SDMB RPG: Shadows of Arcady
Welcome to the play thread for my SDMB play-by-post RPG: Shadows of Arcady, in the vein of the illustrious Fighting Ignorants, the years-long Middle Earth D&D Game and my own, briefly-successful Rule of Three (RoT).
[ul][li]What is Shadows of Arcady (SoA)?[/ul][/li]SoA is a play-by-post RPG campaign taking place on the SDMB.
[ul][li]What kind of schedule does the game have?[/ul][/li]Play will progress when what I believe is an adequate number of players have posted. For relatively unimportant moments in the game, such as determining marching orders, etc, this will require a simple majority. I’ll give enough time for everyone to post during important story moments. I hope for players to be able to post at least once a day, excepting occasional delays, which are understandable.
[ul][li]How do I join?[/ul][/li]We currently have a full party. If you’d like to be on the replacement list just post in the setup thread or send me a private message.
Notes on posting:Players, please make it clear what you’re doing when you post. Is your character speaking? Are you telling me what you want your character to do? Are you saying something OOC (Out Of Character)? I should be able to tell at a glance what you’re trying to do. If you’re asking me an important question try to bold or color it so that it jumps off the page at me.Introduction:[spoiler]SoA takes place in a medieval fantasy world called Gaia. More specifically, the action takes place on the dying continent of Arcady. It is a varied land covering over a million square miles, nearly all of it lost to wilderness. The vast city of Platinum Falls in Arcady’s far southwest is the last bastion of civilization on the continent.
Platinum Falls was originally a small, walled mining colony built into the side of a squat mountain overlooking the Silver Sea to the west. The colony was a joint venture between humans and dwarves: The humans kept to their shallow mines and fields of the world above and the dwarves toiled a mile below in Goldhelm, their delve. The history of Platinum Falls is long and oft-disputed but what is known is that Platinum Falls as it exists today is nothing like Platinum Falls as it existed shortly after its conception.
The mountain itself is now home to the Platinum Keep and its Glitterspire. The hilly region surrounding it is known as Whitewall, land occupied by Platinum Falls’ wealthiest and most respected residents. The pristine limestone tower of the Prime Academy juts proud from among the elven manors of the Island District to the northeast. To the east are the ancient estates occupied by Platinum Falls’ human nobility. To the south is the so-called Crowns District with its financial institutions, temples and dwarven embassies.
For miles in all directions stretches the core of the city and its many repeating rings of perimeter walls, all in varying states of decay and disrepair. Each was built in some age past as the borders of the city expanded. And for many more miles once the core has been passed is Underthumb, also known as Landfill, a shantytown that spreads across the horizon, peopled by the poorest of the city. Beyond that and over the horizon there are endless fields of wheat that supply the city with grain. And finally, beyond that, there is the Burning Sea, a desert without measure and the greatest defensive barrier the city enjoys.[/spoiler]Notes on magic:SoA is a low-magic campaign. The average person in the game world has seen magic only a handful of times in their lives. Spellcasters are often feared and occasionally treated with outright hostility. Nobody knows why some people are born with inherent magical powers and others are not, but of course everyone has a theory. Due to magic’s relative rarity no more than two members of the starting party will be allowed to be spellcasters (and even that many is not necessary).Notes on gender:[spoiler]SoA’s game world is not as sexist as actual medieval society, but gender roles still exist. Women can’t pledge their support to other houses except through marriage and they can’t own land except by becoming widows (they lose their land if they remarry - many a hostile takeover has been performed by marrying the widow of a powerful lord).
Though it is rare, some women do become professional soldiers.[/spoiler]Notes on race:[spoiler]Much more important than gender is species, more commonly referred to as “race.” Humans and halflings tend to get along the best (at least compared to the others) but all the other races are suspicious if not outright hostile towards one another. There are stories of love and friendship breaking down racial barriers but in reality the only thing that tends to motivate members of different races to get along is money.
The four dominant races in Platinum Falls are: Humans (who are by far the most numerous), dwarves, elves and halflings. Most dwarves reside in Goldhelm, the last true delve, beneath the streets of Platinum Falls. The elves of Platinum Falls tend to live in the Island Disctrict, a gated section of the city exclusively populated by their kind and home to the only institution of magic that exists, the Prime Academy. Halflings, like their human cousins, are dispersed pretty evenly throughout the city.
These four groups, along with the rare and universally-shunned half-elves, make up the five playable character races.[/spoiler]Notes on nobility and honor:[spoiler]Nobility in Platinum Falls is based around power and wealth. Perhaps once there were more official rules governing the rises and falls of individual families but these days nobility is something that can often be bought outright.
Honor is a code that governs how nobles treat one another. It has nothing to do with how nobles treat peasants and, indeed, a noble who works his serfs to death, burns entire villages to the ground and sells children into slavery can be considered very honorable by his peers. Peasants have no honor and so nobles are not obligated to treat them honorably.
Nobles are expected to to be honest and true in their dealings with fellow nobles, to spare the lives of noble noncombatants (execution of criminals an exception), to show respect to their superiors and so on. Different nobles put different values on honor. Some only care that they have the appearance of being honorable. The actual intricacies of honor would be too much to post here, but suffice it to say that if a noble is looking for an insult to one’s honor (real or imagined) as justification for a feud it would be very easy to find.
Dwarves have a system of nobility similar to what humans enjoyed in ages past. They put great weight on station and rank and tend to treat honor with much more gravity than their surface neighbors.
Elves have the strictest of caste systems, with elven nobles claiming the ability to track their families back thousands of years. Among elves nobility is close to godhood, though very few true elven nobles remain.
Human, dwarven and elven nobles might not respect one another as much as nobles of their own race, but they still tend to recognize that higher status.[/spoiler]Notes on religion:While not everyone in Platinum Falls is religious, there aren’t any people that would outright deny the existence of the gods. Those who did would quickly become pariahs, shunned by those hoping to avoid the gods’ inevitable wrath. The gods aren’t concerned with good or evil: Instead, each deity rules over a particular portfolio. There are also minor household gods that some families worship. There are those that claim to have contact with the divine and to derive magic power from that contact- the truthfulness of these statements is always difficult to determine. The common man has no contact with the divine.Notes on the system:[spoiler]For those unfamiliar with White Wolf’s Storytelling System, it uses 10-sided dice. Each die rolled has a 30% chance of success (8s, 9s and 10s are successes), with a 10% chance of critical success (10s are a success plus a reroll). Stats are typically measured on a scale of 0 to 5, with those stats being used to determine how many dice are rolled. For example, if I need to throw something to you I’d add my Dexterity (say, 2) and my Athletics skill (say, 1) together for a total of 3 dice. Now let’s say that it’s windy, imposing a -1 die penalty. So I’ve got a total of 2 dice. I roll both and score a 4 and an 8. That’s a single success, meaning my aim is true and I throw the object to you successfully. Skill specialties give characters a single bonus die to related rolls. So if I had the skill specialty Athletics: Throwing, I’d have rolled a total of 3 dice rather than 2 in my example.
The mechanics aren’t too important. For the most part you can simply describe to me what you’re attempting to do and I’ll use the mechanics to guage your success. [/spoiler]