Where's My Castle?

I broke my gaming teeth on D&D - not AD&D, but basic D&D, specifically the Mentzer version.  Cracking open those pages for the first time was a moment of wonder for me...  I'd long been fascinated by fantasy, and the idea of a game where I got to be a hero like in the fantasy novels that I'd read?  Wow.

I'd played the little solo adventures at the beginning of the red book, and they were a lot of fun.  My ten-year-old self was pretty taken by Aleena the cleric (pictured left - the foxiest cleric of them all!), and to this day I still hold a grudge against the evil wizard Bargle for killing her.

I didn't really get to play those games much.  While I did get a lot of my friends of the time into RPGs, most of them turned out to be far more interested in Palladium or Marvel Super Heroes than good old D&D...  And I enjoyed those games too, for a time.  But there was just something about D&D that held an allure for me.  Often I'd end up playing the game by myself, buying a solo module every once in a while or rolling up wandering monster encounters for my fighter to battle.

Despite not playing the game often, I still bought the Expert rules set when I felt I was done with Basic.  Then, when I was done with that, the Companion set, and the Masters set after that.  Never bothered with Immortals, and the concept didn't interest me much.

Since those days, I've played in plenty of campaigns (nothing recently, but that's by choice rather than circumstance), most of these being 2nd edition AD&D and 3rd edition D&D.  They were fun at the time, until they stopped being fun, but I did notice regretfully that they had different assumptions than the boxed rules sets that I started with.

See, in the Mentzer sets once you reached name level, it was expected you would be able to get a castle.  This came with the ability to acquire/hire followers, staff, and land which you'd administer.  And frankly, I fell in love the idea.  It even came with an entire set of rules (pretty much the thrust of the Companion rules) for managing your domain, battles between armies, etc.  Looking back, the rules were somewhat poorly designed and arbitrary, but I still loved the idea behind them.  Still do, in fact.

Strangely, this assumption that adventuring would naturally lead to becoming a ruler was almost completely absent in the advanced version of the game to which I later migrated.  Frankly, it was always something I really missed, even though I never really got to use them with my basic set either.  Something about the idea just really appealed to me.

Sometimes, I'd play in a game where my character would eventually achieve some sort of rulership:  They'd become leader of a tribe of lizardmen, or conquer a city in a rebellion, or whatever.  The Burning Wheel game I'm playing in has my character in charge of a multi-racial town.  But these always seem somewhat handwavey in practice, and even when rulership is the focus of the game it's always felt like an afterthought at best.

I think it's interesting that this legacy of domain-managing rules has since been adopted by other games, particularly of the retro variety like Adventurer Conqueror King. They, like the Mentzer set I pored over so long ago, assume that this is sort of a natural progression.

I'm not a fan of having to grind through nine levels to get to this stuff, though.

* * * * *

Been working busily away at Mistwardens in preparation for another playtest this weekend, when a friend is coming by for a visit.  I hope to have the Retinue rules ready by then, at the very least, since they're almost finished.  I also intend to revise the rules on monster design to make them even easier to build on the fly.

It would be awesome if I could have mutation rules done by then...  But it's not looking likely, not if I also want to have something to actually run on Sunday.  We'll see, though.

One thing I know for sure I won't have ready by then, sadly, are the domain management rules.  Oh, well.

5,321 words written since my last update.