Silver Steak
The Ghost of SS
The Story, in brief
The Gods have all died. The charred earth is dotted with small huddles of mortals. They've just experienced the extermination of all immortals, those who were worshipped are all gone. They started to rebuild in their brave new world. The grew, settled, and continued to thrive. The Gods were all forgotten. Until the coming of Yorn. Yorn, the otherworldly entity saw the mortals with no deities to rule them, and it was WRONG. He set to create new Gods by planting in the mortals an urge to seek and worship immortal beings, and he also planted the seeds to the Gods. Now, brave leaders who have just grasped their new divine sparks and eternal life arise to claim the worship of all mortalkind! But numerous rivals and heretics stand in their way! This can only mean one thing: WAR! And so, the Age of Yorn arrived.
Objective:
To gain as much Faith as possible, or stomp out all other religions. Your choice.
The Hero/The God
Each player starts with a hero. This hero is the God of your religion, and is present on the Earth by incarnation. In short, your Hero is a corporeal avatar. Still, as a deity your power originates in the faith of your believers. This means you will be able to ressurect your Hero, should he get him/herself killed. Such foolishness will be punished with your religion being NPC'd for one turn, suffering from lack of proper divine leadership. If you want to, you can be an agent for an even greater deity, or something even more excentric. Just write it down when you join up and I'll decide if I'll let you play it or not. I will generally not allow insane, incoherent or inappropriate ideas. Alternatively, I will allow these, and your religion will suck horribly.
The Hero has three different stats. These give a measure at what the hero excels at. The Stats are Leadership, Tactics, and Divine. At the beginning, you choose which stats you want your hero to master. Ranking is text-based, and might change with the course of the game. The ranks are:
Terrible (0~3) - Poor (4~7) - Average (8~11) - Good (12~15) - Great (16~19) - Wonderous (20~23) - Epic (24~27) - Divine (28+)
The stats will increase with your Faith. Every time your herd of believers increases over 10k(x) believers, you will gain an additional point to spend on either Leadership, Tactics OR Divine.
Leadership: How well your hero can affect mere mortals and make them follow him into, say, their certain deaths. Also, Leadership helps organizing the government and maintaining stability. High Leadership makes establishing a firm rule over conquered lands easier and faster.
Tactics: How well your army fights, and how efficient they are at other tasks. With high Tactics, you will win duels more often, have fewer losses and kick more butt on the battlefield.
Divine: Your hero's God stat. Helps convert mortals, affects Mana recovery (see below) as well as being a positive factor in nearly all situations. Possibly the most important Hero stat.
To make your hero's sats, you must assign points to them. You start with 15 points, and may allocate them freely on Combat and Leadership, but not on Divine. Each point will make one stat go one notch up. The divine stat will initially be Average(8) for everyone, and can only be raised through new believers.
Artifacts: Each hero will start with one artifact. This will be given following the example of Battle Royale: random starting gear. This is, also faithfully sticking to the mentioned example, to extinguish some of the inherent advantages or disadvantages found in all competitions. If you don’t like what you get, you can always whine or throw it away. Above all, feel free to consider killing your fellow players if they won’t give you their artifacts freely. IMPORTANT NOTE: YOU CAN ONLY HAVE TWO OF THEM IN USE AT ANY TIME! If you want to swap one or both of them, send it with your orders and your stats will change right before the update. Note that some artifacts are hidden in the world, and may be found by players or NPCs who search for them. Also, the queer and peaceful among you might even consider swapping artifacts for mutualy benefit...
Game Mechanics
Your nation stats are Military, Wealth and Faith. Each stat will be represented by two scores (A/B). The first one is your actual score, and the second is the maximum score. Merely invading a territory does not grant new recruits, taxes and believers. You must wait a while before the local population is accustomed to the new government and faith before reaping the fruits of your conquest. Bringing your leader to the frontline is great for this purpose. Also, writing stories always "helps", aside from making it all much more interesting. As in the immortal words of stalin006: "Storywriters get random events!" or something.
Military: Your military stat will appear as follows: (A/B) A is the size of your current army. B is the maximum size. Every turn, I want you to write in the update how many troops are placed where, along with simple tactics. Note that if your army size goes over the limit, you must pay upkeep. This can happen if you lose land to enemies, or otherwise lose support. You can spend gold to avoid the negative consequences, either by having a buffer in your coffer or by spending gold on it for the next update. You can only recruit up to 1/5 of your maximum per turn. This might be stretching it, though, so bear in mind that you are not guaranteed that many every turn. Your believers may start to revolt, or convert. Every turn, I want you to tell me how many percent you are recruiting, if any at all.
Addendum: The recruitment is basically cost-free! However, if you want to equip your soldiers with metal weapons, it will cost 1000 gold per 600 soldiers or 6 ships. (So recruiting 900 with sticks and stones will cost as much as 600 with proper weapons.) You must first have access to the metals to be able to do so.
Here are the Military support rules:
Population * Maximum Army Size * Maximum Navy Size
10 000 * 1000 * 10 Ships
20 000 * 2000 * 20 Ships
30 000 * 3500 * 35 Ships
40 000 * 4500 * 45 Ships
50 000 * 6000 * 60 Ships
60 000 * 7000 * 70 Ships
70 000 * 8500 * 85 Ships
80 000 * 9500 * 95 Ships
90 000 * 11000 * 110 Ships
100 000 * 12000 * 120 Ships
110 000 * 13500 * 135 Ships
120 000 * 14500 * 145 Ships
130 000 * 16000 * 160 Ships
140 000 * 17000 * 170 Ships
150 000 * 18500 * 185 Ships
160 000 * 19500 * 195 Ships
170 000 * 21000 * 210 Ships
180 000 * 22000 * 220 Ships
190 000 * 23500 * 235 Ships
200 000 * 24500 * 245 Ships
Note that the total military counts towards your maximum. This means I will add the effective size of both army and navy to calculate wether or not you've exceeded the max and must pay upkeep. With 10k population, you can have 500 army and 5 Ships. Recruitment will be handled the same way. If you have 50k population, you can recruit 700 army and 5 Ships.
Upkeep will be paid for units that exceed the max. If upkeep is not paid, these units are disbanded and will be removed from your stats. you can risk ending up recruiting units, only to have them disbanded due to lack of upkeep in the same update, so make sure you can afford the units. Upkeep will be 500 gold for every 300 army or 3 Ships exceeding the max.
Wealth: How much Gold you get through taxes every turn. Measured in thousands for simplicity. Your Wealth stat will be shown as follows: (A/B/C) A is the amount of gold you get at the beginning of every turn. B is gold banked, if any. Demestic and foreign debt is also recorded here. C is the income/loss you have from trade centers or tributes. Economy can be spent on a great number of things, ranging from funding missions to founding new cities, or building great wonders to glorify your Hero and religion. Just write with every order what you are spending how much on.
Faith: How many believers you have in your nation. This is the most important stat IMO. It will be a measure of your religion's size and extent. Faith stat will appear as follows: (A/B/C/D) A is the amount of believers, measured in thousands. B is your current Mana. C is the amount of Mana you regenerate per turn. D is maximum Mana. Mana allows you to cast magic through your Hero. Your spells will not have a set amount of Mana cost, and you will have to specify how much Mana you are expending every turn. Mana regenerates automatically, based on C. C is calculated out of your Faith, and your Divine stat. Obviously, having a high Divine stat increases the Mana recovery, but not the maximum.
There is one last sub-stat to Faith, which is the Force stat. This is basically a measure of how well your religion is doing ATM. It will be a score from 0~100, and will be measured by looking at your religions' success and popularity, compared to the others. Do not despair, however, if you have a low Force score. The actual difference can only be read through comparing all of the stats (and much else besides). Likewise, do not rest too easy on your uppity upp score. It is easier to fall than it is to climb.
Magic: This is a large part of all the fun. Instead of having a tricky system with lost of spell lists and Mana costs, I went for an entirely clean and simple system. In short, your magical strength are determined by your Mastery.
There is one major restricting to spellcasting: your Hero. the onle one who can access these divine powers is your Hero, and he must be relatively close to where the magic is going to take effect in order to cast the magic successfully. This means you can't hurl a fireball into the air, ICBM style, and have it land in the palace of your rival, killing him instantly. Also, no spell is permanent. If you want the sky to be always blue, you need to cast the spell that does it every turn.
Magic is also separated into subtypes. This is to make the players focus in a few branches, and making it easier to combine and describe magical effects. The specialization also allows players to gain different levels of Mastery. If you only have one branch, you will be Level 3. If you have two, Level 2 and likewise 1 if you have three branches. The Masteries signify how effective your magic is. Specializing in one branch will give greater effects than multiple ones, but you might be wanting to combine magical effects of two branches to create specific effects. It is entirely up to you, and it is by no means said that one or the either is the best choice.
Feel free to describe the "spells" you cast. This will allow me to write better updates, as well as they might prove a little bonus if it is logical. Still, if you describe an ICBM fireball spell or something rather, you might just fry away Mana with no result. Keep it real, and don't try to do overly fancy stuff unless you have a Divine level Divine stat.
Mastery affects spellcasting in the following ways:
Level 3: 240% Spell efficiency
Level 2: 100% Spell efficiency
Level 1: 60% Spell efficiency
As you can see, having several branches of magic will decrease the effect of your magic. Likewise, choosing only one will let you excel in it. As already described, this is for players to decide their own style of play and maintain diversity. It will prove interesting what combination will be the most successful in the end.
The various schools/branches are as follows:
Fire
Water
Earth
Air
Life
Death
Nature
Illusion
Trade: This won’t be a great NES if you cannot trade your goods. There will not be any trade routes, however. Trade centers will be on the map, which gives an income bonus. These will be more or less constant ones, unless they are destroyed by war, or new and better ones are "made". You will not be able to control trade, other than restricting it, but you can encourage trade in your nation. Mostly, though, trade regulates itself, and centers will come and go in accord with what is happening in the world.
You can make all sorts of trade agreements with fellow players, but do remember everybody else is, ultimately, your rivals. As in the great spirit of Battle Royale: There can be only one! Do backstab and betray eachother, as this ensues in many conflicts and lots of bloodshed. I do expect war, not ”Priests of Catan”.
Note that you are not "out of the game" until you've lost all of your believers! Converts don't simply vanish as soon as you lose a territory. This means an exiled hero will be able to cast spells even though he doesn't get any income or recruits. This also means you need to be careful with your Hero. Sending him into the forefront might be heroic indeed, but having him killed by doing that means you're NPC'd for the next turn. There is also the possibility of assasins, traps, natural disasters, not to mentions perils while searching for lost artifacts (they are lost for a reason - like the clock inside the crocodile in Peter Pan). Still, I will take it for granted that the security around you Hero is paramount, and you don't have to state it in your orders every time. Having a few protective magics might be a good idea nontheless.
I cannot think of any more rules to add… Lastly, I will present the rule above all other:
Churches are made, not born! Do not expect to win this NES by sitting idly about! Conversion requires action!
Welcome, Heroes. The Age of Yorn awaits you.
The Gods have all died. The charred earth is dotted with small huddles of mortals. They've just experienced the extermination of all immortals, those who were worshipped are all gone. They started to rebuild in their brave new world. The grew, settled, and continued to thrive. The Gods were all forgotten. Until the coming of Yorn. Yorn, the otherworldly entity saw the mortals with no deities to rule them, and it was WRONG. He set to create new Gods by planting in the mortals an urge to seek and worship immortal beings, and he also planted the seeds to the Gods. Now, brave leaders who have just grasped their new divine sparks and eternal life arise to claim the worship of all mortalkind! But numerous rivals and heretics stand in their way! This can only mean one thing: WAR! And so, the Age of Yorn arrived.
Objective:
To gain as much Faith as possible, or stomp out all other religions. Your choice.
The Hero/The God
Each player starts with a hero. This hero is the God of your religion, and is present on the Earth by incarnation. In short, your Hero is a corporeal avatar. Still, as a deity your power originates in the faith of your believers. This means you will be able to ressurect your Hero, should he get him/herself killed. Such foolishness will be punished with your religion being NPC'd for one turn, suffering from lack of proper divine leadership. If you want to, you can be an agent for an even greater deity, or something even more excentric. Just write it down when you join up and I'll decide if I'll let you play it or not. I will generally not allow insane, incoherent or inappropriate ideas. Alternatively, I will allow these, and your religion will suck horribly.
The Hero has three different stats. These give a measure at what the hero excels at. The Stats are Leadership, Tactics, and Divine. At the beginning, you choose which stats you want your hero to master. Ranking is text-based, and might change with the course of the game. The ranks are:
Terrible (0~3) - Poor (4~7) - Average (8~11) - Good (12~15) - Great (16~19) - Wonderous (20~23) - Epic (24~27) - Divine (28+)
The stats will increase with your Faith. Every time your herd of believers increases over 10k(x) believers, you will gain an additional point to spend on either Leadership, Tactics OR Divine.
Leadership: How well your hero can affect mere mortals and make them follow him into, say, their certain deaths. Also, Leadership helps organizing the government and maintaining stability. High Leadership makes establishing a firm rule over conquered lands easier and faster.
Tactics: How well your army fights, and how efficient they are at other tasks. With high Tactics, you will win duels more often, have fewer losses and kick more butt on the battlefield.
Divine: Your hero's God stat. Helps convert mortals, affects Mana recovery (see below) as well as being a positive factor in nearly all situations. Possibly the most important Hero stat.
To make your hero's sats, you must assign points to them. You start with 15 points, and may allocate them freely on Combat and Leadership, but not on Divine. Each point will make one stat go one notch up. The divine stat will initially be Average(8) for everyone, and can only be raised through new believers.
Artifacts: Each hero will start with one artifact. This will be given following the example of Battle Royale: random starting gear. This is, also faithfully sticking to the mentioned example, to extinguish some of the inherent advantages or disadvantages found in all competitions. If you don’t like what you get, you can always whine or throw it away. Above all, feel free to consider killing your fellow players if they won’t give you their artifacts freely. IMPORTANT NOTE: YOU CAN ONLY HAVE TWO OF THEM IN USE AT ANY TIME! If you want to swap one or both of them, send it with your orders and your stats will change right before the update. Note that some artifacts are hidden in the world, and may be found by players or NPCs who search for them. Also, the queer and peaceful among you might even consider swapping artifacts for mutualy benefit...
Game Mechanics
Your nation stats are Military, Wealth and Faith. Each stat will be represented by two scores (A/B). The first one is your actual score, and the second is the maximum score. Merely invading a territory does not grant new recruits, taxes and believers. You must wait a while before the local population is accustomed to the new government and faith before reaping the fruits of your conquest. Bringing your leader to the frontline is great for this purpose. Also, writing stories always "helps", aside from making it all much more interesting. As in the immortal words of stalin006: "Storywriters get random events!" or something.
Military: Your military stat will appear as follows: (A/B) A is the size of your current army. B is the maximum size. Every turn, I want you to write in the update how many troops are placed where, along with simple tactics. Note that if your army size goes over the limit, you must pay upkeep. This can happen if you lose land to enemies, or otherwise lose support. You can spend gold to avoid the negative consequences, either by having a buffer in your coffer or by spending gold on it for the next update. You can only recruit up to 1/5 of your maximum per turn. This might be stretching it, though, so bear in mind that you are not guaranteed that many every turn. Your believers may start to revolt, or convert. Every turn, I want you to tell me how many percent you are recruiting, if any at all.
Addendum: The recruitment is basically cost-free! However, if you want to equip your soldiers with metal weapons, it will cost 1000 gold per 600 soldiers or 6 ships. (So recruiting 900 with sticks and stones will cost as much as 600 with proper weapons.) You must first have access to the metals to be able to do so.
Here are the Military support rules:
Population * Maximum Army Size * Maximum Navy Size
10 000 * 1000 * 10 Ships
20 000 * 2000 * 20 Ships
30 000 * 3500 * 35 Ships
40 000 * 4500 * 45 Ships
50 000 * 6000 * 60 Ships
60 000 * 7000 * 70 Ships
70 000 * 8500 * 85 Ships
80 000 * 9500 * 95 Ships
90 000 * 11000 * 110 Ships
100 000 * 12000 * 120 Ships
110 000 * 13500 * 135 Ships
120 000 * 14500 * 145 Ships
130 000 * 16000 * 160 Ships
140 000 * 17000 * 170 Ships
150 000 * 18500 * 185 Ships
160 000 * 19500 * 195 Ships
170 000 * 21000 * 210 Ships
180 000 * 22000 * 220 Ships
190 000 * 23500 * 235 Ships
200 000 * 24500 * 245 Ships
Note that the total military counts towards your maximum. This means I will add the effective size of both army and navy to calculate wether or not you've exceeded the max and must pay upkeep. With 10k population, you can have 500 army and 5 Ships. Recruitment will be handled the same way. If you have 50k population, you can recruit 700 army and 5 Ships.
Upkeep will be paid for units that exceed the max. If upkeep is not paid, these units are disbanded and will be removed from your stats. you can risk ending up recruiting units, only to have them disbanded due to lack of upkeep in the same update, so make sure you can afford the units. Upkeep will be 500 gold for every 300 army or 3 Ships exceeding the max.
Wealth: How much Gold you get through taxes every turn. Measured in thousands for simplicity. Your Wealth stat will be shown as follows: (A/B/C) A is the amount of gold you get at the beginning of every turn. B is gold banked, if any. Demestic and foreign debt is also recorded here. C is the income/loss you have from trade centers or tributes. Economy can be spent on a great number of things, ranging from funding missions to founding new cities, or building great wonders to glorify your Hero and religion. Just write with every order what you are spending how much on.
Faith: How many believers you have in your nation. This is the most important stat IMO. It will be a measure of your religion's size and extent. Faith stat will appear as follows: (A/B/C/D) A is the amount of believers, measured in thousands. B is your current Mana. C is the amount of Mana you regenerate per turn. D is maximum Mana. Mana allows you to cast magic through your Hero. Your spells will not have a set amount of Mana cost, and you will have to specify how much Mana you are expending every turn. Mana regenerates automatically, based on C. C is calculated out of your Faith, and your Divine stat. Obviously, having a high Divine stat increases the Mana recovery, but not the maximum.
There is one last sub-stat to Faith, which is the Force stat. This is basically a measure of how well your religion is doing ATM. It will be a score from 0~100, and will be measured by looking at your religions' success and popularity, compared to the others. Do not despair, however, if you have a low Force score. The actual difference can only be read through comparing all of the stats (and much else besides). Likewise, do not rest too easy on your uppity upp score. It is easier to fall than it is to climb.
Magic: This is a large part of all the fun. Instead of having a tricky system with lost of spell lists and Mana costs, I went for an entirely clean and simple system. In short, your magical strength are determined by your Mastery.
There is one major restricting to spellcasting: your Hero. the onle one who can access these divine powers is your Hero, and he must be relatively close to where the magic is going to take effect in order to cast the magic successfully. This means you can't hurl a fireball into the air, ICBM style, and have it land in the palace of your rival, killing him instantly. Also, no spell is permanent. If you want the sky to be always blue, you need to cast the spell that does it every turn.
Magic is also separated into subtypes. This is to make the players focus in a few branches, and making it easier to combine and describe magical effects. The specialization also allows players to gain different levels of Mastery. If you only have one branch, you will be Level 3. If you have two, Level 2 and likewise 1 if you have three branches. The Masteries signify how effective your magic is. Specializing in one branch will give greater effects than multiple ones, but you might be wanting to combine magical effects of two branches to create specific effects. It is entirely up to you, and it is by no means said that one or the either is the best choice.
Feel free to describe the "spells" you cast. This will allow me to write better updates, as well as they might prove a little bonus if it is logical. Still, if you describe an ICBM fireball spell or something rather, you might just fry away Mana with no result. Keep it real, and don't try to do overly fancy stuff unless you have a Divine level Divine stat.
Mastery affects spellcasting in the following ways:
Level 3: 240% Spell efficiency
Level 2: 100% Spell efficiency
Level 1: 60% Spell efficiency
As you can see, having several branches of magic will decrease the effect of your magic. Likewise, choosing only one will let you excel in it. As already described, this is for players to decide their own style of play and maintain diversity. It will prove interesting what combination will be the most successful in the end.
The various schools/branches are as follows:
Fire
Water
Earth
Air
Life
Death
Nature
Illusion
Trade: This won’t be a great NES if you cannot trade your goods. There will not be any trade routes, however. Trade centers will be on the map, which gives an income bonus. These will be more or less constant ones, unless they are destroyed by war, or new and better ones are "made". You will not be able to control trade, other than restricting it, but you can encourage trade in your nation. Mostly, though, trade regulates itself, and centers will come and go in accord with what is happening in the world.
You can make all sorts of trade agreements with fellow players, but do remember everybody else is, ultimately, your rivals. As in the great spirit of Battle Royale: There can be only one! Do backstab and betray eachother, as this ensues in many conflicts and lots of bloodshed. I do expect war, not ”Priests of Catan”.
Note that you are not "out of the game" until you've lost all of your believers! Converts don't simply vanish as soon as you lose a territory. This means an exiled hero will be able to cast spells even though he doesn't get any income or recruits. This also means you need to be careful with your Hero. Sending him into the forefront might be heroic indeed, but having him killed by doing that means you're NPC'd for the next turn. There is also the possibility of assasins, traps, natural disasters, not to mentions perils while searching for lost artifacts (they are lost for a reason - like the clock inside the crocodile in Peter Pan). Still, I will take it for granted that the security around you Hero is paramount, and you don't have to state it in your orders every time. Having a few protective magics might be a good idea nontheless.
I cannot think of any more rules to add… Lastly, I will present the rule above all other:
Churches are made, not born! Do not expect to win this NES by sitting idly about! Conversion requires action!
Welcome, Heroes. The Age of Yorn awaits you.
