By Dean Johnson.
The Basic Concept
Your Lair/Location bashing characters get more than one force conquering battle in the 14 day cycle by teleporting into a force owned by another player, who runs the second battle.
Pre-Requisites
- Your characters need an arcane skill/item that gives access to the Teleport Character spell. (This normally rules Priests out of this type of action).
- You need team-mates or other players to Roll the Thunder with.
- Good scouting data to provide enough targets for several to be hit every turn.
Prestige Pooling and a Common Misconception
When an NPC force (Lair or Location) is conquered for the first time in a game, the main character who owns the force gains 1 Prestige. Players commonly believe that you have to be the overall commander (appointed to slot 9) of the force to gain the prestige. This is not the case. The overall commander gains ownership of the force.
CRT thus has 2 purposes.
The first is that the bashers have more battles, which gives them more chances to morph their status and to gain increases in stats (PC) / militant skills (Knight, Berserker etc..). This is in itself a powerful technique for improving your bashers, to take on even stronger monsters and perhaps compete in Clashes.
The second is that the player, who controls the force with someone else’s characters in and that takes a location, is gaining 1 prestige that he would not otherwise gain that turn. If that one player is in fact controlling several forces with characters in from other positions, all of which take a location, then that one player is gaining prestige very fast, at the expense of the other players who are not taking those NPC forces. This is the process of Prestige Pooling, i.e. pooling the prestige of several players onto one, or perhaps two players within a faction.
How to Actually CRT!
The favorite setup position for CRTing is the Adventurer Party. You start with several characters and with team-mate/faction support; you can soon get most of them to the point where they can tackle weak lair monsters on their own. Each AP player can thus soon be potentially loaning 3-4 forces out to conquer lairs for another position and donate prestige. Without good exploration and mapping to provide targets, the maximum level of possible CRT-Prestige pooling may never be achieved.
Player A: Target for Prestige Pooling Player B: Donator of Prestige.
Turn1B: He has to think ahead on this turn, activating a force at the next+1 target.
Failing that, the force should be within 1 move of a target.
Gift the force to A.
B hits a lair/location himself.
B teleports into the force that he gifted to A.
Turn1A: A takes locations with his own and B’s characters.
Move any forces that attacked in Mil Phase 1 towards next target
Turn 2B: If possible, resist taking targets himself
Otherwise repeat Turn1B ad infinitum, or until A hits required Prestige.
This does not seem too effective until you realize that Player A could be doing this with Player B, C, Etc…….