Natural 7

Levels High and Low

I've previously mentioned the shift between "knave-level" and "domain-level" in roleplaying games. If you haven't seen this shift before, it's the change you get when the scope of a game magnifies substantially from the local region.

One example is when characters hit level 9 in Old School Essentials and construct their first strongholds. This marks a turning point in the game because now they can easily amass allies and have become so powerful that the gaze of distant enemies has been drawn.

Another example is when you stop fighting off goblin raiding parties from the mountains, and now have to defeat the hobgoblin war monger marching from the south with hundreds upon hundreds of snarling minions.

A third example is when Paul Atreides becomes Emperor of the Universe. He can't just care about Arrakis, he must care about every planet.

Knave-Level

Knave-level refers to low-level characters and smaller scope adventures. You might delve into nearby dungeons, rescue locals, or travel through generic wilderness. During this time your characters are likely at higher risk of dying because you don't always have the resources necessary to survive. Sometimes you'll have the opportunity to interact with political figures, but they are either not very influential or they don't really care about you.

You don't really leave Knave-level play until someone or something enlarges the scope of the adventure and forces you to take action because of it. You could be the catalyst: asking to build a stronghold in the land of your queen is a sure-fire way to enter Domain-level play. Other entities could also cause the shift: war springing up wherever you try to adventure will usually pull you into the conflict too.

I use the term "level" loosely. Sometimes games will have implied cutoffs at certain levels that suggest your game should change scope, but it isn't always necessary. I don't think you ever have to change your scope if you don't want to, though it may become harder and harder as the game goes on. Especially if you care about the peoples and places you have encountered on previous adventures.

A GM might poke and prod an enlarged scope onto the game because of the abilities of characters to solve problems. Suppose your group just found one or two legendary weapons and have been crushing all enemies thrown at them. Maybe the GM will spice things up with a super powerful monster that wants your weapons. The monster, its minions, and its goals will likely have a significant impact on the scope of your adventure.

My Experience as a Knave

Let's use Mythic Bastionland as an example because that's what I always do. The game's scope begins with characters who are knights traveling from distant realms to seek myths in one main realm. They aim to finish about 12 or so myths and then seek something called the City. If you've read my first post about Mythic Bastionland, you'll know that the westmarches game I played in was quite a bit different from the core experience.

We began like normal, with knights from all over coming together to seek myths. Our quests were about exploring the realm we knew next to nothing about, and trying to find allies, knowledge, or tools to help us on future adventures.

However, much of our time was actually spent just trying to mitigate the chaos and problems caused by myths. In our first in-game year, we had winter twice because of one myth changing how time worked. We were constantly at low health because of this, and that made careless adventuring much more frightening because anything we ran into could kill us.

We spent a lot of energy and time trying not to die. We found ways to survive fights or talk our way out of bad situations. Almost every myth we encountered was very challenging for us to resolve quickly.

Every myth has a sixth omen. These omens were very destructive. We lost an entire holding and every single seer in our realm was killed at once. It was a pain in the butt to try and clean up all our failures, I promise you.

Eventually we started to get ingrained in the politics of our home realm. This caused some shifting power dynamics and a few regime changes, but eventually we had a good ruler and a few good knights ruling the local holdings. We had sought quite a few myths and some of us had already reached 12 glory on one or two knights. We began seeking our equivalent of the City.

My Domain Experience

Our scope-shift happened around the time we killed our first dragon at the end of our "City quest". This was when we as players began to realize how useful warbands were when facing mighty foes from beyond our realm. It also marked the moment that we ended all myths in our home realm. The neighboring realms were now the only places we could go in order to seek new myths. Most of us had positions of political power in our home realm, or were planning to find power in those other realms. We had domains to manage, and far-away lands to explore. There was danger on the horizon, but it had yet to make itself fully known to us.

For reference, there are no dragons written into the core rules of the game, so our GMs made do with a mutation of the dragon stats from Cairn. Also, there is nothing written about ending myths in your realm. Also also, several of us had some pretty sweet magic items and/or custom warbands. Also also also, we weren't actually seeking the City once we hit 12 Glory, we were looking for one of four powerful artifacts hidden in each of the four local realms. We are quite off-script from this point on.

The biggest difference was being motivated to explore distant realms. We got to meet new NPCs, enter new holdings, and map new terrain. Some of the realms were more hospitable than others, so players began to pick favorites. Most of my adventures were in the northern realm, so I rarely got to see the characters who solely ventured in the western realm.

With new realms came an almost constant stream of new threats. We were always juggling different NPCs that didn't like us and monsters that wanted to kill us. It was hard to decide what to do first, because if we screwed up then the next bad guy would come over and beat our heads in. Sometimes it didn't matter what came first and the bad guy would come over and beat our heads in anyway.

As you might be able to guess, more threats meant more motivation to build stronger characters and obtain powerful magic items and train useful warbands of soldiers. We became stronger as a collective, which made it harder for enemies to defeat us, and so the GMs made stronger enemies (further increasing scope by doing so). Eventually, we got to the point where we had hit the ultimatum: either we were the most powerful characters in this region, or we were going to be washed over by the entities that were. Those entities were called the Stewards.

We bashed their heads in with sticks.

So the game was over. The scope was as big as it was going to be; we had vied for power across four different realms and succeeded at uniting them under our charismatic leaders. In more superheroic games, maybe we would go on to fight demon lords or fallen deities or cosmic angels. However, in Mythic Bastionland, we had surpassed the intended scope of the game long ago. We had surpassed it about four times. It was time to call it a day.

Final Thoughts

This post looked at some examples of what high and low level play can look like in roleplaying games, and how it specifically impacted a game of Mythic Bastionland. Many players won't have the opportunity to reach domain-level because it can take a long time for the scope to shift; it usually requires a dozen sessions or more. I hope that if you get to try both low and high levels in a single campaign, you'll be able to compare the differences between the two.

Thanks for Reading, See You Next Week!

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