Reign: A Game of Lords and Leaders by unseenlibrarian

Introduction

posted by unseenlibrarian Original SA post

Reign: A Game of Lords and Leaders by Greg Stolze

So my very first encounter with this game was in a certain infamous rpg.net thread . I figured anything that could drive that many people that insane with just a paragraph was worth picking up, so I nabbed a copy with my next paycheck.

The default Reign setting in the original core book (There's a later, settingless version of the rules called Reign Enchiridion) is called Heluso and Milonda, a pair of continents that, well, I don't want to spoil that reveal just yet. The following paragraph only applies to that setting, but as a warning, it may inspire reflexive rage taken out of that context. (As witness the thread linked above.)


So those two paragraphs tell us a few things: First; men don't ride astride, but there's still mounted combat- this means the cavalry is made up of either units of women or eunuchs.

Also that there's something really weird going on with the sky in that world, but again we'll get to that later.

Next time: We skip back 280-odd pages to begin at the beginning.

By my words, cities burn

posted by unseenlibrarian Original SA post

Reign: By my words, cities burn

I'm going to gloss over the opening fiction, except to note it has two virtues most opening fiction in RPGs doesn't: Firstly, it's short- only a single page, and second: It doesn't start talking about random elements of the setting before they've actually been introduced, leaving you wondering what the hell's going on or leaving you to figure out fancy new word meanings by context. This is something other games could stand to copy.


All the above is a fancy way (Literally so, in the face of the first paragraph- it's written in a elaborate font that fortunately goes away very soon) of saying that there's a second layer of play in the game, where you manage the organization that your group controls. One of the example campaigns in a later sourcebook is actually -just- the company system, with no stats for the characters at all, but we'll go into that when we hit that book.

Okay I lied about the fancy font, it stays with us for sidebars and...side fiction.



This also conveniently has the writer explaining something of his thought process about how the book is organized, before we dive right into the rules on the next page.

Reign uses the One Roll Engine, as previously mentioned in the thread, and I will again just quote the book, as it's a bit easier.



Next we get into discussing different types of contests- Static, Dynamic, Opposed, and modifiers.

Static contests are a straight roll- get a match, you succeed. There are two kinds of modifiers for this- Difficulty, where your match has to be of a certain height to succeed, or you might need a penalty to your pool.

Dynamic Contests are where two people are trying to do the same thing at the same time, but only one of them can pull it off. This could be a footrace, two people trying to give opposite advice to a leader, etc. All those involved roll their pools and choose the sets they're going to use. The sets are compared and the best wins. What's best varies based on what's being decided; in some cases, width (Which indicates speed) is the deciding factor. In other cases, height (which usually indicates quality is. The foot race is probably a width contest. Convincing the king could be either- height if they've got a lot of time to sway him on the issue, width if it's say, trying to advise him to fight or flee before a besieging enemy that's at the gates -right now-.

Opposed contests are when two characters are directly, well, opposing each other. Like the dynamic contest, both roll a relevant pool- body+fight to punch someone in the face and coordination+dodge to avoid it. If the attacker fails, the blocker's dice don't matter (Though this can change with the right special training.) If the attacker succeeds and the blocker fails, well, the blocker gets punched.

If they both succeed, the blocker's dice become special gobble dice- each gobble die can counteract one die in the opponent's set, provided the die being gobbled is of equal or lesser value. The gobble die set also must be at least as wide as the set it's trying to spoil if timing matters. Say the defender rolls 2X7-if the defender has two nines, she can eliminate one of the sevens, meaning the set is spoiled and the attacker misses. If he'd rolled 3X7, however, and the defender had that same 2X9, he'd attack before she could get out of the way.

If timing doesn't matter, the width of the gobble dice set doesn't matter. Gobble dice are also more efficient vs. Multiple actions- A single gobble die set can interfere with more than one attack, or say, if you're on the ground and fighting someone swinging from a chandelier, your dodge/parry can both block his swing and also keep him from getting to the other balcony by killing his momentum.


We mentioned difficulties and penalties earlier; difficulties are best for problems that are tricky, but don't preclude great success, and affect everyone attempting the task equally- you have to roll a set of a certain height or it doesn't work at all affects you no matter how many dice you have in your pool.

A penalty is when dice get knocked out of the pool- this is for problems that are easier for a more skilled person to accomplish than a novice- if a penalty drops you to only one die, you can't even try the task. Expert and master dice, which we're about to go into, get removed by penalties first.

The rest of the chapter is occupied by a glossary of game terms- (And only game terms- no tossing in random words that you only get context for later in the setting.)

Area dice are for area attacks. Everyone in the affected area rolls the indicated number of area dice and take the appropriate amount of damage to each hit location that turns up in the roll.

Expert dice are wild cards- you set your expert dice to whatever value you want before you roll. So say, you're aiming at the unarmored heel of a mystically tough warrior, you set one of the area dice to 2, since 1-2 isa hit in the leg. If you then roll 2, 3, 4, 9, 8 on your attack, you get a 2X2 set, because of the expert die.

Master Dice are what expert dice grow up to be- you can set them to whatever you want -after- you roll, meaning you can always get a minimum set.

You can't have more than one expert die or mastery die, and you can't have one of each in the same pool.

Gobble dice we've already gone over.

Some important ones:

Armor: Reduces all killing and shock damage to the protected area by its rating- it doesn't affect attack rolls, only the results.

Bonus: anything that raises a numerical value. If you get +2 armor and already have armor 3, you have armor 5. If you have a four die graces pool and get a +1d graces bonus, you roll 5 dice instead.

Slow: Some things you might want to do in Combat take extra time- this is represented by a slow rating, with each point being a # of rounds. For each point, you have to spend that many rounds before rolling- a heavy crossbow is Slow 1, and can thus only be fired every other round. Some spells might be slow 3, and can only be cast every fourth round.

Multiple Action: When a character attempts to do two or more things in the time usually required one thing, that’s called a multiple action. For example, trying to hit two people in quick succession is a double use of the Fight pool. When trying to do two things at once, use the lower pool, take one die out of it, and hope for two sets. If you get two sets, you can apply one set to each action as you see fit. If you keep an Expert or Master die in your smaller pool but not in the larger pool, you must assign at least one set to that pool’s action. If you don’t get any sets, obviously this isn’t an issue.

Squishing: Exchanging Height and Width. If you can squish a result two points, you can change a 4x5 to a 2x7 or a 6x3. If you squish something down to 1x, it’s no longer a set. You can’t squish a set above Height 10.



NEXT TIME: Character Generation, and a few ONE ROLL CHARACTERS.

It's important to know what you want from your character (and thus, from the game) before you put pen to paper.

posted by unseenlibrarian Original SA post

Reign: It's important to know what you want from your character (and thus, from the game) before you put pen to paper.


One of the few pictures in the book that isn't just a fancy background under text


So we've hit the character generation chapter! We open with some fairly wise advice: Make sure everyone's on the same page when it comes to character generation. If the GM's setting up for a military campaign about a mercenary company and you're rolling up Lord Gadfly, Courtly ornament, there may be some issues. It also advises that players work together to design their characters, since Reign is as much about the Company you run as it is about the party.

From there there's a brief mention of two kinds of chargen: Point-buy and One-Roll, which is completely random. (And also completely awesome.), and then we dive into stats and skills.

The stats are the traditional ORE stats: Body, (Strength and toughness) Coordination (Dexterity with a new name) Sense (Awareness/Perception etc), Knowledge (Ability to learn and remember) Command (Presence- how imposing you are.) and Charm (How likeable)

That's right. This game has TWO CHARISMAS.

Stats finishes up with a note that you can't get master or expert dice in a stat. (Naturally, the magic section breaks this rule more than once)

Skills: These are fairly finely divided, each stat has several, and sometimes the distinctions can seem a little weird. (Why is run a separate skill from athletics, for example.) This is probably down to esoteric disciplines and martial paths, which get explained in a later chapter.

One thing of note: Each skill has a note for "Expected possessions". If you've got an expert or mastery die in the skill, or at least 5 dice, you're assumed to have an appropriate item. Some of these are obvious: High run gets you a pair of comfortable shoes, high parry gets you a shield. Some are...less so. For example; every character starts with a mastery die in their native language: The expected possession for the languages skill is clothing. Thus, no character starts the game naked. (This is actually how the book explains this. I guess this has been an issue in some games at some point somewhere? Maybe Rifts. I bet Vagabonds have a chance to start without pants or something.)

For the most parts the names are self-explanatory, but I'll comment on some of them.

Body: Athletics, Endurance, Fight, Parry, Run, Vigor- Of note: Fight is a sort of 'unskilled' skill: It's melee weapons and brawling, but notably, it's sort of a trap for a warrior character, because you can't get martial paths with just fight- you want a specialized weapon skill. Vigor is how well you recover from injury.

Sense skills are basically specialized subcategories. You've got Direction, Eerie, Empathy, Hearing, Scrutinize, and Sight. Empathy is "See through lies and cold reading" Scrutinize is "Spot hidden things in the environment, and thus probably the most important if your GM for some reason decides to send you into a hidden temple full of traps. Eerie is detecting magic or other weird shit that makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Charm: Fascinate, Graces, Lie, Jest, Plead. Fascinate is basically "Distract someone one on one with patter/talk a single person around. Jest is jokes, and has a special rule where with high skill you can set up straight lines with the GM beforehand. Graces is well, social graces, and knowing what not to do in social situations.

Coordination: Climb, Dodge, Perform, Ride, Stealth, Weapon. Yes, you can take Weapon: Unarmed to learn kung fu.

Command: Haggle, Inspire, Intimidate, Perform. (Yes, Perform is under two stats- Command based perform is for things like acting or singing. Coordination based perform is for jugglers, acrobats, dancers, etc.) There's also a note in the chapter that you can use skills with other stats, so I'm not sure why this skill was specifically called out compared to any of the others.

Knowledge: Counterspell, healing, Kanguage, Lore, Strategy, Tactics, Student.
Counterspell is for magic resistance. Lore is general education. Student is a catch all category for "I know a lot about this narrow subject.

There are two skills not associated with any particular stat: Expert, another catch-all category, often used for crafting skills. (For example: Expert: Cobbling) or if you want your highly coordinated but not so strong character to be good at acrobatics: Expert: Jump.)

The other is specific to Heluso and Milonda: Sorcery. Each magical school in Heluso and Milonda has a different stat associated with it, but they all use the sorcery skill. (Yes, there is a Body school who performs magic with muscular effort. MUSCLE WIZARDS) The magical system from a later alternate setting doesn't use a sorcery skill at all, but that's three books from now.

Next page is a brief summary of martial paths and esoteric disciplines. Martial paths are for weapon and combat skills, and esoteric disciplines are for non-combat. You purchase these as advantages: Each path has 5 levels, and each level costs the same as the level number, and you have to purchase them in order. So a level one discipline costs 1 point, level 2 costs 2, and to master a path or discipline thus costs 15 points. (1+2+3+4+5). You can't ever learn more than 15 martial techniques and 15 esoteric techniques. So 3 mastered paths, 5 paths up to level 3, or whatever. There's no list of them in this section, though- they get their own chapter.

Money is highly abstracted in Reign. You get a wealth rating from 0-5 at chargen- it's purchased like an advantage. (Which we still haven't gotten to yet, oddly enough.) Basically, Reign keeps wealth abstract, because it's more fun to conquer your enemies than to do double entry bookkeeping. (I would not be surprised if there were a double entry bookkeeping estoretic discipline later on.)

Passions: Personality drives, that can give you a bonus or a penalty depending on whether you work for or against them. There are three kinds, and you can have one of each.

A mission is a concrete drive: Master a fighting style, get a peace treaty signed between our company and one we're feuding with" Complete a mission, get a bonus experience point, and you can pick a new one.

A Duty is more nebulous- ethical principles. Always aid a damsel in distress, never dirty my family name, etc. These are hard to change.

A craving is more selfish: Get drunk when people aren't counting on me, Have -all the money-.


Whenever you're in direct pursuit of a passion, you get a bonus die to a roll, or you can offset a penalty. You can thus add as much as three dice to a roll if somehow all three of your passions work together. If you're actively working against it, you lose a die. If they conflict, they cancel out, but it can be funny. Passions don't cost anything, because they're as likely to hurt as help. They're also called out as optional as the rules aren't balanced around assuming they exist.

Advantages: Why this didn't come before two things that are purchased as advantages, I don't know.

It's got most of the standards: Fancy gear, wealth (again), beauty (Which has a neat mechanic: On appropriate social skills, beauty sets the minimum height for your set, provided you get a success at all. So if you roll a 2X1 but have the five point version of beauty, it's suddenly a 2X10 roll instead.)

Knack for learning seems better to have for a skill you've only got at a low level, as it makes raising that skill cheaper every time you spend XP on it.

There are two kinds of luck. Fool lucky: Lets you reroll by spending XP, and you have to accept the second result even if it's worse. Regular Luck lets you reroll once a session if you get a result with no matches at all.

The Secret advantage means you know something people would kill to protect; a secret forging technique for swords, how to brew special plants, or construct aqueducts.

There's a Heluso and Milonda specific-advantage listed as well: Spells. Each rank gives you one at an intensity of advantage rank+1, or two at intensity equal to the advantage rank. You can't start with spells above intensity six. It also calls out that you can totally have known a spell in the past but forgotten it- for example, because it was one you only ever need to cast once, like the spell that permanently attunes you to a school. (More on that in the sorcery chapter.)



Finally: Problems. These are flaws, but not the 'give you points at the start' kind,- more like complications in M&M or flaws in the NWOD; they give you bonus XP at the end of a session where they affect play. You only ever get the one bonus XP, even if you're a one-armed, one-eyed, peg-legged pirate prone to drunken blackouts.

Excuse me, gotta write down character concept.

Next time: We try out the two kinds of Reign chargen. Suggestions for what the point buy character should be are welcome. As for the one roll characters, well...you'll see. That's kind of the point!

Esoteric Disciplines

posted by unseenlibrarian Original SA post

Okay, after a ridiculous delay, it's time for more...




So I know, waaaay back in my last post , I promised Chargen. I am...not going to keep that promise. Instead we are going to go into the next section instead, as it explains some things you might need to know before we do Chargen. Namely:

Esoteric Disciplines

The idea behind these is essentially, special techniques for non-combat skills. They are, by their nature, unusual and, well, esoteric. Anyone can give a speech, but someone trained at a fancy elocution school can make that speech really well, with fancy breathing tricks and speaking from the diaphragm and so on. It mentions that while these are all specific to Heluso and Milonda, they're pretty easily reskinned. They're purchased in order, in ranks from 1-5, with one or two exceptions.

So let's go down the list, shall we?

Pure Breath Techniques are used with your vigor skill; it improves your ability to heal shock damage with vigor, and ignore penalties, lets you use Vigor instead of Endurance to perform effortful tasks, and add your vigor to an athletics roll for a non-combat burst of strength.

The Divine Regimen started out as special training techniques for a not-Olympics event to honor the gods- it gave the side who developed it a great advantage until everyone else stole it. Oops. This is all about Athletics. Better lifting, jumping, resisting knockback, improving the results of athletics sets. At the top level, you ignore Fatigue or injury penalties for any body skill.

Svrana Run Special running techniques used by couriers. This is notably not a parkour thing- it's all about running faster and for longer distances without penalty.

[B}Proper Climbing [/B] The first and last ability in this both have to do with taking less damage when you fall, with the pinnacle technique basically not having a height limit at all. In between lets you climb anything with no equipment, climb incredibly fast, and instantly stand up if you're knocked down.

Truil Bodywork Weirdly, some of the best non-magical healers in the game are cannibal mammoth riding werewolf barbarians. (Okay, not all of them are werewolves- only those who practice their special werewolf magic, but you know, that's what most people think. It's very much a 'hurt them to heal' set up, letting you do shock damage to allow recovery from poison or disease, add your body score to knowledge+medicine rolls (MUSCLE MAGIC? Try MUSCLE MEDICINE), convert killing damage to shock even if the character has had no time to rest, and treat each hit location as its own thing when healing shock damage.

The School of Professional Readiness is the imperial tactical handbook, and is mostly centered around making unworthy opponent followers better; giving them clever instructions so they can keep larger sets, giving them the threat bonus for being armed even if they're naked, and treating one of their dice as a master die if you trained them.

The Tyrant's Command Another 'make followers better' school, but it uses Command+Intimidate instead of Knowledge+Tactics. It improves morale attacks you make on other people's followers, scare your followers into performing at higher threat, free your followers from the effects of someone else's morale attacks, or at the top end, make them completely immune to them as long as they can see you, because you're worse than anything on the other side.

The General's Visage. The first path we get that interacts with the yet-to-be-seen Company rules. It at least points you at them at the start of the writeup. It's all about inspiring your troops for high level actions instead of just at the squad level, like the last two.

Troubadour's Fortune This is all about playing to the crowd. Use your perform skill instead of graces to be suave, reduce penalties for romantic interactions, subtly warping the mood of a crowd, failing with style so people think you meant to do that all along, and escape consequences of your breaches of trust. This is basically the school for complete jerk musicians.

Relentless Pursuit All about being crazy-good at tracking, to the point where you can see through tricks to throw you off and track from even the tiniest signs.

Inner Senses All about being better at detecting magic, this was developed by the Maemeck Matriarchy, and is about sensing magic so you can counter it later- it's the first one to break the pattern and has only 3 techniques, all about giving you more info from your Eerie skill.

Political Whispers Another company-based technique: This one is all about whispering campaigns and detecting and affecting their Influence score. Find out how strong it is relative to yours, find out what they're doing with it, adding your jest to your fascinate score to affect their influence, or even lowering it for a month- which they get a roll to detect, but no roll to resist.

Respectful Clarity of Speech Diplomacy! This is less about sabotaging other companies and instead is about bolstering your own's territory, including a top end technique to permanently increase it by one.

The Jester's course The art of being funny- another 3 technique system, It lets you fail a graces (Diplomacy) check and pass it off as a joke, act like a twit in front of unworthy opponents so they underestimate you and have their threat lowered, and tell anyone a joke so funny that it can mess up their next roll, or even, if you succeed on this multiple times, literally paralyzing him with laughter so he can't do anything. (And he may start laughing again just by seeing your face.)

Path of the Moistened eye Mastery of Begging: Whining so exquisitly that if you succeed you get a marginally better result, retry a failed roll immediately, beg from people poorer than you without penalty, beg on behalf of your country, and giving a company's treasure roll a master die by bullshitting people who you owe money to to invest again. In a non-fantasy world, this would the chief skill of televangelists. [/B]

Strategic education Strategy, instead of tactics- another company scale discipline. if you lose a fight you and the other PCs can throw your army at people as a distraction so you can escape safely, go double or nothing on the losses in a fight by escalating the conflict, send waves of troops in at the killbots until they reach their preset kill limit, increase your company's might by one as long as you're personally in the fray, and offset permanent might losses by sacrificing another permanent company stat.

Financial Sophistication The last one in the section is all about using your Company's treasure rating wisely; not reducing it for actions taken during the month, using it to gather info and reward followers.

It actually segues nicely into the last part of this chapter, which is all about wealth and more in-depth discussion of how the abstract money system works. Combining it, spending it, gifting it.

Next time: The first in-depth look at a Country in Heluso and Milonda: Uldholm, bastion of democracy! Sort of.

The First Nation: Uldholm

posted by unseenlibrarian Original SA post

Two updates in one week! One day I may keep up the relatively breakneck pace of the Rifts reviews!

(That day will be sometime in 2025.)

Yes, it's time for more:




The First Nation: Uldholm

The chapter opens with the tale of Criff the Clever, an Uldish culture hero who managed, in the course of the tales about him, to function as a member of all 15 of the Uldish guilds, thwart the Imperial invasion, make himself rich, and get laid with as much variety and as little repetition as possible. He's the sort of self-made man the modern forward-thinking Uldholm admires, since they don't have kings, nobility, or a state religion, unlike most of their (As they see it) less advanced neighbors. They're the most egalitarian nation in the world! Which is true as far as it goes, since well, on one side you've got an expansionistic empire ruled by a hereditary empress, on another you've got Dindarva, a country rules by a noble class that believes those not born noble are literally like children and should be treated as such. (More on them later.) And of course, there's the Truils, but the Truils barely have culture at all, do they. (Spoilers: They do. They are the next country writeup in the book.

Anyway, the big split in Uldholm isn't between noble and commoner, it's between Guilded and guildless. The guilded believe themselves to be a meritocracy where anyone can advance, and thus feel justified in taking advantage of non-guilded, because obviously if they weren't so lazy and applied themselves they'd be in a guild, wouldn't they? (Except for immigrants, who can't join a guild. Or folks who practice a trade without an associated guild. Or because they pissed off the wrong farmer and got blackballed by guild politics.)

Basically the Uldish have a chunk of Prosperity Gospel republican in their makeup. Which still makes them less jerky than their enemies in a lot of ways. (And bigger jerks in others, obviously. The Dindarvan noble attitude towards the less fortunate is patronizing as all hell but at least they try to care for the poor out of a sense of noblesse oblige as opposed to "You wouldn't be poor if you weren't so lazy")

The guilds have two major political schools of thought- traditionalist and and visionary. Traditionalists are big on doing things the way they've always been done, obviously, and are big fans of "Anyone can do it if they just work hard enough." Visionaries are always looking for a better and easier way to do the job, preferably by getting someone else to do it for you.

So how'd it get all early modern there? Well, it's the empire's fault. Uld back before the invasion, generations back, was a fairly traditional kingdom, with a noble class, a king ruling by divine mandate, and all the other bits. Then the Empire invaded, and brought their Blood-cutters with them. The Bloodcutters are a school of sorcerers that were concerned with the bonds of family and lineage, but their big important power was the ability to use one member of a family to strike at any other relation, no matter how distant. And when your noble class is as inbred as your typical noble class is, with everyone being more or less related to the king, well, capture one member of a noble family and his whole line is gone inside a week. They pursued a royal heir, and got one, and so the royal line was wiped out. This worked pretty well to cow the empire's other conquests, and would have worked on Uldholm too, except for a guy known as general Rolf, a common-born trooper who'd risen through the ranks. As the nobles got decimated, he found himself more and more free to wage war as he liked, and had better results. (How true this actually is open to question, but Rolf -did- exist.) The war turned to messy guerilla war affair, and eventually the empire decided Uldholm wasn't worth taking, with there being organized groups of orphans the Bloodcutters couldn't hurt. (Other things were also involved, but we'll get to that in the section on Imperials.)

In any case, the guild council already existed at that time to settle disputes, but since the soldiers were their own guild, it became a sort of defacto government, eventually adding a legislative senate, with the council as executive. Guilds have the right to trial over their own members over the civil authorities. Local governments. Who are, of course- appointed by the Guilds. And the lawyers have their own guild, but you might rather be judged by a bunch of other bakers. Maybe.

Culturally the Ulds are aggressively modern- "Classic" art, music and literature from the old Kingdom is a guilty pleasure at best. Modern Uldish music is shallow and light. Medieval Pop, and most plays are either slapstick comedies or, well, blockbusters- military special effect shows, sometimes with real wizards on stage to cast spells. Actors and playwrights aren't guilded, except for musical theater, but they're pushing to become one because a lot of them are making a lot of money, especially the ones who feature in the specialty plays for rich audiences.

See, there's an undercurrent of conspicuous consumption in Uldish culture. If you're reach, you should be -eating- rich, and dining on shit like sparrow's tongues, monkey livers, and fried snake from the lightless jungle. You can't just be seen going to the latest Rolf's Battle adaptation, you have to go to special plays- tragedy-drenched romances or anguish plays where everyone suffers, including the audience. The Uldish belief is that moral rightness, working hard, being clever in your dealings, and so on leads to material success. So it follows that looking rich is as important as being rich, or at least can't hurt. They also tend to dress like idiots to show off their wealth- even the very poor will have one or two fancy outfits. Uldish fashion is described in other countries as "Wear your heart on your sleeve! And try to find room for anything else that might fit."

As mentioned, the Ulds are ruled by 15 guilds:

The Cultivators: Farmers, though most of the political cultivators are only technically farmers and may have never seen a plow in their lives. The largest and most fractious section of the senate.

Merchants: The second largest guild- traders and shopkeepers. They are isolationist, because every time Uld goes and conquers new territory the guild that grows the most is the Cultivators.

Miners and gemcutters: Nearly as rich as the bankers and with more guildmembers, but ideologically opposed to the merchants, as they always need new territory to expand their mines.

Weavers and Woodcarvers: A unified block of votes and about as politically neutral as you can be and still be in an organization that calls itself a senate. (This means they're good at taking bribes and concessions before they vote.)

Masons and Builders: The tax and spend block- because public works means more work for their guild members. But they also pay the highest dues and taxes of any guild, so they're honest about it.

Butchers, Teamsters, and Tanners: Animal handling and animal products. Also expansionistic, but only against the Truils.

Bakers: The only reason they aren't the most fractious guild is because there are more Cultivators.

Bankers, Lawyers, and Mercenaries: Rich out of proportion with their numbers, and lender of private armies to other guilds.

Blacksmiths: Split into those who are proud about traditional uldish craftsmanship and those who want to steal the smithing secrets of the Dindarvans.

Soldiers: The enforcement arm of the law, and with more men under arms than the mercenaries, they are in favor of spending on defense but not on aggressive military campaigns.

Traffickers: Importers and exporters of goods. Somehow a separate guild from the merchants. Big on peace.

Physicians: Influential on health matters, but fractured on every other issue.

Enchanters, Sages, and Lifelong students.: NEEERDS. Natural allies of the soldiers, though, because the native schools of Uldish magic are very combat oriented.

Musicians and translators: Big fans of foreign adventures, either peaceful or warlike, because it gives them songs to write about and work for the translators. Not well-trusted.

Brewers, Innkeepers, and Givers of Hospitality: They have one senator and one council member, and basically get nothing done because they're too busy fighting internally.

The chapter wraps up with Uldholm at war: They rely heavily on wizards: Uld is home to both the Flamedancer school (Fireproof dancers who can blow up battlefields) and the Stormtongue school (Winged, can call lightning.) So they can get there fast and do a lot of damage. They have pretty good grunts, but no real elite troops other than the wizards. Currently, they're only at war with the Truils, who are proving annoyingly hard to actually be effective against, as the scattered truilish tribes tend to fade away after a few raids, and can cross land the Ulds consider 'conquered' in small groups. If they get too successful they're going to run into the Mammoth-riders and they may be in for a surprise. Dindarva's on the other side of heavily fortified mountains from Uldholm, but the east, the border with the empire, is less well defended because it's almost all broad open plains. They're hoping their improved combat sorcery and regular army will deter future imperial invasions. The Empire, in turn, is more worried about Dindarva and the war on other end of the country to even think about Uldholm.

Next time: Truils! and then? COMPANY RULES.

The Truils

posted by unseenlibrarian Original SA post

It's time for more



It's time for the most nation of Heluso and Milonda, the TRUILS. Truils are cannibal, mammoth riding, drug-crazed, werewolf barbarians. Well, technically they are three tribes. One is a tribe of mammoth riding barbarians (The Mountain Riders), one is a tribe of werewolf barbarians, (The Night Hunters) and one are folks who use a lot of a special drug called Kratig (The Bluefaces. So it's only a slight misrepresentation!

They -are- all cannibals, however, in two acceptable and one unacceptable circumstance. The two acceptable circumstances are funerary (where a truil in good standing is served as the main course of a feast in his honor) and on the battlefield, by biting a live enemy and ripping a chunk off- given that just about every Truil in the Night Hunters probably knows a spell or two even if they aren't full blown dedicated sorcerer-priests, and that Truilish magic is about being a werewolf who worships the moon as a goddess, this may just be practical. It's also a good scare tactic against their most common enemy, the Ulds. (Because well, who's not gonna be freaked out by that?)

The mostly unacceptable version is about eating the uncooked flesh of a dead enemy; Truilish belief is that this curses the enemy's ghost to unending torment until the one responsible is himself dead and his body goes uneaten. (If the killer gets a Truilish funeral, well, the torment isn't going to end.)

The Truils aren't really a nation, exactly , despite being in a chapter called "The Second Nation" they're a collection of not actually unified tribes who are slowly being pushed off their land by the Ulds. They aren't entirely sure why the Ulds want it, really, given that their own myths say that they were tricked out of the good lands where there is actual sunlight by the ancestor goddess of the Ulds. The tribes are nomadic, and 'agriculture' for them consists mostly of tending to plants in an area and trying to plant and grow more than they take from a given spot before they move on. They're an oral culture, for the most part, and possibly the most actually egalitarian society on Heluso and Milonda, but this is largely because the gap between "Chief" and "Average member of the tribe" is just not that wide.

The truilish military is basically exactly the opposite of the Ulds; Ulds tend to field big waves of average troops, backed up with terrifying military sorcerers who dance to make people explode or spit lightning. Truils do small sneaky commando units, supplemented by werewolf terror attacks or mammoth shock and awe raids.

As a side note: The Truil chapter is the first one to mention skin color; Truils (And a group that don't get a full writeup until another book) are the only white people in the setting. (This is another bit that drives some people crazy about the game, though not as crazy as 'Men ride side-saddle'. These people probably deserve to be driven crazy.)

Next time: COMPANY RULES. Possibly even this month!