I have had my eye on Strongholds & Followers for a while now, but getting my hands on a physical one has proved tricky. The straw that broke the camels back was today, when I saw hardbacks were back in stock - and on offer! - but shipping to the EU was going to cost $115. I am not short of a few pence by any means but that was too rich for me. So I bought the pdf, got a black & white hack-job printed off at by local print show (colour would have cost almost as much as shipping) and finally got stuck in. And lo, it was worth it.
Cover art by Conceptopolis
If the measure of success for an RPG book is ideas sparked and schemes set bubbling in a DMs mind then this was a solid hit. From watching The Chain I had a fair idea I was going to like the followers rules but the details are even better. This is one of those rare occassions were something that was long hyped, that I had been thinking about getting for a while lived up to the expectations.
So what is all this stuff you get in the box?
2 pages of Introduction with Matt Colvilles thoughts 'what is this book for'
60 pages on Strongholds and the powers they grant their builders
30 pages on Followers
The Siege of Castle Rend - 52 pages of an adventure
Appendix has a first section with 83 pages of Monsters
Second section of the Appendix is 13 pages on Warfare
Appendix closes with 18 pages of Magic Items
Starting with the Strongholds section - this is the big opener, describing the money pits and big shiny lures that is a player Stronghold. Part of the game from the earliest editions, and assumed to be an ambition of any player once they hit a certain level, it is great to get this new set of rules to make them more interesting and desirable. From a GM's point of view, getting the players to want and invest in an endless engine for adventure generation like a Stronghold is fantastic. The real innovation from MCDM here is that a Stronghold gives useable power to players who have one - massively over-the-top but extremely cool ones. Things like fighters getting to have *every attack by their allies hit* for a round. For a cleric, beams of golden light stab down and every undead or fiend within 60' must save or be annihilated. These are almost preposterously powerful actions but they make the time and effort of getting a Stronghold worth it in more ways than just role-playing opportunities.
The core concept here is that by founding a Stronghold you declare yourself lord of the land and become one with the land, for good and ill. This requires outlay in terms of gold and time commitment but also grants powers while you are within the borders of your desmesne. In this chapter we get mechanics on the costs of acquiring or repairing Strongholds, how they can be upgraded with Establishments within them and the types of retainers that can turn up to serve you. I like all of these for expanding the attraction of setting up a Stronghold beyond just those players who like to play the domain-level chess side of things, but also those who may be more focused on personal adventuring - we have not had these granted powers before, this is neat.
The second big new block of mechanics, Followers, is what I actually came here for. Watching 'The Chain' I really liked the slim-line rules that were used for followers and retainers and I like this toolkit for having Followers who are tough enough to be useful but not as complex as running a second character. They are essentially simplified archetypes of classes, a Skinwalker being something like the classic shape-shifting druid but with much fewer things to worry about at the table.
I have been my own best guess at this at table for a while - a couple of index card NPCs who sometimes support the players - and it is good to see the thinking laid out here. I appreciate the notes included in the text on why things are the way they are which gives a solid basis to then add whatever variants you may need for your own campaign that will be coherent with the systems here. That transparency on design is really helpful both to know how to run these and how to create more.
There are two types of followers in here - Retainers - the simplified character archetypes mentioned above - and artisan followers who are the craftsfolk and non-combat types who will also turn up looking to serve the lord of the land. The second group may or may not come into play depending on how hands on the players get about building out their Stronghold but good to have them.
The Siege Of Castle Rend - a showcase for both the new rulesets above which is good as there is nothing really comparable out there otherwise. The set up is good, relatively classic stuff, but the addition of a nice walk through of the mid-adventure down-time options is very useful. Assuming the players do not fumble the ball, they wind up with their grubby paws on Castle Rend with trouble on its way and so the downtime actions and what abilities come with having a Stronghold are relevant questions that this serves as a nice worked example of.
One minor note, I missed or it did not register exactly what level this was for on my first read-through and I read on through encounters that seemed increasingly scary until finally I got to a point where I went 'surely not' and went back to figure out what level this was for. As a 5th level adventure, this is pretty punchy - careless adventurers are going to come to a sticky end, pretty sharpish.
Monsters - the chunkiest section - a setting told through its monsters in the grandest fashion. Reminiscent of Creature Collection (Sword & Sorcery), Kobold Press Midgard, Creatures for Fateforge). Some interesting ideas here, also where this strays off into its most distinctly non-generic so your mileage may vary on whether you like and want to use these monsters.
Warfare gives us a shallow-and-broad system for playing out warfare - to paraphrase the text "this is not a wargame, its a streamlined way to have warfare happen within an RPG." There is a good block of mechanics on unit attributes, which are effectively ancestry, type (e.g. infantry, cavalry), experience level and standard of equipment. There are traits to differentiate things further and a set of rock-paper-scissors like mechanics about who can attack who. Combine this all and you get the means to stat up some units and have them duke it out while players have battlefield encounters in parallel.
In common with the Followers rules, the use of units are streamlined into a roll to hit, roll to overcome toughness with the impact being a health dice being decremented (similar to the health level for the Followers). Combined with an second, super-streamlined battle mechanic which involves opposed whole-army rolls and there are some good dials here to get the crunch right for your table. I can see some people getting lots of fun out of twiddling with their units, balancing equipment levels against cost, etc. while I could see others just choosing from the handful of generic units included in the book.
Magic items a good selection of items of various levels of power that fit with the new rules - things that can summon a unit, steady troops and so on. These have the feel of old Warhammer to me, like some of the old magical unit banners or nicely flavoursome various odds and ends you could assign to unit champions. Good to have with the new rules.
If the measure of the quality of the supplement is the fizz of inspiration it generates, then this is top quality. It hits a nice balance between the crunchy mechanics of how to do strongholds and followers for yours party but also heavily salted with inspiring background and the implications of both players and NPCs having access to these powers.
MCDM has since evolved their thinking, with Kingdoms & Warfare and soon Flee, Mortals! building out the systems and setting seeded in Strongholds & Followers. I have seen some discussions online on how S&F is not 100% compatible with the later editions as thinking evolved over time and word is that eventually there will be a revised edition of S&F but in the meantime, I think what is here is well worth having. Were I able to get my hands on a hardcopy without extortionate shipping, I would have been pleased to do so - as is, I have greatly enjoyed the sub-par quality home print version I have which speaks to the level of the design.
Other reviews can be found on Dungeons & Possums, the Kind GM, Skullsplitter Dice, Cannibal Halfling Gaming, Variant Ventures and Master the Dungeon.
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