Requiem of Another World
Rules and Mechanics V_1
Setting
RAW will take place in almost the same universe as one of my other games, Song of Another World. The key difference is that the history of the world, as far as a of you know, is closer to OTL. The player-made concepts in the other game, while cool, are in the end constricting to me in terms of building my own world. So, they will be left in that other game. Instead, we’re going right back to the initial premise; a world in which the unnatural becomes natural.
To recap, this is a world that went the same as ours until an enormous but mysterious cosmic event causes what seems to be intense changes to the laws of nature. Space became temporarily meaningless, resulting areas of space switch places entirely. To add on to this, new materials with alien properties are beginning to be found and creatures that seem to defy God Himself now roam the earth.
The Player
Players in this game take the role of their own avatar in this world. All player characters have one thing in common: they were but lowly commoners that would have been forgotten in the history of man had it not been for this one event. Now, though, they seem to have been blessed - or cursed - with unique abilities that are sure to change the flow of history itself.
DISCLAIMER: You are allowed to have had moderate success in your peasant life. You just weren’t living in a castle or some lofty estate or anything.
In order to join, fill out the below.
Name: The name of your character. Make sure it’s viable according to where you’re from unless you’re joining in one of the “spatial distortion” (see the codex section I havent made yet)areas in which case choose the name that suits the culture. Just don’t have a Swedish name living in southern Italy. You’re a commoner, and most of you guys didn’t get around too much.
Profession: What you did before the event. Can be almost anything, so long as it isn’t all that important to society. No being a prince or a famous general. You’re a filthy peasant, I say!
Sex: Biologically. Don’t lynch me please.
DoB: Trust me it’s relevant. Don’t be fancy, just use the Gregorian calendar. I don’t care if it doesn’t exist yet.
Place of origin: Can be from anywhere on the map. Just mark it and slap it on your post. Don’t crop for God’s sake. A link to the image is just fine.
Background: What was your life like beyond what’s stated above. Write SOMETHING of substance here so I have an idea what kind of person your character is in a more abstract way. Things like religion, values, etc. whether they be explicit or implicit.
Stat allotment: You have 5 points to spend. For more information, head on down to the game mechanics. Trust me. Go there.
Strength:
Dexterity:
Intelligence:
Charisma:
Faith:
The Player Character
So, characters in this game have 4 stats.
Strength is a measure of the character’s physical prowess. Stronger human beings also tend to have more endurance and constitution, so you can also consider those kinds of thing falling under this. Strength allows for dealing higher damage in combat, lifting weight, and surviving hits. The increased stamina translates to a better ability at committing to many actions each turn.
Dexterity is a measure of the character’s nimbleness, balance, and speed. It also denotes reaction time. High dexterity means you do things fast - dodging, hitting, running, praying, talking, whatever. Better aim is also considered in this domain. Dexterity allows for more possible actions per turn, more combat rounds when combat is processed, and decreased chances of getting hit.
Intelligence is a measure of the character’s critical thinking skills. Characters with high intelligence tend to have a better grasp on their abilities, thus are more efficient at doing most things up to a point. Intelligence allows for faster character leveling and general increased chances of things going your way on a broad scale, and allows characters to better utilize their special ability. You can also consider perception under this domain.
Charisma is a measure of the character’s ability to speak.
Faith is a measure of the character’s conviction in their ideals. Not necessarily in the sense that they blindly follow religious texts, but whatever it is the faithful truly believe in, they really believe in it. Faith works sort of like a luck stat; whatever special ability you get, it is more likely to match what sort of character I interpret your character to be. Unlike luck stats in most games though, it doesn’t arbitrarily raise the odds of things you do going your way per sey(that’s what Intelligence is for); it increases the odds of random good things happening to you and decreases the odds of random bad things happening to you. Basically, it is kind of like loading the dice in terms of what ability you get and what things happen to you.
All characters have a base of 0 in everything; this denotes an average human. The average person, who is not exceptional in any way, whether it be exceptionally weak or strong or stupid or what have you, is one who has all stats zeroed. Meanwhile, a 4 in the stat denotes as proficient in the stat a human can naturally become. A 5 in a stat is, as implied, beginning to go off that scale. I’ll let you use your imagination for the specifics until the feats of one with a rank 5+ stat become fairly common.
When building the character, you may also lower a stat by 1 to get half a point to spend on another stat. This signifies going below average. A -4 is as bad as you can be at something while still having the general ability to do that thing. A -5 in something is essentially having an inability to do that thing. Usually, this is justified by mental illness or extreme injury. To clarify, of course you can only spend whole points. The half-point you get from lowering a stat isn’t usable without another half-point.
In addition to building your character, of course, you also direct their actions when the game begins.
Characters: What Do They Mean
So there are two types of broad “characters” in this game. And no, I’m not referring to PCs and NPCs. There are Unique Characters and Mundane Characters. Unique characters, broadly, are people with a considerable clout of power. This does not automatically make every lord eligible for this classification. Only the highest leaders can be considered one of these if they do not have a power. Inversely, anybody blessed with a power is eligible for this classification. That is how exactly how powerful these powers are. An Emperor that is also blessed with a power is probably one of the most formidable opponents in this game.
Mundane Characters are exactly how they sound. They lack the political clout to mean anything on the grandest of scales and do not impose the presence that one who wields a power does. They are your average farmer and foot soldier, but also the knights and lords who serve under someone more powerful. For the purpose of this game, not many of these will have names. They are there as a resource that you can assert your will on.
Character Management
Character actions are theoretically infinite. The problem comes in when you direct your character to do too many things in one turn. For example, you can’t expect to create and manage a new trade league and then go out on the battlefield and lead an army to victory during an ongoing conflict, and then personally lead a diplomatic expedition to a country a sea away all in the three months that is one turn.If you give your character this huge a mandate, expect your character to not complete some work, mess up some of their work, or burnout completely. All of this is not mutually exclusive. That said, your character’s capacity to do different kinds of actions depends heavily on their stats. For example a character with higher intelligence can do a lot of things related to thinking.
To start with, you only have one Unique Character you control. However, you can win the loyalty of other Unique Characters so to increase what you can do over one turn and play towards certain characters’ strengths. Loyalty can be obtained in many ways, from comradery to “generosity” to romance(though that one is… stickier than other relationships, as one would expect.)
In addition to controlling characters, you can also control Organizations. Organizations are anything from Kingdoms to plots of land and can handle a variety of tasks. For example, if your character wishes to commit to research into the new things that populate the world, the character can found a college rather than doing all the work by themselves. Or, perhaps you can usurp a kingdom and use its resources to do the same. Possibilities are pretty open-ended here. View Organizations for more of the knitty gritty of how they work as mechanics.
Resources
This game has several kinds of resources your character can directly utilize.
The main resource broadly used to purchase things is Gold. Gold is obtained in a variety of ways outlined below, in following sections of the rules and is used in most any transaction.
The next kind of resource is Loyal Manpower. This is essentially the number of people you could possibly get to fight on your side in a conflict and effectively lead. Note, this is not the number of people living under your lands or even the number of people that are able to fight. That stat is denoted by regular Manpower, which if you don’t have an organization to keep track of, you can’t actually know.
Finally, the last numeric stat associated with your character is Prestige. This isn’t really a consistently spendable stat in the same way gold and manpower could be; instead it’s one that is built over time and sometimes spent in chunks. View Politics for more information.
This game also employs the use of Special Resources. Special Resources are harvestable natural resources that appear throughout the map. Farmable goods, metals, etc. There are several different kinds of Resources in this game. Most of them should be self-explanatory. The ones that aren’t your character probably doesn’t know too much about either, so deal with it.
Markets
Across the lands there are various markets. This has been abstracted to “Market Zones” which are based in a specific location and work similarly to trade nodes in Europa Universalis games. Market zones will have various demands on goods and various suppliers trying to make bank. For simplicity’s sake, each Special Resource source produces the same amount of that resource. Each time a new source is added to a market, the value adjusts accordingly.
A Market Zone is controlled by whoever holds the most economic clout in the zone. In other words, the person making the most money from their various organizations. Market Zones can be seized militarily, but doing this will compromise the overall economic output of the zone temporarily.
Market Zone controllers have a variety of special actions they can take. For example, they can elect to import resource that is in low supply from another zone. This makes that good cheaper broadly, increasing profits of organizations who use that resource. However, it undercuts the profits of the producers of that resource in that zone. Which might be the actual goal, too.
Organizations
There are two broad kinds of organizations. Resource Gathering Organizations and Action Delegation Organizations.
RGOs gather or create particular resources for profit. Usually, that is their only purpose. Each RGO has a Profit Rating that dictates how much gold it can possibly rake in. The person in charge of managing it will decide how much of that gold goes to your pocket. Also, RGOs that gather natural resources can only be built atop a Special Resource.
On the flipside, ADOs will manage particular actions depending on the ADO’s mandate. For example, a College would be an ADO. The effectiveness of the ADO is also dependant on their manager.
Some Organizations synergize. For example, again using research, if an RGO is mining Brimstone, you can choose to take a permanent dip in profit to supply the ADO(the college) with rimstone to research, which will increase the odds of discovering how Brimstone works. Another example is a Recruitment Organization ADO. If you have a farm and send food to the ADO, they’ll have an easier time getting more bodies for an army.
Another main distinction between the two organizations is that ADOs require a gold maintenance. Since RGOs will generally produce gold, you will have to manage what kind of organizations you want to field. Be wary though, as RGOs can run into difficulties that make them run into the negative.
The cost to set up Organizations is generally rather steep, especially ADOs as they are more of a luxury and do not turn a profit in themselves in most cases. A level 1 RGO costs 250 Gold; a level 1 ADO costs 750. Each subsequent level costs double of the previous cost and will increase the overall effectiveness of the Organization by 25%.
Politics
An important part of advancement in this game, if this sort of thing is what you’re going for. As you create Organization, rise in power, and overall succeed at life, you build up Prestige. Prestige is, more or less, political clout. It is a measure of how much people respect you. Higher Prestige generally raises how you fare with getting people to agree with you, to a cap based on your Societal Rank.
Societal Rank is where you are on, well, the societal ladder. In this time period, upward mobility was a real rarity. Most people stay in the class they were born into. However, that is about to change. As you build up Prestige, you can begin taking various titles for yourself, improving your rank in society. However, improving your rank does come at a cost. Improving your Societal Rank eats away a portion of your Prestige and makes local powers - especially with a rank closer to your own - fairly angry. If you intend on increasing your rank to that of a King or Emperor, be prepared to fight an actual King or Emperor, especially if one already exists and has a claim in the land you are occupying.
Your Societal Rank is not just for show, as well. It pretty much directly correlates to how much you can make use of land and the people living in them. Eventually, your word could become tantamount (or even literally) law.
Actions
Actions are pretty open-ended. However, for the sake of direction, I’ll outline some things that would comprise one “standard action.” As a general rule of thumb, a character can commit to 3 standard actions each turn before they begin hitting penalties. Though, depending on their stats as pointed out in the stats section, they may make more standard actions per turn. AS another general rule of thumb, every 3 points in a stat allows 1 more action to be done in a related action. Strength is an exception, where every 2 points allows 1 more action to be done for all actions.
Attack: Designate a target to attack.
Find: Try to find the whereabouts of a target.
Research: Commit to research on some specific thing.
Found: Found an organization.
Manage: Manage an organization for this turn.
Explore: Explore an area for resources.
That should give you a good idea as to how a standard action is defined. If you have anything else in mind, just ask me about it.
Items
Where mundane characters can just be assumed to have certain equipment that automatically gets paid for either by them or by you equipping them in your recruitment, Unique characters have arsenals comprising of specific items.
There are two broad ways of acquiring items. First is simply buying them off the local market. Second is forging the equipment, either yourself or through one of your organizations. Though, if you’re doing the forging with your own assets, you’d still need to pay for the materials, though of course that’s still cheaper. Unless, that is, you own all the RGOs that goes into a piece of equipment, in which case all you need to do is order your men to do the thing for you.
Items have various stats that affect the outcomes of certain things, depending on the item and the stats. As expected, an excellently forged sword gives a bonus to combat. Meanwhile, if you somehow were to forge a microscope(hintdrop) you would get a bonus to research.
Aside from being equipped, items can be sold or donated to one of your organizations. I don’t think I have to explain selling, but donating is pretty simple too. You just give one of the items in your possession to an organization of yours and they could get a bonus to their effectiveness. The size of this bonus and how long it sticks around depends on the quality of the item and how applicable it is to the organization. For example, while a finely crafted sword might be quite combat effective and look magnificent, a research institute doesn’t have much use for it.
Item creation is simply a matter of gathering the resources required and putting some man-hours towards it. The quality of the item being created is semi random, but largely depends on the skill of the smith; high strength and intelligence is your friend in this case. Too low of either stat will produce mediocre items. Keep in mind, the properties of several new minerals is completely unknown; there is more to items than metal alloys and a well-built kiln in this world.
