Gisli's Saga and Boot Hill

I read Gisli's Saga the other day and something about it reminded me of Chocolate Hammer's Boot Hill campaign.  It got me thinking about how one could set up a powderkeg for a saga quite similar to that, but perhaps smaller in number of characters.

Thorkel and Gisli are brothers from Norway who settle in Hawkdale in Iceland, and marry into Hawkdale families.  Gisli marries Auda, the sister of a man named Vestein, while Thorkel marries Asgerda.  It comes out that Asgerda fancied Vestein, leading to suspicions of infidelity and eventually the deaths of about a dozen men.

Asgerda's interest in (already-married) Vestein is a pre-existing fault line in the micro-setting that the player-character-like outsiders Thorkel and Gisli stumble (and then marry) into.  It doesn't seem like it would be too much of a stretch to build a tiny setting of 5-10 extended families with a bunch of such fault lines:

• a long-simmering dispute over grazing-land or property lines
• a contentious dividing of property among a man's heirs
  
• a father who mislikes his daughter's favored suitor
  
• a bastard child whose step-mother hates it
• a badly-treated thrall
• a wheel of cheese stolen in a hard winter
  
• a good sword borrowed and never returned
• a badly-given gift
  
• a lad whose father was slain, who wants eventual revenge on his killer but can't get it yet
• an insult in one's cups at the Althing some years back; cooler heads prevented bloodshed then but still it rankles
  
• weregeld accepted for a relative slain but some family members still think the slayer should've been made an outlaw instead
• a suspected cheater at sports or horse-fighting
• a man envious of another's wealth, desirous of the priesthood / chieftainship
  
• a rich man who is miserly to guests and alters deals, gets away with it because he has several strong brothers
  
• a skilled duelist who runs roughshod and takes what he pleases, challenges those who object (returns from sea-roving mid-campaign to shake things up, presumably)
  
• a suspected sorcerer feared by those outside his family
• three town gossips poking their noses in everything and spreading news of dubious veracity
• a skolding wife who urges her husband to unwise deeds
• a husband who mistreated his wife, causing her to return to her family's house; a dispute over the dowry
  
• a hot-headed young man, yet unproven in battle and eager for it (probably about ten of these, really)
  
• a cool-headed young man, goaded by his father as unmanly for preferring words to violence
• a wise man's foreboding prediction
• an ominous dream

And then let some player characters loose into it to get into trouble over the course of a few years of game-time.

I don't know what system you'd use for such a game - Pendragon, Mythras, and Wolves of God all spring to mind, but they're not quite Boot Hill.  But it's an interesting thought.

... I suppose it would be amusing to hack up Boot Hill's ranged combat system to instead do high-detail, few-combatant, armorless melees of axes, bill-hooks, spears, swords, and shields...  "Grim cut off Skiolld's foot at the ankle-joint, but Helgi thrust him through with his spear, and he got his death there and then" seems like the sort of thing a derivative of Boot Hill's combat system would do well.

Traveller, Open Tables, and Boot Hill

There's been some discussion of Traveller on ACKS discord lately and it has me thinking.

All of the Traveller campaigns I've run or played in have been of the "crew of a single ship, small-cast" model.  And Mongoose Traveller, at least, explicitly encourages this with the party skill package.  But what would an open table Traveller campaign look like?  How would you make that work?

If I thought adapting ACKS to open-table play would be tough, Traveller seems a whole 'nother animal.

The biggest difficulty, obviously, is ships.  If there is no party-as-a-whole to own a ship, do you instead have individual players hold the leases on ships?  But then what do you do in a session where no player who has a ship is present?  Is this what the rules for paying for passage are for?  And likewise, what do you do if multiple players with ships are present?  Do you just both go to the same place, convoy-style?  Do you let one ship sit idle?  But then you're paying loan for something you're not using, which brings up another point - if you're a loan-holding player and you can't make a session but time passes in-universe, then what?

Maybe it's best to assume that ships sitting idle are doing boring local deliveries that just break even.

I suppose another answer to the trouble of ships would be "the party (as in the whole playerbase) is a corporation", with ships, debts, and treasury held in common.  But then what if some particular session's subparty really screws up and gets the ship destroyed, or loots the party treasury?

(I suppose another solution to the ship problem is to break with tradition and embrace jump-capable small craft, allowing you to move a party but not a whole lot of gear on a much smaller budget than a typical starship)

Another difficulty - what do you do if you do have a ship-holder at a particular session, but no pilot?  Here again, a seldom-used rule might be relevant: salaries for various crew positions on MgT1e page 137.  The rules in Pirates of Drinax for hiring NPCs would help too.  But it could get weird if the NPC part of your crew is getting paid salaries while the PC part of your crew isn't, and weirder still if you pay different PCs different rates.

Cost of Living for different PCs with different SOC stats (MgT1e page 87) also poses difficulties.

There also isn't really a good Traveller equivalent of a megadungeon.  I suppose one could build an enormous wreck to explore over the course of a campaign, but megadungeons benefit from being fantastical environments which admit lots of internal variance; in a simulated "real" space, you can't do that, so it risks getting dull. 

On the other hand, open table Traveller could be a lot of fun, in part on the basis of variety between planets.  One of the things I liked about Traveller is that it can vary a lot adventure to adventure; it's easy to do Firefly one session, Alien the next, and Mad Max after that.  And in an open table environment, with a broad set of players with different preferences and different skills, it seems like such variation might be more welcome than in a higher-continuity campaign.  It might even be a good excuse to bring out some of the supplements from time to time - if you don't have a ship this session, sign on for a short tour with some mercs and do Hammer's Slammers with Striker this session, or do a stint of private eye work and bust out Agent.

But the point about salaries brought another things to mind: Boot Hill's campaign structure as described in the books, where each player is doing their own thing and you occasionally convene to resolve combats.  A subsector with one or two high-tech or industrial worlds and a smattering of low-pop worlds starts to look rather like the Boot Hill campaign map, with a central "city" and a smattering of ranches, homesteads, and mines.  An X-boat route is a lot like a telegraph line, while an established jump-1 trade route has a certain resemblance to a railroad (using something like warpgate stations instead of ship-mounted FTL really starts to look like a railroad, in that you have to build expensive infrastructure and only service certain spots).  And like Boot Hill, Traveller admits high-volume automation of NPC generation; the process is more complicated, but the output is still simpler than most characters in D&D-type games (particularly if you prune some of the softer noncombat skills / go back to Classic Traveller).  Lining up the passage of real time with the passage of game-time like in OD&D's campaign rules puts the "one week per jump" rule in a new light (I don't know that you'd really want to do 1:1 time, but it's an interesting idea.  2:1 might be more reasonable, so you can do a week in jump and a week in port per IRL week).

A lot of interesting options open up when you break the notion of "party", move to a big cast of PCs with conflicting interests, and maintain campaign-time.  Multiple PC-run mercenary companies, possibly deployed against each other from time to time?  Some players playing at Merchant Prince scale, some players playing individual crewmen of ships and earning salary?  Cat-and-mouse games between PC leaseholders and PC jump tracers?  PC pirates and smugglers who accumulate bounties vs PC bounty hunters, like Boot Hill's dynamic between lawmen and outlaws?  PC belt miners claim jumping each other?  Your hit the motherlode of radioactives and next thing you know you're hiring PC mercenaries to keep the PC pirates off of you.

There's a whole weird world of ways of playing when you let each player play their own subgame which interacts with other players' subgames, and it seems under-explored in tabletop games.  If you don't want to deal with ship mortgages, or asteroid mining, or whatever, there's no party dragging you into dealing with that particular mechanic.  On the other hand, "many players independently playing their own interacting subgames in spaaace" may have also just described EVE Online.  But there's something to be said for games that have below Dunbar's Number of players and a flexible referee.

And Traveller covers two of Boot Hill's weaknesses: lack of information on economy and yields of various activities (if anything Traveller refs are spoiled for choices, across the various editions) and political difficulties around the Wild West setting.

BH2 and Lost Secrets of the Old Hexmappers

Having read the Boot Hill rules, I decided to pick up a couple of the old modules too, because hey, you can get the whole line for less than a single expensive system.  I read BH5: Range War first and it was fine (sadly it did not have the "how much does having a farm or ranch earn you, the owner?" questions I had from the core rules), but BH2: Lost Conquistador Mine (by no less a pair than Cook and Moldvay) has some interesting stuff going on.

In particular, there's a hex map of a region of wilderness and they do some things with it that I've never seen on a hex map for an RPG before. 

The two biggest and most obviously novel things are that some hex-sides are marked as impassable, and the visibility distances of some features are marked on the map itself.

Impassable hex-sides occur along ridge-lines through high mountains.  On reflection this seems like sort of an obvious thing to do, coming from the wargaming tradition - there are impassable hex-sides on the OGRE map, if I recollect rightly.  But I've never seen it on an RPG wilderness map before!  The best you ever get is that rivers are sometimes impassable except at certain points.  But making hex-sides impassable for other reasons is an interesting tool for the Wilderness as Dungeon toolbox - sometimes the rooms really do have hard walls!  And it gives Climb Sheer Surfaces a use in wilderness play too.  This might be an interesting way to represent the fact that many mountains can only be summited by a few routes (four trails up Fuji, fewer up Everest and Rainier if I recollect rightly).

Mountain peaks are also marked with a pair of numbers, the first representing the number of hexes away from which they can be seen with the naked eye, and the second representing the distance at which they can be seen with a telescope.  I don't know how they determined these numbers; it seems like taking prominence above surrounding terrain into account could be tricky.  But they look mostly pretty reasonable, if you're willing to accept the abstraction that they're visible at the same distance in all directions.  Anyway, I'm just thrilled to see spotting distance for mountain peaks on a hex-map at all.  The Old Masters were worrying about the same things that Trilemma and I do.  Maybe we're on the right track.

Visible from 2 5-mile hexes with the naked eye, or 6 hexes with a telescope

On a similar "on the right track" note, the module comes with a hex-map for the players to fill in as they explore, with just a small section around the starting town filled in.  Cook and Moldvay knew: Never show them the map!

And the treasure map that is given to players is a stained, torn, creased, hand-drawn mess, and the text on it is in German (back in a pre-smartphone pre-machine translation age).  German is a great choice really, since it's sort of close to English, enough that you can probably draw some conclusions in combination with the drawings, but not high-confidence ones.  Some of the landmarks on it are also no longer accurate within the game-world, or not quite as unique as the map's author thought.  It's a wonderful "give them some hints but don't just tell them where it is" treasure map.

A curiosity that I hadn't seen on a hex map before is that there's a dry riverbed, which can only be entered and exited in certain directions in certain hexes.  Naturally, it can also flash-flood.  Sort of a variation on blocked hex-sides.

One other odd property of this map is its sparseness.  I haven't done a precise count of its rows and columns, but I reckon it about 20 hexes tall and 50 or 60 wide.  In those thousand hexes, there are about 15 named and described features (which have visibility numbers in the map's key) only a couple of which have people, plus about ten mountain peaks.  It's very sparse.  And only about ten wilderness encounters are described (one of which can only take place in a particular region).  So I'm not sure what to make of this.  I'm a big believer that putting something in every hex is an unreasonable amount of work, but having one feature per 40 hexes (counting the peaks) is lower than even I would expect.  It's an interesting reference point I suppose.  Maybe this is partly because it was intended as a tournament module and only needed to fill a single-digit number of hours; there was no need to fill a hex map to the same degree that you would if you were to run a sustained campaign on it?

In any case, a very interesting hex-map.

Truer Combat as War

Was thinking more about Chocolate Hammer's Boot Hill campaign, and I had the realization:

This is much more Combat as War than any OSR game I've run.

We may like to talk about how B/X or ACKS or whatever is combat as war because poison is save-or-die and you have to actually prepare when you go to fight vampires, but ultimately I am forced to the conclusion that it's still basically combat as sport.  It's a much rougher sport than newer editions of D&D.  It's more like baseball, if you were sometimes the Yankees and sometimes the Pittsburgh Pirates, depending on the situation, and yeah sometimes you lose hard and and people get cut from your roster; unfair/asymmetric sport with permanent consequences.  But it's not no holds barred, please enjoy your complimentary assassins combat as war.

And this sort of settles a conflict I've had.  I've had this gut feeling that if I were to run a B/X-y type game again, I'd kind of want to run it fairly clean; here's a big dungeon to explore at your own pace, your various classes have tools for dealing with particular kinds of threats, you don't really need to cheese because you have the agency to go where you want and avoid hard fights until you feel like you're ready, and in exchange I would like you to, you know, not cheese too hard.  Because presumably if your crazy plan to research broken-ass spells or flood the dungeon worked, every other wizard would've already done it, so there must be an in-world reason that they haven't, but coming up with reasons the game world isn't totally broken every week is a lot of work that I'm not spending on forward prep.  It's fire that prevents me from motion.  And being Basic-lineage D&D, the system wasn't written with rules lawyers in mind anyhow - and that's part of what's attractive about it in the first place!

Maybe the argument I want to be making here is that while any single combat in B/X might be won in a single round by a single character, possibly cheekily / by CaW means, when you zoom out and look at the expedition as a whole, it looks a lot sportier - each class does have a role to fill, each class has some combats that are theirs to carry.  I'm not sure about this thesis and maybe it warrants further thought and elaboration.

In any case, this desire for a nice clean game of pure, fundamental, elemental Basic D&D is in tension with combat as war, because combat as war says "if you're not cheating, you're not playing."

Maybe the right metaphor here is limited war vs total war.  Keegan would argue that just about every society that has warfare has invented limited war.  If goblins and adventurers come into regular conflict with each other, there will probably be some informal conventions that emerge.

Maybe my conclusion is that "having seen what combat as total war looks like in an RPG when you really commit to it, maybe I'm more OK with taking a sportier position for (Basic) D&D."

Which isn't to say that I don't also want to run a maximalist combat-as-war game - I just don't think it should be (Basic) D&D!

Boot Hill 2e Notes

Following reading Chocolate Hammer's post about his Boot Hill campaign, I felt compelled to go take a look at the Boot Hill ruleset.  Thanks, Wizards, for putting it up on DriveThruRPG as a pdf.

No scale on the big hexmap?  It's a nice looking map, though there are only two settlements on it.  They've left a lot of empty for users to fill on, which was nice of them.  No scale on the map, unfortunate.

These rules are aimed at enjoyment on a plane unusual to wargaming, the individual and personal. Rather than commanding hordes of troops, players typically have but a single figure, their "character".

A rather luminary list of playtesters.

Wow there was an ad for GenCon in here.  In unrelated news, I just realized the Gen in GenCon is probably from Lake Geneva.

The discussion of campaigns emphasizes both having players "on both sides of the law" and that one advantage of having a referee is that players can make secret plans without each others' knowledge.

A single player running multiple characters in a single campaign is permissible as long as they "have little cause to cooperate or conflict with each other".

10 second rounds, 6 foot squares (on the town map).  Hexes on the hex map are 2 miles. The week is suggested as the best unit for campaign timekeeping.

In most instances. players will not find their characters involved in every tabletop action that results in a campaign. This allows non-involved players to assume one-time roles as participant characters in the action being played out, while the involved players take their own character's role - for better or worse.

Stats: speed, shooting accuracy, throwing accuracy, strength, bravery, and experience

Some weird breakpoints in stat generation in the way player characters get bonuses - if you roll a 69 (nice) you get a +10 for being in the 50-70 range and end up with a 79, but if you roll a 71 you only get +5 for being in the 71-90 range and end up with 76.

This experience system is really interesting.  Your experience stat is tracked in terms of the number of gunfights you have participated in (with some reasonable chance of death for yourself) and survived.  When you're rolling a new character, you roll a d% and index it into a table and most starting characters will have been in 0-2 fights before, which probably gives you a small penalty to hit.  But as you participate in gunfights during play, you can move up this table.  It's a very...  tied-to-the-world experience system (diegetic, as the kids would say).  You get better at shooting at people while in danger yourself by...  shooting at people who are shooting at you.

There's also a separate progression system that increases your speed and bravery percentile stats very slightly for each gunfight survived.  The lower they are, the faster they rise, but never more than 3% per combat, and this can never bring a stat above 96%, which is a separate regime for bonuses.  So you can get pretty fast by experience, but the savants are born that way.

You can never actually increase shooting accuracy or strength (toughness).  Maybe the right way to think of the shooting accuracy stat is depth perception and manual dexterity, things that you can't really improve with experience, versus experience and bravery.

Derived stats: first shot determination (sum up the various speed scores and weapon speed factors and see who gets to attack first in the attack phase of the combat round) and hit determination (what you need to roll to hit with a particular weapon, determined by a combination of skill, bravery, and experience)

Movement rules look pretty reasonable.

Facing!  But it's mostly for observation, not for arcs of fire or hit determination I think.

Shotguns and scatterguns seem to affect biiig areas.  "All possible targets in the field of fire will be individually checked to determine whether or not they are hit".  I could see this slowing things down a bit...  but they also fire pretty late in the round, so by that point it might just be mop-up.

OK wow this melee system.  Two tables (punching and grappling) that interact in weird ways.  Each melee round you choose either punch or grapple.  Generally rolling high is good, because it lets you hit, deal damage, and inflict a penalty to the other guy's next action.  Rolling high on grapple lets you put the other guy in a lock and restricts his ability to punch a lot.  Rolling low on grapple gets you kneed in the face for some damage and a bonus on your opponent's next melee roll, on either table.  But if you're in a lock, there are two ways to escape: rolling pretty high on the grappling table, or very low on the grappling table, and it's 2d10 so it's bell-curved.  So if you have a big penalty from getting hit hard last round, that can help you escape a grapple.  Meanwhile on the punching table, rolling low gives your opponent a bonus to their next action but not as big a one as a low roll to initiate a grapple (you've left yourself open, but not put your face right where they can knee you), so if you're burdened with penalties and not grappled, punching is probably a better plan than initiating grapple, because the worst possible outcome is less bad.

Attacking with a melee weapon uses the punching table, except on a hit instead of inflicting small damage and a penalty, you do a wound just like hitting with a gunshot would.  Hits from weapons get assigned randomly to body parts and are either light, serious, or mortal.  Leg injuries slow your movement, arm injuries penalize your shooting aim (but not melee I think?  RAW anyway, it would be a reasonable house rule), head injuries have a 60% chance of being immediately fatal, injuries of most any kind reduce your speed in combat and may make you shoot later in the turn which can mean getting shot again in the interim.

Other things that affect your to-hit target number for shooting: whether you moved (and how fast), whether your target moved (and how fast), multiple shots this turn, shooting from the hip (but this gives you a speed bonus), shooting with a pistol in each hand or with your off-hand, ...  It's a lot of potential modifiers.  They're almost all multiples of 5% though, which...  makes converting this to d20s kind of tempting.

There are also a bunch of modifiers to shooting speed, for things like "you already drew and are aiming at them", "fired at them last round", surprise, drawing multiple weapons, and giving your opponent the first move.  Some of these aren't multiples of 5%, but most of them are.

One thing I'm less clear on is how picking up weapons and other sorts of non-attacking non-movement actions work.  The melee example has a character pick up a chair to use as a weapon and I guess he just...  did it for free?

At this point we've cleared all the Basic Rules and are now on page 12 of 44, Advanced Rules.  Secret and simultaneous movement (I love this), firing in the middle of a move, firing from a moving stagecoach, shooting at targets who are on horseback and maybe hitting the horse, arcing arrows over cover, and morale. 

Optional rules begin on page 13, things like called shots, interleaving shots rather than "first person to shoot shoots three times before anyone else can", stunning, drunkenness, gambling, dynamite (can self-detonate, very exciting), gatling guns, grapeshot cannons, stray bullets hitting bystanders, more campaign rules.  Tracking, how long does it take to assemble a posse, overland speed as a function of horse quality (why wouldn't horses have quality ratings?), aging, healing, cost of living and salaries for doing various jobs.  

Ah, the good old days when you could live on $25 a month, and whiskey was $2 a bottle. 

The tracking table is interesting, it seems like your two options for effectively escaping pursuit are to get into hard / rocky terrain or to get into a large town and blend in.  Makes sense.

The table of NPC stats by job type that Chocolate Hammer programmed a generator for.  Five pages of stats for various historical outlaws, including their bounties and whether they were ambidextrous.

Two tactical scenarios, one a straightforward 4v4 at the OK Corral, the other a double bank robbery pitting prepared robbers against some randomly-generated townsfolk using whatever armament they happen to have on them at the time.

Two campaign scenarios, one more concrete (with a big list of NPCs) and the second more "here are some suggestions for where to set the hex map within the Territories, some ideas for other stuff to put on the hex map, some ideas for stuff to happen, good luck have fun", including this great piece of structure:

The players should be divided into two basic groups - lawmen and out-
laws. There can also be an assortment of prominent citizens - ranchers,
businessmen, and so on...

Players opting to be outlaws start their own gangs by hiring non-player characters and/ or by joining with other player characters of similar bent. None of the player outlaws are wanted by the law at the start of the game. so they are free to travel and act as they please until such time as they break the law...

The objective of outlaw players is to be the first to accumulate $I00,000
and safely escape from the area. The objective of the lawmen players is to be the one who garners the most reward money for capturing outlaws without being killed (all player outlaws must be captured for any lawman to win).

It's a little unclear to me how player outlaws are supposed to afford hiring NPC gang members, given that "Hired Gunfighter" salary is $5/day.  I wonder if you can offer shares instead.

Finally at the very end we have some rules for "how much money is in the safe you just blew up with dynamite" (or was in that stagecoach you robbed, or that train, or that guy's pockets, or so forth) and some terrible looking rules for interoperating with other TSR games including AD&D.

A couple of maps of building interiors and then a reference section of tables and character sheets.

I suppose one other thing that puzzles me here is that they mention even bigger-scale games: "A typical campaign of the designers has each player starting as a property owner and ends with each player trying to gain complete economic and political control of the county."  But I don't see a good way to adjudicate that.  Maybe it's in the supplements?  Or maybe they just had some reference works they liked on the period at their local library and went with numbers from those?

Chocolate Hammer's Boot Hill Campaign

This is a heck of a post.

So I created a town.

When GMs say this, they usually mean they created the narrative of a town: a pencil map, a few key buildings, a dozen significant NPCs. But my hyperefficient tool lent itself to a more extreme approach. My goal became to marry the organic, procedurally-generated detail of a videogame like Dwarf Fortress with the human consciousness and genuine reactivity of a tabletop game. My town would have hundreds of named characters—and nearly as many grudges...

Everywhere in town, I stretched tensions as thin as they’d go. Here, a deeply crooked and vicious campaign for sheriff. There, “respectable” business owners versus “rowdy” roughnecks. In the boonies, robbers versus marshals, marshals versus deputies, robber gangs versus robber gangs, a gangs robbers versus its robbers. A powder keg of a county, always ready to blow.

Then I dropped the players into it.

It may seem like my goal was to create as many combats as possible, but that’s not true at all. I knew that if PCs died every few minutes and there was no continuity of story, even gory Boot Hill combat would grow boring. Instead I designed my setting to offer the constant threat of violence: the tension of knowing that a sudden and fatal battle might result from any misstep.

After all, a powder keg’s more thrilling when it hasn’t blown up yet.

Not many games discourage players from pissing off NPCs. The worst thing an aggrieved character can do is fight you, and that’s just where most RPG characters are built to succeed. I know from personal experience that, roleplaying aside, it’s tempting to conclude: “I’m going to fight this douchebag eventually. Why not get it over with now?”

Played ruthlessly, Boot Hill‘s mechanics and milieu produce very different expectations. That any character can die easily in a fair fight is almost a moot point; if you provoke a cattle baron or a slimy industrialist or a crooked sheriff, he’s not going to get his henchmen and fight you fairly. He’s going to pay someone to shoot you in the back with a shotgun, and if you’re not ready for it, that’s not much better than a death sentence. The only reason the streets aren’t awash with blood at all times is that the NPCs are also hapless mortals that have to watch where they step. That’s another reason to fill the setting with conflicts rather than prebuilt adversaries: the PCs stand to live longer if there’s a balance everyone else fears upsetting. 

Faithfully roleplaying the game’s emergent “villains,” or the characters willing to risk death and murder to get their ends, comes with a set of broadly-applicable rules. Don’t fight unless the rewards or risks are too great to avoid it. If you’ve got power or money, abuse it to keep yourself safe and your interests protected. Confront enemies directly only when you’ve got the force to bully them into backing down or surrendering; otherwise, strike from ambush. Use the extent of your cunning or guile. Be wary of crossing other powerful interests, like the law or organized crime; strike surgically whenever possible. Wait for the right moment.

Very naturally, the players found themselves observing the same rules...

I wouldn’t normally end a player character like that, let alone two at once. In most games it would be an ignominious and frustrating end to a story. But for this story, for this campaign, it worked. It was the ending that was earned: the ultimate escalation of a war between bitter and heartless people. It was thrilling, tense, and an epic finale that did justice to the danger both characters had been in the entire time.

Sounds like one for the Inspirational Campaigns file, next to West Marches.

The bit about having a concrete cast of a few hundred reminded me of Ker's remark on Icelandic literature - "All history in Iceland shaped itself as biography, or as drama, and there was no large crowd at the back of the stage."

And it seems like precisely the vicious, Renegade Crownsy sort of campaign that I have tried to get at with ACKS (particularly the first summer of the Shieldlands campaign) and never quite succeeded at, perhaps, as the author points out, because PCs even in OSR D&D have a tendency to solve their problems directly.  Because they can (eventually).  Another part of it might be that managing a big stable of NPCs, even with characters as simple as OSR D&D characters, is still a fair bit of mechanical complexity.  My henchman generator is pretty good but it still doesn't do class proficiencies, and magic items and spells lists introduce a lot of variance in capabilities.

So this is really something to think about.  Maybe I need to get even simpler and even deadlier.