It occurs to me that the Kingdoms of Seoland would make a fine setting for D&D.
Now, that’s so self-evident that it sounds kind of dumb, given that it’s supposed to be an ‘old-school’ setting and all. But what I mean by it is that I’m not interested in D&D – at all. If I wanted an old-school game I have a number of alternatives but would likely settle on Castles & Crusades, which while very like D&D, is not D&D per se. I am not interested in playing or running D&D out of the box, or in making the kind of sweeping changes to it that would be needed to make me happy with it.
But there is one kind of D&D that I would consider playing – Birthright. Not Birthright exactly, either; that was a wonderful setting but the D&D rules of the time (AD&D 2nd Edition, a system I passionately hated,) were very inadequate for the style of game that it was shooting for, and it ended up being a weird synthesis of styles where the PCs were kings, rulers and archpriests that would go dungeon-crawling together. But try we did, back in the day, and we had a wonderful time with it, despite the many issues. I’d be happy to play that type of strategic-level game again, if I had a better rules foundation for doing it.
D&D 3.5 had just such a system available, in Fields of Blood from Eden Studios. It gives you mechanics for ruling and building fantasy kingdoms, and the interactions between them, diplomatic and otherwise. Around the time of its release, there were several D20 products from various publishers that tried to do similar things, but FoB is the best of the bunch, in my opinion.
But there’s one problem with it. It’s a pretty detailed set of systems, all tightly interlinked, for military operations, diplomacy and regional development. The scale is set up such that one 12-mile (I think I’m remembering that number correctly) is a single ‘province’, which you as the ruler can then go ahead and develop, pillage or whatever. Movement rates of troops are tied to the 12-mile province. A small kingdom might have two or three provinces, while a big one might have five to eight. Massive and vastly powerful states have 12-15. Each province adds significantly to the bookkeeping involved in running a state; nations of a few provinces are no problem, but actually running big empires at the table is likely to eat whole sessions, especially if the players actually talk about what they’re doing.
The problem should now be apparent, if you’re thinking about the numbers here. Medieval Wales, by this yardstick, is a vast and powerful empire. Late Medieval France, not the largest country in Europe at the time, is made up of thousands of FoB provinces, making it unplayable under those rules. It thus becomes very difficult to plug FoB into any existing setting, virtually all of which presuppose the existence of states which are of reasonable (or at least vaguely believable,) size by historical standards but totally unmanagable under the FoB rules. Nor does FoB supply a setting to use.
There are a couple of ways around this; setting up a single large kingdom wherein the players take the roles of Barons of the realm, ruling over smallish areas, rather than as the rulers of the realm. But FoB provides few mechanics for the interactions of internal political factions, which is what such a game would naturally center around. Nor can you just change the size of the provinces, because the movement systems are tied into them very tightly, and you’d have to retool the rules substantially to make it work. Rules design is not something I want to put effort into when envisioning potential D&D campaigns. This leaves me back at the starting point of not wanting to do anything with D&D proper.
But it happens that the map I am using for the Kingdoms of Seoland is one I’ve had around for a while. And it happens to be of a scale appropriate to a ‘world’ (which you should read as ‘campaign area’,) of 12 miles to the hex. It occurred to me just yesterday that this could be made to work with Fields of Blood, and that my overall picture of the place, of a decent-sized island containing several small kingdoms, as well as areas dominated by barbarians and humanoids, would complement it as well. A world designed with FoB in mind alleviates the scaling problem entirely.
This doesn’t really change the development of the Kingdoms at all, and running a game using Fields of Blood remains a hypothetical option. The notion of getting up to speed on the D&D (3.5, probably) rules holds no particular appeal. But there’s also nothing that says you can’t do old-school gaming under D&D 3.5. The strategic-play thing is definitely not old-school, but you could set up a campaign in phases, with a series of dungeon crawls in the early levels concurrent with building the PCs reputations as heroes, or at least competent folks who get things done. Such a campaign could then (around levels 5-6, I’m guessing,) move into a mission-oriented phase, where the PCs are working for some important personage or other, before moving into a final, political phase where the PCs are movers and shakers themselves. Run the way I’d prefer, this would let me dig into what is, after all, a fairly complicated rules system pretty gradually.
