Thank you guys so much for the progress so far! We still have a long way to go, and at the rate we're moving, I'm confident we can crush at least a few more stretch goals!

First, some housekeeping: there's a new Pledge Level! Merchant Coiner has been added, allowing you to get $160 worth of Crowns 2e, Limited-Edition print copies (AKA four of them) for only $100! That's nearly half-off! We're just eking out a profit on our end to ensure that you, the merchant, make as much on yours! If this is you, or if you and your friends want to get in on Crowns 2e together, this is the perfect buy, please consider upgrading your pledge!

And, there's been an update for the Crowns 2e rules, read all about it here: https://ward-against-evil.itch.io/crowns-2e/devlog/948688/5192025-backerkit-success-and-outsiders

Moving on, I'm going to post a highlight of one section of the book every day for the next week, just to give you guys something to chew on while the campaign chugs along!

A "Keep" is the Crowns term for what other games call player strongholds. They are part of the assumed progression of the game, that around mid-level (Veteran-Expert Seekers) will obtain a small Keep for their own. In my experience, this tends to end up being a dungeon they cleared out in the past and want to repair into their own personal fortress, which, you know, is pretty cool!

Keeps provide the players with the ability to tax Holdings and access three new Downtime Actions (called Regency actions, each one taking a week to perform): Caravan, Patrol, and Muster.

Holdings are the settlements that are under the control and protection of the Keep. Depending on their size, they provide different amounts of taxes to the Keep, but these tend to only cover the maintenance costs of your keeps and logistics costs of your warbands (if you want to make a lot of money, you need a lot of holdings, or you need to keep adventuring). They can be pressed to give more taxes, but this has a chance of shrinking their size, reducing future tax revenue.

Caravanning allows players to invest money, wait some time, and hopefully make some profit! The farther out you send it, the less likely it is to come back intact, but the more money you'll make if it does! You can do this in the background while you go off and do adventuring things.

Patrolling allows players to improve the settlements under their control. The world is dying and civilization is losing to the chaos of the wilderness. Shows of force and marching warbands shows people you're serious and makes commoners flock to your refuges in hopes of being safe. This is the fastest way to grow your settlements and get more taxes, but requires you to have active warbands (which are expensive) in order to perform. The more impressive your warbands, the more likely you are to grow a settlement (commoner militias are cool, but cadres of knights are cooler).

Mustering is how you get warbands in the first place! They come in three varieties:

You can of course get different warbands! But we'll take more about that later...

Base building is fun, and so Crowns 2e has a lot of it! You can construct an expansion for your keep by spending some coin and waiting the time it takes to construct it. Each expansion even has different levels (1-5) that allow it to be more fun and helpful, and if an expansion is at least level three it can attract specialist retainers to come live at your keep!

There are four types of expansions: Armories, Galleries, Sanctums, and Towers.

Armories are the forges that temper your soldiers arms and armor, bowries that fletch fresh arrows, stores of weapons and plate, stalls set aside for warhorses, and all things needed to wage a war and win. They provide bonuses for all of your Regency Downtime actions and attract Armorers, Carpenters, and Fletchers to your Keep. I find that most of my players wait on one until it clicks for them that this makes them more money from boosting their Regency Downtime actions, then they build a huge one.

Galleries are great halls, throne rooms, gardens, museums, and other players to display your greatest accomplishments so far as a Seeker. They allow you to display treasures, magic items, and monster trophies (instead of selling them) for bonus Renown (the Crowns 2e equivalent of experience). You can display one per level of the gallery. They also tempt Coiners and Bathhouse to come live at your base. Strangely, this was the most in-demand expansion by every player I've had because by the point they get a Keep they are often extremely proud of the adventures they've been on and want to show off their rewards.

Sanctums are wizards' towers, clerics' temples, druids' groves, alchemists' labs, and arcane libraries all rolled up into one. Downtime actions like Transcribing (making scrolls out of grimoires), Duplicating (making watered down versions of potions), and Inquiring (answering questions about the world) are boosted by strong Sanctums. They also attract Apothecaries, Occultists, and Temples to your keep. Usually, these are the last expansions players buy, not because they don't have a lot of magic items, but because they don't realize just how useful it is to have one until they have one.

Towers are exactly what they sound like: big ole' defensive turrets along your walls. These are the most mechanical of the expansions, acting as a warband during battles where your Keep is involved (and thus they can also be used as a metric for how to build your own bad guy castles). They don't attract any retainers, but players feel naked without them. Makes sense, considering most don't have standing armies.

In a lesson I learned from a Lamentations of the Flame Princess rulebook, it's cool to bring back weird artifacts from dungeons to boost your own stronghold, so that system is included! Expansions are automatically levelled up by one for each unique item you furnish them with, such as:

So if you find something cool, bring it home! It will literally make you better!

A warband is a group of warriors whose collective HD (hit dice) adds up to 40. Some monsters are Elite or Solo, and this means their HD is multiplied by 2 or 3 (respectively) in conventional, man-to-man, combat. Well, it's similarly multiplied when accounting for a warband. Likewise, monsters with 0 HD are treated as having half an HD for warbands. So, 40 mercenaries is a warband, but so is one dragon or 80 commoners.

Warbands have the same stat-blocks as the monsters that make them up. So a warband made up of 1 HD mercenaries is a 1 HD warband, and a warband made up of a single dragon is a 20 HD warband because dragons are really freaking scary.

Warbands can be mixed with different kinds of creatures, but they have the stats of the stat-block that makes up the majority of the formation. So, a block of mercenaries with mixed weaponry is treated as all having polearms is the majority of them have polearms. Likewise a troll is a big deal, it's a Solo creature that accounts for 21 HD of the formation (7 HD x 3 for being a Solo monster), but that's not enough to make a full warband, so it needs to be supplemented with a few 1 HD goblin handlers who have no effect over the stat-block but make up the rest of the HD. It's still treated as an all-troll warband, but when it loses HD we can say, in the fiction, that's just goblins getting chewed up.

Warband combat is called Warfare and plays out exactly the same as normal combat. The only difference is that there are Solo or Elite monsters in warbands don't get to roll on their special style tables or attack multiple times a round, but they do get other their special abilities (ghoul warbands get to paralyze enemies for example).

There's a few other minor differences with Warfare vs. conventional combat, but you'll be able to look them all over once you get the full PDF in a few weeks! What's really fun (to me at least, as a former real-world military logistician) is the logistics of running an army!

Warbands cost 100c per HD per week to maintain. That means it nearly takes the tax revenue of an entire Hamlet (a level three out of six settlement) every month to pay for a single warband of HD 1 mercenaries for that same month. Woe betide anyone who attempts to keep a dragon on retainer (8000c a month)! This is why you muster armies for short periods, do war, then rely on your towers and defenses in the meantime, with a small skeleton crew of soldiers to patrol the land if need be.

To be continued...

You can playtest the game on our Discord with me and our awesome community! We don't bite!

Let's get to $5000!
Reese Surles, Ward Against Evil