While We Wait: (Almost) Anything Goes

Bonsoir mes amis,

I am taking a break from TNES to run a board game based around a fantasy region inspired by the intrigue, politics, and culture of the Italian Renaissance. You can play as a lord, a merchant, a criminal, a mercenary, or even a populist uprising, and their family, friends and associates.

You can find a draft of the ruleset here, and of the geographic map here.

There is still some time for me to customize some of the local setting if you have a particular faction in mind. I will probably launch the thread with my players already chosen and placed on the map, so if you want to play a game of this type, please read the rules and then send me a message on the NES discord or #nes IRC chat.
 
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Thlayli, first of all it sounds very cool so :hatsoff:to you :) What time were you thinking about launching this one?


I also had a general point of discussion. On the forum we now have both a lack of players and moderators. While GM's inability to update for whatever reason is not new to NESing, I believe that the lack of player participation is. One way to address that might be in releasing updates more regularly regardless of player participation. NESing is a game stretched in time and its hard to keep motivation for longer projects in this day. As a solution for this, a GM could, I do say could, update regularly without much player participation. This would allow the story of a NES to develop, show GMs commitment and based on that to attract players. If people drop out or have a long break in the game then the game would still go on. I believe that it might be better to sacrifice some control of one's own nations for a turn or two rather than wait for player's orders that might never come. What do you guys think? Turning NESing into more "stories" when the game calls for it?
 
I would agree that updates of any sort keep people interested and will attract new players. Too few players may frustrate the mod, but no updates is a quick way to see players drop out. Says the guy who has not been active here for almost a decade.....
 
It's been about six years, but bizarrely I've updated Our Terrible Purpose. You may find it here, listed under Ill Things Come to Those Who Wait. The vast majority of content may also be found therein. If any players have stories I've missed for my selection, please feel free to find me on #nes.
 
Greetings all. Looking to dip my toes back into something with a story or roleplay bent, or perhaps to launch another NyNES.

I've missed this place.
 
Nylan, it is so good to see you again my friend! Thlayli is running the most active NES right now, and we're also talking about projects on our IRC channel (still accessible through Mibbit and other IRC programs). We also have a discord!
 
I was challenged to make a collapsing space empire NES concept on #nes, so here it is. If at least 5 people actually wanted to participate in this and did ~250 word backgrounds I would run a mostly stat-free mini-NES in WWW.

To Still The Dynamo:

When the Pacs defeated House Ichor, they knew not what they wrought. An ironclad imperium of immense but fragile dynamism built around the hieratic core of Old Alter suddenly ground to a halt as the core cooled, and a frantic conference was held instead of what should have been a glorious triumph of a hundred worlds. All the victors agreed it was a sin that Alter’s mountains had been harvested, her oceans frozen and carted to Venusian sky-palaces, her core hollowed and replaced with the glowing machine that programmed the strand-ways.

Yet it was a sin each and every Pac-lord’s house had consented to, and their genealogies and share-prices attested to it. Many new Alters were made in its image, reflections of what the forests, islands, and deserts might have once been on the old world, with creative improvements. Lush geological playgrounds for the franchise-holders were made possible by the atomic transmutation fields stamped with the ancient imperial seal, I-Core.

Nonetheless, the royalties grew unendurable, and the Dynamic Church began to be seen as yet another imposition of distant control, another arm of Ichor’s ever-increasing centralization. The franchises had become worlds with cultures of their own and self-sufficient systems. Critically, the discovery was eventually made that (inferior) strandways could be made without hollowing entire planets, at higher risk and reduced stability, but stimulating a wave of smuggling and piracy outside the imperial routes that decimated Ichor’s revenues. Taxations were algorithmically increased on the satrapies to account – and the classic story renewed itself.

Old rivals with vastly divergent cultures and languages met in hushed meetings, which escalated to open proclamations. A feudal league was formed of a thousand banners, families with their own histories nigh unto that of Ichor in glory and forward-thinking innovation. Proud franch-lords, veterans of alien crusades and radicalized firebrands who had never seen Alter and refused to worship it as their ancestors had – against them arraigned the forces of the few loyal satrapies, and Ichor’s hated Imperial Fulfillment Authority.

After initial reverses, the Pacs shattered the IFA in a series of decisive battles, some in real-space and others in strand-space. Entire fleets were lost to nothingness in the breaking of temporary connections that shuddered the power grids and geomagnetic cores of a dozen rebel worlds unevenly sharing the burden across lightyears. Though inferior to the churning megalith, the rebel satrapies nonetheless were able to make temporary strandways that inflicted devastating and unexpected raids.

The rebel satrapal fleets made up in number and tactical creativity what they lacked in quality against Ichor’s ancient mobile fulfillment fortresses. Against all odds and the history of a dozen past failed rebellions, came success. In the end the empire lost due to doctrinal inflexibility, too attached to projected revenues of the stable streams to consider severing them to make new connections that might bring victory.

The greatest cost of the final battle was the Ichor Research Facility on the Olympia Imperial Pac. The red planet grew redder, and redder, and now churns as a red dwarf crackling with storms, a ruinous, distant omen in the skies of Old Alter, an eternal memory that the imperial house is now a slave to the whims of the satrapies. With it, the majority of the Empire’s technical expertise and the documentation of their greatest crimes vanished.

Alter was despised by the colonies – and yet, as the imperial strandways simultaneously collapsed - necessary. Re-enfranchisement was the demand and the compromise, and the dynamo was restarted. A rotting, powerless imperial house was retained, mere engineer-scions left with their inherited knowledge to maintain the juddering dynamo until a permanent solution found. The neutered IFA was stacked with satrapal commanders, and the labyrinthine imperial bureaucracy placed under the oversight of the satrapally-appointed Seated Princes in the converted Fulfillment Fortress over Venus, which the Immolant Faction rapidly decried as a mere shifting of Ichor’s authority to the richest and most well-connected satrapies.

There is a question now, of if there is even an empire. The great imperial strandways remain in slow decay for lack of maintenance, but satrapal and even private strandways now drift through the intergalactic breeze like floating strands of spidersilk, snapping in the tension like sailcloth. The influential Eidetic Faction wishes to reform Alter, to wind it down and replace it with a superior network with strandways governed by mutual consent, while the Immolant Faction (and its various sub-factions) wish to destroy Alter once and for all, with various designs of ever-escalating grandeur or parochialism as to whether a new Alter should replace it or the satrapies should finally be left to their own designs. But the Eidetic Faction is known to be corrupt, and the Immolants unrealistic and disunited, so most satrapies remain unaligned.

It is an absurd situation, as a puppet Ichor sits on an undermined throne. The only thing keeping the spire from toppling is the inconstancy of the breeze and the fear of those living in its shadow. The first war opened the door to Chaos, slammed shut at the last second by the fear of the princes as the illusion of human unity was made manifest. The Seated Princes fear what the second will bring, and so they crouch over Venus as supposed guardians of Alter’s corruption, while slowly being seduced by it, as the satraps who appointed them intrigue against each other from afar.

And, in the shade of the brazen glare of the monolith, slowly grows the secret hunger whispering through the dynamo’s code.

Concepts:

1. Finite resources
2. Each house has 1-5 points to be spent on influence, intrigue, military, economy/tech or space-bending
3. Space is mutable (sectors' relative positions can change with significant effort)
4. Aliens exist but are unplayable & hostile
5. Artificial intelligence exists but is highly regulated (& self-regulated by servitor councils to ensure machines remain subordinate friends to man)
6. Uplifts are forbidden, genetic modification is allowed
7. Great cultural diversity in satrapies
8. Story point bonuses
 
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Thlayli said:
I was challenged to make a collapsing space empire NES concept on #nes, so here it is. If at least 5 people actually wanted to participate in this and did ~250 word backgrounds I would run a mostly stat-free mini-NES in WWW.

To Still The Dynamo:

When the Pacs defeated House Ichor, they knew not what they wrought. An ironclad imperium of immense but fragile dynamism built around the hieratic core of Old Alter suddenly ground to a halt as the core cooled, and a frantic conference was held instead of what should have been a glorious triumph of a hundred worlds. All the victors agreed it was a sin that Alter’s mountains had been harvested, her oceans frozen and carted to Venusian sky-palaces, her core hollowed and replaced with the glowing machine that programmed the strand-ways.

Yet it was a sin each and every Pac-lord’s house had consented to, and their genealogies and share-prices attested to it. Many new Alters were made in its image, reflections of what the forests, islands, and deserts might have once been on the old world, with creative improvements. Lush geological playgrounds for the franchise-holders were made possible by the atomic transmutation fields stamped with the ancient imperial seal, I-Core.

Nonetheless, the royalties grew unendurable, and the Dynamic Church began to be seen as yet another imposition of distant control, another arm of Ichor’s ever-increasing centralization. The franchises had become worlds with cultures of their own and self-sufficient systems. Critically, the discovery was eventually made that (inferior) strandways could be made without hollowing entire planets, at higher risk and reduced stability, but stimulating a wave of smuggling and piracy outside the imperial routes that decimated Ichor’s revenues. Taxations were algorithmically increased on the satrapies to account – and the classic story renewed itself.

Old rivals with vastly divergent cultures and languages met in hushed meetings, which escalated to open proclamations. A feudal league was formed of a thousand banners, families with their own histories nigh unto that of Ichor in glory and forward-thinking innovation. Proud franch-lords, veterans of alien crusades and radicalized firebrands who had never seen Alter and refused to worship it as their ancestors had – against them arraigned the forces of the few loyal satrapies, and Ichor’s hated Imperial Fulfillment Authority.

After initial reverses, the Pacs shattered the IFA in a series of decisive battles, some in real-space and others in strand-space. Entire fleets were lost to nothingness in the breaking of temporary connections that shuddered the power grids and geomagnetic cores of a dozen rebel worlds unevenly sharing the burden across lightyears. Though inferior to the churning megalith, the rebel satrapies nonetheless were able to make temporary strandways that inflicted devastating and unexpected raids.

The rebel satrapal fleets made up in number and tactical creativity what they lacked in quality against Ichor’s ancient mobile fulfillment fortresses. Against all odds and the history of a dozen past failed rebellions, came success. In the end the empire lost due to doctrinal inflexibility, too attached to projected revenues of the stable streams to consider severing them to make new connections that might bring victory.

The greatest cost of the final battle was the Ichor Research Facility on the Olympia Imperial Pac. The red planet grew redder, and redder, and now churns as a red dwarf crackling with storms, a ruinous, distant omen in the skies of Old Alter, an eternal memory that the imperial house is now a slave to the whims of the satrapies. With it, the majority of the Empire’s technical expertise and the documentation of their greatest crimes vanished.

Alter was despised by the colonies – and yet, as the imperial strandways simultaneously collapsed - necessary. Re-enfranchisement was the demand and the compromise, and the dynamo was restarted. A rotting, powerless imperial house was retained, mere engineer-scions left with their inherited knowledge to maintain the juddering dynamo until a permanent solution found. The neutered IFA was stacked with satrapal commanders, and the labyrinthine imperial bureaucracy placed under the oversight of the satrapally-appointed Seated Princes in the converted Fulfillment Fortress over Venus, which the Immolant Faction rapidly decried as a mere shifting of Ichor’s authority to the richest and most well-connected satrapies.

There is a question now, of if there is even an empire. The great imperial strandways remain in slow decay for lack of maintenance, but satrapal and even private strandways now drift through the intergalactic breeze like floating strands of spidersilk, snapping in the tension like sailcloth. The influential Eidetic Faction wishes to reform Alter, to wind it down and replace it with a superior network with strandways governed by mutual consent, while the Immolant Faction (and its various sub-factions) wish to destroy Alter once and for all, with various designs of ever-escalating grandeur or parochialism as to whether a new Alter should replace it or the satrapies should finally be left to their own designs. But the Eidetic Faction is known to be corrupt, and the Immolants unrealistic and disunited, so most satrapies remain unaligned.

It is an absurd situation, as a puppet Ichor sits on an undermined throne. The only thing keeping the spire from toppling is the inconstancy of the breeze and the fear of those living in its shadow. The first war opened the door to Chaos, slammed shut at the last second by the fear of the princes as the illusion of human unity was made manifest. The Seated Princes fear what the second will bring, and so they crouch over Venus as supposed guardians of Alter’s corruption, while slowly being seduced by it, as the satraps who appointed them intrigue against each other from afar.

And, in the shade of the brazen glare of the monolith, slowly grows the secret hunger whispering through the dynamo’s code.

Concepts:

1. Finite resources
2. Each house has 1-5 points to be spent on influence, intrigue, military, economy/tech or space-bending
3. Space is mutable (sectors' relative positions can change with significant effort)
4. Aliens exist but are unplayable & hostile
5. Artificial intelligence exists but is highly regulated (& self-regulated by servitor councils to ensure machines remain subordinate friends to man)
6. Uplifts are forbidden, genetic modification is allowed
7. Great cultural diversity in satrapies
8. Story point bonuses
Click to expand...
Oh, you.
 
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