A while ago I saw a post on the OSR Discord (I think it may have been Jenx's Zandan megadungeon retrospective) that talked about how useful it was to talk about failures. Disastrous campaigns and ill-formed systems that can serve as a warning for others.
This is, in part, that. A few weeks ago I talked about my dubious experience with "Ten Blade Demigodlikes", a domain game system originally by Phlox popular in the GLOG sphere (you can read its rules here and the rules I've been using so far here).
The actual rules of the game went largely without mention there, but they've caused no end of issues themselves. So, in the spirit of talking about failure, the worst parts of my old system and some half-formed plans for the new edition I'll be using when the game comes off hiatus in 2026:
1 - The Economy
In Ten Blade Demigod and its imitators, the economy is simple enough. Each year your domain produces taxes based on your Level and Trade holdings, plus some randomization. Then, in each season, you can make one domain action - building things, hosting people, et cetera, which usually costs some money.
This is a perfectly functional system - if you happen to have things like "taxes" and "money". Navigators have neither - instead, I tried to experiment with a system based off of Luke Gearing's Reputation Tables, to simulate the soft power and persuasion inherent to their social structure. Each domain leader had a 20-entry table, half-filled at the start of the game and filled further through XP-generating-style activities like arranging profitable marriages, resolving disputes, and so on.
When they attempted to perform a domain action, they made a number of d20 rolls on that table (varying by the action's "cost") and needed all of those rolls to hit a filled table entry. If any number of actions missed, the people of their domain said "sorry boss I'm busy making textiles" and the player must choose a different action for that season.
This was the worst idea I have had in my life. It was meant to be unreliable, but this was shocking - 25% or less chances to accomplish basic tasks and a complete lack of control over the domain. It is the only mechanic I have ever had or seen that fully got a player to just Quit. I patched it - ways to pass failed rolls at varied costs, the addition of trade goods as a second track, and so on, but while that made it work (ish), it also made it a towering inelegance spread throughout the handbook with no organization.
My plan for 2e is to, instead, rip off Sofinho's genius new hunter-gatherer townbuilding rules, which use surplus time left over after hunter-gatherering as their base currency - renewed every season, impossible to save, and scaling off of population and local terrain. His recruitment and reputation system may also find use.
2 - Exploration
Originally, Ten Blade Demigod had winter set out as its adventure season. The unnavigable seas froze to ice, allowing PCs to march out to the isles of Acmori. Later domain games generally abandoned this structure, though mine kept it - with the airless Black Season as the Navigators' venturing period.
However, despite this being (essentially) a naval game, I forgot to have a sea. The exploration rules were strange and exceedingly specific to constrain the PCs to single adventure sites when they had a spaceship and the nearest adventure site was a couple hexes of walking away.
In 2e the focus of exploration will be ventures into Machine Space, tens of thousands of miles of vacuum-filled artery filled with Acmori-like "island" sites and ship-scaled random encounters. The larger hexcrawls will still exist, but be a rarer, difficult-to-find option where Navigator PCs will still be constrained to shock raids: sawing holes into the map from Machine Space, running around, and returning to their getaway ship before the megastructure notices the intrusion and sends an automated dreadnought and repair team.
3 - Player Characters
Prior domain games of this type have been set in autocracies - players had A Character, who ruled with an iron fist for life. Unfortunately, as with the economy, I decided to make my life difficult. Navigators are largely egalitarian, except for the position of the Select, a judge elected for a single year to resolve disputes and act as clan representative in negotiations.
My solution to this problem so far has just been to ignore it, trapping the players in a flickering superposition between "actually their character" and "the mood of their clan" depending on what was more convenient on a gameplay level. This works, I guess, but is also boring and not particularly intuitive.
In 2e I want to fully detach the player from a character - more like Crusader Kings than D&D, Select drifting in and out of power and the player generating new PCs as needed when the time comes to play a character.
I do not know how I'm going to do this yet. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins does something similar with a switch between long-term play as a faction and adventure play as a single-use specialized PC, but on a shorter timescale of seasons instead of generations it's more difficult to get rid of already-used player characters.
Re-specializing the Select as a judicial position would also permit the players to pilot PCs with other roles (similar, perhaps, to the roles given to newly-made Legacy PCs), but at a certain point I've started trying to do troupe play with a constantly shifting cast of possible characters, which sounds like Hell.
This is the system I'm furthest from knowing what to do with. We'll see.
