Kingdom

Kingdom is a GM-less roleplaying game about communities by Ben Robbins, author of similar storygames such as Microscope and Follow. Microscope is one of my favourite games of all time (and the only game I couldn’t wait to play having only read the rulebook). I’ve played Follow a couple of times; it was okay but didn’t quite work for me.

Although I’ve had Kingdom for a while, I only got it to the table in early 2023. So here are my thoughts.

A “Kingdom” is the game term for the community or organisation that is the focus of play. Any community works – a school, a company, a club, a nation. Players play characters who are part of the kingdom which will face difficult decisions (crossroads) and eventually a crisis.

I played a three-player game over Discord, using Trello as our tabletop. We played two sessions and completed a crossroad and crisis.

Physically, Kingdom is a 6x9, 99-page black and white book with a colour cover. There’s minimal art – the cover and a couple of diagrams. I only have the second edition pdf, but it has a classy, elegant feel.

Making a kingdom

To create a kingdom:

Create a kingdom: We batted around a few ideas before deciding our kingdom would be The Egregious Society of the Silver Fork, a Victorian occult society.

Create three threats: Our threats were: Someone wanting to take over the order and remake it, a change in the law banning occult societies, and a collapse in relations with the museum that supplies our trinkets.

Although we agreed on these, I wasn’t sure how this would work out. I need not have worried.

Create locations: Each player creates two locations where characters are likely to be found. Our locations were Tavistock Hall, White’s Club in London, Petrie Museum of Egyptology, Madam Zara’s seance parlour, The Royal Society, and Stonehenge.

People: Brainstorm the kind of people who would be part of the kingdom. We brainstormed artists (painters, sculptors), theatre people, a wealthy but idle lord, an actual occultist who thinks he has powers, a down-at-heel European madam (fleeing revolution), a fortune teller, butlers, the deputy Prime Minister, society officials (chairman, treasurer, secretary), minor royals, a charismatic demagogue (with secret occult knowledge), and antique dealers. Plenty there to get us going.

(And if you don’t want to create your own, Kingdom has a dozen or so example kingdoms to get you started. But I wanted the whole experience, so we started from scratch.)

Make your characters

Creating characters introduces the trickiest concept in Kingdom – their role.

Your role: Before you decide who you are, you decide on your role. The three roles are:

• Power: You have authority over the kingdom. You decide what the kingdom does and what it doesn’t do.
• Perspective: You understand the kingdom, both its merits and flaws. You can foresee the consequences of the decisions the kingdom makes.
• Touchstone: You reflect the desires of the people of the kingdom. Your attitudes show us what the populace wants and how they react to what is happening.

While you don’t need all three roles at the start, the three of us each took a different role. I chose Power. (If you’re playing Kingdom for the first time, I recommend ensuring all the roles are taken – not having a role makes some later sections fiddlier.)

Who are you: While it seems odd that you choose your role before selecting a character, it makes sense because the role you choose influences your character. You take a character from the list of roles you have brainstormed.

So as I had chosen Power, I decided my character would be one of the society officials and created society chairman Reginald Winchester.

(Our Perspective was a seer, our Touchstone, an aspiring actor/playwright.)

Your locations: Now pick two places (from the locations listed earlier) your character may be found – and why they may be found there. I selected White's Club (where Reginald feels at home) and Tavistock Hall (because Reginald likes hobnobbing with the Tavistocks).

Your bonds: Now you choose a bond with the character to your left – what you need from them and what makes it difficult. You agree this with the other player to create something interesting. So Reginald wants Gwynn (the aspiring actor/playwright) to introduce me to his family, but he won't - he goes into a rant every time I mention them.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it feels like it’s straight out of Hillfolk. I don’t know if that’s the case, but Hillfolk was published/Kickstarted a year before the first edition of Kingdom, so maybe.

A minor character: Finally, you create a minor character to help flesh out your kingdom. Again, you take someone from the list brainstormed earlier. I created Madam Zara, a sixty-something, pipe-smoking, Soho-based "fortune teller".

So that’s our kingdom created and populated. What happens next?

Playing Kingdom

Kingdom is played with scenes, but before we can get to a scene, we need to set up the crossroad, an important decision the kingdom must make.

Our Kingdom Trello board

Our first crossroad was: Will the society repair its relationship with the Petrie Museum? We decided that the Petrie Museum, our reliable supplier of occult artefacts, had started supplying a rival society. At the same time, a new dig had opened in Egypt, providing many new finds. How would this play out?

Play a scene: Then you take turns playing scenes. When it’s your turn, you must include your main character, and you decide who else is involved. They can be anyone – main, minor, or new characters invented for that scene.

Playing a scene is the roleplaying bit of Kingdom. It’s nice playing not only your main character but other characters as well.

In our game, one scene involved meeting Ernie, the supervisor of the warehouse where the finds from Egypt were being unloaded and catalogued. We were trying to discover if Ernie would be a suitable alternative supplier of occult artefacts.

You draw the scene to a close as soon as you’ve learned something new or seen a character make a choice. (The guidance in Kingdom isn’t super-clear here, but it was surprisingly intuitive when to end scenes in play. In essence, end a scene when it seems obvious to do so – and err on the side of ending it early.)

One of the things you can do during a scene is to use your role – provided you are playing your main character. So Power can make a decision, Perspective can make a prediction on the outcome of the crossroad, and Touchstone can say how everyone is feeling about it.

Check a box: Once you’ve played the scene, you check either a crossroads box or a crises box.

Reactions: After a scene concludes, and whether you were part of it or not, you get to react to it as your main character. (This is another opportunity to use your role.)

Resolve a crossroad or crisis: If the crossroad or crisis tracks are filled, you must resolve them. Resolution means Power makes the decision, Perspective tells us what happens, and Touchstone tells us what the people think.

In our game, we didn’t repair our relationship and instead bought our artefacts from Ernie at the warehouse. One consequence of this, however, was that the artefacts were much more expensive, and members weren’t happy with subscriptions being put up.

As we hadn’t completed the crisis track, we didn’t resolve the crisis.

That was the end of our first session. It took us about 2.5 hours to set up our kingdom and play through our first crossroad.

Our second crossroad: Our second crossroad, which we developed during our second session, built off the previous one. Now that we had an alternative supply of artefacts being smuggled in, we were approached by bloodthirst gangster Peregrine Cray who wanted to use our smuggling operation. In return, the society’s financial difficulties would be solved.

As we played through the scenes, we ended up with a crisis – would our alliance with Peregrine Cray destroy our kingdom? This is decided by a vote, and while it wasn’t unanimous, the society survived. It’s damaged and bruised, but it survives.

Kingdom: the good

It just worked: Kingdom worked much better than I had expected. I wasn’t sure how the game would work as I wasn’t sure if our crossroad was meaty enough, but it proved to have plenty of depth to it and we created lots of interesting scenes.

Kingdom played better than our first game of Follow or Fiasco – but maybe that’s our experience with GM-less games.

Easy to learn: Kingdom was easy to learn. I simply read from the pdf as we developed our kingdom.

Many example kingdoms: Kingdom provides a load of example kingdoms, with suggestions for conflicts, people, locations and crossroads. We didn’t use them because I wanted to create our own kingdom – but they exemplify the range of games you can play.

Two-player rules included: We had three players, so we didn’t need the two-player rules. But I’m interested in trying them at some point.

And the not-so-good

Bonds: The bonds didn’t come out in play much. While I touched on mine (with Gwynn) once or twice (and not at all in the second session), most of the time we focussed on resolving the crossroad. That’s an improvement on Follow, where I don’t think we touched on bonds at all.

I’m sure we could lean into the bonds more, but they feel a bit of an add-on. (They mean more in Hillfolk, where they are at the centre of play.)

It’s something to pay attention to, perhaps.

Resolving conflict: Kingdom has slightly fiddly rules about resolving conflict (Fight-or-Fix), which we didn’t use. I don’t know if we have a more cooperative style of play than others, but we didn’t use them. (Similarly, we didn’t need the Changing your Role rules, as everyone was happy with the role they had chosen.)

Overall

Overall I enjoyed my first game of Kingdom, and I’m looking forward to playing it again. From the one game I’ve played, it’s better than Follow but not as good as Microscope.