Multiple Settings Thread To Table; A Collection Of Offerings

[AaronMk]

OK I see some of you are looking for new RPs you're all beginning to revive interest checks a year old by now. So I think it's time for someone to step in to serve up some hot fresh ideas. This is merely a preliminary interest check to pick the strongest of three premises that'll get its own proper interest check with fleshed out premises and all the appropriate compliments befitting a hot dish. In the meantime, this thread will mostly be to throw in some input and ask some questions before anything takes final shape. But generally until a premise is carried into full in-character posting I consider it as a proto-type and subject to find tuning based on feedback.

Before I continue I think I should describe my personal philosophy: I hold literary mechanics and style to be superior of table-top gaming mechanics in play-by-post roleplaying. I find setting up even basic or chance-based systems and information tables for what is already an incredibly slow and time-intensive form of roleplaying annoying and more labor intensive than need-be. I would rather see posts and good posts then to wait as the game-master for everyone to make a post and for you then to wait for me to apply the DnD dungeon master experience to those posts, and craft a post for all of you to react to move the role play forward. I work full time and got other hobbies. I am not making anyone suffer this wait. Instead I will be taking up a position in-the-world-itself rather than outside-the-world-itself in order to try and provoke you goons into doing something, especially if that needs to happen or it's even possible for me to do something. I can be either your dictator or your president of the council of narrative.

That said, let's get on with it:

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The Empty Throne​

Fantasy world roleplay. Centuries ago a foreign empire conquered the lands in which the setting takes place and reorganized the disperate kingdoms, chiefdoms, and so on there to support their regime. But centuries of imperial rule has come to the inevitable dynastic degeneration. Afflicted from disasters from within and without, corrupt with exacerbated jealousy new and old among their subjects has brought the imperial reign to its terminal point. The subjects of the realm are able to contest their subjugation, reaching to either reclaim their independence, to demand their own autonomy within the realm, or to joing forces with imperial authority to set the empire back on its own feet and to restore it to a new and fresher dynasty able to reign in the discord of the realm. The empire is diverse, encompassing a wide range of races and species and a wide range of territories.

The Dionyseid​

This is the your option that has two alternatives. An alternative-history setting in the period and place of the Hellenistic Kingdoms and the Hellenistic Era ushered in by Alexander the Great and defined by the personalities of his Companions and Sucessors. As participants we take up the governance of the kingdoms, satraps, and what-not in the world of roughly the 4th century BCE. The options:

• The Triumph of Alexander: the great Conquerers ambitions carry on as they had and his life is not changed. But rather his life is extended. Avoiding or surviving the illness that would otherwise take his life he lives on to see the birth of his legitemate son and his accession to an age of relative maturity. But having been turned back to Babylon and the West by the protests of his men he never returns to India and has spent his time attempting to stitch together his great Empire into something worthy of his name, with military adventures into Sudan and/or the Balkans. But great men are mortal, and sometime before the start of the RP the great conquerer has died and the fate of the Argead is up in the air. And while Alexander IV is a mature young man able to take the throne, the rites and customs of the Macedonians do not explicitly recognize a clean succession and the Companions are free to contest the succession and demand their pounds of flesh. Unpaid or underpaid soldiers of the Empire can take what they believe owed to them from Greater Macedon itself, and the great Companions are no longer burdeoned by the light of Alexander-Herakles
• The Defeat of Alexander: Early in his campaigns against the Persians, fate does not look gladly down on the Macedonian King and in battle he is killed by Darius III. The death of Alexander sends the Macedonian-Greek armies back to Europe and Iranian dominance of the Near-East is assured for several more centuries. Where the previous iteration would be premised on there being deeper entrenched Hellenism as secured by the stability of the personality of Alexander the Great persisting for some more years, here is proposed a near total absence of Hellenism in the near-east but an unbroken Iranian heritage in the Achaemenid Empire. But passed the glory of Darius III, the Persian Empire is no less vulnerable to internal intriques and the revival of the Empire under Darius sees a second decline in the Empire as royal governors in frontier Satraps are again free to conspire and new rivals from outside the Empire consolidate.

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The Ghosts of Napoleon​

Triumphant at Waterloo, the forces of the French Empire are able to turn aside Coalition forces and enforce the justice and stabilité of the French Empire. The line of Bonaparte is secured, for the time being. But by Waterloo, the health of l'Empereur had been slipping and no longer as sharp as he was in his youth the otherwise energetic and stellar campaigns of his early caareer is over and the forces of France are only just able to hold the victories of the Revolution and the Bonapartist order. Premissed as well on victories in Egypt. The French victory over Horatio Nelson at Aboukir Bay in 1798 being the first marker in a long period of transition into the full alternative history of the French victory at Waterloo. A French radical sweep of Europe opening the option of National Revolution to sweep Europe by the onset of the RP in 1838, fifteen years after the death of Napoleon himself and into the reign of Napoleon II. France itself contending with the national question: has Bonapartism run its course?

 

[TipToeToast]

My vote goes for Empty Throne. Ghosts of Napoleon sounds terrific, however if the GM is soured on heavy mechanics, then you would maybe be similarly annoyed at history lawyer'ing /obscure microgeography lawyer'ing blowing up your DM's. I'd love to participate if this gets off the ground.

 

[AaronMk]

My vote goes for Empty Throne. Ghosts of Napoleon sounds terrific, however if the GM is soured on heavy mechanics, then you would maybe be similarly annoyed at history lawyer'ing /obscure microgeography lawyer'ing blowing up your DM's. I'd love to participate if this gets off the ground.

GoN being an alternative history is supposed to be a bit liberal but I am not unfamiliar with the era. Everything on here would get a nap if that's what you are worried about, otherwise, GoN being especially global in scope being picky over microscopic details for potential battlefields not yet and never fought would be A Bit Much

 

[Bone2pick]

I would be interested in the fantasy nation builder. I have a few civilizations from previous roleplays that I’d consider dusting off. Or, if need be, I could create something fresh.

 

[AaronMk]

I would be interested in the fantasy nation builder. I have a few civilizations from previous roleplays that I’d consider dusting off. Or, if need be, I could create something fresh.

Either or it doesn't matter. The fantasy nation builder is itself a dust off of a dust off from a couple years ago

 

[Bone2pick]

So the leaders of our civilizations/kingdoms will basically be satraps of a much larger, disintegrating empire? I can dig it. If you’d like some help fleshing out the world and devising storylines, just shoot me a pm. I’m pretty adept with those sort of things.