Friday, December 14, 2018

Strongholds and Followers - Initial Impressions

(The gorgeous cover art for the book, taken from the kickstarter page)


Matt Coleville's Strongholds and Followers dropped last night in PDF form. I was a backer for the book on kickstarter, and a fan of Matt Coleville's Running the Game series before that, so I couldn't wait to jump in. The book, on a quick flip through, is good. In fact, I'm looking forward to seeing how I can use it to help me run certain parts of my own game where the PCs have built themselves a number of structures that could just be Strongholds.

The book breaks strongholds down into four categories: Keeps, Temples, Towers, and Establishments.

Keeps are, well, Keeps. They're military fortresses that can be used to raise and train armies.

Temples are...temples. They can be used for prayer and to summon allies from other planes depending on whether they are attuned to a good, neutral, or evil god/goddess/power.

Towers are for arcane study and spell research.

Establishments help you gather information and make money.

Each has a couple variants built in to help GMs and DMs alike tool things to fit their games, and I'm not going to go into huge details because...well, buy the book.

The book is also loaded with beautiful art, has some interesting additional abilities PCs can get from their strongholds, and a number of other bells and whistles. It also has rules for mass combat, that are wide open for anyone to use or tweak as they see fit. I hope to have more on those soon, but I haven't read them even a little yet. Next week, maybe?

So if this sounds like something you could use in your game, check it out. The PDF is only $20. Matt has already announced the next book - whose name I already forget - but is waiting to make sure everyone gets their Strongholds and Followers stuff before they even begin looking at funding for that. But keep an ear out, if the quality of this is anything to go by it will be a great addition as well.

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