So, I had a quick flip through Warlock’s Fortresses, Temples and Strongholds.

For starters, this is exactly as it says on the title, a quick set of rules to build and run establishments in D&D 5e, it is NOT a guide for running anything else beyond that (say, a small kingdom or a village).

What we do get is a nifty table with kinds of establishments that can be built and run using this document. We get basically a table with example buildings and to be honest it is a pretty thorough list; to expand it one can either “reskin” any of them or use any of them as an example.

What we do not get is a same list for land. The author(s) leave that to DM’s discretion (or an other set of rules maybe) to determine price for land. We also do not get the how much labor each building needs in order to be finished. We do get a construction time, but it is not specified the number of workers that are needed to meet that time.

A hefty nice mechanic that is used is that each building has the “Expansion Units” (EUs) value. This is basically the number of available “improvement slots” each establishment has. So it is logical to see a mansion having 4 EUs while a simple house has only 1. But if we examine each structure separately, we’ll see that each structure provides special bonuses (for example, expansions built in a house are built half the price or a fort has already an armory expansion in place).

Logically, there is a nice list of expansions available. Each expansion has three values: Cost in EUs, cost in GP and cost in time (days). Also, each expansion has some special abilities of its own (for example, you can use the Alchemist’s Lab to cast certain spells better).

Furthermore, there are rules and options to modify/expand your Expansions so as to provide more abilities. Basically, this section provides the tools to make dungeons, as you have the construction options for pocket dimensions, traps, etc.

The next section is about the staff that operates in your structure. Staff can be broken into three major groups: Hirelings, Soldiers and Spellcasters. Hirelings come in three qualities: Unskilled Hirelings, Skilled and Slaves. It goes without saying that Skilled Hirelings are better but cost more and Slaves cost nothing apart from initial purchase (well, at least if you do not inherit them). One minor note here: apparently the author(s) have Forgotten Realms in mind or other similar setting by stating that only Evil characters can own slaves. This of course is up to each setting.
Soldiers and Spellcasters are further broken down categories of their own, but the author(s) use the MM NPCs, so you may easily use those.

Finally, we get a couple of new spells to create establishments, plus a note for basic PHB spells that can help in the construction/maintenance process, one can be really creative after all.

Closing, there are some fine ideas to finance your establishment. Some are already covered in the PHB or the DMG, but a couple of more never hurt anybody.

So, I like that and thanks Brandes for pointing it to me. It is as thorough as it should and it is almost tailored made for my purpose. To be honest, I haven’t got through the price lists in the document, but I believe they got that right.

Hey, no need to rush things. We are at least a month of real time before they finish the main module and it’ll take at least as much again for them to have some resources to start building/repairing stuff. So I guess it’ll take some time before I can worry about suitable rulesets to run that part of the game.

And all of this presumes that they survive the adventure or we keep playing of course.

Thanks for the Warlock’s Homebrew stuff!!! I’ll have a read to that as well and post a quick review here.

Uh, wow. Tall order! I… don’t know that I can have anything ready in the next few weeks, as right now all I have is an approach I want to try, and it is only useful to you as an approach if you’re interested in the PCs expanding their domain to a second settlement and beyond.

I didn’t specifically review this system, but Walrock’s Fortresses, Temples, and Strongholds homebrew is on point for 5e’s style. Check it out! http://walrock-homebrew.blogspot.com/2015/11/worldbuilding-option-fortresses-temples.html

So, I’m starting with the 13 Age rules, as they are free to find plus they are the most comprehensive as I came to understand.

Brandes, if you are anywhere near in preparing something of your own and you want somebody to playtest it, my table is at your disposal.

For a small settlement with minimal stat-tracking, Dungeon World (available online legally through its SRD) is tops. You’ll have to do some minimal conversion of “coin” to a more definite gp value, if you’re running any form of D&D/PF.

If you look into that and it doesn’t suit, Mentzer’s Companion/Rules Cyclopedia are more stat-using, but still light. I’m not an OSR loyalist, but Mentzer’s work stands up incredibly well through 34 years of other systems getting developed.

Seriously though, we’ve got a lot of (very nice) milage out of domain rulership,
I’m currently running a game where the players have inherited a keep with a few small villages surrounding it and have to clean the area. Considering the abject horrors around it this will be a long campaign.
Which system would you recommend for running a small settlement? I’d much prefer a rules light story generator system over a granular, stat-focused one.

Actually, it’s not available there.

There’s a big story behind it (you can find it under the “Controversy” header on the Wikipedia page linked to near the start of this article), but the long and short of it is that Kelestia Productions and Columbia Games are two different companies that are both producing Hârn material independently. The two products in this article are sold by Columbia Games.

(I tried to post a link to Columbia Games’ page with the PDFs of these titles for sale, but it was eaten as spam.)

You said something in your reply that I think is a good word for me to remember. You said that the data outputs just aren’t *compelling enough*…

I think that’s the thing about the domain rulership systems for me. They are interesting and have some neat looking tables and systems. They cover some interesting ground and touch on themes and concepts that D&D at the core (DMG, PHB, MM) don’t always include in detail.

But in the end, the things presented, no matter how interesting, just aren’t *compelling enough* to me to pursue them. In my D&D system of choice (4E), things like the Power Source concepts are compelling. The class roles and how they interact with the power sources are compelling. The ideas of balancing power levels of parties with enemies via the encounter structure is compelling. And so I use those things.

Thematically, the history of the world of Eberron (where my current campaign is set) is compelling. How the previous empires rose and fell, and what that means to people in the world today; the identities of the residents of the various nations and how they feel about others after the Last War; the motivations of the Dragonmarked Houses and other power groups; all of these things are compelling to me.

But the output of a domain rulership system just doesn’t quite catch my “compelling” gene!

But I said it before and I’ll say it again, the information in these articles, along with the way you presented it made for some wonderful reading. And it also has put that nugget in my mind that if some day I wanted to have more socio-political intrigue and less “save the world from certain doom” in a campaign, I know where to look for information of how to do that.

HârnManor’s copyrights are ’84 and ’99, while Household was published in ’92. I would be genuinely surprised if digital implementation was what Crossby had in mind, though it’s not impossible that he was that forward-thinking. Closer to the time of his passing in 2008, sure, that seems a lot more probable.

It would be fairly doable to build all of this into Excel or Google Spreadsheets – it’s like 5% beyond my journeyman knowledge to implement, and I could probably work it out in a day or two (and learn some useful things in the process). The system’s data outputs just aren’t compelling enough to make that exciting to me, other than the random event tables in HârnManor (which are the part that LEAST need spreadsheeting).

I’m glad that you have enjoyed the series so much!

It seems (as you mentioned) that this sort of thing would do well with a software application (or maybe even a spreadsheet) to handle the heavy lifting when it comes to the calculations, or what I call “fiddly bits”. Perhaps the writers had originally been working on a digital implementation of this system, but that wasn’t working, so they just exported all of their spreadsheet formulae and printed a book around them!

In any case, despite my desire to run away from that system in horror (despite the fact that I am a number-crunching math nerd at times), it was still a very interesting and entertaining article. Thanks again for all of these that you’ve done!