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shadow_archmagi
2015-06-30, 07:55 AM
Fluff Premise:

The Fantasy Empire is establishing a colony on this new island. The PCs are the crew of the last ship sent. The PCs are not supposed to be the last ship sent. Without regular supplies, how can several thousand people survive on this jungle-covered monster island? They'll have to keep themselves and their people alive while solving the mysteries of this place, and find out what happened to their founders. Fairly low-magic for fluff purposes; if the PCs mercenary company has four wizards in it, that's notable and a little weird and they'll be the only ones in town.

Crunch Premise:

The game will be sort of a mashup of D&D, Xcom, and Dwarf Fortress. That is, the game will have two distinct components (in the style of Xcom): An overworld game where the players manage resources and try to build this community into something sustainable despite disasters, (Ala dwarf fortress, banished, etc) and then they'll want to, on a regular basis, send tactical groups into the wilderness to explore, investigate, and secure resources. (in the style of a traditional D&D adventure.) Fairly low magic for crunch purposes; 3.5 style magic tends to rip apart a game driven by material resource concerns. The tricky part about the city-building is that since the PC town is isolated, we can't really use games that assume a level of society. It doesn't help to know that a castle requires 500 gp worth of stone, because we're not paying for the stone; we need to know how hard it is to get a castle's worth of stone out of the ground.

Players will control a stable of characters (one big stable? One group each?) and then choose which one goes on each mission, with players being compelled to alternate between characters regularly. PCs not assigned to missions can do stuff 'around the house.' IE: A Bard could be assigned to spend the week raising morale, wizards can research, fighters oversee fortifications being built, etc. Thus, character death, esp. at low levels, can be a regular thing without being crippling or causing story weirdness as a *new* 5th level character joins the party every time tragedy strikes. In the long run, when the city really gets big and the rival groups become truly apparent, there might be a few tabletop wargames as armies clash. That's actually the easiest thing to do, because Domains at War exists. GM is still in the early planning phases, but thinks around 30 PCs is a good number. (I've been pushing him to do 9 PCs per player, with 4 strength-based, 2 dex-based, 2 wisdom-based, and 1 int-based class, because I really like the 4:2:2:1 ratio)

Players will all be fairly experienced with RPGs and comfortable with houserules and cobbled-together abominations, so feel free to suggest stuff like "I think you should use the terrain-exploration rules from Legend of the Grassy Gnoll, 4E combat, 13th age Backgrounds, ACKS mortal wounds, and Shadowrun's... whatever it is that Shadowrun does well."

LibraryOgre
2015-06-30, 09:12 AM
You might look at the domain running rules from the Rules Cyclopedia, or from Birthright. Birthright, particularly, has rules for building up different kinds of power structures (so you might build up guilds to boost your economy, or law domains to boost your defense), and can be focused on by different members of the group.

Eisenheim
2015-06-30, 10:52 AM
Fate core will do you very well for this. It works well with a character stable, and there are some robust rules available for community building.

Look at Burn Shift in the Worlds on Fire book for one well-developed example.