Glorantha ORE, maybe?

I have managed to misplace my copy of Heroes and other Worlds, so I had to get on Lulu and order another copy today. Before that I tried to sort through all my games and find it, unsuccessfully. While doing that I did find some gems I had not seen in a long time. Boy do I have many game books or what? I need to stop working and play games full time!

One game I found that made me stop and browse it was Reign. For some time it was a game talked about quite a bit. Now I have not heard about it in a long while. Maybe the fact that the built in fantasy setting was not all that interesting, and that the weird world just felt weird for it's own sake made people shrug and walk past it. But, the rules are interesting and the idea of playing on a higher level, as lords and leaders, still resonate with me. I felt that resonance way back, and long time readers know.

I've never played the so called "end game" of D&D and all that jazz, neither have I ever played Pendragon. I've always felt Reign was the way to go, though. Especially as an alternative to D&D, since you would get there from the get go, and I never was that into knights.

Consider Glorantha. When the rules set Hero Wars and Hero Quest were published, Greg and friends really pushed for the social aspect of the game to come to the forefront. I seem to remember there actually being a book all about "hero bands", like they called the party. It was a group of individuals with contacts, relationships and resources. I kind of liked the idea, but never tried it in play.

Enter Reign. That's the game that's all about playing a "company" of some sort. Maybe it could be married to that setting where you no longer exist (things were different in thr RQ days) as a lone adventurer?

Playing games full time sounds better and better every time I say it...

(anyone want a copy of the flawed but brilliant Glorantha game Hero Wars? Pay shipping and it's yours...)

Reign and the D&D engame

Have you heard of Reign? The game showed up on my radar when I was reading Unknown Armies. Apart from being a game with a very cool setup, that game is the best written game I've ever read, so seeing who had written Reign I thought that it was bound to be at least a good read. It did have some other qualities, and one that I'm focusing on in this post is the so called "Company Rules".

To begin with I'm going to let you know that you can buy Reign from here. Hopefully I will be that convincing.

Reign describes itself as a game about "Lords and Leaders". What could then be more fitting to use as inspiration for the endgame?

A company could in theory be a way to play the whole party of PC at once, but I'm going to consider it more for domain management. Just like a character, a company have stats. Inspired by Reign, I'd suggest to at least have Fortitude, Wealth, Psychological Strength or Influence as stats for your company. Now, when you have stats, you can treat that realm as an entity that can take actions, and be affected by actions.

To consider your fief, thieves guild or wizard's school like a character like this, you can use it to play long term actions while playing on the PC scale, and you can use it together!

Consider this.

Say your realm have a Fortitude of 12 on a scale of 1 to 20. If your DM have told you that there's a drought in the lands, you roll a d20 at your Fortitude, or better, to have the realm handle the problem without penalty. On the other hand, if you need to do something like influence the politics of a nearby realm, you use the Influence of your company as a modifier to a die roll for your character. Maybe you divide that rating from 1 to 20 by 5 and have that as a d20 roll against CHA to see how well your diplomatic mission went after preparing the neighbour with your Influence.  You get the idea, right?

This way the domain rules wont be a totally different game, but just a more abstract way to handle a character with a few basic stats. I imagine that that would lower the bar, and make it easier to not only include domain management, but also integrate it as die modifier to the regular character level.

I'm not sure I'm making sense, or that this became as well presented as I would have liked. On the other hand, maybe I can just get the message across that Greg Stolze's Reign is a game with a very modular system that can be borrow outright, or used as inspiration for what I consider a fascinating aspect of higher levels of play. I strongly recommend it. Let me know if you manage to pound the suggestions above into something cool. I'll probably try to massage it a bit further myself.