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How many boars do we have to kill to get to level 1?
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How many boars do we have to kill to get to level 1?
One angry cat will do.
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This all sounds really cool! The creative out of the people behind Arx has always blown me away. Excellent story telling!
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The Kingdoms of Ariwn
“One stands before us in Durance. Speak thy name and testament.”
It is sometimes said that there are grudges between living kings and queens of Ariwn that predate the founding of any other realm in Catenys. This is not at all true. They are, strictly speaking, not living, as those immortals died and received their gift of eternal undeath from the Blood Patriarch a long, long time ago. The grudges, however, that much is exceedingly true. One can spend a lifetime trying to learn the cause of a truly ancient vendetta, only to discover in a passing comment that the reason a lord despises Umbros is because some Umbral noble nine centuries ago made the mistake of referring to his demesne as a ‘petty kingdom scarcely the size of a duchy’.
Ancient vampires, as a rule, are proud creatures.
Many in the other realms fear us, and not without cause. Not solely due to our ancients that might spend centuries plotting revenge for some slight that not a single living soul would ever remember. But they see in us a realm of predators. Of dhampir desperate to win approval of ancient rulers that may accidentally call them by the name of a great-grandparent. Of newly sired vampires, struggling to control their thirst and obey the laws of the Blood Patriarch. And most of all of the Lycan Clans, who are portrayed all too often as war-crazed ravagers, relentlessly seeking to win glory for the Fleshreaper.
Ariwn is not a realm overburdened with unity.
“Eternity is overfull of immortal mediocrities. Become a legend.”
In the ages since Arx was sealed, Ariwn became a popular destination for scholars hoping to speak to ancient beings who could provide answers to the many historical questions and invaluable firsthand accounts of events with no living witnesses. They were inevitably always greatly disappointed. Many ancients will claim that the never-seen Blood Patriarch has forbidden the elders from speaking about the circumstances around Ariwn’s founding, and there may even be some truth to that. But among both the born and created children of the elders, most strongly suspect that the real truth is that speaking of the past simply bores them.
The appetites of vampire and lycan alike are easily maintained by the willing herds, but the desire for entertainment in Ariwn is insatiable. For the Lycan, this means ever higher contests of glory seeking, and great hunts to war with Afflictions and the demonspawn within. For the children of the blood, this often means hoping to become Gifted, and slipping to Shroudwatch to start one’s Durance likely over the stern disapproval of an ancient being that detests change. For the elders, the desire to see something new in unchallenging frivolity makes Ariwn the most rewarding destination for bards, harlequins and mummers’ troupes in Catenys.
And if a jape should go too far and a jester winds up impaled upon one of the peaks of the Bloodrange, that is simply a reminder that one must know their audience.
“Even in the land of Night Unending, remember that the morrow is never promised.”
To the rulers of other realms, Ariwn presents a vexing puzzle. In theory the kingdoms formally possess a nominal highlord in the Blood Patriarch, but centuries may pass without even a single word from him, and even nobles of Ariwn that attempt a summons tend to vanish without a trace. In practice, this means that Ariwn is compromised of scores of independent petty kingdoms that are very loosely affiliated, lightly constrained by ancient treaties and traditions set down from its founding. The solution for most realms tends to be to pretend Ariwn simply does not exist, and conveniently forget that it is the eastern bulwark against the Deadlands that causes the dead to divert instead against Aythirmok.
With Ariwn’s veil of darkness over the land, the ancients have never shown any interest in expanding beyond those borders, and while there have been some significant wars over the centuries brought on by Lycan Clan expansion, Ariwn has stayed largely untouched for ages past. Which is exactly as the elders have liked it. The comparison was often made in Catenys between Arx and Ariwn, two unchanging bastions, one under an impenetrable shroud and one under a veil of darkness. There is a joke often told in Ariwn about its stasis, a grim humor among the younger vampires and dhampir who bemoan that they would never get to wear a crown from the ancients. ‘No need to fret, the elders will abdicate the moment the Shroud of Arx drops.’
The elders are no longer fond of that joke.
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So about the last post, yeah PCs can be vampires. There is an important mechanics distinction here though, in that time of day is an automated thing, and so is damage from sunlight, with ways to try to mitigate that so someone isn’t completely shut out of RP if they take precautions.
Having said that, I don’t like the idea of players ever having potential character loss from AFKs, disconnects, whatever, so how I approach something like that is essentially if a character is taking environmental damage, they have to opt in trying to tough it out, or they auto flee for safety. No response after a time period just goes to the auto flee. So for example if a vampire (or dhampir or dark elf) linkdies/quits in a scene that was happening during the night in a public room, log back in a few rl days later when the scene is long gone and it’s day and they go get a drink or something irl after logging, they probably come back to their PC hiding in their room and nursing some light burns.
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@Apos Would you like to place a wager on an initial playerbase census (characters in each area by %) after this posting about Ariwn?
(Also, how do you pronounce it?)
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@Apos Just thinking in terms of time differences, paused/continued scenes, or nighttime event scenes that are scheduled to start during the day for player availability, is there going to be a mechanism to tell the grid like… yo, we said it’s night, now?
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There’s something really funny about imagining someone AFK/timing out from the PC’s perspective. Your vampire friend just goes dead silent for half an hour, then suddenly screams and sprints out of there.
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@Dreampipe They go quiet at the nagging feeling that they forgot something at the start of the evening. After a few quiet minutes, they suddenly bolt upon remembering that they forgot to take the Hell Hound out for walkies and it is now probably using the household staff as chew toys to vent it’s pent up energy.
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@Apos Just thinking in terms of time differences, paused/continued scenes, or nighttime event scenes that are scheduled to start during the day for player availability, is there going to be a mechanism to tell the grid like… yo, we said it’s night, now?
Yeah. So the grid moves at 3:1 IC:OOC time ratio, with again a lot based around a RL week as a cron for updates, so that much might be familiar to some Arx players. Automatic aging, along with significant mechanical bonuses for physically older characters, IC birthday reminders, significant IC calendar days, mechanical differences from seasons, that kinda stuff is more baked in now.
But for RP, players and GMs have a good amount of leeway here in controlling when scenes are, though there’s a distinction between RP that is happening on the grid versus something formalized in a scene vs again an event or a GM session. Any players RPing together in a room could choose to make that a scene, and lock the time ICly there, because in my experience while overall gametime can and should be much faster than OOC to make character arcs more meaningful, the way people actually write in an RP scene works out to be vastly, vastly slower than real time, where people could spend hours writing about something that really would realistically take place over a couple of minutes.
So anyone planning an event if they pick an OOC date time, they could decide to choose an IC date that corresponds roughly within any couple of IC weeks of that range, and down to the IC minute if they really wanted something happening at the stroke of midnight or something. GMs running a session for their table could have a series of different scenes, since they could have a tempus fugit mid session, and skip forward a day or up to within a few weeks for the next part of the same session they are running. Characters captured, time passes.
There is some OOC formalization in moving into a room and then ICly joining a scene in progress, even if it is always very clear who is or who isn’t there (again in keeping with Arx’s design philosophy, there’s never going to be any kind of OOC invisibility that creates ambiguity in whether RP is or isn’t being watched). But it does mean that someone moving through the grid at night, wandering into a bar scene doesn’t immediately burst into flame if they see they set it for the day.
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@Apos Would you like to place a wager on an initial playerbase census (characters in each area by %) after this posting about Ariwn?
(Also, how do you pronounce it?)
I have absolutely no clue who is gonna play what, tbh. Like I have a feeling the areas I am most excited about for the kind of story arcs I have in mind aren’t what will immediately resonate.
Pronunciation is roughly ‘Are-yoon’. Though someone that speaks ancient Armenian could correct me I’m sure.
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If I missed this somewhere above, I apologize (I’m lazy) –
Is my boy Leviathan coming back? Can he take the form of a cool talking fish?
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If I missed this somewhere above, I apologize (I’m lazy) –
Is my boy Leviathan coming back? Can he take the form of a cool talking fish?
Most of the gods got got but Leviathan is still around and some Infernals worship him, especially among the Sireni.
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@Apos Was Flopsy the white rabbit ever able to fulfill his dream of kill all humans?
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@Apos I’m getting Astarion running off on fire into the Underdark vibes from this mechanic and I giggle.
suddenly your vampire roommate runs into the house literally on fire
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@Apos Was Flopsy the white rabbit ever able to fulfill his dream of kill all humans?
Oh boy did he ever get to chase his fluffy, hateful dreams. He came up in conversation the other day when discussing examples of relatively minor figures that went on to ascend to malevolent demigodhood in the new larger polytheism.
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If I missed this somewhere above, I apologize (I’m lazy) –
Is my boy Leviathan coming back? Can he take the form of a cool talking fish?
Most of the gods got got but Leviathan is still around and some Infernals worship him, especially among the Sireni.
I actually don’t recall if this got asked (and I have nfc what to look for if the answer exists), but how does it work that <things> got chomped and then the culprit got what happened to them. I mean that in a “does that particular notion have to be refilled by a successor” or is it more “VACANCY: THIS MANY FOLKS” who may or may not have the same “portfolio” so to speak.
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@Testament THE COMBINED. MIGHT. OF THE SUN!
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So who is the Blood Patriarch, and can he be my boyfriend
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