Bay 12 Games Forum

When the world of Aerowell ended, there was little the mages could do to stop it. The Dark Moon rose in the North, and the sky was dyed purple under it's might. Under it's ominous glow, much of the world, and it's inhabitants, we're corrupted. Mages and masters across the world threw their might against the oncoming light, but one by one, they fell. In the end, it was those who fled, who survived.

To the west, the great gates of the Lost Barbican we're forced open. An ancient stronghold, it was abandoned by the First Dwarves when they dug too deep. Luwald Griswine, last king of the western mountainholme, had to abandon his ancestral kingdom when the Moontouched attacked the fortress. Having no other option, the Lost Barbican was opened, and Aerowell's last survivors descended into the ancient bowels of the earth. Behind him, others followed, and the future was cast in darkness.

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Welcome to the Lost Barbican, the last splotch of darkness in a world drenched in a horrid light. You find yourself to be the leader of one of the several factions who must share the last city in the world. As such a leader, you have a seat at the Counsel of Lords, the governing body of this city. Whether you were the ancient king of a now lost empire, or the lowly sargent who led your people to this dank underworld city, your vote holds as much weight as any other member. Now you and your fellow counsel members must guide the last bastion of mortality through these tremaltous times. Through famine, plague, and the unending Moontouched onslaught, it is your steady hand and iron will that shall keep these lands afloat, or fumble them to the unholy light of the Dark Moon.

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Game composition:
This game is divided into turns, with there being twelve turns in one year. Each turn will begin with the results from last month. After which, you'll receive the war notes for the coming month, if there are any, so that you can allocate your armies accordingly. Lastly, comes the issues at hand. These are issues that require the Counsel to take a vote on and are decided by simple majority vote. Whether this is as simple as raising taxes, or as difficult as allowing new refugees to join your city, the counsel must vote on how to proceed. Additionally, Lords have the power to add to the docket requests and other issues for the counsel to address. Lastly when you take your turn, I ask you update your inventory somewhere in your post. It'll go a long way if everyone can manage their own, so I don't end up spending more time balancing books than writing for the game.

Resources
In this game all resources are pooled into a single stockpile. As a result, there are a few ways to gain resources for your faction to use. If one of the Lords wishes to expend resources, whether it be to equip their armies with weapons or build new buildings, a Lord may put a supply request before the counsel. Unlike normal motions, these pass unless a majority denies the request. The second way to gain resources is to simply buy them from the stock pile (using your funds collected by taxes, more on this later). Of course sneaky lords may skim some resources off of their buildings on the way to the stockpile, or even more dreadful, steal them from the stock pile, though these come with various associated risks.

Taxes
Nothing can be certain but death and taxes. Each month lords will collect taxes from their various establishments, and enterprises. These taxes go directly into the lords coffers, and can be spent at their leisure. Useful for buying resources from the stockpiles, or from other lords, as well as units, trade goods, and boons of all kinds.

Expenses
Of course running a city is not cheap and there are various expenses tied to lordship. The first is the King's tax. This is a small tax levied on to the lords that goes into the central stockpile for miscellaneous uses throughout the kingdom, as well as to be used by the lords through the central stockpile. The other main expenses are the operation costs for buildings, as well as pay for units.

Units and Combat
Your units are the main source of actions for your faction. The main types of units are combat orientated, while civilian actions are mostly done through buildings. There are three main types of damage: piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning. Each of them has advantages. Piercing does extra damage against larger creatures, and can occasionally pierce armor. Slashing damage has an advantage against unarmored and lightly armored units. Bludgeoning damage is best used against targets which do not bleed or are heavily armored.

Espionage
Of course brute force isn't the only way to achieve your goals. Subterfuge and espionage are often great options for ambitious lords. This culminates in the spy unit, a rather sneaky unit. Upon creation they (secretly) are given a specialization. This can be something like theft, assassination, or intelligence gathering. Though the spy is often used within the city itself, a clever Lord may find much use for them in the caverns.

Buildings
Buildings are the other half of your holdings as a Lord. These are related to more civilian pursuits and often serve some sort of function. There are four main types: resource generating, service oriented, and housing, and production oriented. Mines and farms are two good examples of resource generating buildings. Taverns, shops, and the like don't generate resources, but collect revenue from the citizenry. Housing is another main type of building. Your citizens require housing, and homeless citizens have greater unrest, which can lead to a variety of issues. Taxes from houses are lower than other types of buildings. Lastly there are production based buildings. These are buildings designed to make  objects out of raw resources. These are your blacksmiths, your alchemists, and various other craftsmen. These buildings produce finished goods, which unlike raw resources, don't go into the central stockpile. However, the goods they create can often be sold for a decent sum of coin or be used by your armies or citizens for great benefit.

There is one area where buildings and military overlap: defensive structures. Walls, bastions, and other defensive structures provide no taxes, but give significant advantages during the combat section of each turn.

Magic and Gods
Under the light of the dark moon the voices of the gods have grown faint and the power of magic has ebbed. However, deep under the earth you have found your strength returning as you discover the strange magics of this abyssal land. Magic and Gods are a bit more free form and can provide unique advantages. Much of the world's magic has been lost, abandoned in vast libraries on the surface. Though through research and study, you can create all manner of spells and enchantments.

Research
Much of the world's history and advancement was lost when the surface world was abandoned. Each turn players will receive 1d10 (an amount determined by a ten sided dice) research to spend on researching a topic of your choice. When research on a new topic begins, it will be given a difficulty. This determines how many research points it requires to complete. From this  points may be subtracted if you have related research completed.

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Character Sheet
Leader name:
Leader description: (physical and personality)
Leader backstory: (How you became leader and how you got to this point
Faction name:
Faction race: (Feel free to create your own race here or have a mix of a few races)
Faction backstory: (History before the Dark Moon and how your faction got here)
Faction trait: (choose two, you may choose the same one twice).

Faction traits:

STT TO CHU
LAM to STT

Also, merry Christmas!

I'm not doing a volcano "thing" so much as using that eruption as a marker in our oral history, and including one semi-active volcano and some igneous landforms in our local geology. You're clear as far as tribal identity goes. I think intertwined back stories is an interesting idea, however; look at what's happened so far with the spider worshippers. As for an event in history, I didn't have anything grand in mind (my tribe didn't start off as supernaturally as yours) but it could easily be true that the local explosion we remember was part of a more general pattern of divine activity in the world.

Also by the way (and I probably should have made this more clear), that backstory is meant to be taken with a grain of salt. It's a mythos, so it's more likely than not that the ancestors of the current tribe didn't actually fight a god or anything that extreme, but more mundane events got inflated as the story was passed down through the generation. Really depends on how magical Lemonpie wants the world to be.

Glass
You wipe away the trickle of blood and quickly forget it. Probably the pressure change down here or something. Looking at the schematics for the teleporter, you can say for sure that you don't have enough materials on hand. It's a big machine, and an intricate one as well. Looking at the schematics, its really intuitive how it's put together and you wonder why no one had ever put together the pieces before. Seems like teleportation wasn't too far off for humanity. Oh darn, your nose is bleeding again. Powering through, you're certain you could build the teleporter if you had all the materials for it. You glance over at the soul pods and think for a minute. There's probably enough of the key components in those to jerry rig a teleporter. But you think better of it after a minute, it's a dangerous world out there and those pods are your 'get out of jail death free' card. It's at that point that King Zultan comes out of the elevator and asks if you want to accompany him down the road to pillage supplies from a nearby gas station.

King Zultan
Looking at the gas gauge, you got about a quarter of a tank. Sitting inside, you notice it's a really solid SUV. Leather seats, real wood accents, digital display on the radio and surround sound speakers. When these things aren't smashed to bits by bloodthirsty monsters or whatever, they're pretty nice. You step out of the vehicle and check with everyone to see who wants to gather supplies. Shouldn't be more than a 10-15 minute drive down the road.

GPeter
Still sneaking about, looking out for literal monsters, King Zultan approaches you and asks if you want to go with him over to the gas station for snacks and supplies. At this point it's been a few hours since you woke up, and judging from how empty your stomach is, you're pretty sure the Soul Pods don't come with in-flight snacks.

Tankkit
Moments after your phone call ends, King Zultan comes out of the elevator. Sounds like he's got one of the cars started and is headed over to the nearby gas station to gather useful supplies. Want to go with him?

King Zultan
You grab the crowbar and head over to the undamaged SUV. (2) It's locked and you don't see the keys around, but you look down at your cowbar, and then at the SUV, then back at the crowbar and back at the SUV. (16) You wedge that bad boy in to the back passenger side door and with a good deal of elbow grease, manage to pry the door open without causing too much damage. (14) Crawling into the front seat isn't the most majestic thing you've ever done, but you get there and get to work. Once inside, you open up the internal workings of the car, and you experience a strange phenomenon. As you're looking at the tangled labyrinth of wires, they seem to start moving as if they were alive. You feel as though you and this machine are one being for a second and you immediately know which wires need to go where. As the car roars to life, you notice a few droplets of blood coming from your left nostril.

Glass
You look for further information on the teleporter and find schematics for something labeled "FT-Bunk-B". The schematics for it are all there, and it looks like it was supposed to be constructed on the fourth level of the bunker here, but they never got that far. Just trying to figure out how it works makes your head spin and blood begin to trickle out of your nose. You instead look at the mechanics of it, rather than the theoretical principles behind it, and that goes a lot better. It seems it uses similar technology as the soul pods and were meant to link the bunkers together. There's not a map of the location of the bunkers, but you manage to find a small note about how your bunker was centrally located in Missouri so that it could access several teleporter links.

:/ I guess if the GM wants them to be toothless that's fine.

How to play:

Take one of the images below and make a small change to evolve the creature. You can change one aspect of the creature to a small degree. Add a sciency sounding name to the creature and write up a bit about it. Lastly, make sure to write the name of the creature it evolved from. You don't have to use the most recent iteration of a creature, in the case you want to branch off, so letting me know what creature you started with is important here. You can also change the background if the creature moves to a new location as part of your evolution.

Rules:
(1) Only slight changes. If you're adding a new part, it should be pretty simple. If you're editing an existing aspect, it shouldn't be too far from the previous iteration either. For example, if its a creature with feet and you want webbed feet, that's totally cool. If its a creature with no feet or limbs, you can't just jump to giving it full limbs with webbed feet.
(2) Don't edit the same creature twice in a row. You can a creature once two other people have edited that creature. This is on a per creature basis, so for any of the four lineages, as long as there are two other evolutions between your post and your last post of the same creature, it's cool. Gotta let everyone get in on the evolution action.
(3) Use good save files. PNG is my favorite for things like this, but I think JPEG would also work. That's not really my department. Just make sure its a quality upload so the images don't degrade as the game goes on.
(4) Don't argue, especially with the GM. Discussion about the evolutions and all that is highly valuable, bad attitudes are not. If I veto something, it's veto'd.
(5) Have fun and be creative.

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Primus Fishicous

A common green aquatic creature. It's body is shaped to help it move through water, but lacks any real specialization.

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Primus Plantimum

A small photosynthetic growth. It has tiny roots and lacks much structure.

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Primus Orangitha

A small orange and pink thing. Fossil records have yet to reveal whether it is a plant, animal, or something else.

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Primus Fungonia

A small fungi with a cream colored stalk and bluish cap.

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Tankkit
You go off into one of the empty levels and take the phone call.

Glass
You begin going through the genetic modification programs. There's a pop-up warning about the risks of self-experimentation and live subjects which is so full of lawyer double-speak and jargon that you end up just clicking next instead of reading the thirty page long epic. You find a simulation program easily enough, but upon launching it, you find the databanks are corrupted. The UI is remarkably intuitive and well designed, and you quickly locate an analysis option to load new genetic information into the database. With enough samples, you're sure you could put together a decent simulation and write up a program to edit human gene expression while splicing in genetic material from other organisms. It's at that point you realize your nose is bleeding slightly from one side and you were thinking incredibly quickly about topics you have, or rather had, little to no knowledge about. It seems as though you've gained an intricate knowledge of this advanced machinery and principles. You look at the soul pods and wonder what those things truly are and who could have possibly made such a thing.