Empires in the Dark – Research and Developments
I picked up a copy of Wrath of the Autarch (thanks again Jason Corley ) and read through Houses of the Blooded and Reign again and I’ve been doing some research on a 4X take on Blades.
I feel like one of the important aspects of a 4X RPG is probably the concept of research and development : researching technologies and developing regions… I for one would certainly like to be able to discover new arts and sciences, and improve my empire’s territories and culture.
Generally, I like the concept of players taking on the roles of regents of a single realm, so that the empire echoes the players’ crew in Blades, which means I’d ideally like a system that can stand up to multiple players cooperating on their empire’s development each season.
I’ve been wondering about the concept of making the empire’s equivalent of Crew Claims act as technology improvements, unlocking access to various regional developments.
There’s a few reasons I dig the concept :
1. Each empire playbook has its own tech tree, explored by taking claims on the empire’s castle map, each claim acting as prerequisites for various region improvements, these make up your empire’s default technology progression.
2. BUT just as in Blades in the Dark, if you really want a claim from another empire playbook, you can have also it, you just have to find a way to take it from someone else (with all that that entails)… and when you do, it may well be the prereq to some weird, new and exciting region improvements.
3. Using Calum Grace’s awesome concept of character-unique claims, it means player character choice effectively unlocks access to certain technologies : a Lurk in the crew could give access to the Thieves Guild or the Spy Network claims, which act as prereqs for certain region improvements
I’m still deciding how to handle resources, which will hopefully decide whether taking Claims should also cost resources or not.
What do you guys think?
You may want to take look at Legacy: Life Among The Ruins for how another PbtA game has handled a similar set-up. It’s post-apocalyptic, with each player controlling both a character and the family/faction/cult they belong to.
Thanks Lex Permann, I’ll add it to the list I’m working through.
Ambitious! I would definitely look into some Kevin Crawford stuff. Also I would play board games that do 4x well, and work out where they can be abstracted.
Look into each of the 4 X’s and work out how important they are to your design most 4 X games have at least one X that they minimise.
eXpand: Most RPGs are set up to do this to some degree although maybe not on the scale you want, the crew and character playbooks in blades help here but you might want to consider additional shared resources that could get playbooks and expand.
eXplore: Many RPGs do this well but it is really not a focus for blades, no advice here but there are lots of ways that you could bring this in.
eXploit: Not a focus of many RPGs but some do this reasonably, some hacking needed for this. Take some inspiration from economic board games, they have already boiled an economic system into a game that can entirely be handled by players. I would keep this part fairly simple.
eXterminate: I think Blades has you covered here, but you might want to think about scale and scope here too.
I’d love to hear your progress on this one.
Thanks for your feedback Joseph Levey!
Yep, I’m digging into a few boardgames too, but cautiously because I don’t want this hack to become one 😉
It strikes me that both HotB and WotA must have had the same thought, they both follow to some extent what I’ll sweepingly refer to as the Settlers of Catan model.
I’d love to find a way to turn the economy into a BitD-esque system (Mark Cleveland Massengale had some thoughts on that in the previous post) abstracting away resources into a few rough resource types that can be handled similarly to Coin, Rep, Turf etc.
It strikes me that it would be easy enough to give project clocks a “resource cost per segment” for example, which might give rise to some interesting mechanics, but all of that is still rough notes on yellow lined paper.
I feel like “most 4X games have at least one X that they minimise” deserves a longer discussion, but I think I know what you mean and I would broadly agree.
Specifically in this case, what I’m looking for is a way for players to own and develop a province; I wouldn’t anticipate eXploration to occur on a much larger narrative scale than it does in BitD itself : There may be ruins to explore and hidden secrets under landmarks, but I would imagine the world to be, by and large, known.
So for your purposes it could be boiled down to developing the eXpansion and eXploitation elements of BitD 😀
I’ll keep you posted.