“Join a tiny king’s quest to unite the Tinyblins. Only problem is, he lacks resources and soldiers. Gather, harvest, or pillage then keep his monument standing against his rivals’ mechanical soldiers.”
If you can’t wait for it to be published in the OPD 2022 compendium, you can check out the pdf here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1phtZ-E4Qgf1VyM2LBgwvqLzYWKPBqcGI/view?usp=sharing
Some math and other making-of tidbits for those who might be interested.
Sort of worst case scenario was the plan that players could harvest everything they needed in 20 rounds with an average result of 10 (4 PCs x 5 resources x 10 x 20 rounds = 4000 resources, with some slack to account for movement, wasted remainders, and similar).
With 20 rounds or prep, that would roughly result in 10 rounds of army building split across the three rivals. This results in about 16 Soldiers and 5 Specialty units total. There are 13 Soldiers and 7 Specialty units on the map at the start. Theoretically, the existing soldiers would be defeated just hunting down the starting materials, then the waves of enemies would start attacking the monument.
Assuming an even split, each rival would have 5 + 2 troops. There is a bit of travel time, and not all soldiers are likely to be killed instantly, so they will build up in their assault on the monument.
1: 7 troops, send 2, build 2 (6 total)
2: 7 troops, send 4, build 2 (12 total)
3: 5 troops, send 5, build 2 (15 total)
4-8: 2 troops, send 2, build 2 (6 total)
Soldiers average 2.33HD and specialties average 5.33 HD. Total average Soldiers, 37 and Specialties, 20. Best guess for HD of slain golems is roughly 193. For a total expected treasure of 1930gp. Then Theo’s holdouts have to be accounted for plus the extra 5-7 rounds of Bar and Miblis troops (18 more soldiers and specialties plus Theo’s 7 Ironbound). This adds another. 194 HD, for a rough total of 3870gp just from golem pillaging.
6 camps total 600 wood, 3 towns total 600 wood and 300 gold, and the singular castle adds 500 stone. Excess wood piles average 200 wood. Looting everything nets roughly 1400 cp 500 sp and 300 gp.
Combining all that tentative loot with the 10,000 gp for the portable workshop, nets roughly 14,234 gp. Although technically, the players could instead join Theo then take his monument when he betrays them for net 2,000gp. The theoretical best they could do is work with Pavlar, allow Theo to finish his monument, then destroy Theo and take his monument to earn both rewards, to earn ~24,234 gp. Not a bad reward for defeating over 400HD of mechanical golems and defensive structures.
On the flip side, if the players betray Pavlar, they would not receive the workshop and Theo might chase them away without his promised payment either. Hey, they were warned that this guy wasn’t trustworthy in the opening paragraph!
Originally it was going to be Miniblins, but apparently they are a creature in the Zelda series, and I didn’t want the association. I’m not familiar enough with them in LoZ to know if I want all the connotations and pop-culture references they would bring with them. Other ideas that I discarded at the time were “gearblin” and “smolblin” but they were a bit of a mouthful.
It is, however, based on the theme of Wonder being a particular building in Age of Empires that is very expensive but if built and defended for long enough would grant victory if the game conditions allowed it. The timing came from the ratio of build time to victory time in the game. The math of build time in game worked out that if I assumed roughly 50 Tinyblin “villagers” it would take about 200 seconds in game to build or roughly 3 minutes and then 5 minutes for the wonder timer to grant victory. If I assume a 10:1 time dilation for such tiny beings, that works out nicely to 3 rounds and 5 rounds.
Fans of the game might recognize the soldier and rival’s inspiration. Originally, King Pavlar was going to be inspired by the Spanish and use souped-up Workers, but I couldn’t get it to work right with the text space limitations and confusion it would create with the neutral workers/Tinyblins around the area.
AnarchyDice 