How to Implement Kingdoms & Warfare in Dragonlance

 

Table of Contents

This post may include spoilers for the adventure Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen…

Adding the content and extra systems from Kingdoms & Warfare to this adventure may seem onerous at first, but after spending a few hours studying the rules and working on it today, I will tell you that it can be done. But first we need to understand how the new rules work.

Understanding Kingdoms & Warfare

Available in hardcover and PDF from MCDM, Kingdoms & Warfare provides two systems that are related but distinct. First it provides an overarching system for creating player and NPC domains or organizations that help model political interactions between groups (the political science student in me sings for joy!) The second system models war, which as Clausewitz taught us in On War is merely “a continuation of politics by other means.” The systems are intertwined in that intrigue allows the players to interfere with the villain through various means, and impact their capabilities in the final pitched battle that is the confrontation between them, and which uses the warfare rules to have a simplified and abstracted tabletop battle.

So we need to look at how to implement each of these systems for this adventure.

Intrigue

Intrigue involves organizations (in actual political science you might call these actors) sometimes they are a state (or country/kingdom) or sometimes they are non-governmental actors like thieves guilds, knightly orders, religious groups, or mystic circles of mages or druids. 

To understand intrigue, imagine your organization as having skills and features similar to a character sheet. There’s powers that characters can use in combat and titles that also given them powers, but those just act like extra character abilities and can essentially be ignored if you are looking specifically at what interacts with intrigue.

The skills are Diplomacy, Espionage, Lore, and Operations. Much like character skills they can be used to accomplish various tasks and are resolved through a d20 roll with a modifier added based on the score, then compared to a target difficulty class (DC). Now this is an important distinction; outside intrigue these skills can be used to conduct any number of imaginative activities thought of by your players. Inside intrigue, which can be compared to 5e combat, using a domain skill counts as a domain action. These actions function exactly like in combat. An organization only gets one domain action per turn, and if the organization has features that allow them it can also choose to take a domain bonus action and reaction. Domain skill tests can’t be made as domain bonus actions or reactions unless they are included in a feature that allows them.

Each domain also has defenses, which have both a set number that acts as a DC if a skill test is targeting one of them as a domain action. Separate from the number are defense levels, which start at zero at the beginning of each intrigue. There is a scale for each of these and they can be increased and decreased through domain actions on a range of up to +3 or down to -3 (the separate scales for this is a bit confusing in the text of the book as is buried in the middle of a paragraph). There is a section of Kingdoms & Warfare defining consequences that occurs during the final warfare battle between the two organizations at the end of intrigue based upon how these defense levels have changed over the course of the intrigue. So targeting these helps give you more advantageous circumstances in that battle. 

Other examples are provided for domain skill tests as domain actions that include Operations tests to muster additional units for your army, Espionage tests to determine statistics of the enemy domain or learn about their army composition, and diplomacy tests to petition NPC domains not involved in the intrigue to provide units for you to use with your army in the final battle (these units leave after the battle occurs). 

Player Organization 

So the first step of implementing the system is to have your players make their own heroic organization from those options available in the book. For a Dragonlance campaign the Martial Regiment, or the Mercenary Company specialization from the Adventuring Party organization type fit best for a warfare campaign and with the characters as essentially helping Kalaman, but if another organization type works for your group then try it out. 

Enemy Organization 

On the GM side, you need to build a villainous domain for the heroes to oppose. There is a section in Kingdoms & Warfare outlining the process, and it’s pretty clear and concise. 

For Shadow of the Dragon Queen, we’re dealing with only a portion of the Red Dragon Army led by Kansaldi Fire-Eyes. So that portion will have its own organization for now. One issue I’ve noticed with the enemies in the adventure is that the major leaders of this small portion of the Red Dragon Army are all CR 11 or 12, far too high for officers fighting even a group of 10 or 11th level characters at the end of the adventure as written…but the adventure as written uses some of these as bosses over it’s progression, so we’ll just use that attrition and have lower CR commanders fill out Kansaldi’s miniboss ranks when we get to the climax.

We’ll call this organization the Red Dragon Army Vanguard. Although we definitely could use the Draconic Imperium NPC domain as a base I think the Despotic Regime is a better fit for the capabilities and activities of this organization (all the details on these are found in Kingdoms & Warfare). It is a size 2 domain as compared to the characters’ size 1. Because of this we get 16 domain points to spend on the skills and defenses on top of the base stats for Despotic Regime.

Red Dragon Army Vanguard 

Type: Despotic Regime 

Size: 2

Domain Skills:

Diplomacy: -1

Espionage: +2

Lore: +2

Operations: +4

Domain Defenses:

Communications: 14

Resolve: 15

Resources: 13

NPC Domains 

The next step is adding some other domains for the players to interact with. As written there aren’t many options, but I think we can brainstorm a few.

• Kalaman military: This is an already aligned organization, but I want to represent it as something the characters can interact with and influence. I may even do a bit of a house rule and allow the enemy organization to be in intrigue with both the Kalaman and player domains so that the players have to choose between taking their own domain actions against the enemy or assisting their ally. They will get to command the military’s units in the final battle, but these might get some debuffs from the intrigue actions.
• Detachment of Solamnic knights: It’s Solamnia, right? I figure there’s a company or garrison of knights somewhere nearby that can be petitioned for aid. They might have their hands full with their own problems, but hey worth a shot, right?
• Estwilde Goblin Tribe: Though not strictly canon based on what I’ve read about Estwilde in a quick google search, I think it’d be good for Gringle to influence other people like him, and it makes sense that not all of the barbarian tribes of the region bow the knee willingly to the Dragon Armies.
• Silvanesti Exiles: These elves are in the Northern Wastes, and might be a good option to influence via diplomacy to get some magic ranged users help in the final battle. Zhelsuel is a named leader, and the characters can impact his attitude towards them directly, much like in the Baron of Bedegar adventure in Kingdoms & Warfare.
• Thoradin Bay Dimernesti Sea Elves: These elves are also set up to be assisted in the story and are against the Red Dragon Army for their own reasons.