Return to Risk

I was wrong to call what I was creating Risk.   Only about 2/3 done with the massive map's provinces...  not even started naming them.  It's not Risk, it's Birthright.  Except I don't want that cluster fuck of rules.   God did it suck and digging out that horrid module, it leaves a whole hell of a lot to be desired when compared to the last decade and a half of empire building game advancement from 1996 to today.

What did my players want to do immediate when they got land?   They wanted to develop it.  To pour countless tons of wealth into the land to turn each province they had so lovingly stolen from the minor nobles in isolated lands to turn them into real cities.   They wanted to do what they do any game of Civilization or Master of Orion or Alpha Centauri or Hearts of Iron 3...  or any of the later Total War series games.

Except you can only do the most rudimentary of upgrades in Birthright.  There is nothing to allow a person to develop a backwater province and turn it into a powerhouse if they pour enough roads and make it attractive enough.   It assumes in the rules that you go in with the idea that using their maps and regions is the only way to play!

Screw that!


I am a die hard empire builder and I know at least 2/3 of my players want to also build an empire.  They want to know their money is doing something.  I want their money to do something.   They are also patient.  They are playing long lived races and are more than content to take a decade or two to build up a nation from next to nothing and into something that might eventually make a stand against ancient powers.   The satisfaction of knowing they took disparate provinces no one cared about on the frontier and turned them into a Prussia or better.   Some dream bigger than that.

This means I need to throw off the cheap way out and start to work to help fuel their desires, to help stoke the fires of ambition and see where this takes them.  Will they build something that will last or will they try to reach too far too fast and end up in ruins, an occupied shell under the rule of an empire?  That means newer and better rules.

Simple rules that can be easily understood but big enough to cover the level of detail they request... like their armies, infrastructure, crafting capacity, income makers, and critical resources...  but avoid the minute details that would bog it down too much under paper work.   They are to be kings, not accountants... that is what the Hand is for.  Btw, that's me.

But it is a neat experiment honestly on my part to see what my players when forced to make the BIG choices do.   They have been adventurers across a number of campaigns for years.  Now, they have to take on the mantle of being something far, far more.

All because a simple map with silly names was put before them and they could for once actually plot out their actual size of their tiny holdings and think.  So glad I listened to my room mate that day and spent the time working on it... even if I was distracted with the Ninja Warrior marathon because the main entertainment was knocked out thanks to the hurricane knocking out the web servers.