass combat, unless your heroes are inflated to comic-book proportions.
But this creates a dilemma for me. There's some precedent for letting lairs be eliminated by encountering the monsters outside of them, where logically speaking it should be possible to bring your entire army to bear. For example, The Hobbit has its dwarven expedition encounter two lairs (trolls at the beginning, dragon at the end) and in each case defeats the monsters away from their home base. If this is possible, then it starts to feel almost mandatory to lure the monsters out of hiding. The right way to kill Smaug is always to trick him into flying over a squad of Laketown archers, and never to kill him in the fastness of Erebor.
This problem might be resolved by cost efficiency, for some monsters, where heroes who can survive the encounter can save the lives of the dozens of archers that would fall to a chimera's breath. But if you're getting reimbursed for casualties with a vast hoard of dragon-scale wealth, this stops mattering. (Archers are cheap, I'll just buy more!) This also obliges the player to follow the somewhat tedious approach of camping an army outside the front door of the lair for weeks, waiting for an ambush chance. Not especially heroic, and pretty boring for gameplay.
I'm torn between making lairs something like settlements (where they summon smaller monster patrols, but don't lose their own population in the process), or just making the monsters never emerge from them at all. The former feels ecologically silly (where are all these extra dragons coming from?!) But the latter feels static and non-threatening, and doesn't capture the kind of creeping dread that ought to arise from journeying too close to that ominous old cave with the smoke drifting out the front. I'll probably need to play it both ways, and decide which works better in practice.
I remember in D&D 3.5, that Dragons and Koblods had a symbiotic relationship. The kobolds flock to a dragon and become its servants. They set up camp and patrol the dungeons and coutryside for their master. The dragon can then lounge about as it pleases, for years at a time, as the little kobolds bring back trinkets and small morsels. Then, when adventurers fight through the kobolds, they get a nice boss fight.
ReplyDeletePerhaps monster lairs should be treated as settlements or encounters on a per-monster basis. Some monsters accrue hangers-on, but others remain solitary.
In the scope of the rules, is the monster lair automatically found, or must it be located after knowing it is in the hex? What I mean is that if the monsters are slain while out on patrol, might it be possible to have difficulty finding the lair? Might it take a few weeks to scour the mountainside looking for a small cave hidden by brush?
I don't quite know where I am going with this, but I like both ideas for monster lair encounters. I think they should be mobile or static based on the monster.
One weird feature of a game that tries to balance exploration objectives and map control objectives is that exploration tends to create problems. That is, currently the rules can allow you to have a perfectly safe trade route that generates income, and then you suddenly discover a hostile settlement on the border of the trade route and it becomes un-safe. Of course, it should never really have been safe to begin with, in real terms, but if you uncover the map a little at a time, it's hard to represent that.
ReplyDeleteCurrently all four types of encounters are just triggered by entering a new hex. Patrols (small/medium encounters) also happen while camping overnight within the "threat radius" of something already on the map.
You don't need to search for them initially. (Goblins: "Don't call us, we'll call you!") Again, it makes perfect sense that things could work as you describe, but I need to do it in a way that's compatible with a procedurally generated board that doesn't exist until you've explored it.
I already have a few humanoid lairs (a necromancer's tower and an evil temple) that involve a boss with some underlings, and that's also the default model for most settlements. For example, goblin strongholds (underground settlements that work like lairs) have three troop types plus a boss, and only wolfriders have a decent radius. So you can kill off the wolf patrols with a surface army, to reduce the stronghold's threat range on the map, without actually taking a team of heroes into the underground caves commando-style. There's a weekly check to see if reinforcements arrive at a reduced settlement, so it's a temporary solution only.
The idea of implementing symbiotic minions has good ecological grounding from a simulationist perspective, but it also runs the mechanical risk of either making it too lucrative to fight only the weaker minions (grind to victory!) or else making them worthless 'trash' who impose a time-tax on the interesting boss encounters. (Granted, I don't want to admit how many hours I've spent playing computer games based on the latter model...) I want the minions to be rational about not frittering themselves or their hoards away, and to helpfully support their overlords.
At the moment I've been playing around with ideas to make the lairs "smarter", so that monsters have some kind of rule-of-thumb that they use to decide when to ignore you and go home, something based on size ratios. Swift flyers like dragons/griffons/rocs/etc would be able to avoid encounters, but you could potentially bring light cavalry to chase down slower types.