Three sheep with numbered collars

I found two images to illustrate this article, one literal, one figurative. This is the literal image, courtesy of freeimages.com / Mew Lotova. The expression on the one closest to the camera is priceless!

I originally intended to publish the Blog Carnival round-up today, but last week’s computer failure has messed up my plans quite a bit, so I’ve given myself a couple of extra days to get that finished. This is another article that I wrote while my internet was dead, and could be viewed as something of a filler – but I hope that it’s left-field enough to inspire and interest, anyway.

I’m not sure what brought it to mind, but this morning I thought up a fantasy campaign unlike any that I’ve ever run or even heard of before.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve worked for the Australian Census a couple of times. Back in medieval times, a Census, such as the famous Domesday Book, took a lot longer to compile. It could, and would (in a Fantasy environment), take years.

This was more than a count of people – every piece of domesticated livestock and every acre of cultivated land, what was being grown there, and the typical annual yield, was recorded. The number of practitioners of every profession was recorded.

The monarch who ordered the Domesday Book – William The Conqueror – had it easy compared to a Fantasy Monarch.

Monsters alone would make life difficult.

But there would also be:

  • nobles who did not want an accurate count of their true wealth made;
  • all sorts of schemes that might be stumbled over,
  • organizations like Thieves Guilds that suspect the census counters of actually pursuing some other agenda on behalf of the throne and who don’t want an accurate record of which of their members are where.
Spiralling numbers as though draining down a hole

This is the figurative illustration from pixabay.com / geralt. This campaign sounds like such a simple process, but it really does take the PCs down the rabbit-hole….

And pity the poor nose-counters who have to try and get an accurate count of the numbers of Orcs, Dragons, Vampires, etc, who may be resident within the Kingdom!

And on top of that, there are all the “normal” adventures that may be stumbled into simply because the act of taking the census takes the census-counters to the right place at the wrong time!!

Who would such a monarch turn to? Adventurers, of course. No-one else could possibly hope to complete such a difficult task.

And it goes without saying that every adventurer can be explicitly trusted, right? The purpose of the Domesday Book was to determine how much tax revenue the King was owed. Speak up, everyone who agrees that no adventurer would ever take advantage of the opportunities with which they might be presented – bribes to under-report, for example, or to over-report the wealth of a rival? Hear that hollow echo?

If you can’t get enough adventures to carry a party all the way from Level 1 (novices) to Level 20+ out of this framing device, hang your GM Screen in shame.

What appeals most about this idea is the variety of adventure that can result, just from the variation in opposition or enemy. You could literally take this plot device just about anywhere.

Just another notion to file away for the next time you need a campaign in a hurry….

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