OOC - Intro
- Location
- Germany
It wasn't quite clear how you got that link, maybe you accidently clicked on one of the hoax emails that your computer ought to have cleaned up on its own, maybe someone send it to you for a laugh or maybe you just thought it might make for an amusing Roleplaying game. Either way – you found yourself staring at a slightly moving image, shadowy figures in a tall archaic hall, human features that seemed just a tad off, bulkier bodies under heavy robes, some even stranger arched backs and overly long limbs. Either way – whoever did that video had at least some people who were good in the cosmetics department. The image zoomed on a shadowed tall figure on a throne, unmoving and invisible from your point of view for now – till an oddly resonating voice come through the speakers of your PC, tablet, mobile phone or whatever else you were using: a chorus of young, old, male – female speakers and multiple languages, which still were able to be understood by you:
"I am Sub-sector Arbiter Kriqors of the Quyhm Dynasty, overseeing a hundred worlds in fealty to the Celestial Throne world and in accordance with Their Imperial Majesties will, Defender of the Evilian March, Grand Admiral of the Ilusian Fleet and conqueror of the Xivian Barbarian Kingdoms.", letting a pause echo through the silent halls, the thin figure raised a single hand, before continuing:
"Your world, Imperial Corps Exploration Number: 772-SBN7V, found in the year 32.982 after the death of the first Imperial Majesty, contacted in the third century of my service to the Celestial Throne, lies at the borders of the recent expansion. Your species has been categorized at Tech Advancement VII, standard political systems, negligible unique differences to other nearly civilized people. This has put me in the position to declare your world a protectorate under my own sufferance and authority as Sub-sector Arbiter, backwater and provincial as it may be now, there's potential for greatness for all subjects of their Imperial Majesty."
Lowering their hands once more, the figure seemed to look directly at you as the many voices spoke eerily as one: "If you are seeing this message, the search algorithm the Explorers have left in your rudimentary networks have chosen you as a potential candidate to serve as Planetary Arbiters in my stead and in accordance to the will of the Celestial Throne. All following information has been added to this message. Pledge yourself to me and you shall speak and act on your home planet in my stead, with my authority and those means I deem necessary for slow integration of your planet into the wider march – as long as you serve loyally, the measures of your activities are your own."
With this the message zooms out again, the whole court shifting away, some faces shifting and turning from something human – into something else and back again, before the image cuts out and you are suddenly stuck with a few papers in unreadable script and tiny (slightly stiff and sometimes wonky) translations in your respective language, downloading themselves onto your device.
"I am Sub-sector Arbiter Kriqors of the Quyhm Dynasty, overseeing a hundred worlds in fealty to the Celestial Throne world and in accordance with Their Imperial Majesties will, Defender of the Evilian March, Grand Admiral of the Ilusian Fleet and conqueror of the Xivian Barbarian Kingdoms.", letting a pause echo through the silent halls, the thin figure raised a single hand, before continuing:
"Your world, Imperial Corps Exploration Number: 772-SBN7V, found in the year 32.982 after the death of the first Imperial Majesty, contacted in the third century of my service to the Celestial Throne, lies at the borders of the recent expansion. Your species has been categorized at Tech Advancement VII, standard political systems, negligible unique differences to other nearly civilized people. This has put me in the position to declare your world a protectorate under my own sufferance and authority as Sub-sector Arbiter, backwater and provincial as it may be now, there's potential for greatness for all subjects of their Imperial Majesty."
Lowering their hands once more, the figure seemed to look directly at you as the many voices spoke eerily as one: "If you are seeing this message, the search algorithm the Explorers have left in your rudimentary networks have chosen you as a potential candidate to serve as Planetary Arbiters in my stead and in accordance to the will of the Celestial Throne. All following information has been added to this message. Pledge yourself to me and you shall speak and act on your home planet in my stead, with my authority and those means I deem necessary for slow integration of your planet into the wider march – as long as you serve loyally, the measures of your activities are your own."
With this the message zooms out again, the whole court shifting away, some faces shifting and turning from something human – into something else and back again, before the image cuts out and you are suddenly stuck with a few papers in unreadable script and tiny (slightly stiff and sometimes wonky) translations in your respective language, downloading themselves onto your device.
Just what was that – or more importantly – what will you make of it?
=} OOC Intro {=
=} OOC Intro {=
Welcome dearest Players or at least people who might be interested in playing this little scenario of mine. Welcome to "In Their Imperial and Royal Majesties Name", which is of course a handful and a monument to my inability to find a shorter and catchier name that would also make more sense as acronym than ITIRMN. In this game you are going to have the job of standing in the middle between our dear old homeworld – and an even older galactic Empire that really can't be bothered with all those primitive worlds lining up along its claimed space. Through a chance of fate or other influences, you have been chosen as Planetary Arbiters of a distant neo-feudal bureaucrat, whose representing an even more distant Crown.
Thanks to a recent Expansion of the Celestial Empire, Earth has ended up in the territory claimed by it, what exactly that means – is unclear to most people, even those who you might have to call superiors. There's much at stake, Alien life has made itself known and it has been here longer than the modern human has existed, there's no war of the worlds – for the Imperial Fleet has better things to do. There's no enlightened first contact – for those aliens, far away and secure in their own cultural superiority see little use in bestowing upon us their truths. Still – there are many reasons for different ships to make port at Earth, some more, some less honest than you can imagine. Earth is now a small dot on the Imperial Maps, a tiny speck, but one that is known – it will be your job to keep both visitors and visited from destroying another or more importantly: something going wrong in a way that makes your distant overlord look down at our little blue and green world.
Thanks to a recent Expansion of the Celestial Empire, Earth has ended up in the territory claimed by it, what exactly that means – is unclear to most people, even those who you might have to call superiors. There's much at stake, Alien life has made itself known and it has been here longer than the modern human has existed, there's no war of the worlds – for the Imperial Fleet has better things to do. There's no enlightened first contact – for those aliens, far away and secure in their own cultural superiority see little use in bestowing upon us their truths. Still – there are many reasons for different ships to make port at Earth, some more, some less honest than you can imagine. Earth is now a small dot on the Imperial Maps, a tiny speck, but one that is known – it will be your job to keep both visitors and visited from destroying another or more importantly: something going wrong in a way that makes your distant overlord look down at our little blue and green world.
"Lowly Planetary Arbiter seek to advance their planet and prevent harm on its general population, struggling with an ever more apparent lack of information no one can be bothered to tell them, operating advanced equipment no one might know how to operate after assembly, dealing with distant bureaucratic overlords whose expectations might differ from reality and everything ranging from rowdy alien tourists wanting to see the unspoiled wilds to sleek Traders who would like some real estate. Are you in the twilight of an Empire? At the very start of one – or has the Empire already ended and no one quite knows yet? I guess we will have to find out."
=} Application {=
Character
Name:=} Application {=
Character
Age [Local Time units acceptable]:
Appearance:
Local Socio-unit of importance [Marital Status]:
[Offspring:]
Personality:
Reason you think you were chosen:
Biography:
Personal Organisation
Name:
Goal:
Spend 20 points on the following qualities of your personal Assets:
Might:
Wealth:
Influence:
Territory:
Sovereignty:
Wealth:
Influence:
Territory:
Sovereignty:
=} Gameplay {=
This is going to be a Council game – with a cooperate and corporative nature, which can of course vary depending on what you do with your slice of power. A group of players will operate in a turn-based system, able to utilize their factions qualities– using a shared power base and resources. While you can utilize your power to jockey for importance against another, you might want to remember that you are very tiny fish in a giant pond and who knows what the universe and your GM might throw at you?
Qualities
There are certain Qualities your organisation will possess throughout the game, which in turn set you apart from other players and even NPCs. This might on a personal level show which qualities make your personal forces stand out, while all of them added together show the might of your faction as whole.Might: is the faction's general aptitude at applying physical violence, commanding troops, recruiting armies etc. A rating of 1 implies an organization with little or no aptitude for physical coercion, while a rating of 10 usually involves a force that can take out whole continents of your home world - everything beyond that only gets more impressive. It encompasses the number of soldiers active at a given time, their degree of training and equipment, their access to cutting edge technology, and the brilliance (or foolishness) of their commanders.
Wealth: indicates the faction's commercial and industrial resources. A Wealth score of 1 means that the faction has little in the way of income or investments, no dedicated manufacturing facilities. A Wealth score of 10 is appropriate for someone who has nearly single handedly changed the way economy works on our world and can showcase facilities and impressive marvels of industry that make their visitors faint.
Influence: is the word which you can use for everything and nothing. It gives you a gauge of how much you know and how powerfully (and subtly) a group can sway the opinions of other groups. This is not the power to redraw borders directly, but the power to learn what the other leader believes, and perhaps persuade them to see your point.
Territory: Another very abstract Quality, Territory measures more than just acreage (though that's part of it). Territory means population, it means the strength of the land and its fertility, it means everything from vertical farms to gen-engineered cattle. Good Territory indicates educated followers and efficient workers. It is the measure of your City's physical ability to grow and to recover from setbacks. At a level of 1 it would be just a humble village, but at level 10 you could boost about leading a metropolis.
Sovereignty: Perhaps the least-tangible Quality, Sovereignty indicates the inner strength of your society. It measures the loyalty of the people to the Company and its leaders, and more, their dedication to one another. It is, essentially, their identity as followers of yours and with a high Sovereignty you can expect a great deal of voluntary aid from even its lowliest followers — acting not from hope of reward, but out of a sense of pride or civic duty. Factions with low Sovereignty may dissolve from within, even when there's no external threat.
Playing with Qualities
Maybe your factions are feeling as if they can work well together, better than the Sub-Sector Arbiters belief in "healthy competition" might have expected when he gave you personal forces. In such a case you can merge your sub-factions together into a new one. Qualities of equal value get combined and raise by 1, qualities which are unequal are changed into the higher stat. This means that If two factions with Might 4 combine, the new faction would have Might 5. While a faction with Influence 3 combining with a faction of influence 5 would result in the new merged faction also having an Influence of 5. Things get even funnier if multiple factions decide to merge at once.
If you split up Qualities (maybe to use two-armed intervention troops instead of just one), you split it according to the rules above – so a Might 5 military is made up by 2 x Might 4 or 4x Might 3 armies. Careful if they degrade on their attack thought – you might loose in power when you recombine them once more.
Improving qualities (aside from mergers of the voluntary or involuntary kind), happens by using them, improving them through actions and generally gaining experience points with them. The XP cost for raising a Quality is equal to ten times its new level. If you want to raise your Company's Might to 6, you need to put in 60 XP. Raising Sovereignty from 1 to 2 costs 20 XP.
Using Qualities
The system we are using is based on the Reign ORE system, thus success is going to be measured by throwing d10s, in accordance to the rating of the Quality you allocated to a task and seeing how many of them form matching pairs. The Qualities you dedicated to an action (if you think that is necessary), your plan, temporal modifiers or permanent traits you might have earned, form the pool of an action. The larger it is, the better your chances by far. Success on the other hand can be measured by width (how many dice match) and height (how size of the number on the dice), with width usually indicating swiftness and competence, while height shows favourable circumstances and how critical a success was.
For example if you want to lobby for opening a certain Cuban Beach to alien visitors you might use your Influence Quality of 4 (showing your ability to start a campaign in the Cuban public) - together with your Wealth of 3 (used to bribe various politicians) and on top of it a temporary modifier you gained from a big PR stunt last turn. Now with a Pool of 8 dice, you throw 1,1,8,8,5,10,6,10 and thus gain 3 Successes, winning your challenge and getting a private resort just for your water loving tourists from beyond the Sol system.
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