Expansive Hardholder "conquest"

Alright, I've got a Hardholder with conquest and expansion on his mind. He's been asking me if its possible for him to be commanding multiple hard-holds or to build up additional settlements through the course of events. My answer was sure, but to do it, you'll have to do it. (conquest, gather people, resources, etc)

Its an interesting situation because it provides him with tones of forward motion, and me with tons of potential conflicts. Unwilling settlements, larger holds, smaller--and it zooms out the scale of the world--which fits in well with my gun-lugger pushing minor holdings and making his way towards a Chopper that is interested in heavy raiding.

It'll be awhile before this takes off full bore I think, as the wants on the homefront keep the attention shifting back to the immediate surroundings. That being said, I'm interested in what you might do or suggest move wise / improvement wise.

The vague TERRITORY hard holder supplement

I've considered creating a territory advance, or a more expansive "conquest" hard-holder supplement. Simple example: Conquest. when you break the backbone of the powers in this holding, they do what you want. (detail a few choices that would apply to the surplus/wants of the territory. where a miss adds horrible wants and a hit provides interesting surplus) Follow that with a number of moves that trigger from that device.

At the start of the session when your territory is not in war or rebellion, roll+hard.
When you want something from your territory, name it and roll+hard. 
When pull together your resources and raise an army, roll+hard. Hit you do. Partial you do but x y or z. Miss you do but x y and z.

And then provide some major improvement options such as • add another option to one holding in your territory (from the conquest move) • move your capital from one holding to another (use hardholder and create another holding and let the first fall to the wayside)

The Add another Wealth option

Literally let him take over two holdings, make another as per the hardholder, and let him take the wealth move AGAIN, but suffer -2 to his roll on either one, or a -1 to his roll for both. And let those WANTS basically take charge of his attention. I imagine this will quickly come to dominate the scene's as the multiple hardhold wants come into play.

Add tags to surplus and wants of the wealth move

You've captured a holding! They give their oath to you, add an additional • get another holding option improvement to your improvement list, choose from a territory list. (I set up more options related to territory control over simple hardhold improvements.)  These could ad interesting surplus and wants, but would also always trigger something like want +attention on a partial or a miss, forcing him to head out to these places or for reps of those place to come to him and settle disputes or otherwise that threaten to end his expansion.

ex wealth mod: 10+ get surplus 7–9 you get surplus but choose one want and then choose a territory in need, 2-6 your holding is in want your territories are in need.

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These are some of the Many possibilities that have struck my fancy today while pondering on this. I'm curious as to your thoughts. Could be I'm not seeing something. Could be this setup inspires you to detail something cool. Could be you've another way to do it that worked for you. etc. Let me know.

I'm really interested in this idea, especially if the Touchstone makes progress in her goal of bringing back the U.S. of A I might need something similar.

It seems to me that the very first step is the protection tribute advance for the holding.

More wealth rolls seem like it would become either overwhelming or dominate play after a while.

The third option you presented seems the simplest and most satisfactory.

Another idea that comes to mind: treat territory as if it were a workshop. You can add aspects to your territory: farms, manufacturing, slave armies, ... but you need x,y, and/or z. Probably want to customize the workshop options a bit. Perhaps:

• it’s going to take weeks/months/years of work;
• First you’ll have to get/build/deal with/figure out ___;
• you’re going to need ___ to help you with it;
• it’s going to cost you a fuckton of jingle;
• the best you’ll be able to do is a crap version, fragile and unstable;
• it’s going to mean exposing your territory to serious danger;
• you’re going to have to add ___ to your territory first;
• you’re going to have to sacrifice ___ to do it.

I hope you make this and make it available to people! Very cool idea.

-Vincent

I think this is a very interesting approach.  It's quite logical that a Hardholder might want to make the jump to warlord.

Another approach, if you wanted to keep things small-scale and gritty, is to make the player define, repeatedly, what they mean by "conquest" and "control."  It's one thing to send a militia of guys with rifles into the next town to shoot the mayor, and another to have that other town remain calm and provide benefits back to your holding.  Who's left in charge of the town -- a local guy who promises to be loyal to the Hardholder, or one of the Hardholder's men, maybe with his own little army to keep him in control? 

Maybe the Hardholder will reinvent the feudal system, start disarming the populace and build a fortress for himself and his guys. 

If he succeeds, then run a follow-up game set in one of the towns that the Hardholder PC conquered and pacified.

Hmmm... I'm sure I'm going to start getting my hands deeper into this soon. I appreciate the feedback so far.
I'd still love for more points of view before I really get started into this. Pros, Cons, risks, rewards; My own thoughts are floating around the following questions:

This has to be a new class, and the effective army when pushed against a wall needs to be able to be sweeping. But the general mobilized army needs to be smaller as maintaining the "State" requires significant manpower. I'll probably go take a look at the Revolution show with a careful look at the specific challenges posed to warlording.

THE CORE OF THE WARLORD:
It's not so much about holdings as it is what type of army is being maintained, how many factions and fractures exist within the march. How many guys he can levvy from a hard-hold, what types of hard-holds won't stay put down. It has to stay zoomed-in enough that the other playbooks carry the same weight in the fiction as well. So it'll need to keep the broader conquest active and fun but needs to remain focused on the tipping of powers and the complexities inherent in holding diverse peoples together.

CORE QUESTIONS:
THE ARMY MOVE: to maintain a march with a focus on resources, funding, violence, and putting down inner-squabbles. I think I'm going to set up the army as if it was a holding, and give it wants and needs in the face of the world. So if the army has shows a weakness, shit starts to fly. That way its not simply forward momentum but you have this push and pulls backwards and forwards as the world tries to crush whats left.
THE CONQUEST MOVE: to take the world and shape it, a struggle to maintain civilization facing scarcity.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I'll probably needs some gang specific moves. I'll probably look at your gang like a LANDSCAPE rather then simply a shit load of people. That way the emphasis won't be scattered over 100 npcs in an army, but let the army sortve work like the landscape where the core PC NPC PC triangles flourish within. I'm thinking like, when you use your gang/army to lay siege to a place. I might treat entire holdings like I would another gang at this scale with specific rules at how to look at that exchange. I try to follow the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle when making these, because I'll often blind myself with complexity if I don't.

General questions
What challenges does a warlord face from the world/territory?
What challenges does a warlord face from the inside?
What risks does the warlord face when they summon their full army to march?
What risks does an army face while trying to maintain a status quo?
How can this playbook keep the scale without over shadowing what the other playbooks can do?
What level of screwy violence can be dealt between the playbooks or together with them that makes this endeavor worth while?

I suppose one way to look at this would be like a mobile holding with moves designed to extort manpower/wealth/resources/obedience from the surrounds. Instead of wealth you have Tribute. You army has wants. Your territory has wants. The army has factions like any holding would. The general population is, instead of held within a single holding, is much larger but scattered across many holdings in the territory.

a thought from pack alpha: When you impose your will upon your territory...
work-shopping your territory is neat but if should come with some general understanding.
hard choices might be how to maintain control and forward motion, slavery? forced labor?

I want to ensure someone playing this playbook can work with a hard-holder and the hard-holder won't feel over shadowed either. So GOVERNANCE should still rest within the holdings; and larger scale RISKS may come from beyond the territory (ex. another army, drought, disease, famine, desertion) as well as the homegrown chaos that brews within.

Makes me wonder, when your army is scattered and your territory secure.... what moves would mark a warlord different from say... a chopper or a hardholder? What interesting relationships could exist in this void? Its almost as if an army that isn't actively sitting on a holding and leaching from the people (hardholder) needs to be cracking down in violent ways to maintain themselves, but not so violent that they break the things they're living off of. The army should be able to get pretty damn big, but I wonder if I treated using an army like a spectacle of force would have more weight move-wise then focusing on active bloodshed.

I want to avoid a warlord taking his army and rolling over another player just like that. Gangs pretty much cover the risks rewards, and if every threat is scaled to handle a warlord, the gunlugger and the chooper shouldnt be punished. Nor can I assume the playbooks are working together at all.

Feudal is exactly where this needs to go.

...the ability to gift a small gang to another playbook could be kind of interesting.

This is my off the cuff thought of how I'd run it.

How far away are these other holdings that he's conquering? I guess what I'm getting at here is that word doesn't travel fast in the wasteland and agricultural surplus isn't guaranteed to be a thing. So ok, you've installed one of your guys in a smaller community 20 miles away. Your turn around time to get word and send orders back is about a day unless you've got a Chopper or Driver who happens to be in town. So if raiders or sand worms show up, the main action will be over by the time you get there. In essence, you've got a wider area for problems to crop up on your Wealth roll. Do you want to tust the guy you left in charge or go out there and deal with it yourself?

I think the main mechanical advantage would be that the Holder can go farther and still have his gang at hand. So when he does go 20 miles, there's already a loyal-ish fighting force waiting for him with all of the advantages and disadvantages of the one he left at home to guard the fort. Its pretty easy to argue that tribute is going to balance out with maintaining force over a larger area. Now the Holder can always shake down his designated mayor for more money but that has its own complications.

I've been thinking about creating a Warlord Playbook that would be "man with an army" the way Driver is "man with a car" or Hocus is "man with a cult" -- an actual standing army, with sergeants and rules and marching order would be an unusual and fragile thing in Apocalypse World!

I think there are two, maybe three things that the Warlord or Emperor has to be able to do:
1) Conquer new lands -- maybe a modified version of the Hardholder's military move, you'd probably play this out but eventually you need to leave a stooge in charge and go home to check on the treasury.
2) Manage your stooges -- maybe a modified version of the Operator's gig -- create an NPC lieutenant that you're putting in charge of Joe's Town, roll every session to see if they're still scared of you and doing their jobs.  It could be one of those Moves where on 10+ you choose 3, on 7-9 you choose 1, with results like "the stooge remains loyal, the stooge is keeping the territory pacified, the stooge isn't stealing from the locals and keeping it for himself". 
3) Hold power -- an Emperor needs secret police of some sort, to protect him from disaffected subjects and from greedy officials who are skimming from the top, and especially from generals who decide they want to be Emperor, too. 

If you look at Roman history, you see a lot of Caesars blowing these rolls and getting their legions wiped out, or having whole provinces rise up in rebellion, or getting banked by a fresh-faced general riding the high of victory. 

I could totally see an Apocalypse World game in this kind of setting, but it might be a little mismatched in terms of scale -- one PC is trying to conquer the whole Napa valley for his California Empire, while another, back in the ruins of Sacramento, just wants to fix up his movie theater and sell real popcorn with fake butter. 

The scale is the biggest obstacle I've been facing. A combination of the some of the above suggestions would also be rather nifty. I've been playing around with a few haks and how hardholder functions inherently as well. I'll keep everyone appraised.

I certainly considered making the army a background thing. Choosing an improvement to have conquered a land beyond, etc. Either during play or during the downtime. In that case, rulership becomes the biggest concern and the logical step is to elevate hardholders to wants, or in this case, the stooges ruling over them. Then you can simply allow the warlord to control the 40-60 gang army at each location for their own purposes while within their territory. I figure the use of LAW would probably end up as a move as well. Go aggro against a behavior, almost, with a miss of potential insurrection. Dunno.

There's something too this, I'm sure if this thread continues, someone is going to solve it.

The scale is the biggest obstacle I've been facing. A combination of the some of the above suggestions would also be rather nifty. I've been playing around with a few haks and how hardholder functions inherently as well. I'll keep everyone appraised.

I would almost say the Expansive Hardholder is like an extension of the Hardholder playbook, or maybe an all-new playbook ("the Conqueror") but even that might be too complex. However, for grand ideas like this I wouldn't make it too difficult. One of the reasons Apocalypse World is so inviting is the simple ways complex ideas are addressed.

My idea is that you take the idea of the Hardholder and just make it bigger. Instead of a single holding you have holdings, but you don't need a lot of details for them. You know how in the Hardholder playbook one of the options is "your holding owes protection tribute"? Well, who is that? If there's lots of places paying tribute to one guy, then that's the Conqueror. So, starting out you'd detail four basic holdings and each one can have a trait that makes it special and each one has some drawback. Each holding gives 1-barter every month. How do you maintain control? You've got a large gang and you make moves with them just like you would if you had received a gang and pack alpha through an improvement. Pretty simple. Then the MC can look at these places through crosshairs, ask lots of provocative questions, and respond with fuckery.

Scale that idea up and make it into a playbook: the Conqueror, or the Tyrant
You start with an army, it counts a large gang but can be split up into two medium gangs or four small gangs. Soldiers who are not present to hear your commands will follow your last orders before trying to regroup or return to your base. When you issue commands to your troops, roll+hard. On a 10+, they understand your orders and follow them to the best of their ability. On a 7-9, choose one:
-they didn't understand your orders (they make an honest mistake or there's a communication breakdown)
-they usurp your orders (they still follow your command but they know what's best for you)
-they half-ass it (they don't follow through on your commands, whether because of a lack of discipline, cowardice, or whatever)
On a miss, the MC chooses one and can make a hard move against them or you.
You start with a base of operations, choose what is:
-a radio tower on a hill
-a multi-level parking garage
-a monument of the golden age, miraculously preserved
-something else that sounds suitable
When your soldiers defend your base from inside, they receive +1armor.
Four holdings owe you fealty or protection, name them and work out details with the MC or other players, at the beginning of every session roll+hard. On a 10+, you get barter from each with no issues. On a 7-9, the MC chooses one that is contested, you get barter from the rest. On a miss, all are contested, good luck!

I wrote this up in about 40 minutes just from looking at the Hardholder and thinking bigger. Pretty simple.

Yeah, I like that. Sort of a crossbreed of Hardholder and Operator, where the gigs are whole towns. 
 I think it could work. You know how most AW games start with a sketch map: here's your town, up north are some cannibal bastards, to the east are a bunch of disease-ridden farmers, and here's ruined city full of bandits and stuff.  In a game with a Tyrant, you start of with your town plus a couple of towns, and each of them has their own crap to deal with and problematic neighbors. 

And then you've already defined the setting more, and it will be easy-peasy to make NPC-PC-NPC triangles with the Tyrant, because the Operator's got a gig running back and forth to the other holdings, and the Gunlugger just shot up one of the little holdings because they pissed him off, and maybe the Savvyhead found a cache of ancient disk drives in another holding and is trying to keep it quiet so she doesn't have to share it with the Tyrant.  I would totally play this!

I had constructed something similar, as a test. However, I ended up re-writing hardholder to suit my needs. I'll share it up here someday, but yeah. Totally. Holdings shrunk down works nicely. Add a holding, add a holding, etc.

Yeah, I like that. Sort of a crossbreed of Hardholder and Operator, where the gigs are whole towns. 

I hadn't considered that correlation, but yeah, that works too.
Want to gather tribute from more than two places in one month? Maybe something goes bad, maybe some town revolts, maybe the tribute got robbed on the way to you...
That idea actually works a lot better than what I wrote up!

It occurs to me that this is sort of how I ran my most successful AW game -- it was in a desert loosely based on an old Route 66 map, and I planted communities  semi-randomly up and down the roads, wherever there was a water source and a place to grow food.  The roads are still pretty good, and since it's Apocalypse World, there's still plenty of gasoline.  So conflict went through lots of little towns like beads on a string, and I could Announce Badness with the big bad Warlord by counting off the shithole towns he'd taken as his forces marched down Route 66. 

A setup like that, with a network of smaller communities linked by roads, would make a perfect setting for this kind of game.