Review: Dynasties & Demagogues

Review: Dynasties & Demagogues

How many times have you seen a GM go “I want to run a political intrigue game with lots of social interactions instead of a dungeon crawl?” How many times did the GM actually follow through with this suggestion? How many times did the game survive past the first session and not fizzle out along with the enthusiasm of both the GM and the players? I bet you’ve seen that sort of stuff, and I bet that the GM insisted on using D&D or Pathfinder. I believe that even though you can run such games in D&D or Pathfinder, these systems were not made for that. The problem, however, lies not even in the system, but in the fact that few people really know how to run such games. And can you blame them? D&D Dungeon Master’s Guides only tell you about running the traditional dungeon crawl games, and, as far as I know, the more recent editions do a poor job explaining that as well, assuming that the GM already knows how to do that.
                In Pathfinder, you had the Ultimate Intrigue book that was supposed to cover that, but instead is a collection of character options and social mini-games instead of a guide on running political intrigue games. The current trendy word for this is “slop.” Ultimate Intrigue definitely is slop, and I say that as someone who loves books with character options.
                However, I stumbled upon a third-party supplement for the third edition of D&D called Dynasties & Demagogues by Atlas Games. At first, I thought that it’s going to be something like Ultimate Intrigue, but worse, but I was pleasantly surprised – the book is great regardless of the system you’re using, and I’d like to give it some spotlight.
 
                The book has a unique structure. Instead of starting with advice and all that stuff, it presents the reader a short adventure that highlights some of the differences between a traditional fantasy adventure and a political adventure. The adventure itself is quite nice – it is very generic, so it can be thrown into any medieval feudal setting. It shows off all the differences in status and rank, motivations of the different parties. The party is unlikely to get killed, unless they mess up badly, but the stakes are still there. There are different ways the adventure can play out with different outcomes. What I like the most is that the text has the author’s commentary telling you the purpose of the various scenes and why some things and people are described the way they are. The latter shows that the GM not only should devote a lot of attention to the NPCs and their motivations, but also to how he describes the situation because the description may give players some insight into the relationships between the NPCs.
                After this is all done, the book emphasizes that the most important part of any political game is the type of government. It even has a nice questionnaire for the GM about the political system in the setting that is useful when preparing for the game. Then, the author talks about different types of government and how they affect the game. This chapter does a much better job than GURPS Realm Management at making government type relevant to the game instead of being a vague line on the realm sheet with a bonus or penalty attached to it. The book talks about how government type affects both the GM and the players and even gives you examples with potential campaign hooks.
 
                Then, the book talks about how fantasy races interact with different governments, which is a very interesting topic, as now we introduce the fantastical elements into the game. There is a couple of pages of generic information that lays out the possible treatments of racial minorities and mixed-race societies, and subchapters devoted to specific races – dwarves, elves, gnomes, orcs, etc. Each subchapter has examples, and all of them can be developed into a full political campaign. I particularly liked the dwarven chapter – it’s excellent. However, anything beyond dwarves and elves is poorly expanded on. For example, the entire halfling chapter is basically “eh, they don’t care much for politics.”
 
                The next chapter talks about how magic changes the political landscape. Mageocratic regimes are explored, and the effects of different spells on political intrigues are laid out. There also are some new spells, which is nice.
 
                The next chapter is titled “Character & Politics.” For non-D&D games, there are only two pages of useful information here, and the rest is character options – feats, skills, and prestige classes. However, these two pages are great and probably should be used as a handout for your players if they are interested in playing a political game. Not only does it have another questionnaire about the character’s beliefs, goals, and motivations, but it also has advice on how to build a party, not a single independent character. Very good stuff. At the end, there’s a paragraph that encapsulates the difference between D&D and GURPS. “The D20 System classes focus on what a character can do, but they don’t say much about who a character is. That’s fine in a game that emphasizes physical action and combat, but political games focus on interaction and personality.” That’s a good reason for why one shouldn’t use D&D for such games – in a D&D book, ironically.
 
                The next chapter, titled “Political Maneuvers” has social and political “combat” systems, something akin to what you can find in Pathfinder’s Ultimate Intrigue. I can’t really judge them, as I haven’t played D&D in many years.
 
                Everything after that is pure gold. “Adventures in Politics” is devoted to something that is absent in Ultimate Intrigue and even GURPS Social Engineering – how to actually design a social or political adventure. How you can start it, what you should keep in mind, what kind of activities it can include, what challenges they pose – everything. It guides you from coming up with an idea, to turning this idea into a premise, expanding it into a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and fleshing out the details with encounters, challenges, and twists. Not only does it describe this process in detail, but it shows it using not one, but five different examples on each stage of this process.
“Political Campaigns” talks not about discrete adventures, but about entire political campaigns, describing all the different styles and their special features. It also has very good guidelines for creating compelling villains for such games.
If you want to run a political game, I strongly recommend getting this book just for these two chapters alone, you will not regret it.
 
So, what’s the verdict? I think that this is an excellent system-generic book that masquerades as a D&D book. While I do adore GURPS Social Engineering, I find it lacking with regards to actual adventure design. GURPS Social Engineering is a box of tools without an instruction manual, and Dynasties & Demagogues is an instruction manual with only very few tools. If you are running a social GURPS game, these two books would complement each other very well. If you’re running a D&D social game, this book may convince you to switch to a different system. My only nitpick is that I’d like to have more stuff on fantasy races – I loved that chapter, but I wanted it to be longer. So, I’ll give this book 9.5/10 – very close to perfect. I know that OGL third-party books have a bad reputation, but this is one of the examples of why sometimes you should look past bad rep.
 
Get the book - https://atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3220