Kingdoms & Warfare Reaction

Take the game diplomacy, and a tactical wargame, toss in ideas of domain-level play from early D&D, wrap it in some modern mechanics with gorgeous artwork. There you have Kingdoms & Warfare. It's unlike any other 5e book. Bold. Visionary. I freaking love it.

Let's dive in.

Domains & Intrigue

It took awhile for intrigue to really click for me. By that, I think I needed to read it at least three times. The system is more simple than it appears at first glance. It abstracts by necessity the factors that might play into your domain’s strengths and defenses into your domain skills, scores, and defense levels. This provides an interesting mechanical way to resolve what would normally be narrative actions

My main critique after attempting to use the system is that it's a lot of material to attempt to introduce to your players. Perhaps I tried it a little too soon in my players' TTRPG careers, but it essentially requires a degree of 5e system mastery and understanding as a prerequisite to being able to dedicate time and energy to engage with the intrigue and warfare systems.

The Monsters

MCDM debuted what they call “action oriented monster design” in this book. These are more powerful and flavored actions than legendary actions, but allow the monster to use a power not on its turn, helping tame the action economy problem. These actions are designed to be cinematic and interesting, and essentially guarantee that these villains will actually do something cool before being cut down by the heroes.

Additional psionic manifestations are included, which as I mentioned in my Strongholds & Followers post I also noted. I may need to examine those and compare each source with the Talent sooner than later. This section also includes the massive stat block for the CR 29 Cthrion Uroniziir (whose stat block is also redone in the Talent). But my favorite monster is Relg, The Descender, The Lord in Corpulect. Relg is seen in the MCDM liveplay the Chain of Acheron. All of the monsters in this book are really cool though. While those in Strongholds & Followers offered some that weren't even bad guys at all, each of the monsters in this book provide great quest hooks and ways that they can be integrated into a campaign, and they each possess awesome abilities that keep them interesting.

The Items

There are some really cool items in this book. Some include more Codexes—artifacts that have crazy powers first introduced in Strongholds & Followers. I love these too because I like having powerful magic books. They can be dropped into pretty much any adventure at a library like Candlekeep or dungeon rewards. 

The Adventure

The adventure is really good. It's not perfect. But it's really good. Teos Abadia was the writer for the 70 page Regent of Bedegar. The adventure is a great example of how you can apply the intrigue and warfare systems to a complex sandbox environment. Honestly I would love to see other adventures that provide examples of ways to apply the system like this.

Takeaways

If anyone from MCDM happens to read this, my advice would be that in order for these amazing systems to break out further in the TTRPG community then they need the tools to be able to integrate them into their adventures without worrying about infringing on your copyrights. An idea that we're all familiar with is an SRD. It doesn't need to give away the farm, but something, either under Creative Commons, the OGL, or even ORC would enable creators to make adventures and stories leveraging these mechanics that in turn would increase Kingdoms & Warfare’s profile beyond the fan generated content in your own social media ecosystem. I think this is easier with the intrigue system, since an example player domain, NPC domain, and rough explanation of the applied system would allow creators to make their own domain's for their adventures and make references to domain actions based on what the characters do. I understand holding back the warfare rules, but perhaps putting out a document allowing creators to make and sell their own units compatible with the system, and allowing them to reference your book for the system rules in some manner would be a way forward. Until then, per the