Characters have three main resources for enacting changes in the world around them. The first is that of their character skills and features afforded to them based on their background. Their skills and features are convenient for making direct, immediate changes that require little management.
Characters also have Influence, abstract points representing the force of their full attention and regular management of a situation. Generally unlike features Influence is only ever committed, not expended. A character has Influence equal to their proficiency bonus, possibly a few points more depending on special features or circumstances. A player uses Influence when they want to represent their character’s regular tending of a situation and their “off-screen” use of skills and abilities.
Characters also have Wealth. Wealth is used to represent value they've added to the world and their ability to direct people in the world around them to fit their will. Unlike Influence, wealth is gone when expended, but can be used to change situations and local circumstances in powerful ways, changes that may last until its no longer maintained or destroyed. Characters usually start with little wealth, but gain it for performing mighty deeds and through the investments of their time. Wealth can be used in tandem with influence.
The Nature of Facts
Characters use their abilities, Influence, and Wealth to change facts. Facts are exactly as labeled; they’re the basic truths about a place or situation in the game world. Some might be called out specifically in the description of an area, but most facts are just implicit in the setting or circumstances. A poor farming village is going to have different facts than a prosperous town in Calaban, but most of these facts will only arise when it becomes relevant. The village is going to be cruelly taxed by its lord, and the Calaban town is going to have a huge market, but the GM won’t be going through their notes to write down every possible fact about both places before the game. The great majority of them will just be assumed or implicit.
Characters who seek to affect the world will try to change these facts. How they do so matters, but the ultimate goal of their efforts is to change a place or situation. Perhaps they want to extinguish slavery in a city, or bring prosperity to a village, or establish a fortress against an invading horde, or depose a corrupt lord. Any attempt to build, destroy or alter the realities of a locale can be treated as changing a fact. Some facts are harder to change than others, and some facts might not be possible to change at all without some characteristic deed or perilous adventure. Simple alterations that aren’t opposed by any major powers can be accomplished with little more than a commitment of influence or wealth, but characters who would defy kings, brace fate and grind against the laws of nature are going to have to work harder than that.
Ways of changing things
The simplest way for a character to make a change in the game world is to just do it. If a character has the necessary materials and abilities to make several potions, then they can make a set of potions whenever they have a spare afternoon. If they have the charisma to Influence the minds of people and delicately pursuade the village mayor’s attitude toward their suggestions, then the mayor will give whatever assistance they want him to give. It is not necessary to bring in any more complication than that, and many changes can be settled just with the use of a skill or ability. These changes cost nothing in Influence or Wealth as they are direct, immediate acts.
Sometimes, however, the change that the character wants to make is too far-reaching for the simple exercise of skills, or too complicated to be managed with a simple spell. A city’s lord might be as susceptible to the words of pursuasion as a village mayor, but the substantial body of officials and courtiers around him may prove more complicated to direct, particularly if they suspect their lord is being ensorceled. The character can then exert their abilities towards the courtiers, of course, but it eventually comes to a point where the character would have to spend a significant amount of his or her free time just to keep their plans in motion. It’s up to the GM to determine when a task is too complicated for the simple use of a skill or spell.
Exerting this sort of abstracted effort is represented by the use of Influence. The amount of Influence the hero and their allies must expend depends on how difficult the task is, from one point to make a plausible change in a village, to more than sixty to enact a kingdom-wide reality that is otherwise unreachable for the average person. Provided the hero can explain how their assets and skills can attain their end, they and their friends usually don’t need to do more than commit the Influence and work for a reasonable amount of time to enact the change. Assuming no outside forces are opposing them and no major challenge needs to be first overcome, the change will simply happen.
This Influence needs to stay committed, however, or else the natural pressures and complications of the situation will soon erode away whatever alteration they made. New business might fall apart under outside pressure or lack of direction, while obedient organizations might turn rebellious as unfettered new officials rise in power. This decay usually takes a while, but it’s almost inevitable once the Influence is withdrawn.
For situations where the hero wishes to make lasting changes that persist without their personal oversight, facts must be established. The hero establishes these Facts over time with concerted effort. They use their wits, money, leverage relationships, and natural talents to bring out the desired end, but establishing facts makes it permanent. It alters the outlines of the situation and changes the flow of fate so that the alterations that the hero supported are persistent, and will continue until some disaster or powerful outside force changes it.
With Influence and wealth, stories can be created that would otherwise be unachievable. Fortresses can be raised next to evil laden unholy lands, and institutes of learning built to educate future generations, workshops of fabulous productivity or a store full of alchemical products with potions the average citizen can afford can be established by heroes with intent. For truly great wonders and dramatic changes, however, equally great deeds and projects must also often be completed as well.
Changing Facts with Actions
Some changes the PCs want to accomplish can be performed quickly, just by exerting their efforts. If a paladin comes across a disease-stricken caravan, they can use their lay on hands or cast cure disease enough times enough to change that fact. Unless there's some outside source of the sickness that will refresh the suffering, that single effort is enough to make a lasting result.
In the same vein, a cleric of the forge who wants to upgrade a militia unit's armor with their Blessing of the Forge can simply do so, spending a few days collecting the materials and sculpting the armors to fit the soldiers. They may not have much in the way of manpower to establish a tradition of supplying the military unit, but can certainly upgrade their armor without any additional effort.
These changes are usually enough to alter a situation in the PC's favor, but they're usually not well-equipped to make lasting or complex alterations. The paladin could purge a village of sickness, for example, but that moment's purification won't stop the stream of diseased travellers from the surrounding plague-raddled communities. Without a longer-term solution, the caravan will likely fall back into sickness before too long. In a like fashion, that protective armor the cleric of the forge created might be a valuable armor to help the locals withstand a bandit attack, but the local lords are going to be very uncomfortable with the empowered militia until they are subservient to them.
Changing Facts with Influence
Influence abstracts a PC's attention and off-screen labor to accomplish a more complicated, enduring change. These changes last as long as the PC is still around often enough to maintain their handiwork; once the hero leaves town permanently, the natural forces of entropy
and social inertia will take hold.
The plague-raddled village could be kept permanently free of sickness by a paladin if he stuck around to cleanse it every so often and fix the inevitable travellers who'd seek his divine mercy there. Doing so would involve committing Influence to the situation, allotting some of his limited free time and attention toward the maintenance of the coommunities's health.
A forge cleric who wanted to make sure the local militia they equipped was properly maintained by the village could likewise commit Influence, making it clear to the villagers their intent to keep them ready or else they'd they might not capable of defending the village from larger threats. Watching over the situation and keeping things working the way they wished would require some amount of their attention, but would keep affairs stable.
Coercing a knights's lasting friendship would likewise require an Influence commitment, not only to keep the knight pliant, but to manage his heir, his courtiers, and his functionaries, all of whom might rebel if they think the knight is acting unreasonably. Judicious use of mind-bending powers, reasonable suasions, and careful bribes all take up the PC's time and focus, and if they stop committing Influence to it the situation is liable to degenerate.
In general, keeping Influence committed to a situation keeps the PC in control of it. Bad things might happen to it, but it will be because someone else is acting against them, not because the situation is naturally degenerating. The PC is spending their off-screen time taking care of business, and they're going to get basically the results they expect to get out of it.
When the PC withdraws Influence, however, the forces of humanoid nature and natural events will take over. For small changes or unobtrusive alterations, this might not mean anything. If the Influence was used to get the knight to cooperate in a mutually-advantageous pact with another local lord, then the newly-liberated knight might not even realize he was controlled, and credit his own wise foresight for the excellent results. If the Influence was used to get the knight to abdicate in favor of his puppet heir, on the other hand, things are liable to get bloody in a hurry.
Creating Lasting Changes
Great persons often want to make lasting effects in the areas they inhabit. This represents a characters direct interest in shaping the story as a whole and a direct mastery of their own power. Difficult changes and wholly magical alterations can be performed by spending their focus and using suitable means. The most drastic changes will require some great deed to be accomplished to clear the way for the new fact.
A paladin who wanted to maintain a village's health in perpetuity could spend time establishing an outpost of their order dedicated to removing sickness entirely from the boundary of the village forever after. The organization would take over their duties and provide healthcare when needed. Optionally, they might find an alchemist to tutor promising villagers to teach medicinal potions, granting them the ability to cure many sicknesses and accomplishing the same general effect in a different way.
A lasting fact takes time, and generally the process isn't fast enough to be useful whenever time is an issue. A ranger couldn't feed a village by having a village of farmers change to hunting and foraging when they crucially rely on a staple crop that has suddenly become unreliable, but given a few months creating a hunting guild from trained locals and a bit of wealth for tools of the trade, a new fact about the village can be established.
Sometimes a fact persists about an area or situation because its made true by a collection of other facts. A local oppressive lord might be in power because she has a powerful religious organization that supports her rule, the villagers are ill-equipped to rebel, and she has a deal with a local hag that proves beneficial to both of them. Establishing a new benevolent lord would mean changing the churches support, dealing with the hag, and getting the people on their side. To make the change more lasting they'd need to establish facts that support a new benevolent lord being on the throne. A pc could help form an order of knights that share the intrests of the lord or procure a powerful wizard to stay and advice the lord.
Once a lasting fact is established, it remains until some power destroys it. If this involves multiple supporting facts, then the opposition must create as many supporting facts as the creator did to undo the change. If it involves more physical violence, the enemy might have to simply kill all the acolytes of a healer or strew the village confines with magical curses. A splendid magical academy established by wealth might be undone by a rival spending enough wealth to bribe its supporters and curdle its teachings, or they might simply march an army through the halls, knock down its towers, and kill all its faculty. Without organized opposition, however, a change made with Dominion will persist indefinitely.
Characters also have Influence, abstract points representing the force of their full attention and regular management of a situation. Generally unlike features Influence is only ever committed, not expended. A character has Influence equal to their proficiency bonus, possibly a few points more depending on special features or circumstances. A player uses Influence when they want to represent their character’s regular tending of a situation and their “off-screen” use of skills and abilities.
Characters also have Wealth. Wealth is used to represent value they've added to the world and their ability to direct people in the world around them to fit their will. Unlike Influence, wealth is gone when expended, but can be used to change situations and local circumstances in powerful ways, changes that may last until its no longer maintained or destroyed. Characters usually start with little wealth, but gain it for performing mighty deeds and through the investments of their time. Wealth can be used in tandem with influence.
The Nature of Facts
Characters use their abilities, Influence, and Wealth to change facts. Facts are exactly as labeled; they’re the basic truths about a place or situation in the game world. Some might be called out specifically in the description of an area, but most facts are just implicit in the setting or circumstances. A poor farming village is going to have different facts than a prosperous town in Calaban, but most of these facts will only arise when it becomes relevant. The village is going to be cruelly taxed by its lord, and the Calaban town is going to have a huge market, but the GM won’t be going through their notes to write down every possible fact about both places before the game. The great majority of them will just be assumed or implicit.
Characters who seek to affect the world will try to change these facts. How they do so matters, but the ultimate goal of their efforts is to change a place or situation. Perhaps they want to extinguish slavery in a city, or bring prosperity to a village, or establish a fortress against an invading horde, or depose a corrupt lord. Any attempt to build, destroy or alter the realities of a locale can be treated as changing a fact. Some facts are harder to change than others, and some facts might not be possible to change at all without some characteristic deed or perilous adventure. Simple alterations that aren’t opposed by any major powers can be accomplished with little more than a commitment of influence or wealth, but characters who would defy kings, brace fate and grind against the laws of nature are going to have to work harder than that.
Ways of changing things
The simplest way for a character to make a change in the game world is to just do it. If a character has the necessary materials and abilities to make several potions, then they can make a set of potions whenever they have a spare afternoon. If they have the charisma to Influence the minds of people and delicately pursuade the village mayor’s attitude toward their suggestions, then the mayor will give whatever assistance they want him to give. It is not necessary to bring in any more complication than that, and many changes can be settled just with the use of a skill or ability. These changes cost nothing in Influence or Wealth as they are direct, immediate acts.
Sometimes, however, the change that the character wants to make is too far-reaching for the simple exercise of skills, or too complicated to be managed with a simple spell. A city’s lord might be as susceptible to the words of pursuasion as a village mayor, but the substantial body of officials and courtiers around him may prove more complicated to direct, particularly if they suspect their lord is being ensorceled. The character can then exert their abilities towards the courtiers, of course, but it eventually comes to a point where the character would have to spend a significant amount of his or her free time just to keep their plans in motion. It’s up to the GM to determine when a task is too complicated for the simple use of a skill or spell.
Exerting this sort of abstracted effort is represented by the use of Influence. The amount of Influence the hero and their allies must expend depends on how difficult the task is, from one point to make a plausible change in a village, to more than sixty to enact a kingdom-wide reality that is otherwise unreachable for the average person. Provided the hero can explain how their assets and skills can attain their end, they and their friends usually don’t need to do more than commit the Influence and work for a reasonable amount of time to enact the change. Assuming no outside forces are opposing them and no major challenge needs to be first overcome, the change will simply happen.
This Influence needs to stay committed, however, or else the natural pressures and complications of the situation will soon erode away whatever alteration they made. New business might fall apart under outside pressure or lack of direction, while obedient organizations might turn rebellious as unfettered new officials rise in power. This decay usually takes a while, but it’s almost inevitable once the Influence is withdrawn.
For situations where the hero wishes to make lasting changes that persist without their personal oversight, facts must be established. The hero establishes these Facts over time with concerted effort. They use their wits, money, leverage relationships, and natural talents to bring out the desired end, but establishing facts makes it permanent. It alters the outlines of the situation and changes the flow of fate so that the alterations that the hero supported are persistent, and will continue until some disaster or powerful outside force changes it.
With Influence and wealth, stories can be created that would otherwise be unachievable. Fortresses can be raised next to evil laden unholy lands, and institutes of learning built to educate future generations, workshops of fabulous productivity or a store full of alchemical products with potions the average citizen can afford can be established by heroes with intent. For truly great wonders and dramatic changes, however, equally great deeds and projects must also often be completed as well.
Changing Facts with Actions
Some changes the PCs want to accomplish can be performed quickly, just by exerting their efforts. If a paladin comes across a disease-stricken caravan, they can use their lay on hands or cast cure disease enough times enough to change that fact. Unless there's some outside source of the sickness that will refresh the suffering, that single effort is enough to make a lasting result.
In the same vein, a cleric of the forge who wants to upgrade a militia unit's armor with their Blessing of the Forge can simply do so, spending a few days collecting the materials and sculpting the armors to fit the soldiers. They may not have much in the way of manpower to establish a tradition of supplying the military unit, but can certainly upgrade their armor without any additional effort.
These changes are usually enough to alter a situation in the PC's favor, but they're usually not well-equipped to make lasting or complex alterations. The paladin could purge a village of sickness, for example, but that moment's purification won't stop the stream of diseased travellers from the surrounding plague-raddled communities. Without a longer-term solution, the caravan will likely fall back into sickness before too long. In a like fashion, that protective armor the cleric of the forge created might be a valuable armor to help the locals withstand a bandit attack, but the local lords are going to be very uncomfortable with the empowered militia until they are subservient to them.
Changing Facts with Influence
Influence abstracts a PC's attention and off-screen labor to accomplish a more complicated, enduring change. These changes last as long as the PC is still around often enough to maintain their handiwork; once the hero leaves town permanently, the natural forces of entropy
and social inertia will take hold.
The plague-raddled village could be kept permanently free of sickness by a paladin if he stuck around to cleanse it every so often and fix the inevitable travellers who'd seek his divine mercy there. Doing so would involve committing Influence to the situation, allotting some of his limited free time and attention toward the maintenance of the coommunities's health.
A forge cleric who wanted to make sure the local militia they equipped was properly maintained by the village could likewise commit Influence, making it clear to the villagers their intent to keep them ready or else they'd they might not capable of defending the village from larger threats. Watching over the situation and keeping things working the way they wished would require some amount of their attention, but would keep affairs stable.
Coercing a knights's lasting friendship would likewise require an Influence commitment, not only to keep the knight pliant, but to manage his heir, his courtiers, and his functionaries, all of whom might rebel if they think the knight is acting unreasonably. Judicious use of mind-bending powers, reasonable suasions, and careful bribes all take up the PC's time and focus, and if they stop committing Influence to it the situation is liable to degenerate.
In general, keeping Influence committed to a situation keeps the PC in control of it. Bad things might happen to it, but it will be because someone else is acting against them, not because the situation is naturally degenerating. The PC is spending their off-screen time taking care of business, and they're going to get basically the results they expect to get out of it.
When the PC withdraws Influence, however, the forces of humanoid nature and natural events will take over. For small changes or unobtrusive alterations, this might not mean anything. If the Influence was used to get the knight to cooperate in a mutually-advantageous pact with another local lord, then the newly-liberated knight might not even realize he was controlled, and credit his own wise foresight for the excellent results. If the Influence was used to get the knight to abdicate in favor of his puppet heir, on the other hand, things are liable to get bloody in a hurry.
Creating Lasting Changes
Great persons often want to make lasting effects in the areas they inhabit. This represents a characters direct interest in shaping the story as a whole and a direct mastery of their own power. Difficult changes and wholly magical alterations can be performed by spending their focus and using suitable means. The most drastic changes will require some great deed to be accomplished to clear the way for the new fact.
A paladin who wanted to maintain a village's health in perpetuity could spend time establishing an outpost of their order dedicated to removing sickness entirely from the boundary of the village forever after. The organization would take over their duties and provide healthcare when needed. Optionally, they might find an alchemist to tutor promising villagers to teach medicinal potions, granting them the ability to cure many sicknesses and accomplishing the same general effect in a different way.
A lasting fact takes time, and generally the process isn't fast enough to be useful whenever time is an issue. A ranger couldn't feed a village by having a village of farmers change to hunting and foraging when they crucially rely on a staple crop that has suddenly become unreliable, but given a few months creating a hunting guild from trained locals and a bit of wealth for tools of the trade, a new fact about the village can be established.
Sometimes a fact persists about an area or situation because its made true by a collection of other facts. A local oppressive lord might be in power because she has a powerful religious organization that supports her rule, the villagers are ill-equipped to rebel, and she has a deal with a local hag that proves beneficial to both of them. Establishing a new benevolent lord would mean changing the churches support, dealing with the hag, and getting the people on their side. To make the change more lasting they'd need to establish facts that support a new benevolent lord being on the throne. A pc could help form an order of knights that share the intrests of the lord or procure a powerful wizard to stay and advice the lord.
Once a lasting fact is established, it remains until some power destroys it. If this involves multiple supporting facts, then the opposition must create as many supporting facts as the creator did to undo the change. If it involves more physical violence, the enemy might have to simply kill all the acolytes of a healer or strew the village confines with magical curses. A splendid magical academy established by wealth might be undone by a rival spending enough wealth to bribe its supporters and curdle its teachings, or they might simply march an army through the halls, knock down its towers, and kill all its faculty. Without organized opposition, however, a change made with Dominion will persist indefinitely.