Name pending, seems to work for now. I don't put much value in names, so it's whatever.
You live in... well, it's the city. It's the world. The world you know. A single palisade and the city cowering behind it - in that order. The wall is really what it is, the city itself is secondary to the wall that surrounds it. Without the wall, the things in the forest would kill you, and everyone. No one leaves the wall at night, and even in the daytime it's a risk. Of course it's a required risk, the wall isn't large enough to surround the few square miles of farmland, and even the farm isn't enough to keep the people alive, the river provides so much fish and the hunters bring back so much meat - assuming the hunters do come back.
And that's the status of the world for the duration of history. A rich river, an endless expanse of woodlands, a battered farm, a desperate population, and the wall. History is a funny thing though. History tracks time, it tracks what changes and what's happened. For all of 'history' there has been no change. There's been birth and death, there's been damage and repair, but nothing has actually changed. Survival has been stagnant and it has not been proud. Until now.
You are the first person in, well, in your lifetime at least, to manipulate magic. Written history is sparse, there is no real history of civilization, there's what you remember from your life, and in that time you know you're the first to bend magic. It's a difficult art, but it's very primal and very powerful. The source is something deep and basic, and with your bare hands you've fended off the beasts that prey on humans. Briefly. "Fend off" is very literal, as it was more of a frantic run inside the wall away from an ambush. But it happened, you survived, and others survived because of your actions. You've been a farmer for as long as you were able to walk, at first looking and cutting blight off the crops, later replanting and cooking. But you have an ability now that changes things, on at least some level.
And this is where the game starts. Since I'm looking for 2-4 players, I want at least one of them to be 'the magic dude' but it's not required, as it doesn't actually matter if 0 or 4 characters are magical. The game is extremely open-roam. It HELPS if there's some magic talent, because there will be strictly magical enemies that will be difficult to face without magic. Some will be impossible to kill without magic, though there's naturally occurring defenses, and the magic that kills them doesn't have to be YOUR magic.
The theme of the game, if there was one central theme, it's resource starvation. Metal doesn't exist in any reasonable way. Stone barely exists. There's enough stone to produce axes and a few choice tools, but masonry is not a known skill, wood and plant fiber are the primary materials of the human city. Clearcutting woodland is going to meet fierce and monstrous opposition, stone quarrying is going to be a massive undertaking, and the only metal you're likely to encounter is at the bottom of an incomprehensibly dangerous dungeon, and it'll be a silver dollar sized piece of metal. And THAT little bit of metal should be an enormous treasure. Any attempts at construction, production, or advancement are going to be met with stiff resistance. The existing humans haven't moved beyond their one wall, and there's a good reason for that. The resource scarcity and the monsters that prowl in the night keep people subdued.
So, the actual gameplay. Right now, I'm thinking it will be played on a private forum. A large part of the game should be lack of information, which is why I'm not making exact math and details known, but rather leave them to be discovered. I will say that it runs off something similar to a d20 system, with a skill level and a dice roll + skill check. Posts will be made on the forum, and time will progress as the players agree on actions and things occur. This means the pacing of the game is entirely variable. The general 'speed' of the game is in combat time, which is generally about 5 minutes per turn of attacks, and in world time, which is 1 day at a time. A large focus of the game is meant to be on large-type progression, and there's rules in place for handling laborers and settlements, meant to play as much as a strategy game as anything else.
The game starts with a number of players and their fairly generic characters (woodworker, farmer, etc.) with a basic set of basic skills, along with 1 extra mook per player, who represents "someone who is impressed by your magic and is willing to follow you" or something along those lines. They mook's skill level is on a similar level as the player, and offers another set of hands to do things. Beyond that, there is no direction and no guide. You are aware that there is a city, there are farms, to the west is an enormous river far too wide to swim across, forests surround you on all sides, and far to the north is something that might look like mountains. The world is inhabited by fairly mundane creatures, as well as monsters of a wide variety of types. If you're not careful the world WILL kill you, and quickly.
Anyone interested or have questions? Post here. A lot of information is intentionally secret, but there might be things I should tell more about.
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Topic: The Empty World - An RPG I'm working on, need 2-4 players. (Read 1592 times)