Hey everyone, does anyone know of any good ways to do some basic kingdom management for D&D? The players have all now become kings and queens of separate lands, but I need some good solid rules on kingdom management such as food, what buildings to build in what cities, what government and its perks and non perks etc. I need a lot of rules though because one of the players is one of those people who always try to find a way around the rules. Also it would be nice if the rules were at all similar to games such as Rome total war, Shogun total war, 3 kingdoms total war etc.
Thanks to anyone who replies!
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Fighter: We need to get out of here! The Goblins are overwhelming us!
Wizard: Time to use that sketchy item the DM never stops grinning about *rolls a nat one*
Barbarian(in rage as usual): Aw Hellllllll Naw . . .
The Birthright setting from editions past has a full rulebook for running "domains", which can be not only kingdoms but also powerful temples, guilds, or magical power networks. The rules themselves are certainly adaptable to other settings and this was even done in a Dragon magazine article for the Al-Qadim setting that used to be published for DnD. I am a huge fan of the approach that was taken to domain management (and also the setting that came with the rules, though that isn't what you are asking about). There also is a 5E conversion project that was done for it. The rules focus on giving domain rulers things to deal with (often political) and actions to take related to their domain versus micromanagement of things like building a granary.
If you want a fresh take that was not based around the "blooded scion" paradigm connecting rulers to the land there is also Seeds of Wars which has extensive realm management rules. I am not nearly as familiar with this product but know it exists and that the creators are very passionate about the project. It is marketed as a "setting" but from what I understand the rules can be used in any campaign for realm building and management.
I do not have any ideas for 5E but normally by the time my characters gain a kingdom they have retired.
A king that goes out adventuring is placing his life and his kingdom into very serious jeopardy. At best he could be captured and held for ransom. At worst his enemies will take the opportunity to put a hit out on him and every archer and assassin on the continent will be hunting him down. If he travels with an army large enough to be perfectly safe he looks like he is going to war. If he travels with just a guard unit he is at risk unless he is traveling a safe and known route to a safe and known location. If he travels alone and in hiding he is at a huge risk. Any thug could take a poke at him even if they recognize him. If he shows any wealth he could be robbed and or killed for the gold in his pockets.
D&D is just not set up for mass combat among armies.
But it is nice to be able to set up the kingdoms and then retire the characters.
The DMG has very basic suggestions (with tables) regarding downtime which includes managing lands, laborers and other hirelings, subjects, and buildings. They are not presented as optional rules like things in Chapter 9 or in callout boxes strewn throughout the DMG, but as with all things 5e, the DMG encourages people to customize the suggestions for their tables' purposes.
Ever since the first release of 5e, D&D provided a ruleset to be used as the starting point but not necessarily the end-all beat-all (and keeps having to publish more and more examples of different things that could be done to gameplay because people seem to completely miss those points that were mentioned many times in the original 3 sources).
I get using RaW in competitive play as there needs to be equal understanding at every table, but source-thumping is not something WotC has ever encouraged with 5e.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I’ll echo the recommendation for Matt Colville based on word of mouth and a brief scan. I’ll also say that if your characters have reached the point where they are running an entire kingdom or even a duchy, it’s typical they’d have retired. D&D is really all about small teams facing big challenges, it’s not built around super mass combats or civilization management, so that’s an entirely different game.
There is a 5e version of the Paizo adventure path Kingmaker, in which the characters explore an untouched piece of land and turn it into a country. It includes some questing and normal adventuring as well as systems by which they do the business of developing and managing the nation that you should find helpful.
The players really need to retire those PCs to NPC status and move on to new PCs. Even if you are maintains the world as a campaign base what should happen is that they give you a set of plans for what they want and how they are going to do it then you look them over for conflicts and maybe work those conflicts into future campaign with new PCs. If, for some reason, the new PCs come into direct contact with the old ones then the player can roleplay the situation from both sides - with you watching out for and limiting metagaming.
I am not sure why people are feeling the need to tell the OP and his players how to run their campaign. Different people enjoy different aspects of roleplaying. Many of us can assure you that the trials of realm building, dealing with problems that impact a nation that you have 100% vestment in, interacting directly with other regents and faction leaders through court and political intrigues, having an alter ego so you can do things covertly, etc... can be loads of fun.
I am not sure why people are feeling the need to tell the OP and his players how to run their campaign. Different people enjoy different aspects of roleplaying. Many of us can assure you that the trials of realm building, dealing with problems that impact a nation that you have 100% vestment in, interacting directly with other regents and faction leaders through court and political intrigues, having an alter ego so you can do things covertly, etc... can be loads of fun.
I think it is less about telling them how to play and more about how this can be an issue. If the DM was prepared to run a country building campaign and just asking a few questions it might work. But it looks like they are starting from scratch. And the players have separate countries. So will they get together and all but one player sit and watch as the DM and the one player work out the goings on in their country for 3-4 hours? Will they take turns country by country?
Political intrigue and country management could be fun if the group were running one country together. Not sure how doing each players separate countries would work though.
I am not aware of any "Rules" for running a kingdom in an RPG available to the open market. You may wish to check out DriveThruRPG to see. They have quite a library of references for purchase and some small materials for free.
I entirely endorse Matt Colville's work, but I consider these books guides and not considered a set of rules. They are worth everything I ever spent on them.
I am homebrewing my own Kingdom and I am creating rules, informally, and not setting them all down in writing, for how a PC would play as a titled noble. There are many layers to my nobility system that culminate with being the King.
I wish you every success and years of enjoyment.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I can't suggest new books, but I can offer a few notes on what I do with these books.
For standard adventure, nothing changes. Player characters go on an adventure and can have a significant impact on local and regional politics based on what they get done, or stop.
If I have players who want to build up a base of operations and maybe take on a town or region as their own I go with the Coleville books. They do an okayish job of giving me a framework I can share with those players to detail what their base of operations is doing and throws in some nifty powers and rewards that inflate the game but don't ruin things. It's the reward for the players taking on some actual administration of a thing.
The Coleville books don't always agree with each other and are edited poorly due to things like that, but it's a solid B- product. Kingdoms & Warfare especially (B+) as it can stand on its own and create a layer of players being regional powers with armies and all that.
If my players want to go bigger I escalate to the Birthright rules. While they are built in the 2nd edition rules, the Domain Turn Actions end up being a straightforward d20 challenge. So it's conceptually easy. Especially if you strip away the setting-specific blood abilities, etc. and just run it as a management system. In addition to having clear rules that reward each character type for doing their political thing at scale, the Birthright rules are fantastically clear about time.
If you are managing a Domain Turn it's easy. Each Domain Turn is three months (i.e. a season), and in each of those months, a regent character can take one Domain Action (covering a month). This makes it easy for non-regent characters to identify how long their friends are spending being all fancy and political. I tend to offer non-political characters the ability to spend downtime (ala Xanathar's) to be individually productive or let people run multiple characters (one as a regent, others as characters).
This makes a three-layered-story sandwich with rules for regular old on-the-ground D&D adventures, a bit of intrigue, fun, and warfare for local powers (Kingdoms & Warfare), and then full-on national politics between several powers that be (Birthright).
All of which is to say there's no amazing set of rules that'll do it all cleanly at all scales, but if you are willing to tear apart existing materials you can find an answer.
The biggest failing that most have is the lack of time management. I like that Birthright is clear about the duration of a Domain Turn. It helps me understand where each character is in time to have that simple month-long reference.
Hey everyone, does anyone know of any good ways to do some basic kingdom management for D&D? The players have all now become kings and queens of separate lands, but I need some good solid rules on kingdom management such as food, what buildings to build in what cities, what government and its perks and non perks etc.
I would recommend keeping things very high-level, by which I mean you don't deal with decisions like which crops to plant or whether to mine copper or silver. Rulers have advisors to handle all that stuff and don't realistically have the power to unilaterally decide things like what government system to use.
Provide them with a few abstract choices - for example when I had my party manage a town, at each downtime segment they chose between four main categories to focus resources and manpower: Might, Ingenuity, Harmony, or Prosperity (modeled loosely after the OG classes fighter, wizard, cleric, rogue). All the player chooses is a direction to go in, then you determine what improvements, conflicts, benefits, and other consequences arrive from it. Focusing on Might could result in a larger army, some barracks being built, new weaponry, etc. while focusing on Ingenuity might lead to a college being founded or advances in technology. This will prevent your problem player from exploiting the system because there's not really a system to exploit, but the players still determine the destiny of their countries in broader terms.
Ultimately what I'm saying is, the fewer rules you have around this the better. This really should be a way to develop narratives within the game rather than an attempt to create an entire government simulator that will slow the D&D game to a crawl as your players try to micromanage everything and forget about whatever your primary campaign storyline might be.
Of course, if government simulator is exactly what you all want to play, by all means have at it. I've been there though and the spreadsheets and general extra DM work quickly becomes a chore, even when the actual game sessions are fun. There's undoubtedly other games out there that provide this kind of experience without making a lot of extra work for you.
Hey everyone, does anyone know of any good ways to do some basic kingdom management for D&D? The players have all now become kings and queens of separate lands, but I need some good solid rules on kingdom management such as food, what buildings to build in what cities, what government and its perks and non perks etc. I need a lot of rules though because one of the players is one of those people who always try to find a way around the rules. Also it would be nice if the rules were at all similar to games such as Rome total war, Shogun total war, 3 kingdoms total war etc.
Thanks to anyone who replies!
Fighter: We need to get out of here! The Goblins are overwhelming us!
Wizard: Time to use that sketchy item the DM never stops grinning about *rolls a nat one*
Barbarian(in rage as usual): Aw Hellllllll Naw . . .
Matt Colville has 2 kingdoms/strongholds/ warfare books. Some people swear by them, others don’t care for them, but they may be worth checking out.
The Birthright setting from editions past has a full rulebook for running "domains", which can be not only kingdoms but also powerful temples, guilds, or magical power networks. The rules themselves are certainly adaptable to other settings and this was even done in a Dragon magazine article for the Al-Qadim setting that used to be published for DnD. I am a huge fan of the approach that was taken to domain management (and also the setting that came with the rules, though that isn't what you are asking about). There also is a 5E conversion project that was done for it. The rules focus on giving domain rulers things to deal with (often political) and actions to take related to their domain versus micromanagement of things like building a granary.
If you want a fresh take that was not based around the "blooded scion" paradigm connecting rulers to the land there is also Seeds of Wars which has extensive realm management rules. I am not nearly as familiar with this product but know it exists and that the creators are very passionate about the project. It is marketed as a "setting" but from what I understand the rules can be used in any campaign for realm building and management.
Birthright on DM's guild: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/16938/Birthright-Campaign-Setting-2e?src=hottest_filtered&filters=0_0_0_0_45362_0_0_0
Birthright 5E project: http://www.birthright.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?49-BRCS-5th-Edition
Scions of the Desert article showing Birthright rules integrated with another campaign: https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg233.pdf
And the Seeds of Wars website: https://seedsofwars.com/
I do not have any ideas for 5E but normally by the time my characters gain a kingdom they have retired.
A king that goes out adventuring is placing his life and his kingdom into very serious jeopardy. At best he could be captured and held for ransom. At worst his enemies will take the opportunity to put a hit out on him and every archer and assassin on the continent will be hunting him down.
If he travels with an army large enough to be perfectly safe he looks like he is going to war.
If he travels with just a guard unit he is at risk unless he is traveling a safe and known route to a safe and known location.
If he travels alone and in hiding he is at a huge risk. Any thug could take a poke at him even if they recognize him. If he shows any wealth he could be robbed and or killed for the gold in his pockets.
D&D is just not set up for mass combat among armies.
But it is nice to be able to set up the kingdoms and then retire the characters.
The DMG has very basic suggestions (with tables) regarding downtime which includes managing lands, laborers and other hirelings, subjects, and buildings. They are not presented as optional rules like things in Chapter 9 or in callout boxes strewn throughout the DMG, but as with all things 5e, the DMG encourages people to customize the suggestions for their tables' purposes.
Ever since the first release of 5e, D&D provided a ruleset to be used as the starting point but not necessarily the end-all beat-all (and keeps having to publish more and more examples of different things that could be done to gameplay because people seem to completely miss those points that were mentioned many times in the original 3 sources).
I get using RaW in competitive play as there needs to be equal understanding at every table, but source-thumping is not something WotC has ever encouraged with 5e.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I’ll echo the recommendation for Matt Colville based on word of mouth and a brief scan. I’ll also say that if your characters have reached the point where they are running an entire kingdom or even a duchy, it’s typical they’d have retired. D&D is really all about small teams facing big challenges, it’s not built around super mass combats or civilization management, so that’s an entirely different game.
There is a 5e version of the Paizo adventure path Kingmaker, in which the characters explore an untouched piece of land and turn it into a country. It includes some questing and normal adventuring as well as systems by which they do the business of developing and managing the nation that you should find helpful.
Here is a previous discussion of Colville's related products that I recall from a few months ago:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/115477-should-i-buy-kingdoms-and-warfare-ive-been-burned
One more option I came across while searching after seeing this thread is "Ultimate Kingdoms" - no familiarity with it.
https://www.makeyourgamelegendary.com/products-page/5th-edition/ultimate-kingdoms-5e/
The players really need to retire those PCs to NPC status and move on to new PCs. Even if you are maintains the world as a campaign base what should happen is that they give you a set of plans for what they want and how they are going to do it then you look them over for conflicts and maybe work those conflicts into future campaign with new PCs. If, for some reason, the new PCs come into direct contact with the old ones then the player can roleplay the situation from both sides - with you watching out for and limiting metagaming.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
I am not sure why people are feeling the need to tell the OP and his players how to run their campaign. Different people enjoy different aspects of roleplaying. Many of us can assure you that the trials of realm building, dealing with problems that impact a nation that you have 100% vestment in, interacting directly with other regents and faction leaders through court and political intrigues, having an alter ego so you can do things covertly, etc... can be loads of fun.
I think it is less about telling them how to play and more about how this can be an issue. If the DM was prepared to run a country building campaign and just asking a few questions it might work. But it looks like they are starting from scratch. And the players have separate countries. So will they get together and all but one player sit and watch as the DM and the one player work out the goings on in their country for 3-4 hours? Will they take turns country by country?
Political intrigue and country management could be fun if the group were running one country together. Not sure how doing each players separate countries would work though.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
I am not aware of any "Rules" for running a kingdom in an RPG available to the open market. You may wish to check out DriveThruRPG to see. They have quite a library of references for purchase and some small materials for free.
I entirely endorse Matt Colville's work, but I consider these books guides and not considered a set of rules. They are worth everything I ever spent on them.
I am homebrewing my own Kingdom and I am creating rules, informally, and not setting them all down in writing, for how a PC would play as a titled noble. There are many layers to my nobility system that culminate with being the King.
I wish you every success and years of enjoyment.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I can't suggest new books, but I can offer a few notes on what I do with these books.
For standard adventure, nothing changes. Player characters go on an adventure and can have a significant impact on local and regional politics based on what they get done, or stop.
If I have players who want to build up a base of operations and maybe take on a town or region as their own I go with the Coleville books. They do an okayish job of giving me a framework I can share with those players to detail what their base of operations is doing and throws in some nifty powers and rewards that inflate the game but don't ruin things. It's the reward for the players taking on some actual administration of a thing.
The Coleville books don't always agree with each other and are edited poorly due to things like that, but it's a solid B- product. Kingdoms & Warfare especially (B+) as it can stand on its own and create a layer of players being regional powers with armies and all that.
If my players want to go bigger I escalate to the Birthright rules. While they are built in the 2nd edition rules, the Domain Turn Actions end up being a straightforward d20 challenge. So it's conceptually easy. Especially if you strip away the setting-specific blood abilities, etc. and just run it as a management system. In addition to having clear rules that reward each character type for doing their political thing at scale, the Birthright rules are fantastically clear about time.
If you are managing a Domain Turn it's easy. Each Domain Turn is three months (i.e. a season), and in each of those months, a regent character can take one Domain Action (covering a month). This makes it easy for non-regent characters to identify how long their friends are spending being all fancy and political. I tend to offer non-political characters the ability to spend downtime (ala Xanathar's) to be individually productive or let people run multiple characters (one as a regent, others as characters).
This makes a three-layered-story sandwich with rules for regular old on-the-ground D&D adventures, a bit of intrigue, fun, and warfare for local powers (Kingdoms & Warfare), and then full-on national politics between several powers that be (Birthright).
All of which is to say there's no amazing set of rules that'll do it all cleanly at all scales, but if you are willing to tear apart existing materials you can find an answer.
The biggest failing that most have is the lack of time management. I like that Birthright is clear about the duration of a Domain Turn. It helps me understand where each character is in time to have that simple month-long reference.
I would recommend keeping things very high-level, by which I mean you don't deal with decisions like which crops to plant or whether to mine copper or silver. Rulers have advisors to handle all that stuff and don't realistically have the power to unilaterally decide things like what government system to use.
Provide them with a few abstract choices - for example when I had my party manage a town, at each downtime segment they chose between four main categories to focus resources and manpower: Might, Ingenuity, Harmony, or Prosperity (modeled loosely after the OG classes fighter, wizard, cleric, rogue). All the player chooses is a direction to go in, then you determine what improvements, conflicts, benefits, and other consequences arrive from it. Focusing on Might could result in a larger army, some barracks being built, new weaponry, etc. while focusing on Ingenuity might lead to a college being founded or advances in technology. This will prevent your problem player from exploiting the system because there's not really a system to exploit, but the players still determine the destiny of their countries in broader terms.
Ultimately what I'm saying is, the fewer rules you have around this the better. This really should be a way to develop narratives within the game rather than an attempt to create an entire government simulator that will slow the D&D game to a crawl as your players try to micromanage everything and forget about whatever your primary campaign storyline might be.
Of course, if government simulator is exactly what you all want to play, by all means have at it. I've been there though and the spreadsheets and general extra DM work quickly becomes a chore, even when the actual game sessions are fun. There's undoubtedly other games out there that provide this kind of experience without making a lot of extra work for you.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm