hey up! I’m doing the changes as I slowly work through my job list from the ref meeting.
Vaan’s breakdown of nation/territory/region is correct. There’s a “division” above Nation (which is Empire), but only a tiny handful of rituals that care about that so we should ignore it.
Initially, we intended for players to assign their personal resources to regions - we envisioned a much more tactical (strategic?) game. After further work, however, we decided that it was an unneccessary level of fiddliness to make every player pick not only the territory but the region within that territory. If we had an unlimited pool of talent, money and time we’d have little clicky maps like wot you see on computer games - sadly we don’t.
It’s not ideal - it means that sometimes we’ll rely on players to contact us and say things like “we roleplay our resources are all in Hoboken and Hoboken has been taken by the orcs what should we do?” but it makes the game easier to run, and easier for new players to get started and understand what’s going on.
I prefer it because I think it makes the magic more significant - previously, some of the powerful rituals would probably effect two or three people. Now they have the potential to effect a third of the players in a nation. It also makes much more sense for them to have far-reaching effects on barbarian territories, while also giving us much more freedom to make quests to go and cast them given the quest could go anywhere in the territory. That’s mostly a plot bonus, I’ll grant you.
The changes still need to be signed off definitively by Graeme (He Drops Rules Like A Baws), but I don’t think the costs or gross effects are likely to change.
The eagle-eyed among you may also notice that some of the rituals (Thunderous Tread of Trees is one of them) now have a category called “Warfare.” At some point in the next week or so we’ll have a look over them all and decide if we need to change the values involved. Between you and me, it’s mostly happened because we didn’t have the Campaign military stuff totally concrete by the first event - we knew roughly how it was meant to work and the values involved, but the stuff that went up just after E2 (I think it was) brought some of the warfare rituals into question.
PERSONAL OPINION INCOMING: I think Thunderous Tread of the Trees as it currently stands is a bit … unsatisfying. I’d like to see it buffed "up a bit, possibly with a variable to allow more oompf, possibly with a keyword or two to support the “dangerous to forts” bit. Given it’s basically a little natural disaster, I think it could do with a bit of bite to it. We’ll see what happens though.
I suspect I might expand this post into a #miniblog if I have enough to say on the topic. Or can roll it in with a chat about the stuff the boss has been working on while he’s allegedly on holiday in York
Edit to Add
I prefer to say that the territory of Holberg is lost to the Empire mumble mumble because they do not yet control half the regions that make up the territory. It’s worth noting that if they did control half the regions but not all of them, the region would be Imperial but Contested - which has some implications for certain Campaign actions and events (repairing armies mostly iirc without the rules in front of my eyes)
