The Wasteland at War
"You got your war in my roleplaying games!" "You got your roleplaying in my war games!"
Tabletop RPGs spawned from wargames but more often than not end up regressing back to that older form. Take, for instance, the assumed progression of some versions of D&D where the players become high enough level that dungeons just don’t do it for them anymore and they have to get their kicks not from kicking down doors from from mustering armies and invading territories. This is also what products like MCDM’s Kingdoms & Warfare offer to modern players. D&D is, at its heart, colonialist fantasy, and the money- or power-hungry player-characters are going to eventually want all that such a fantasy entails (well, maybe not the logistics of managing the territory after your conquer it; surely a steward or certified public accountant could handle that).
I enjoy board games involving similar subject matter, be it historical, in outer space, or otherwise. I hadn’t discovered D&D in high school so I was frequently in a friend's basement rolling dice not in the service of pretending to be an elf, but in order to oust another player from their Australian stronghold in Risk.
I also enjoy games like Worldwizard or Microscope where you and your players collaboratively build the world before you begin the campaign for a TTRPG. I like it so much that I wrote an entire post (Worldbuilding as a Team Sport) that both extols the virtues of this method and walks you step-by-step how I run a session zero in this mold at the start of a campaign.
But because I like consumer wargames like Risk and worldbuilding games like Microscope, I thought: why not combine them? And thus it came to be that my latest blogpost (A Game to Generate the World History for Your Campaign) lays out a new game that you can play using components from Risk and Monopoly (games that you presumably already have, just collecting dust at your parents’ house) and which will generate an entire history for your world. Not only which peoples live where, but where did they used to live, where are their cities and towns, where are the major roads, and even where are the dungeons that were abandoned during an act of warfare? Go read the post—it is one of my weirder ones, but I think also quite interesting.
Peace in Our Time
Speaking of warfare and wargames, I am currently playing an interesting variant of Diplomacy set before the onset of WWII (that’s not what’s interesting) in which everyone plays as a major and minor power, randomly assigned, and you can only see what is going on in the territories immediately adjacent to where you currently have units. I won’t belabor what is going on because hearing about someone else’s game of Diplomacy is like hearing about their dream they had last night, but I’ll share the screenshots of my countries (USSR and Rumania) on the condition that you do not somehow find my opponents and share this valuable intel with them.
Blogs in Our Time
Prismatic Wasteland wrote about thousands of years worth of total warfare represented by a board game in A Game to Generate the World History for Your Campaign while Gnomestones zoomed in to provide An Improvised System for Faction Combat in Cairn. And if you are in a war, perhaps try trusting your generals. Or don’t, but either way you should read My Favorite Villain Trope from Magnolia Keep.
Onezero writes about Three kinds of wealth abstraction rules. If you’re looking for more stuff in this vein, a bunch of bloggers wrote about economics and related concepts last here and I rounded them up previously. I am one such blogger, having written It’s the Barter Economy, Stupid, which also includes rules for abstract wealth.
1pagedungeons discusses Gameability in Dungeon Design while Bocoloid from Southern Edge provides their tips on Building a Modular Megadungeon: Design, Challenges, and First Impressions (likely the first in a series of posts). Bastionland reminds us that literal “empty” rooms are a myth, or should be, in Non-empty Rooms.
Enough about dungeons, what about dragons? Enter Elemental Reductions’ latest post for their Thoughts on Dragons. Perhaps you should also revisit the classic post from Permanent Cranial Damage, On The Ecology of Gold & Dragons.