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I'm now in a position of GMing a game style I've never tried before.
As a break from SR, my players and I decided we'd try out Numenera. I'd thought they'd want to do some kind of exploration or ancient-relic-of-the-week kind of game, but instead they're telling me they want to go for a game where they found their own citystate (I've sort of pushed back indigenous cultural and technical sophistication to something less medieval and more classical, like Greek or Mayan city states and leagues).
How should I do a campaign like this? I'm not used to this kind of sandboxy approach. They're starting in Dynafel associated with the Dreaming Reliquary cult, if that matters.
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>>51220894
you can do anything in numenera, just remember to bring the weird and bad end / bad end dilemmas
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Let's put this another way. Does anyone have any mechanical or reading-material recommendations for a way to represent the kingdom building aspects? Like, I understand the system for Pathfinder's Kingmaker kinda sucks, and I dabbled with Mandate of Heaven in Exalted and found it too abstract.
Mostly I just want to make sure there's enough interesting things for them to do and entanglements with other people.
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>>51221562
Maybe check the system in Godbound? I recall that one having some kingdom building stuff that was tied to the characters (although it may tie into the system too much, IDK).
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>>51220894
You may want to change what you give experience for. In Numenera XP is granted for making discoveries and finding artifacts. But if they're focused on building an empire you may just want to give them xp for 'strenghtening the kingdom' or something.
I don't have any suggestions for hard mechanics to run empire building, but consider letting them spend XP to fiat effects in, similar to the way you can do that in core to get a house or an inheritance or such.
Where is Dyanfel and what is the dreaming reliquary cult? They aren't in the Steadfast right?
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>>51221725
That is in the Steadfast, in Iscobal. Basically, the player who's making a nano wanted to make her part of a cult of a nightmare goddess inspired by the Greek Melinoe. That led me to say, hey, there was a cult of dreams in this book somewhere...and we ended up in Dynafel. I'd planned to have them out by Uxphon originally, so it's a bit of a shift.
Pic sadly unrelated. Right in the childhood; one finds amazing things on google image search.
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>>51222184
Oh, okay, Iscobal.
I remember there's something about exiled royalty they can play around with, don't have my books on me so I can't remember too much.
Anyways, most of the countries south of the big river are pushovers except for the Pytharon's. So it shouldn't be too hard to expand. Maybe have them exploit that Iscobal royalty issue, and see if they want to find a nation state or two in Milave to align themselves.
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>>51220894
Here's what I've seen in a few games.
In one of them the players are really building up an empire from the ground up, so to help make the possible actions feel more concrete the dm created specific tasks, with specific rolls associated with it and prerequisites. For examples, you need such skill to establish a trade route, and you need to be there 1 week to have a roll, and you need to accumulate so much on your roll to succeed, etc. This helped during downtime, but I don't know how numenera handles skill rolls for project (if it's d20 it could be for example, you need a combined of 40 on all your rolls to succeed depending, and artefacts found could help speed up the process).
This is for downtown in between "missions", which basically come to interacting with neighbouring town and countries. Usually the main goal is to annex them, although you can throw in a few sidequests and conspiracies in each town to make them feel more alive. Similarly, other countries can come visit to add events of sort to break up downtime. Maybe a spy stole something important, or someone dear to the pcs was poisoned, or some natural event is going to happen soon (a lunar eclipse, it's time to throw a festival for the populace!).
Another thing I suggest is have the players tell you beforehand which city they're planning to visit on a mission, so that you can prepare in advance without having the whole world planned out. Something which helps is fog of war, so players don't quite know everything around at once, and you can introduce a few locations for them to choose from at a time. But keep it close around the starting region and grow slowly. Once they've annexed everything grow the map, etc.
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>>51226243
>you need to accumulate so much on your roll to succeed
A more natural way to do that in Numenera (and most systems) would be: you need to roll X successes against TN Y but only get Z attempts per week (or however your quantum unit for downtime is).
>annexing
It's usually more fun to have more multifacet strategic-level stuff going on. A basic mindmap of factions (who hates who, who's allied) with associated power levels economically and militarily is pretty easy to make and is a goldmine for plot as soon as PCs start interacting with any of them.
Murderhoboing on a national level is hilarious because everyone ends up uniting against the PC-nations.
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>>51226608
Numenera isn't typically suited for that actually. The system isn't made for extended tests. Just declare a flat time, adjusting for skills and assets.
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