The Dungeon Game - Simplified Domains
One of the players in my weekly Dungeon Game campaign has been very invested in having her own town and little domain to manage and build, and while in general I enjoy domain play, in this campaign I wanted to avoid stuff like this, so as a compromise I came up with some very, very simplified guidelines to help manage this. This started with the character being only level 2, and these should scale easily with the size of the domain and PC level.
Domain Type and Territory
Establish what the domain in question actually is. It can be anything from a single pub that the party or character operate, to a small base camp or a wizard's tower, to a fortress, to an entire small fiefdom if you wish. This will inform all further decisions in terms of effect of the domain or the costs for upgrades.
Domain Level and Improvement
The PCs might need to achieve a specific goal to help initially establish the domain (be granted land by the local lord, buy the pub, etc). Once they do their Domain stars at level 1. In order for a domain to increase in level it needs to make 3 improvements, the specifics of which depend on the type of domain and the rest of the context of the campaign, but would usually cost some amount of money, time or further quests to achieve.
For example, if setting up a fort in order to get it from level 1 to level 2 the party might need to:
- Build a palisade
- Hire guards to man said palisade
- Establish a storeroom of food and water
It's a good idea to make the improvements needed become harder and more expensive (in terms of time and/or money) as well as involve more further adventuring as the domain progresses.
Domains can theoretically level up infinitely, in practice it's probably best to set up limit and then maybe shift the entire domain itself into a different category in order to keep advancing it.
Domain Upkeep
The level of the domain also establishes it's upkeep per downtime (weekly or monthly). This is the abstracted cost for the domain to keep operating at its current level. A Domain's upkeep should grow with each level, with doubling it being a good benchmark.
In my own campaign I also incorporated the individual PC upkeep costs per week of downtime as part of the general domain cost, and as PCs level I usually bump up the upkeep of their domain even if it hasn't leveled up.
If the domain can't afford to cover its upkeep costs for three downtimes in a row, it goes down in level. If it falls below level 1, the domain is dissolved and would need to be reestablished again.
Domain Benefits
The main reason to have the domain in the first place! What benefits are earned depend of course on the nature of the domain that is to be negotiated between the referee and the players. This can be either a recurring downtime activity that it allows the players to do, or maybe a source of passive income from a business. I would generally have a domain only have one main "thing" that it does, because anything more than that quickly stops being that simple.
Example Domain - Crownfall Keep
Domain tracker I have in my campaign Google Sheets document.
Crownfall Keep is the name of my players' domain in the valley right above the entrance to Stonehell. It currently is composed of an underground fortified base on the northern side of the valley, the repaired Gatehouse and some additional buildings, along with the nearby Ghost Beggars Redoubt. So this is it's type and it's territory.
In order to establish the domain, the party negotiated with Lord Krofax to establish a collection point for taxes levied against adventurers delving into Stonehell right outside of the dungeon, as a way to minimize loss from brigands and highwaymen attacking parties on their way back to Zorb. The deal is that the party are themselves exempt from taxes (of course), and also get to keep an extra 5% of all loot brought out for themselves, in addition to the 10% owed to Zorb.
And with that Tally Town/Crownfall Keep was born as a level 1 domain! You can see on the sheet above what advancements were used to push it to level 2, then level 3 and currently working towards level 4.
With the main purpose of the place being to levy taxes on other adventuring parties during downtime, I needed some way to figure out how that works. Now I could simply just...decide on a number and move on, but I wanted there to be some variance and so came up with the following simple simulation of parties:
Though simple very much is being stretched as now there are three 1d6+1 expeditions being launched very downtime week, with each one of those needing additional rolls. Thankfully I decided to get a dice bot in the discord for the game!
The secondary purpose was to also simplify PC upkeep, since at an open table we almost instantly ran into the question of what happens to a PC that isn't around for, say, two months? Do they just go broke? Are they working? How do you handle their upkeep? So instead that was simply folded into the upkeep of the domain itself.
I have been using this for quite a few sessions now, and so far it works quite well. I can envision other domains and how those would work fairly easily, so I think that means the system has legs. Hopefully this is helpful to some of you.