Ideas behind the game
This isn't even remotely required reading, but if you want to know what some of the ideas behind the game are, read on.
This is in the main a solo project so "I" here is the gamerunner, Ada, though I have had some fantastic help with character descriptions.
General Inspiration
The genesis of this game was me asking myself, "What if I mashed the original Dragon Age and Warhammer together, toned down the magic, sprinkled in a little more historical inspiration, and make it a MUSH where the player characters are the big movers and shakers?" While I have iterated on the core idea and revised portions of it umpteen times, some will certainly see the vestiges of those settings. A place called in a city with a citadel called the Icespire, in a Poland-Lithuania analogue situated south of a horrifyingly dangerous arctic region, is not in any way subtle. The were somewhere between the Blights and Chaos, and an early iteration looked more like the scale of Tolkien's War of Wrath.
The historical analogues for regions are probably clear enough, though they are only fuzzily inspired by history rather than being straight replicas. The and non-imperial Adanans are Germanic. started off as something like ancient Phoenicia (the name was taken by just haphazardly cutting out part of Qart-Hadasht, or Carthage) and ancient Egypt, and the Emerald River is blatantly just the Nile. The is lifted from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including the bananas fact that one in ten people were noble. is Greek-derived in that there are hills, islands, a bunch of guys with names ending in -is, and a pantheon of rather transactional deities who I will some day actually detail further. came from Italian city states, though obviously grotesque centralisation of wealth has got the better of them.
It bears mentioning, on that note, that while names of characters and houses are supposed to evoke the feel of certain places, none of them are drawn from a language I actually speak, so there is rarely subtext to them, other than and, probably more ironically, .
The obvious MUSH inspiration for those who have been around the hobby for some time is Arx. For those who are newer to the hobby, Arx closed a couple of years ago, though it had a great run. It's a bit of a contrivance to put all the notables of a major polity in one city on the regular (Versailles aside), but it worked there. I could think of no other good way to represent characters all over a continent without splitting a playerbase of indeterminate size, making moment-to-moment roleplay harder, and, in the end, probably giving up entirely as I tried to write the grid.
The Sort of Story I Like
My preferred approach to a story is to give players a setting and the places and things that occupy it, attach some hooks, and let them act without laying out a prescribed course. Some of these hooks are likely to be of global interest while others are more specific to houses. Every noble house has a current events section on its page. Some of them are having difficulties and some are relatively calm, though the calm is not guaranteed.
I'll take the as an example of a major issue when the game opens, since it directly concerns a few houses. It is a polity due west of the empire which is rapidly, aggressively expanding, conquering its neighbours in south-central Elthos. None of the major Elthosian powers have stopped it. There is no imperial consensus about what, if anything, to do. Rin is west of , a culturally Adanan realm which an imperial coalition invaded and seized part of fifteen years ago, after which time the empire and Intis have not maintained normal diplomatic relations. Imperial nobles expect Rin might attack Intis at some point, but it might go elsewhere first. They certainly expect a war eventually.
What do player characters do? Does the empire even act pre-emptively? Does it attempt to collaborate with other Elthosian powers? What if one of them is attacked by Rin? There are no binding treaties and no obligations. Does it seek to make treaties? What preparations does it make domestically? carved out part of eastern Intis for itself and is closest to Rin. Can it rely on its new vassals to stand with it? What about , which has let its border fortresses fall into disrepair and has its share of internal problems? Do they look to the directly? Does the imperial house decide to take initiative itself? What about other parts of the empire? Do they send help? Do they extract a price for it? Can they even afford to send help or to weaken their own holdings?
None of those questions have answers yet and I leave them in the hands of players. The game is not a simulation in any sense, but organisations have limited resources with which to address the problems they and the empire as a whole face. They cannot do everything.
Stakes
I am generally not a fan of character loss without a compelling story leading to it. Player characters might die in the course of the game but I will clearly telegraph the potential to the player in advance. The stakes are instead in the world itself, the direction it takes, and the very likely prospect that player characters will suffer losses, be it of people (even if the non-player sort), reputation, vassal houses, holdings, wealth, or whatever else it might be.