Settlement Building - Part 1
A few years back, I ran a campaign where the party was helping to lead an expedition to reclaim a nation’s ancestral homeland. The ancestral homeland had been taken away by a sudden powerful force of hobgoblins and the people of that nation had to flee across the ocean waves or be annihilated.
During this campaign, the party was responsible for protecting their colonists while also building up their settlement. While that campaign fizzled out and got replaced with Starfinder, it helped plant an idea I had to create settlement rules for a game. Sadly, we didn’t get a chance for me to introduce these rules, but now the idea for settlement rules has come back to me (and not just because I’m playing Frosthaven and we are responsible for building up the city in that game before winter… it’s not going well).
How to Build a Settlement
This is going to be a multi-part series about building a settlement, as I want to explore the ideas and take more than just a stab in the dark on how you might build a settlement.
The other thing is I want these rules to work with minimal need for changes in our mass combat rules created a few years back. Ideally, these rules would integrate together so you could create something like Pathfinder: Kingmaker but for Dungeons & Dragons. I.e. You are building a kingdom (or just a city) and have armies fighting against each other with the adventurers taking part and having a mechanical impact.
It’s all well and good to handwave and narratively describe a war, a settlement being built up, and so on—but it lacks the hard mechanics that make players feel like they are actively involved in the process and that their choices (and outcomes) matter to their army and settlement they are building.
With all that said, let’s jump into the basic framework.
Settlement Wants
What I want this system to do is:
Encourage players to gather resources to build up their settlement
Settlement should offer incentives (via mechanical rewards) for players to interact with the system
Settlement should provide various options for players to build up (i.e. not a single way to build a settlement)
Should work on a hex or square grid, not just theater of mind
A settlement should have good outcomes and bad outcomes (but good outweighs the bad, or else why do it)
Simple, optional systems like settlement wealth, morale, and others
Settlement Do Not Wants
And here is a list of things I do not want my system to do:
Take a lot of time at the table to resolve the mechanics
Creation based on the luck of a die (you shouldn’t have to roll to see if the party succeeds at building a new shop - if they have the resources, they do it. That said, I am OK with rolling if there is risk involved because they are trying to build something very fast or atypical)
Give the Game Master required homework (this does not mean that they shouldn’t spend any time on prep for it, but rather it shouldn’t be busy work because they have to count up little things)
A Working Draft
This post isn’t going to get into the minutiae of the rules, as those will be developed over the next few parts. Instead, I just want to share how I currently see the settlement buildings being used in play. To that end, I am going to start from a level 0 settlement that has yet to see buildings constructed.
When the party arrive at the spot to build the settlement, they will have to decide what is the first structure to build. I am going to assume that they have access to temporary shelters like tents or simple lean-tos.
Most likely, the first thing to be built will be common shelters (that also doubles as a meeting hall and can hold several families at once), food production (wells, farms, etc), or a defensive structure like a fort. Once the party decides what first will be built, we gather the resources required, spend the time to build it, and then add it to our settlement map (either a hex grid or square grid depending on preference).
The moment one structure is built, the settlement then levels up to Level 1. I am currently planning on tying the number of hexes/squares on the settlement map to the level of the settlement to make things simple. So if a settlement is Level 5, it will have 5 hexes by 5 hexes (for a total of 25 hexes). Each hex will be roughly 500 feet, which means that the level 5 settlement will be 2,500 feet by 2,500 feet, or a quarter of a square mile - so not very big at all, but big enough for several buildings around a small square. This does not get into the surrounding farmland, just the core of the settlement (and we are getting way ahead of ourselves, but let me know if you think this has promise).
At this point, we need to figure out how a settlement levels up (right now, I’m thinking it’ll be based on the number of structures and population with exact numbers to come eventually).
We also need to figure out how much wood for how much sheep (Catan joke, sorry). We will have to determine how many resources we will need for each structure, and how specific we want to go… and how do we get those said resources.
I’m thinking of keeping it simple, like 3 wood for 1 large building. In this example, a single “wood” would be about half the work output of a low level settlement. Like, your settlement, so long as it has the population, does 2 to 6 things every week (can you guess what those numbers are referencing? That’s right—proficiency bonus!). If you want them to gain wood and you are a level 1 settlement, you can get 2 wood so long as you have available forests near you.
But don’t worry if you are worried about how long it’ll take to build anything. The moment you build a sawmill, you automatically gain 1 wood for the settlement every week. When you build a mining camp, you automatically gain 1 metal. If you want lots of stone, that’s a quarry.
Of course, not every settlement is going to have access to a forest, a quarry, metals, farmland, and more. Trade will be an important part and you can trade with other settlements, but it takes one of your actions and will come at a delay (I think just a 1 week delay for nearby cities, but 1d4 week delay for further settlements).
Settlement Rules
Of course, these rules and ideas may change as time goes by and we clarify these rules a bit more. Next part, I’ll start working on some of the hard rules and maybe build our first few structures. After that, we will have to refine the rules on trade, settlement actions, population, how bastions might work in this system, and so much more.
I hope you’re as excited as me and please share your thoughts!
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