Birthright - Regency

In my last post I questioned the need to tie Birthright’s regency rules to a character’s bloodline score. According to the rulebook a characters bloodline score does one thing with regards to regency; it caps it. So if you happen to have a low bloodline score and rule a large realm, you will be severely handicapped as a regent. While there are undoubtedly rulers who are ill-suited to sitting on the throne, I don’t see how that necessarily makes the game more interesting to play.

However, I didn’t have any evidence that the bloodline ever impacted the game to a great extent, so I sat down with the Ruins of Empire book and compared the regency generated by the realms of the southern cost and the bloodlines of the rulers.

Realm	Regency Generated	Bloodline Score	Regency Lost
Diemed	41	42	0
Medeore	23	32	0
Ilien	28	21	7
Roesone	30	24	6
Aerenwe	40	37	3
Mieres	50	17	33

These are all realms, though they include examples of Temple, Guild, and Magic holdings.

For the most part there is very little loss of RP, the main exception being Mieres, which I was hesitant to include, as it’s a vassal state with a puppet governor. Granted the governor also controls all of the guild holdings of the realm he nominally controls, which is where much of the lost RP come from.

How is this important, aka, what are RP used for? Simply put RP are used to take actions that impact the domain. Just about every action requires the use of RP, and additional RP can be spent to influence the results. For example, if you controlled 2/3 of the law holdings in a province, and wanted to increase it to 3/3 you’d use the Rule action. Doing so will cost 1GB plus 1RP times the level you’re trying to achieve, in this case 3. The success roll is 10+ on a d20. As I said before, the roll may be modified by spending RP on a 1:1 basis. So spending 6 additional RP (9 total) would make the success roll 4+.

In Birthright RP can also be spent to increase a characters bloodline score by spending points equal to the score he’s trying to reach (1 point more than his current score) which requires at least 2 domain turns (aka 2 seasons!). While interesting, this isn’t useful for my purposes, and it isn’t something that happens very often due to the fact that RP earned every turn are capped at the bloodline score!

Another rule is that Regency can be lost by engaging in actions that violate a character’s alignment, or by failing to adequately respond to various events that crop up during the domain turn.

Next Birthright post will begin a 2 part series on Economics.

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