About KING BEOWULF
KING BEOWULF in a major expansion for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes that provides resources for higher level play, including a realm management system that allows your Hero to become the ruler of their own land, manage events that occur in their realm, and negotiate or wage war with other rival realms.
Jacob with a KING BEOWULF development journal entry here. So the process is still ongoing but there are a few steps I can share with you. A key component of the supplement is that it allows your higher level BEOWULF Heroes to step into leadership roles and that requires defining some terms so that we can talk about the rules for such things. Things, of course, are still in development, and these could change before final publication but this is the state of terminology at present.
First, we have determined that ‘realm’ is the term we will use for the overall thing that your ruler is in charge of. It avoids gendered terms like ‘king’ or ‘queen’ and appears in many translations of the poem. It covers areas of different sizes and can scale in grandeur as your ruler’s lands also gain in size, gifts (more on that in a bit) and wealth.
Next, we use the term ‘scir’ for the chunks of the realm that are broken out into different administrative areas. The term comes from the Old English word and it was quite the journey to land on this term. We are happy with it, as it makes the process of determining events, taxes (more on this in a future blog because the migration era saw some interesting practices and development), warfare, and other processes easier.
Your ruler is aided by Advisors. Like the Followers that aid the Hero during an adventure, Advisors provide capabilities and advice for your ruler during a realm turn. And just like Followers, each Advisor has a series of tags, defining certain gifts and burdens that make them unique.
Speaking of tags, each scir also has a number of tags, providing gifts and burdens for that area. A particular scir might have gifts that allow it to produce more military, naval, or financial resources for your realm or it might have burdens that must be dealt with before your people can make full use of the scir and its natural resources.
For our next journal entry, we will talk more about warfare, including the crowfield, various units and muster lists. See you soon!