At the beginning of time, there was nothing but black. Darker than the deepest of shadows, darkness so thick it was a physical feeling.
Out of this darkness, floating in the black, was a being with a small, rocky sphere. He admired this sphere, the only thing, other than him, present in the empty blackness of space. For the first time in millennia, the being felt touched, real. This being was known as The Twilight.
The Twilight was curious about this world, about how it came to be. It had sensed various portals opening and closing in neighboring realms, a vast infinity of life shifting, swirling, appearing and disappearing. He missed that life, and looking at the rocky sphere, an idea came to him.
Spreading his midnight wings, The Twilight summoned itās powers, and in an explosion of light and life birthed the cosmos, eradicating the dark soup of the previous void to the far corners of the universe. He created the stars and other celestial illusions to scatter away the dark, and then unfurled the small rocky world into a blanket like shape, layering it with caves, the land and mountains, floating islands and a moon like desert, and the floating void beyond.
And he looked upon this world, and pondered it. It was a wonderful, amazing creation, but it was missingā¦ something.
Looking into other dimensions he saw flowering dimensions and creatures abounding, and great feats of magic and technology, and knew what his world was missingā¦ was Life. A purpose.
And so, sacrificing a portion of his own soul, he rained Magic down across the landscape and opened portals to other worlds, inviting in organisms of all kinds. This soul coalesced and rained in a sparkling shower of magic for these creatures to use, stones of immense power.
And this The Twilight saw as amazing, but found it was lonely. It searched for a lifeform to keep it company, and found nothingā¦except one. Armored in shining silver and with antlers adorning itās head, it discovered Vrathsingar, the Warden. Giving him the largest piece of his formerly broken soul, The Twilight entrusted him to watch over it and the rest of the world, as it went into a castle of void to rest and recuperate its soul.
This world was the Wardens to protect now. But the Warden wouldnāt be able to do it alone. As his last command, The Twilight told the Warden to find others, representatives from across the world, who were smart and worthy of being raised to the level of god, of protector.
And protecting the world did need. For in the edge of the void did he sense a tear in reality, a monstrous thing of the void. He just hoped the world was ready for it.
Welcome, spirit guides, toā¦
THE TWILIGHT REALM
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Hey yāall, welcome to my Civ game, the Twilight Realm. This is a survival Civ game in a similar vein to the Pandoraās Horizon series and A Tale Of Earth And Sky. Iām still fleshing out the final details, but they should be ready relatively quickly to start the game.
The initial goal of this game is to fill up the Council of Time, who protects this world. Beyond that is for me to know and you to find out. There are 33 slots open on this council, one to correlate with each type of stone that can be found other than Astralium, the Stone of the Warden.
Becoming a āGodā
To become a āgodā (Note: these are not what we would normally think of when someone says āgod,ā more like insanely powerful but benevolent protectors) a member of a Civ must have a connection with a magic stone, somehow have access to Astralium, and have at least 1,500 believers.
Do note that forced believers, or magically manipulated believers, instead of counting towards your number they will actually be equivalent to -2 believers.
Map and animals
A note on the map: I have coastline organized and everything, and while I am still working on the actual biome choosing system it will be mostly luck of the draw for the actual biomes you find.
In this game, there are 2000 animals, 4000 plant or plant-like species, 100 biomes, and 500 sapient species that you can encounter, and what you encounter depends on what biome you are in. An interesting aspect of this, however, is that of those numbers, the players can design 600 of the animals, 1000 of the plants, and 200 of the sapient species.
Am I expecting you, the players, to fill all of those spots? No, but I am making them available to you, and will have more details on submissions and how that works in a dm group, just tell me if you are interested.
How to join
Now, it seems like Iāve missed a pretty important aspect, yeah? Players, and how they can join. Donāt worry, I havenāt forgotten.
To join, you need to design your Civ. Multi-race civās are allowed, however you must start with only one race in your Civ. Here is the format:
Name of Race:
Description of race, including any hidden abilities like venom and how they look:
Behavior of race:
What biome you live in:
You have 30 points to spend in 6 categories. You may only spend a minimum of zero and a maximum of 10 points in each category. A perfectly balanced Civ has 5 in each category. The categories are:
Power:
Defense:
Intelligence:
Agility:
Charisma:
Mysticism:
A 10 in one category will boost your roll for your vote that round (I will be using a D20) by 50%, and in a similar vein a 0 will lower it by 50%.
Next, Advantages and Disadvantages. Must be a 2:1 ratio, talk to me about special circumstances. I will determine how much of a buff or debuff each will give.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Finally, give me your Civās description and name.
If you want, you can also ask me to randomize it out of all the sapients in the game, so that you donāt make your species but it gets randomly picked for you, however you still distribute your attribute points and make your Civ
I will accept as many people as want to join into the game. However, Once I start the game players will only be able to join every five rounds, at an event called the Summit. More on that later. Players must be online fairly often, as I will post a new round as soon as I have all of the votes. A player has 3 days at max to vote, and if they do not they will miss the round. Miss three consecutive rounds, or every other round for six rounds, etc, and your Civ collapses and you will have to restart at the next summit.
The Summit
The Summit is an event that happens in the middle of every season, and a season lasts 5 days long. At the summit, a book known as The Book of Botany, Beasts, and other Bedazzling facts is updated, for the whole game, and all other players will know of any discoveries you have made and their civs will be able to act upon that info, actively looking for a plant or material they havenāt found before. Also, at each summit the players can vote on what buff they want for the next five rounds out of 10 possible buffs. Those are:
- Mystic
- Charisma
- Power
- Defense
- Agility
- Intelligence
- Pop Growth
- Agriculture/livestock productivity
- Double roll (I make two roles for your vote, and then roll a D6. If the D6 lands 1-3, I use the lower roll. 4-6, the higher one)
- Taming/Initial Domestication or growing buff (more likely to tame or begin growing/using an organism)
Voting and gaining more votes
Finally, we have how voting works. You may do one action per vote. Each person starts with one vote, and can gain more votes by leveling up their vote bar.
The vote bar is a system I devised where you need a certain amount of points from various different discovery activities. you must be the first in the game to do this. These are:
Discover a new plant/plant like creature: 1 pt
Discover a new animal/creature: 2 pt
Discover a new civilization advancement (metalworking, agriculture, etc): 5 pt
Discover one of the 33 magic stones: 10 pt
Make one of your Civ members into a āgodā: 20 pt
To get a new vote, you must pass a certain number of points. Everytime you get a vote, your points reset to zero. The cost of the next vote is always double that if the previous vote. For example:
Vote 2: 20 pt
Vote 3: 40 pt
Vote 4: 80 pt
And so on and so forth.
Now here is a very important poll, I will only count votes from players who wish to join. Do you want the game to have;
- Everyone voting publicly (in forum thread)
- Everyone voting privately (dming me)
0 voters
So I know I said finally before, but here is the actual last thing:
Limits In Gods, the Runic System, and Carrying Capacity
While gods are powerful, they arenāt all powerful, and have limits. Those are;
Once they become a god, they can help their Civ, but cannot actively harm another Civ. Also, a god is not controlled by the Civ who made it, but once every five rounds (every summit cycle) a Civ can use a vote to āprayā to their gods and have them help them in some way, whether that is teaching them specific runes for certain magics, or giving them a small stat boost for the next round, etc.
The runic system is a complex affair, and I can explain how the actual writing looks later, and will once you get to that level and learn runes, but all that needs to be known know is that each line represents a specific letter and where it is in the word, and depending on where that is the rune will glow a different color, resulting in rainbow runes.
The word a rune translates to (it translates into English) also must correlate with the intent of the carver of the rune for the magic to work.
And then, Carrying Capacity. I will be using Dooms carrying capacity system, though I have my own way to determine your max CC vs. your available CC. HOWEVER, if anyone has any ideas at all about how I can make a unique but similar system, please let me know.
EDIT: I was mulling this over in my head, and realized that I had an excellent idea for an alternate system to CC. You see, I have tiles overlayed on the coastline map that I will be using for biome determining, and so I can use those for something similar to carrying capacity.
You see, when you explore you can either choose to explore to the North, south, east, west, northeast, or northwest. So to make CC work, your population growth could follow this equation:
Current pop * Population growth * ((tiles available/number of tiles with food) / tiles available) = pop growth
So while it is a very similar equation to dooms CC, I feel that in execution it is different enough.
Now, I hope you enjoy your stay in the Twilight Realm. Please reserve your spot as soon as you see this if you are interested. I will be finishing up the biome picker system and creature creation (including adding player stuff, so be sure to submit before then!) before the game starts, so you have until then to reserve your spot.
Please do not post any more than absolutely necessary, as soon as you reserve your spot I will add you to a general chat where you can do whatever, but I would like to keep this clear for future players who might want to join.
Again, Enjoy your time inā¦
THE TWILIGHT REALM
Edit: Hey everyone! Accidentally posted this an hour earlier than I meant to, but whatev! Hope you like this game!
EDIT: This is IMPORTANT. Please select your choice for the poll, it was broken before but should be fixed now
