Lone Wolf Fists: Serfdom in the post-apocalypse

"Managing societal resources" is a boring part of any game; so boring that only hopeless pedants like myself ever pay any attention to it. It's an abstraction of an abstraction of something so hideously tedious and boring that they pay people to do it. You didn't come here to do your accounting homework; you came here to breath fire on a scorpion demon.

The exact accountancy is dull, but what it represents is not. When you're painfully counting every bean from the last reluctant harvest from dead soil, you're deciding life and death for the starving survivors which are your only family and the last hope for a future for humankind.

That is great stuff! But here's been the challenge that's eaten me for this last month: how do you make that not boring?

There were two works which I kept firmly in mind as I traveled in this deep, shadowy country:
1) The Mandate of Heaven system from the Exalted storyteller's companion (2nd edition)
2) The Domain rules from the Adventurer Conqueror King System

One is a gold standard, one is a cautionary tale. Here's some things I discovered as to why, while I was creating my own game's system:

Lesson #1: Don't firewall. The Mandate of heaven is basically a separate game that you play that has nothing to do with the RPG that it's designed for. You define your dominion, play between "real" sessions, and it "generates plots" but otherwise doesn't in any way intersect with the game.

Fire-walling like this made the entire exercise pointless; what, you think I can't write down the phrase "trade war" on my own, Exalted? Pretty sure getting ideas wasn't a problem that needed a subsystem to solve.

ACKS on the other hand, has you conquer a tract of land (represented by a hex on the campaign map), clear it out of monsters, build a castle (that is your actual-factual castle, that you can stock with stuff or use to defend you kingdom or what have you), build towns, attract peasants and followers, and have them work to get you GOOOOOOOOOLD. Real, spendable, XP-bearing GOOOOLD. It's a central attraction of the entire system, and one that players get to do things with. 

If you did all this stuff in your Exalted game, it would get abstracted into a pile of dots on an unattractive, truncated character sheet and relegated to a part of the system that is totally independent of playing the game. Blech. Don't firewall kids.

Lesson #2: Keep it simple. Really simple. To do something in Mandate, you choose what is essentially a charm-based action and duke it out in a multi-step combat framework with a rival domain. It's complex, clunky, time consuming, and every step is so alienated from actual in-game events that there's no way to actually describe what's happening outside of the abstraction's framework. You do (something?) with (something?) trying to accomplish (something?) and that results in (something?).

In ACKS, you get gold from you place during downtime. How much gold? Population X Land's Bounty. You need to spend some money to upkeep this. How much money? Population X How dangerous the land is. You never touch the dice; you work this stuff out, and it makes gold happen. Bam the end.

(Okay, you might touch dice, but it's to see if the peasants are revolting, which is awesome) 

The simpler system is more concrete, direct, and SIMPLE god its just so wonderfully SIMPLE. It's a small player-work extension from tracking follower upkeep to domain upkeep; this makes it desirable by players, since they don't have to learn a completely alien system from the ground up and their reward is in GOOOOLD. 

Lesson #3: Give them a reason to care. I can't stress enough how important the rewards are: you get level-boosting GOLD, you get a headquarters, you get new options for espionage and theft, you get the ability to make powerful magic items and cast the most powerful spells... ACKS is a high water mark in game design, not just because it ties advancement to broadening the scope of the game but because this broadening of scope give rise logically to the setting of the game.

In Mandate, players spin their wheels in a pointless, disconnected minigame and their reward is that they get to participate in the generation of the GM's plots. Note that they should already have this power, because they are playing a roleplaying game as the most powerful beings within it. If they're not already generating more steam for the game than you can handle, you've already failed at living up to the promise of Exalted

Anyway, go check out ACKS, it's worth your time. Also here are the Populace and Resource rules.

....

Populaces

Not every random NPC a character meets is “Follower material”; sometimes they’re just a huddled, frightened and starving mass of post-apocalypse survivors. However, even such pathetic wretches might swear their loyalty to a powerful PC; what’s a hero to do with these noncombatant slobs?

Well, you put them to work, of course!

Populaces who swear allegiance to a character are more abstracted than proper followers and are hence easier to track. They’re represented by only two stats: Population (which is just their total headcount), and a Loyalty score: that’s it.

A character may put a Populace to work, leveraging any available resources with their hard labor. The exact resources and the amount produced depends on the fertility of the land or the productivity of its factories; this is fully explored under Resource (p.XX).

Populaces are unskilled laborers: They farm, or scavenge, or pull levers, or otherwise perform relatively simple tasks for their lords.

To produce works of art, industry and science, more skillful labor is required. This is handled by the Intellect Mechanics. (p.XX)

Growth and decline

Populaces expand and shrink over time, due to immigration, plague, starvation, and (rarely, in the fallen world) healthy live births.

Decline: At the end of any scene in which the Populace endures a hardship (famine, plague, war, etc.), check for population decline.

Roll 1d10, interpreted as follows:

• Minor hardship: The d10 represents number of persons lost. Decrease Loyalty by 1.
• Significant hardship: The d10 is the percentage of the population lost, resulting in between 1-10% lost. Round up to the next whole person. Decrease Loyalty by d5.
• Major hardship: The d10 is multiplied by 10%, resulting in between 10-100% of the population lost, rounding up to the closest whole person. Decrease Loyalty by d10.

Every time a Populace suffers losses, roll 1d10 for each named, 0-Degree NPC the players have met within that Populace; on a roll of 1, they died in the hardship.

***CALLOUT BOX*** Math nerds may note that, for a Populace of precisely 10 people, these results are identical, while for populations below 10, the more severe hardships are technically beneficial. We recommend simply adopting the “lowest” penalty of 1d10 persons lost, while keeping the more severe Loyalty drain, in these edge cases. Feel free to use this as an excuse to push your tiny Populaces to the breaking point. ***END***

Growth: At the end of any scene in which the Populace is adequately fed, housed and cared for, check for population growth.

• Surviving: Roll 1d10 and grow the population by that many persons. Increase Loyalty by 1.
• Thriving: If the Populace produces more than they need and doesn’t choose to save it, but to immediately consume it, then they are Thriving. Roll 1d10, multiply the result by 10, and grow the population by that many persons. Increase Loyalty by 1d5

Growth represents previously ill, weak or young persons becoming healthy and able-bodied, as well as the trickle of immigrants and healthy births that prosperous civilizations draw in the future’ graveyard.

Growth rates are slower than decline rates: this is the post-apocalypse, after all.

The best insurance of growth is absorbing a new Populace into an existing one. This might be a result of peaceful cooperation, or a bloody military conquest. The result is identical: The Populace grows.

However, whenever an alien culture is absorbed into a Populace, the larger of the two Populaces becomes the new dominant culture. In addition to whatever effect this has in the Tactical Infinity, this means that the largest Populace’s Loyalty becomes the new aggregate Populace’s Loyalty.

Example: Nuke decides to absorb the vanquished serfs of Seven Sorrows Raven to her gang of desert raiders. The Serfs have a Population of 140, while Nuke’s gang has a Population of 23. Nuke’s followers previously had a Loyalty of 9, but the Serfs have a pitiful Loyalty of 2. Nuke’s gang struggles to contain the unrest of the serfs, and the entire Populace’s Loyalty drops to 2.

Loyalty may grow if a culture of fanatics is absorbed. Fanatics, unfortunately, tend to bring significant cultural baggage with them.

Sustaining Populaces

People need to eat, and they need clean water to survive.

Food is important to a Populace, for obvious reasons: just like other characters, Populaces must eat once per Montage scene to survive. However, because they are accustomed to living on scraps, they can be fed less than their number might indicate.

• If fed less than ¼ of their Population, they begin dying of starvation. This is a Major Hardship.
• If fed more than ¼ but less than ½ population, they become hungry and miserable, but survive. This is a Significant Hardship
• If fed more than ½ but less total Population, they are underfed but subsist. This is a Minor Hardship.
• If fed equal to or over total Population, they are well-fed and satisfied (in lieu of other disasters, this grows their population, as outlined in Growth and Decline above)

Water however is more vital: Populaces which do not receive water rations equal to the Population sicken and die. This is always a Major Hardship.

Getting food and water is covered under Resources (p.XX)

Resources

Wars are fought over the scarce resources remaining to the World of Ashes and Ghosts. This section will give your characters reasons to fight those wars.

Places and Resources: Nodes

Resources reside in places, called Nodes; most Fields are too small to have more than one (if they have any at all), but Tracts and larger areas typically have Nodes. The larger the area, the more geographic space it encompasses, and the more Nodes it generally has.

The description of an area often provides clues to what Resource Nodes it contains (or doesn’t… barren, irradiated wastes don’t much to offer).

Types of Resource Nodes

Resource Nodes might be harvested, mined, manufactured; any kind of labor or industry is possible. There are broadly three types of Node:

• Limited Nodes have a finite sum of resources, which is extracted by labor. After their resources are extricated, they are depleted. Gold deposits in a mountainside are an example of a Limited Resource.
• Renewable Nodes regenerate their Resources given time. They are harvested for their bounty then renew unless overtaxed. Produce crops are an example of a Renewable Node.
• Manufacturing Nodes are factories of some variety. They combine the raw materials provided by Limited and Renewable Nodes into useful things. Automobile assembly lines, pharmaceutical laboratories, and bullet factories are all examples of Manufacturing Nodes.

Attributes of a Node

Below are all the attributes that define nodes. Every node has some of these, but not every node has them all. For example, a farmer’s field wouldn’t have a Deposit, but it might have a Limit.

• Resource: The specific resource produced by the node. Might have several: forests produce timber, for example, but might produce meat from hunting
• Productivity: The number of finished resources created per worker, per work scene
• Limit: The maximum amount of resources that can be produced per work scene
• Deposit: The total amount of resources present within the node. Once harvested, the node is depleted; for example, a “mined out” gold mine, or a dry oil well
• Cost: The amount of fuel needed to run the node’s productive faculties. Gasoline to run a factory’s engines, for example
• Size: The amount of space taken up by the node. A sprawling peat bog might be the size of a Domain, while a single oil well might be as small as a Field

Scavenging and subsisting

Two resources are of vital importance in the World of Ashes and Ghosts: Food and Water. Almost every population center is built around water and food producing nodes. Once these have a surplus of goods which can be saved, Populaces gradually expand their work to include non-vital operations; mining out gold or drilling for oil or rousing ancient factories into life. Societies of this level of stability become powerful in the graveyard of the world.

To represent this scrabble, a Populace may, in lieu of more profitable labor, Scavenge an area for food and water. This follows these steps:

1.    Scouting. During this step, lean-bellied scouts survey the area for food and water. Surveying a Field can be done with 10 or less people; for every greater category of land surveyed, increase either the number requirement by a factor of ten (100 for a Tract, 1000 for a Domain, etc). Or the time spent surveying by a factor of 5 (5 scenes for a Tract, 25 for a domain, etc.)

2.    Discovery. Scouting reveals every obvious resource node available in the area.

3.    Scrounging. The populace does everything in their immediate power to harvest, hunt, scrape, ration, and otherwise efficiently feed their hungry people. This allows them to survive on starvation rations with only a Minor Hardship, or any greater amount with no hardship as they bend their full skill to survival.

4.    Surplus. If they do happen to discover more than they need to survive, they can save their surplus. This might be used for future scenes of scrounging, but could also serve as the basis to feed them while they work on something more lucrative than mere subsistence.

Using a Node

At the beginning of any Montage scene, a player may direct a Populace under their control to work a Node that they occupy. For example, they might be directed to run a recently discovered oil rig, or sow and plow a rare stretch of arable land. This follows these steps:

1.    Nourishment: Populaces must be given adequate food and potable water before they begin working. Populations suffering a Major Hardship are too distressed to work this scene.

2.    Fuel: If the node requires fuel, then you must spend the type and amount it requires in this step.

3.    Work: The populace uses their muscles and performs the “unskilled” labor of tilling fields, casting fishing nets, pulling levers in a factory, or some similar task. This takes the entire Montage scene

4.    Production: Every worker produces one “unit” of the node’s Resource. If the Productivity attribute is greater than 1, it acts as a multiplier to this labor. For example, Productivity 2 would allow every worker to produce two units. You can’t produce more than the Limit, or the Deposit, whichever is smallest

Resources and Trade

You just produced a huge pile of bullets from your bullet factory: awesome! Now what? You can use them to load all those guns your followers keep insisting on, true. You could even stockpile them, so that you might use them to shoot future threats (also a great idea). But, since you’ve got such a massive ammunition surplus, you could also trade some bullets for something else you want or need.

Neighboring areas can trade at the beginning or end of any Montage scene; they move the goods quickly and safely to their bordering trade partners.

Moving loads of resources longer distances requires them to be appropriately transported (using trucks, sleds, or some other method of moving things). This follows the normal travel rules, but of course invites danger en route. This is naturally a perfect setting for some post-apocalyptic martial-arts heroics.

Nodes and the Shared Mindspace

You might be asking “What is the point of all of this?”: Good question: at its core, this system exists to give a timeframe, cost, and logistic underpinning to the activities of post-apocalypse survivors trying to build societies and defend their food and other resources. That’s it. You can use it for a lot of things, though.

Maybe you’re nutty and want to provide your population with sweater vests (I’m not at your table, I don’t know what weird crap you get up to). Maybe you want to mass-produce guns and bullets to arm your followers (that’s a little more in-genre in my opinion, but you do you sweater vest guy). This system lets you do that in a structured way.

It also forces your kung-fu superhero to defend these peoples, places and things from threats. You’re not the only warlord that could use access to a goldmine as a monetary underpinning to your burgeoning society.

Alternatively, maybe you’re the threat. You can attack a powerful foe through setting fire to their wheat fields, instead of engaging in open battle. Cripple their people’s food supply and you can undermine their empire without ever throwing a punch.

This system brings these elements into the game in a way that can matter to players.

Lone Wolf Fists: Mommy, where do martial heroes come from?

Time to talk about the birds and the bees, kiddos

You see, when a bird finds a bee scrounging through the smoldering remains of the post apocalytpia, sometimes they see the potential of the bee to transcend their boundaries and be a useful follower of the bird.

(Sometimes the bird's player just likes a bee NPC and wants to keep them around, they can do this too)

If the bee is amiable to the idea (through straight-up roleplaying or some application of the Heart skill) the bee may become the bird's disciple. It's simple to track a bee (follower's) stats: they have a single Effort die, same as any other "normal" human (bee). They have a single Health Box, and when it fills they're toast (with honey).

A bird (master) can have up to ten disciples (bees), because that keeps bookkeeping in a reasonable place and agrees with the span of control theory of personnel management. It also means that the familiar PC/follower relationship from D&D and it's many children is retained, so there's some cross-system familiarity for players of the most popular RPG (and anything I can do to reduce the cognitive overload of new players is a decent idea, in my estimation)

It gets better: a master can train their disciples. Here's where we're starting to see all that work on scene structure design pay dividends: you take a Montage scene, you train your guys. Nice and simple; we already know Montages are significant chunks of time, so we're preserving our timeline's integrity without a bunch of extra paperwork.

Later on I'll really blow you minds by linking the passing of Montage scenes to the movement of elements in the setting (you take a montage training your followers, your enemies get a montage to move their tanks toward your town, for example)

Trained followers can be organized into a Group: this allows you to treat up to ten followers as a single unit with up to Effort and Health 10 (in effect, like one "big" character, rather than many small ones). This expands your potential followers from 10 disorganized, untrained people into up to 100 well-trained units of 10 apiece.

Groups can be taught Novice-level Techniques as Tactics, which they power through Morale, rather than Prana (I'll get to this later once we learn about how groups work: it basically works the same, but it comes from a leader inspiring them rather than them tapping into their respective magical wells of power)

BUT IT GETS BETTER: Every time you train followers in the rudiments of magical Techniques, there's a chance a given bee may learn how to actually use the magic. This transforms them from a bee (follower) into a Minor Hero (small bird)

Minor Heros occupy the same intermediary slot of character power that Lesser Legends occupied in Legends of the Wulin. The big development here is that their status, genesis and relative powers are placed into the middle of the process of going from normal person (bee)>student in magical training >kung-fu superhero (bird)

It gets even better: These Minor Heroes can have their own followers, allowing them to act as administrators or generals on their own (so if you have 10 Minor heroes as your NPC followers, they can each have an army of 100 followers, putting you on the top of an army's power structure)

Furthermore, you can "train up" your Minor Hero all the way to a proper Hero, granting them an Archetype and a Major Dharma so they can get Kharma without you.

And that's where baby PCs come from

....

Followers

What are followers?

Followers are NPCs that follow a character as their leader. They obey and defend the character, in exchange for the protection, prestige and reward of working for them.

Most followers have 1 Effort die, 1 Health box, and no other abilities.

Recruiting followers

Any time you meet an NPC, you can try to recruit them. You can either try to convince them to join up with you purely through speaking and acting in-character, or you can leverage the Heart skill to bowl them over with rhetoric and force of personality.

Followers have a stat called Loyalty which determines how much they stick with you (and follower your orders) when times get tough. For freshly-recruited followers, they begin with between 1-10 Loyalty. This is either chosen by the GM or rolled on a d10.

Tests of Loyalty

Any time a follower must choose between their self-preservation and loyalty to their leader, roll a d10: if it is over their current Loyalty, they choose self-preservation.

They might also test loyalty if they must choose between deeply-held principles, treasured persons/things, or any significant temptation and loyalty. Failing their test results in them betraying their leader’s interest in favor of the triggering principle, treasured thing, or temptation. These triggers are circumstantial; the GM will choose if their loyalty is challenged by these things on a case-by-case basis.

Followers that fail any test of loyalty reduce their loyalty score by 1 as their hearts cloud with doubt. Betrayal by a leader, as judged by the GM, reduces it to 0.

Divided Loyalty

Followers may have loyalty to more than one character. This is fine unless loyalty between their leaders comes into conflict: if they must ever prioritize or choose between leaders, roll an opposing d10 for each leader, adding their loyalty to that character. The highest-rolling dice, in descending order, determines how they prioritize their leaders. Re-rolls ties, unless the GM wishes them to be paralyzed between loyalties and take no action.

Increasing Loyalty

At the end of any scene in which a follower is publicly flattered, rewarded or otherwise treated remarkably well by their leader, increase their Loyalty by 1. Loyalty can never be higher than 10.

The leader to which the follower has the deepest loyalty sets a ceiling for all other loyalties: no other leader may have an equal score. If a follower’s loyalty would become equal, they must choose whether to forfeit their loyalty increase, or demote the current-highest by one (altering the hierarchy of their loyalty)

Truly heroic acts or fantastic rewards from leaders can increase Loyalty by +1d10, rather than by 1, at the GM’s discretion.

Limits on followers

A single leader may have 10 followers before they’re unable to manage any additional ones. They may surrender a current follower for a new one, although this reduces the jilted follower’s Loyalty to 0 (and may test the loyalty of other followers at the GM’s option)

Followers may be trained into Disciples and formed into Groups, however (See Training Followers, below). Each group may have up to 10 members, and each group counts as 1 follower for purposes of determining how many followers a given leader may have.

Effectively, this allows each leader to lead a small army of 100 well-organized followers under their direct command.

Training Followers

A character may train their followers to improve their capabilities. The training character is called the master, and the trained characters the apprentices.

The Master and Apprentices dedicate one Montage scene to train. During this time, they are totally engrossed in training and may perform no other actions. After this scene, they graduate from Followers to Disciples.

Disciples may be formed into a Group (p.XX) with other trained followers of their master’s choosing. They may also be taught Tactics, the beginnings of Techniques (p.XX), and invested with Morale (p.XX).

To teach a Tactic, a Master must choose a Rank-1 Technique that they know and spend a scene training a Group of Disciples in its motions. At the end of the scene, they learn how to use the Technique as a Tactic. They may only use Tactics they have learned while they fight within the group

At the end of every training scene, each apprentice rolls their Effort. If any of the dice results is 10, that Disciple awakens their slumbering potential for greatness and become a Minor Hero (or Villain!)

Minor Heroes

Minor Heroes are promising Disciples with the potential to become True Heroes (as the Player Characters are). Once their potential emerges, they become Degree-1 Minor Heroes. This has the following immediate effects:

•        One of their Chakra goes from Closed to Slumbering,
•     Their Effort and Health Boxes increase to 2 apiece
•     They learn one of the Masteries known by their Master

Such promising students are highly prized, for they immediately learn any Tactics they once knew as Techniques, up to a maximum of 3. If they Awaken their now-accessible Slumbering Chakra, they may utilize these powerful Techniques without relying on a group.

Minor Heroes may no longer form into groups but may lead and direct a group of their own (although they cannot further train them: that requires a True Hero).

Training Minor Heroes

A number of Minor Heroes equal to the Master’s Degree may be trained per Montage scene. The training is intense; it blends punishing physical exertion with a soul-searing spiritual journey. It is only through this agonizing process that heroes may learn to handle the burning cosmic destiny that reduces lesser wills to ash.

Each Minor Hero taught must test their loyalty to complete the training. If they pass, they achieve the next degree. If they fail, they become discouraged and are unable to advance, finishing the scene exhausted and frustrated.

Minor Heroes have only two Degrees: if they achieve the second degree, they gain the following benefits:

• An additional Effort (total 3)
• An additional Health Box (total 3)
• A single Focus Slot
• Their Slumbering Chakra Awakens

Should they succeed at another scene of training, they become True Heroes: they gain the abilities of a Degree-1 Character, selecting from a Hero Chart of their choosing and advancing their capabilities appropriately. True Heroes have 3 Novice Technique and one Expert: if they have insufficient Tactics to convert to new Techniques, they may learn any they lack from their Master’s repertoire.

Some Minor Heroes get discouraged and quit their Master’s brutal training regimen. Such loose cannons make their own rocky way in the world, often being seduced by an unscrupulous master into wickedness (the Mockingbird Emperor is particularly talented at this method of recruitment)

Mismatched Heroism

It sometimes happens that a Strong archetype-character trains a Cunning type, of even an Enlightened hero. Such mismatched master/student relationships make sense if the master in question knows an appropriate Gupt Kala to teach them as their Expert Technique, but what if they don’t?

There are two options a GM has to resolve this hiccup:

1) You can assume that the knowledge of a clan’s Gupt Kala are “encoded” into their other teachings and vice versa: for instance, knowledge of frantic and fiery social graces can be gleaned from the Radioactive Scorpion’s fiery martial kung-fu. In this case, simply have the student select an appropriate Gupt Kala from their clan’s Techniques.

2) If a clan doesn’t have access to such esoteric Techniques (for instance, a minor clan without any Gupt Kala) you can substitute a “waiting slot” for the character. This slot may be filled whenever the character encounters a situation which can teach them the “missing” Gupt Kala, for no Kharma cost.

The second route places starting characters at a disadvantage, so is recommended for NPCs before PCs. It is a great motivator for adventure for a player, if they choose to start this way. You might want to warn them that they’re playing the game in Hard Mode though!

True Heroes as Followers

A True Hero with loyalty to a Leader is still their Follower; at least, while they’re treated well.

True Heroes adopt the Minor Dharma of their Master; however, they also choose their own Major Dharma. Major Dharmas are powerful cosmic destinies; this often draws them into conflict with their loyalties.

In this way, True Heroes have three conflicting loyalties: Loyalty to Clan, Loyalty to Master, and Loyalty to their own Destiny.

In any scene in which a True Hero Follower is present in an active capacity (ie: fighting or doing something noteworthy, not just standing around) they will try to act in a way that accrues Kharma.

True Heroes accrue and spend Kharma just as Player Characters. PCs may teach their follower any Techniques they know so long as they have the Kharma necessary to learn it.

They may also learn Techniques from other Masters, but this will cause them to acquire Loyalty to that Master as though from a tremendous favor.

While they follower a PC, True Hero Followers will not act in such a way that they will acquire Zui unless they fail a test of Loyalty. If they fail such a test, they immediately seek to use a Negative Trigger to gain Kharma and Zui.

Followers of Followers

True Heroes and Minor Heroes may have Followers and Disciples of their own. To simplify bookkeeping, their Follower’s Loyalty isn’t tracked: it is assumed to always be exactly equal to the True Hero’s Loyalty.