Sunday 2 October 2016

Song of Gods and Glory - Part II: Plaguelings and Retinue tables.

Moving on, the next element of Pestifex' retinue. I managed to roll up a whopping 4 Plaguelings: Small and mischievous demon-children of the Plague-Father.



These are mostly made of greenstuff, with a few plaguebearer bits thrown in (mainly the heads).
I'm still pretty much a rookie when it comes to greenstuf, so I these didn't quite end up like I envisioned them. Still, I think they are decent for the effort. In game, they will have the following profile:

Quality 5+ Combat 1
Demon, Gang, Gregarious, Poison

They are, honestly, pretty shitty. If separated, they'll quickly get murdered and driven off. Used wit ha bit of finesse, though, they can be dangerous as they pile on the outnumbering modifiers. Should be fun to use. Or at least provide entertainment as they get brutally slaughtered.

***

In writing the retinue-tables I had two design-goals:

  • Make a means to generate varied and interesting warbands, with a bit of deity-specific flavour.
  • Keep it simple and streamlined

And as I thought about the system, one more goal was added:

  • Allow an amount of player-agency, without compromising the general "random" nature.

In the end, I settled on a system based on d6 rolls: A champion starts out with 5 rolls on the basic follower table. They can also choose to spend 2 rolls on the elite follower-table. A 6 on the standard follower table allows a roll on the elite follower table instead.
This way players have a bit of agency over the generation; Roll 5 dice straight away, and hope for 6'es or a horde, or go for a smaller, more elite band. Personally, I tend to do 3 rolls on the basic follower table, and if no 6'es show up, a roll on the elite table.
I quite enjoy this mini-game, even if it doesn't have an amazing amount of depth. It's [i]fun[/i] to roll up warbands, and see what the system spews out.

I've found that this generates generally interesting warbands of 4-7 characters. The size of the warbands are just enough to allow some sort of emergent theme, without drowning it out in the static of randomness.
Every deity has their own retinue-tables, though they all follow a standard formula with small tweaks. For example followers of Pestilence might have undead (Plague-zombies and skeletons) in their warband, while agents of Change have a higher chance of demons and spawns.

The pestilence tables look like this:
I realise that there's a mismatch between the table-names and the explanatory text. The Rare Followers of Pestilence-table is the Sworn to Pestilence-table. As I've mentioned, it all still needs some work. Right now I am mostly focussing on getting the core ready for playtesting


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