Realm Management: New Widdershins

 GURPS Realm Management  is a supplement that lets a gamemaster create a "realm" with some fairly simple stats that can be used as background flavor or part of a political type campaign. Players can even play the leaders of different realms as a competitive political campaign. As a playtester I built a couple of kingdoms for my Chalice World setting using it.

In one of my current games our group are playing leaders of a band of refugees from a small town in Colorado in modern day that escaped from a world ending event by Elder Things. The group just reached a nice place ot settle down and build anew and the GM will use GURPS Realm Management to help run this portion of the campaign. So lets see what happens....

Starting Out

The valley we have arrived at is a modest one, about 10 miles across and maybe 50 miles long with a river running from a north pass to a south pass and a small lake in the middle. We had several days to ransack our old town for supplies before the gate to this world was complete and picked up more supplies from a National Guard Armory along the way here. Oh, the valley is somewhere along the trunk of the world tree and magic is now a thing.

Were going to say our new town is about 50 square miles for a realm Size Value of +6.

Our population is 306 people, money is kinda weird at this point  but lets base it on our old standard, especially since it most impacts our starting costs. lets say average wealth for $2,600/month.

Our base value (p. 29) is thus $1,560.

Adding up our collective  goods we have $2,214,494 plus a bunch of vehicles and material not currently priced. This includes a lot of canned and dry goods as we had planned for a long trip with no idea what the terrain was going to be like. Frankly our vehicles could have been a waste too but they helped us haul as much as we could during the short time we could keep the gate open. We basically piled everyone and everything we could into vehicles and lined them up like the starting line at NASCAR or something then rushed the gate when it opened.

Starting Resource Points cost (Base Value *0.5) or $780 each, giving us a whopping 2,839 RP to be divided up among Agriculture Points, Luxury Points, Natural Resource Points, and Workforce Points. That influx of capital makes sense for spending heavily on starting resources to build our town. One might wonder why or how it should apply to Natural Resource Points but consider that it helps us get what we want out of the ground or water in a quicker manner than if we had fewer people or less equipment. Also processing it will be much easier with our tools, generators, and solar panels.

Misc Starting Stats

Lets list some general stats before getting to the meat of building New Widdershins.

Population: 306 all healthy and mobile. We do not need ot worry about carrying capacity at this point as we have plenty of food stores and the land is likely to support a much larger population once we start farming.

Citizen Loyalty: Very Good (+3) seems appropriate here. Leadership just saved about 1/3 of the old town from an apocalypse and the towns people are remarkably resilient, self reliant, and practical. We also have that small town loyalty to each other and everyone is wanting to work for the common good, at least for now.

Infrastructure Rating: 0 Not good! This gives us -5 (improvised equipment) for most things.

Control Rating: 2 is I think about right, we have a frontier situation but a strong leader in the town sheriff and he has 23 deputies and staff for 7% of the population. People are also used to obeying the laws of modern USA.

Conformity Rating: ConR3 fits our town pretty well, though an easy argument for ConR4 could be made.

Openness Rating: OR4 Mildly Open is the highest we can have without spending anything so lets call it that.

Government Type: Right now it is arguably Anarchy with a small group of leaders most of the town respect and trust to get things done and keep them alive. We will probably go to a representative Democracy like everyone is used to at some point.

Economy Type: Traditional is probably where we are at for now.

Education Rating: Should be 4 based on TL8 but our town seems very educated and includes a lot of military vets.

Management Skill: Default is 12 but we have high point leaders and overall a lot of very competent people in town. Each +1 costs +5% to Realm Value and we likely have Usually Reliable Management for another  +25%.

Habitality: Good (14; +1) We just got here so don't know the seasons but we have a couple of people with Naturalist so can make a good guess. Excellent fishing, something called pig apples that are very plentiful (kinda like potatos), nearby forest with game (already hunted some deer), and plains grass that smells like water melon and is edible. We also brought some grain of our own and have chickens for eggs and eventually meat. Plus cats and dogs to keep vermin under control.

Reaction-Time Modifier (RTM): +1; Adding things up we get 0 from TL8, +1 from Management Skill, and +0 from Complexity for a net +1.

Summary

That gives us a starting point.  Next up are modifiers and tweaking the numbers above as the GM provides more input (or GM Fiat).  I'll likely post some of that tomorrow.