Review: Empire (by AEG)

Review: Empire (by AEG)

You probably noticed that lately I’ve been in the mood for some domain management rules. Today, I’d like to briefly review a third-party supplement for D&D 3.0 titled Empire. This book was published by AEG – Alderac Entertainment Group – I already talked about one of their books before titled Evil. I remember saying that AEG produced poor books in terms of D&D mechanics and character options, but good books for ideas and generic advice. The book was written by Mike Mearls, who later became one of the lead designers of D&D 5e, and I can say that his writing definitely degraded with time. So, let’s see what Empire is all about.

The first chapter is titled “the Rules of Power”. Why is “Of” capitalized here, but not in the titles of chapters 2 and 3? That’s just something that I noticed when writing this. But formatting aside, these 27 pages are devoted to domain management rules. The rules are abstract, but not to the degree GURPS Realm Management rules are. Resources, land, and other things are measured in abstract units, some of which represent different amounts of stuff depending on the scale. There are three realm scales – barony, kingdom, and empire. For example, one land unit on the barony scale is 1 square mile, while on the empire scale it is 400 square miles.

After explaining that, the rules tell you about several different ways the player characters may assume the position of power, and then tells you how to generate the domain. The book suggests a starting domain size and terrain composition that makes it possible to feed the population and earn enough revenue. It also talks about how many resources the domain should start with. The lack of this was one of my big gripes with GURPS Realm Management.

Then, there’s something that may be mildly confusing – Room for Growth. The book says that you should surround the domain with wasteland to represent room for growth. One may think, and I did, that wasteland is a terrain type, and that each domain with plains, forests, hills, and mountains, is for some reason surrounded by barren deserts, but that’s not actually what it means. In the context of the rules, “wasteland” is a terrain type that represents an undeveloped and unsettled area. Each wasteland also has a secondary terrain type, and you can convert a wasteland into an area of its secondary terrain type by settling and developing it. I really think the author should’ve used a different word for this, such as “undeveloped.”

Empire has three types of resources – food, lumber, and minerals. However, minerals are also subdivided into adamantine, copper, gold, iron, mithral, silver, and stone. Each unit of resources has its own gold conversion rate. I like it when the resources are divided, I don’t like abstracting them too much.

Population also is measured in arbitrary units. This section has something that some other domain management systems do not talk about – population of different races and mixed-race domains. Every population unit belongs to a certain race, and they all work differently when producing resources. For example, dwarven population produces more metal and stone, while elves get more lumber and food out of forest provinces. You can even have undead population, which is something many systems try to brush under the carpet.

Each major group, character, or faction within a domain can have a loyalty value. Obviously, low loyalty is bad, and high loyalty is good. Finally, you also may assign three ministers – the treasurer, the general, and the prime minister.

After that, the book talks about the rules for actually managing a domain. The turns follow a seasonal structure – each turn represents one season, and available actions may be restricted to only specific seasons. There is no limit to the number of actions per season, but your domain’s resources may serve as a cap. There are some generic actions that can be performed regardless of season, such as Buy Goods, Sell Goods, or Raise Taxes. Some actions are obligatory – they must be taken every appropriate season. That’s a pretty decent concept, and I’ve seen this seasonal structure in other books, such as Fields of Blood: The Book of War that was released in the same year by Eden Studios.

Then, there is a section of the various stronghold and settlement improvements – temples, guilds, walls, markets, etc. It’s okay, even though the number of options is a bit underwhelming.

That’s basically it for the domain management rules, but this is only one fifth of the book. Chapter two is titled “The Art of War” – it’s a mass combat system. I cannot really evaluate it properly, but it seems to be at the same time more complicated and shallow than Domains at War: Battles.

Chapter 3 is titled “The Dogs of War.” This is something like a Monster Manual for mass combat – it has many of the classic D&D enemies in the format of mass combat units and the actual monster statblocks also are reprinted for ease of reference. I must say that I appreciate the effort here – these units definitely can be used as inspiration for, for example, the aforementioned Domains at War: Battles. Also, I like the art here – it’s very competently made. However, this is where I realized that the domain management rules do not actually interact well with the mass combat rules, which seems to be a major shortcoming of this book. In the domain management rules from this book, when you muster troops, you recruit a medium-sized unit of the 1^st level. However, the amount of resources spent only defines how much gold you can spend on the unit’s equipment. For example, 1 gold unit gives you 100 gp for your unit’s loadout. You can outfit some men with leather armor and give them axes or… you could recruit a band of cloud giants for free if you have cloud giant population, and they would literally stomp many of the human units into the ground. In short, for the purpose of recruitment, the unit’s nature doesn’t matter, only its gear does, and this throws the balance out of the window. I know that I said that balance is overrated, but this just makes no sense. Also, the sample units in this section do not even have gold values of their gear, so you have to calculate it yourself. Why wasn’t it included? And why are some monsters included only with their regular statblocks but not the mass combat statblocks? This is just strange.

This chapter made me realize that this system just doesn’t work properly, even though it “doesn’t work” to a lesser degree than GURPS Realm Management.

But let’s trudge on. Chapter 4 is titled “Characters and Rulership.” It’s actually pretty good. It talks about how each of the core 11 classes would work as a domain ruler, and provides new class features related to mass combat and domain management. I don’t think I’ve seen such thing in other similar books. Then, there is a new NPC noble class, several new feats, and a couple of prestige classes, but I don’t care.

Chapter 5 is titled “the Empire Campaign.” It’s all about campaign design, and it offers some decent advice on how to start a domain campaign, how to run it, what kind of courtly NPCs you can involve, what campaign models there are, and what practical issues may arise. The different campaign models is something every GM must consider before running a domain campaign. Do all the characters run the same domain? Are they all supervised by the same king? Do they all have domains of their own? Or is rulership just a goal for them? The adventure design advice also is pretty good and worth reading. After all, even if you have good domain management rules, what do you even do with them? What’s the goal the players will pursue?

After that, there’s an appendix with optional rules that are mostly concerned with skirmish combat, but I don’t really care for that.

Overall, what can I say here? I know that a few days ago I said that Empire is one of the best domain management rules for D&D 3.0, but I take my words back. After reading them more thoroughly instead of relying on old memories, I see that while this ruleset does have some potential, it doesn’t interact well with its own mass combat system and feels a bit barebones in other places. However, its adventure design advice is pretty good, and the book may be worth reading just for that alone, if you’re interested in that sort of stuff.

This is not the end of Eggplant domain management arc, because I have some other books in mind too. I’ll wait for ACKS II to be released in its final version before reviewing it, but there are at least two other D&D books that I’d like to take a look at – Fields of Blood: The Book of War and Classic Play: Book of Strongholds and Dynasties. The latter looks very promising and detailed, so I’m excited.