Godbound's Dominion economy part 1 - Factions and Artefacts

Godbound is a game about playing demigods created by Kevin Crawford. It has a number of attractive features - high-power game setting, simplified game mechanics, robust power sets, compatibility with other OSR books, etc. However, today I would like to talk about a few interesting, intertwined mechanics that I first came across while reading the book - the Dominion system, its economy, Influence, Factions and Artefacts.

If you'd like to read the sourcebook for yourself, there is a free edition of Godbound available that contains about 95% of the full release's content in it.

Dominion, Influence and Shards

In Godbound, the players take on the role of the titular Godbound, mortals that ascended into a proto-divinity status. Think Gandalf, or Marvel's Thor or Vision. The PCs are gifted with a variety of superhuman powers for handling their day-to-day problems, but they also possess the power to affect the game setting on the larger scale through Dominion.

Dominion is an expression of Godbound powers to alter the world. The characters accrue the Dominion Points over time with worship and adventuring. They can spend those Points to make large changes to the world - Changing Facts, Solving Problems, Creating Features and building Artefacts.

Changing Facts relates to altering the setting in general manner. Erecting a mountain, shrouding a valley with eternal night, creating a race of flying humans, etc.

Solving Problems and Creating Features relate to the Faction System. Basically, every major group, town, nation is represented as a Faction that has beneficial Features ("The city has a prosperous mine", "Nation ruled by a great philosopher-king"), and negative Problems ("The city is plagued with disease", "Nobles are waging a secret war with one another"). The characters, basically through sheer force of their will, can change those. They can Solve a Problem, eliminating it entirely (for example, Gandalf removing Saruman's influence over Théoden), and they can also Create new, beneficial Feature (Tony Stark building the Ultron Program to help with global peacekeeping would've been a new Feature, save for Ultron himself...).

Lastly, the same Dominion can be spent to Create powerful Artefacts. We're not talking about +1 swords, but something more akin to The One Ring, Mjölnir or Yaka Arrow. Each of the Artefacts would be a significant boon to the already powerful Godbound, rather than being "just a piece of gear".

Godbound also features Influence, a more temporary form of Dominion the characters can invest into temporary changes. It allows the players to quickly train up an army, fortify defences, create stopgap solutions for some problems and so on, as long as their characters keep maintaining those measures. When the PCs leave, the changes revert back to the original state.

The game also features Celestial Shards, basically glorified scrap that is required for creating Artefacts and making really impossible changes happen (for example, creating a floating city, starting an entirely new species of humans, or building a network of teleporters). This generally means that the players have a limit to how outlandishly they can affect the setting at any given time - you get only so many Shards at a time and there are always multiple projects that could use them.

The Dominion Economy

Godbound creates an interesting dynamic with its Dominion Economy. It's a shared currency the players can spend on many disparate things. In the same game you could basically have a swordsmith forging a blade Artefact that will cut down an entire army with one swing, a tinkerer creating a mechanical angel that will be their herald, a warlord making his winged hussars actually fly, a merchant prince that would bring new riches to his old mines, a king quelling a rebellion with the power of his will and a fire god erecting a volcano as his new seat of power, all using Dominion in different ways.

Moreover, because Dominion is a universal resource, it will never go to waste - a character will always have something to spend it on. They are even required to spend it in order to progress - a Godbound character can only level if they get enough experience AND they had spend a certain amount of Dominion.

Lastly, Dominion costs can vary depending on the power portfolio of a given Godbound and the Points are non-transferable. This encourages the players to work together and trade favours. A mighty warrior might make his army very strong, but he would have problems giving them power armour. It would be trivial for an artificer however. So now the characters need to figure out what would be an equitable trade for such services...

In the actual play however, you can expect varied level of engagement from players. In the two campaigns my group ran, we had some players that were diligently spending their Dominion on regular basis, and we also had some that would let theirs pile on until they had to spend it to level up. It really depends on the party you have.

Conclusion

All in all, Godbound's Dominion system is an interesting take on creating a robust system for godly powers acting on a macro level. It is so universally applicable as to be useful for most styles of gaming, while still remaining simple and easy to use.

That is not to say it's without fault. But for that, a separate blog entry will be required to delve deeper into how the Dominion system and the Faction system don't gel all that great in the long run...

Continued in "Godbound's Dominion economy part 2 - how the players break Factions".