Cosmic Campaign: Spring Liftoff!
So it begins...
This will begin with an explanation of the game in a more cohesive way, I am getting a lot of offhand questions by various peoples.
The columns of the chart:
The name of the faction, and its cosmic divisional alignment.
The name of the leader of that faction, along with a numerical description of their acumen.
The total population of the faction/realm, this is public and is as accurate as possible to keep every other faction aware of relative strength.
Sites include any major landmarks and locations, hamlets and other such minor places are excluded, but places such as mines, dungeons, towers, etc. are counted.
Some factions are on islands, and some are landlocked, and some have access to a coastline.
Heroes labeled on the chart are able to be targeted by spies/assassins/etc, and are able to participate in offensive movements to other factions.
Knowing if the enemy location has a castle or not, a dragon or not, would be fairly public knowledge, so obvious and necessary information goes here.
The number of chainmail points of army that is currently mustering to campaign out to another land, or to sally forth to defend themselves or others.
The number of chainmail points of army that is has already mustered for a season, and is ready and capable of marching to another faction or sally forth into the wilderness to defend themselves or others.
These are the current movement orders for the season.
Chaos Calls Forth its Allies
The inciting incident for this campaign is from the perspective of chaos. They have been called by greater powers to accomplish a goal, they have been given objectives, time limits, rewards, and punishments. This will drive some of action, but also define a specific start and end to this campaign, as is proper for the definition of the term.
All of these factions exist in currently running D&D or adjacent games, with PCs actively playing in them. This campaign is a superimposed in top of their games. When this campaign ends, the games will return to their previous state. This is the correct definition of a Campaign.1
Diplomacy is the Name of the Game
This campaign is mimicking a game of diplomacy. The issue is, we are reading OD&D as its text says, all games are surrounded by unknown wilderness. Or as Rick Stump puts it, you can sail into the ocean and show up in another game. This means that we functionally can’t make a map that connects all these games together, we must allow the distances between them to remain ethereal.
To solve this issue, we look at how Diplomacy works. It has a map, and armies on the map. The entire game is just moving armies into territories to take them. This means that we need some way to understand that an army is capable of attacking, or incapable, at any given time, if we wish to copy this game play.
The public Chart serves this purpose.
Armies must be Mustered for one season before they are ready to act in the subsequent seasons. This is a clean way of showing when an army is ‘on the board’, and will then facilitate the mind games of guessing what an army will do and how to react to it that is the meat of Diplomacy.
Armies on the Chart are only necessary for moving to another game, any armies kept home do not need to be publicly declared.
Communication
The current game is, I think, about a 50/50 split of me being an arbiter between email communications and players directly speaking to each other. While I am being a referee of sorts, the games are still run completely by the DM’s that own them, and I am not forcing anything on anyone.
When a military force moves into another game, the owning person of that game determines what happens.
If I send 250 Heavy Foot into your game, I will give you my orders for them, and you would deal with any and all resolutions and then give me a report.
This is a high trust game. It involves serious players and referees.
A Few House Rules
OD&D is missing a lot of the real rules needed to run very crunchy wargames. I have added just a few rules for clarity and for the abstraction.
Movement of armies between games will take 2d4+1 weeks, and the army will encounter 1 wilderness encounter per week. They will receive a strong bonus or penalty to the reaction roll to encourage forces to fight/flee/join the marching army.
Movement of smaller parties between games, spies/assassins/wagons of goods/etc will take 1d3 weeks, and will encounter 1 encounter per week.
Mustered armies can sally forth and meet attackers (or defend others) in the Wilderness, this will keep the battle off their game map, and offer a mutual place to have pitched battles.
Pay for mustered troops will be the standard OD&D pay rates, but on weekly increments.2
Pay for food while campaigning will be a minimum of 1gp/week/man and 5gp/week/horse and 1gp/HD/monster34
It is recommended that standing armies be capped at 10% of the local population for a regular army. Troops up to 20% of the population can be mustered with a penalty of double pay/costs.5
Caveats for these rules, obviously being that I am giving these as guidelines for OD&D because they are not present. These are minimums. At least one player is using ACKS in their game and has their own costs.
As the game progresses, I would like to get more crunchy on the actual wargame rules, but we will see what comes up. A big part of this experiment is to see how close we can get to a consistent wargame with the very minimal rules in OD&D, I am not here to write 1500 pages of wargame rules.
Come Play with Us
I am taking anyone who wants to join, just email me Capt_Hook_DND@protonmail.com and we can chat. OD&D, AD&D, ACKS, anything works.
Get in before the summer turn!
Again, all thanks to JoyOfWargaming for encouraging us to do greater things. And many thanks to Dave and Gary, who gave us this game that we didn’t appreciate nearly enough.
When this campaign is over, I would be very happy to see these games continue to be connected, and more organic scenarios and interactions take place.
Pay for a light foot is 1gp per Month. Guard duty is double that per Month to 1gp per 2 weeks. Pay in the dungeon is 1gp per Day. I think that calling ‘wartime campaign’ pay, 1gp per week, is wholly agreeable to the rules.
The minimum food for a man per day is roughly 1lbs, while a horse is 5lbs, a more ideal number for both is triple that so 3lbs for the man and 15lbs for the horse. When troops are on campaign, and we are assuming foraging, I stated a minimum gold cost for food, to make sure that baggage trains with the armies will have to account for at least a minimum.
I also gave a minimum standard for pillaging/foraging costs, it will cost the owning faction double the food cost in damages. ie if 150 orcs (1HD; 1gp/week each) were pillaging/foraging in a game, it would cost the owning player of that region 300gp (2gp/each) per week in cost for the destruction/consumption. This is a heavy handed abstraction to give a rule because od&d doesn’t have such rules.
OD&D doesn’t have any economic rules other than 10gp per peasant head of income. Therefore the only way to apply economic stress is a cost to represent it. This is woefully inadequate, but it is the rule I put into place as a test.