The Heaviest Burden: the Crown

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Trying for an evocative title that’s not generic. D&D play does from being a nobody adventure to the endgame of being rich enough to rule a kingdom. Rules for government play with mass combat and things. I’m looking into that but I feel out of my depth.

The game pitch is the players are on the kingdoms ruling council. Run your kingdom.

I think the game would work by sharing the role of GMing. The main gameplay would be some way to track rounds. An event would happen by using spark tables to generate an event and/or procedures are using to describe the changing world. The players would discuss actions to take and after X rounds if things weren’t decided then a majority vote takes place.

The main thing is it’d be easy to make a storytelling. I’m interested in a OSR style resource matters, procedure driven, game about a large population. Anyone interested and/or have a strong grasp of these type of rules in the roleplaying genre?

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If I were to attempt running a game where the players were counselors governing a kingdom, I would lean on a few different systems.

I’d modify the Errant Downtime Turn to act as the basis for Kingdom turns. Players could spend turns to make progress on long-term projects. There would likely be a lot of clocks to track both player’s progress on projects, and known threats they are attempting to counter.

Downtime in Zyan has a procedure for court cases that could be used to abstract court intrigue. Players attempt to collect information, evidence, and blackmail enemies in erode their standing.

For warfare, Errant has solid rules both for smaller skirmishes and large-scale conflict you may find useful. However, I might use Whitehack’s Auction rules for mass combat instead.

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That’s helpful! thank you