Contest Province in original BR referred to a ruler marching in and claiming a province as his own with the backing of military force.

Contest Holding refers to an entirely different concept, that of purposefully attacking the influence and power of opposed holdings in the same province.

One of the major issues that has arised, both with the original game and especially with the BRCS ruleset, is that province levels tend to go up much more easily than they go down. And there are pitifully few counters to this trend.

Currently, there are only 2 ways I can think of for regents to intentionally reduce province levels: either sacking a province during occupation, or casting the Death Plague realm spell. Otherwise, only the rare catastrophic natural disaster will do the job.

Sacking province levels is, in my experience, quite rare due to the severe limitations on occupation. An army has to occupy a province unopposed for 4 weeks, and only then may they sack the province during the following month! Talk about having your hands tied. If your invading army's object is simply to reduce the enemy's lands, then any battle fought over these lands will be over long before the occupation conditions can be met. And at that point, most regents who have invested the big bucks to stage an invasion would probably rather invest the province at this point rather than devalue it (though sacking enemy holdings might be quite a different matter). The main exceptions are probably humanoid raiders, but I find they rarely have any luck hanging around uncontested for 2 months at a time.

Death Plague is by far the easiest way to lower province levels, but there are very few necromancer source regents who will do this thanks to the rarity of necromantic magic amongst mages. Also, the outbreak of such a plague generally means the local temple regent will hastily cast Dispel Realm Magic or Prot. from Realm Magic to insulate neighboring provinces or counter the spell entirely.

I have been thinking of possible solutions to this problem. One is Raiding, which I and others have brought up before, but it hasn't been solidified thanks to the ominous silence from the War department for the Ch 6 revision (Dan??? You still there?). More on raiding later, as it's a messy subject of its own.

The other idea I was brainstorming last night was a new version of Contest Province. And in fact I'd like to name it Contest Province, keeping it inline with Contest Holding, while the old Contest Province could probably be dropped in favor of Invest Province, while Coronation could cover the more peacable version of investiture.

Here are some initial ideas, which are totally rough and very open for discussion as they represent a significant addition to the old rules.

Contest Province: [Standard; Lead; 1 GB per level of target province]

Base DC: 10 + the targeted Province Level

-The contesting regent must own a Law, Temple, or Guild holding in the province whose level is at least 1/2 the province level. This is the holding used to initiate the Contest Province action.

-Any Law, Temple, or Guild holding in the province may use its levels to support or oppose the action.

-No RP may be spent to support or oppose this action. Only holding levels may modify the action check.

-This action may only be attempted once per season in a given realm, regardless of whether or not the action succeeds.

-Success permanently lowers the province level by one.

Optional: A critical success (natural 20 followed by a normal success) lowers the province level by two levels. A botch (1 followed by a normal failure) permanently lowers the contesting holding by 1d3 levels.