In the beginning, God created the world.
In the beginning, the Titans forged the world.
In the beginning, the world created itself.
In the beginning, Vessel self-destructed.
In the beginning, there was no beginning, because it is only an illusion.
In the beginning, everything exploded.
In the beginning, mankind created God from chaos.
In the beginning, the primordial chaos settled into foundations.
There was at some point a beginning, or several revisions ago a suitable facsimile thereof.
In the beginning somebody built a worldgen script and here we are.
Ostensibly, there was a time loop ray knot acting as origin to our spiral.
In the beginning everyone died and the process was executed.
Whatever the case, as usual it has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

These disagreeing origins have gotten together and misbegotten a disaster that resembles a wargame, interpreted by someone who hasn't played or balanced wargames. You usually have to love a genre to do it deconstructive violence, and love is beyond the purview of those who gathered there that day.

No advance knowledge is necessary to play or vote: we are alpha-testing some mechanics and narratives. Posting while having no idea what's going on is perfectly acceptable. Relevant information will be revealed later, including major sections of the rules. Consider it black box testing, for now. The overall assembly pitch is sort of like Erfworld slapped through a tabletop RPG engine for dice resolution, but not that closely. Updates and rebalances occur in-universe as well as out-of-universe, though not exactly with parity.

One hundred Royalty and a smattering of other idiots (scratch that, 99 Royalty now, I think that guy died of logical incoherence) have scattered themselves across the Setting Name Currently Subject To Disagreement. They stand as emissaries and adjutants to the Sus, beings who are accused of everything from creating the world to being the swine people refer to in 'pearls before swine'.

Give us a few tones of fantasy and themes for their arsenal...there. A weak spot. Maybe we can sub in for that dead guy before we need to reload the game.

...Well, it wouldn't be a Nedben game if you didn't get a gazillion choices you didn't need and didn't understand. Each with impacts tangential to what the vote is nominally about, for that matter.

Here. Let me cut down a few pieces for you. Pick a path. As always, you may ask questions but the answers have no guarantees of making sense. This choice I'll position first, since it will be a pretty big constraint on character creation.

[ ] ROYALTY
Replace the 100th Royal, who was no longer mechanically coherent by this revision. You, or technically your proxy character as needed, will receive his city site and reformat it into something acceptable. The strongest, but restrained by a number of design factors and mandates from heaven.

[ ] OVERLORD
There are a number of open sites without the starting bonuses or obligations of divine right kingship. Slightly or significantly behind, but you should still start with a capital city in the works.

[ ] WANDERER
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A ROCK
I cannot suppress my superiors for long. They are suggesting dumb things again. This isn't a trap, but it does make you a bit of a proxy. You can decide to start as unaffiliated, but that's expensive and much more dangerous. Details depend on subsequent choices.

[ ] ADVISOR
OH BOY I LOVE THOSE
We will give the others a few turns to become stable and then emplace you. You will have a much smaller strategic focus depending on what type of advisor you are, but it will be much less overwhelming and paranoid to start later.

[ ] ACTUALLY WAIT
I do have one regret-

Vote in standard [X] VOTENAME format, skipping the option-description text unless you intend to request or clarify a nuance. Updates will be bloody unpredictable, timed unfairly, and involve invisible weighting based on reasoning, external associates' voting, and random number generators.

This is a work of fiction. User discretion is advised. You absolve Redacted, Classified Information, Censored, Data Expunged, Expletive Deleted, Section Missing, Boop Beep, Block Text Character, Senator Janet Damita, and associates thereof of responsibility. Feel free to report bugs and typos in thread, and hopefully we'll be able to fix them in editing.

What's your one regret yellow highlight

[X] 'RE A ROCK

[X] ROYALTY

As you can see by the name, I am biased.

((Library of Ruina spoilers BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxduFWbbndE ))

I don't remember. There's more than one.

Urgh, yellow background's always like that. Subsection vote registered for the rock, but starting with 1/4th of one victory in your artificial hands is drastic.
One vote for Royalty too, nice.

lol. lmao.
HEY WHY DON'T YOU GUYS KEEP VOTING I'LL KEEP IT OPEN FOR A SEC KTHX

Oh, NOW it shows up. Yellow background's big regret at that moment appears to have been that we're picking the very early game unless specific options are chosen to do otherwise. But it's a complexity thing, I'll see if it's appropriate in later settings.

[X] ACTUALLY WAIT

Three way tie time!

Three way tie created!

Okay, let me just tie it up, and... there! A bow!

yaaay

Lightning round...

[ ] COMBO PACK
The Arkenstone breathes now in royalty, but is showing up after everyone else.

[ ] LATE ROYALTY
The Last Royal chose to come late and wandering. The rock rose up, and then the world spoke.

[x] combo pack is the rock option right
[y] or is late royalty Also a rock option
[z] I gotta say it's mildly ambiguous here
[a] I mean combo has an arkenstone but late royalty also says the rock rose up
[b] there isn't a limit on these vote things right
[c]anyway what if we tie again

[X] late royalty ypipppee

Combo pack guarantees that you will be a specific rock, and skip the majority of chargen in favor of sidegen.

Late Royalty can be a rock, but they can also be a metaphorical rock. Or, well, something rock-like that's passed off as a stone.



That's two votes for Late Royalty, I'll start drafting unless I hear objections.

I vote rock

[X] ROCK OPTION

[d] oh well in that case combo pack is the rock option and thus better.

[X] roylaty againag

[X] I THINK YOU GUYS JUST WANT ROCKS
THE STONE WHO CAME IN ANOTHER STAR

Breath. Focus. Stop dying, me. Too much chaos in the voting procedure invokes him-

no. *kills*

Ow, respawned again. Chaotic votes induce randomness in the result. Shitposting is a valid move, but a potentially dangerous one.

The Last Royal's stony nature can be metaphorical or literal. It seems things chose to be literal today.

The steppes of the cloud spoke. They do that, from time to time. You rose up like the dirt and the dolls and you were one again. You had fallen from the first heavens, dripped away like jewels from the hem into the seconds. And you bounced, and you did not choose to stop bouncing, and then you jumped hard toward incarnation.

You are like a star, falling from the heavens. Or more precisely, the camera orbiting that star. You see the globe, and the edges where that globe is a roughly-rectangular hexmap, and the weird places where it is neither, and maybe Switzerland too because they're too neutral.

You are a stone who might be another stone. It's a stone, Luigi.

Give me a name and colors to go with this rock.
[ ] (write-in name)
[ ] (write-in colors)

Then, we'll need a biome. It seems most of the royals picked the...normal biomes. Don't worry, you'll impact and raise a city site, it's just. Uh. Yeah. Places.

[ ] Steppe Foothills
Where grassland meets mountainland. Some parts by the rivers are more farmable than others, but it kinda sucks.

[ ] Deep Desert
A city only by oasis. Isolation except from cacti and specialists.

[ ] The Ocean's Fledge
An island, an island! Or, well, probably. Possibility of jungly bits and deep sounds where it's cooler.

[ ] Sankt Winter
Where it is cold, where it is holy, where it is wrong.

[ ] Rampaging Flesh
The ground flails. Life is upbeat. Plants are animals and animals are plants and evil rains from the heavens with you. These are generally disliked.

[X] Name: Lapi
[X] Color: Blue
[X] The Ocean's Fledge

[X] Name: Lapi
[X] Color: Blue

[X] The Ocean's Fledge

Hard choices

[X] Name: Graig

[X] Color: Red dot with a Green bottom and a White top

[X] Biome: Steppe Foothills.

We should be Welsh, everybody!

[X] Name: Golem

[X] Color: Constantly changing color, Mario Invincibility style

[X] The Ocean's Fledge

[X] Name: Rock
[Y] Color: Grey-brown, as is the nature of the platonic 'rock'.
[Z] Sankt Winter

[X] RUNOFF VICTORY

Lightning round!

Redacted takes the wheel...

[X] Lapi the Blue of Ocean's Fledge
anyway you won't understand what this update is lmao

Neutral Turn. Animals look about in the vague awareness passive mobs sometimes have of impending disaster: fish quake about in the sea, wood-deer and rabbits and wolves and whatnot scattering to the filler, birds flock to the higher branches of trees.

The clouds part with blast force as a blue rock yeets towards a blackened clearing, yet stutteringly decelerates to a midair stop rather than touch the ground with something so ungracious as fall damage. It looks back and forth cautiously, as if royalty should mean appraisal, and with a cartoonish smurfy arm that might be telekinetic or unreal pokes up, then down at the ground and announces claim. With a little stock construction sound effect, Lapi now sits atop a plushly cushioned wooden chair in the stubby garrison main hall of Ocean's Fledge City. They pull out a little gold crown with a red velvet top that flushes blue as they act, and are crowned the last of the firstborn kings to claim their first capital.

Shiny new faction, Ocean's Fledge.

Ocean's Fledge is by the southern cold part of Setting Name Currently Subject To Disagreement, less than a solid ship's turn from the south continent of Sankt and the Cymraeg Memetic. Something is wrong, but not like terribly wrong, just kind of inconvenient or off-kilter. You didn't get a very good look at the surrounding land due to heavy cloud cover, and it's still kind of cloudy this morning.

Gray sediment pops into existence with a plate on the prevent-people-from-marching-up-to-the-king desky table thing in front of the throne. You look away at the simple yet expertly placed masonry, get distracted by a chandelier lit by standard glowy magic stuff, and by the time you look back Lapi's already eaten daily meal. What the...?

There's not very much to do on Day 1 of a new faction but manage the place and wait for more units to pop tomorrow. Between metaphorical narrative blinks, Lapi has somehow looked about the major buildings of this already old-looking place. The garrison is something more like a large stone manor with wooden supports than a castle, with a bunch of housing and a few other utilities indeterminate. Bedrooms, bathrooms (with very simple running water), kitchen (provisions currently just tins of ambiguous food-gel), armory (void of armaments save a few sticks and metal tools).

There's a modest stone tower that sticks up from the front-middle, accessible by a boring stairwell with a top observation deck and with sliding glass paneling for windows and having aerial units dock. The middle area where it joins up with the main castle hosts the library (with a few minimal lore-texts because nobody's published much this early ingame, and some cushions). Airspace clear besides the cloud cover and occasional drizzle. Suspiciously quiet, no ambient birds or anything. Atmosphere fairly temperate, neither that chilly nor that warm.

The garrison has a simplistic dungeon that's basically a stone basement with some random wooden furniture and casks. Stairs downward reveal a sub-basement holding a flickering azure gate behind a fullcaster-only interdiction field, proof this place is an active capital city and access to the Suspicious Place. A heavy glass door of some sort has been pulled over the room for it, meaning that if some crazy magician runs through and tries to eat you they'll have to break glass in case of emergency first. Lapi (probably?) doesn't have the stable magic ability to enter the magicians' holy ground, having Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Something is messed up there. Spiritual damage values and being cast out of heaven aside, Redacted again for good measure. That might be correctable Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Lapi decides to leave the sub-basement so I can stop talking about Redacted and maybe cultivate it later.

The outer city is a few shacks passing for the appearances of vital services these cities usually generate. The lesser resources that popped within mix stuff useful for humans with stuff useful for motile rocks. The latter appears to be difficult enough to translate, including an unreasonable supply of various chemicals, assorted forms of sand, mineral fluid, and something rather autoclavey that is presumably used for heat-related distortion. Uh.

Okay then. The city is bordered by water on two sides, spreading off to its east as saltwater ocean and the southeast more of the same but interrupted partway through by a freshwater river where the farms live in the outer-city zone. There's a bit of a beach and a pier stretching out to the east-southeast that forms the city's harbor zone. Some fishing poles sit out there on nets that more or less spawn fish rather than actually accumulating them, strangely enough.

The land border on the remaining four hexes is a rather boring-looking forest, primarily pine secondarily spruce, studded with larch, a few random other things and small aspen blobs.

Lapi finally, finally bothers to check the units menu and see what this city will do. At the start of next turn, units will pop. Materialize like any ol' RTS game 'X has completed production', battle-ready but unlikely to see it.

You have dorfs, rocks, hauflin, and owls as your default options.

Dorfs are basically dwarves, but have weird shit like 'angels with the morality aspect filed off', 'souls made of architecture', 'MAGIC RUNES, LADDIE' and 'oh fuck they can fly that's terrifying AAAAA'. They're fabricator digging knights and they can do buildwork, very utilitarian and can get a lot of places as siege, but bloody expensive upkeep-wise. They can go commander on their own if they get good enough at casting. It will take the city's entire unit production to get one per turn, since it's so low-level. Casting-knights are usually upper-tech-tree units, so dorfs are on the weaker and less efficient end of such.

Rocks as units are basically stone golems, or lesser earth elementals. They happen to be suspiciously gelatinous or suspiciously solid as the moment demands, capable of pseudopodia, behaving as if statuary, fine-gripping, and phagocytosis. They can become roughly people-shaped and grippy-limbed, particularly if they should be holding things, but most of them when left be are kinda just colorful blobs with terrifying levels of control like Lapi. The exact power and upkeep of Rocks is variable: sometimes they're poisonous, shocking, stronger metals, gemmy...whatever, the weird ones take more to pay for. You should usually get about 1 to 5 per turn, depending on if special. They're a bit weak to piercing, also weak to ice, but good against crushing and siege (surprise digging crew the stone's mining you).

As an aside, Lapi is mechanically a level 1 royal rock, meaning that they're a commander but are otherwise not special. Rocks reproduce through unit generation system like everything else here, but their love-related actionset appears to be causing various forms of terror. I guess that means Lapi is the rock equivalent of lovable? Rocks-as-units in general can be commanders but usually aren't unless pointedly made so at promotion cost. Their voice is mildly unsettling and prefers abstracted translation over being heard directly.

Hauflin are this side's analogue of generic human infantry, except slightly smaller and creepier. Accusations of being lanky boring-souled dwarves are perfectly founded. They mainly pop as throwers and switch to short-spear fighting as backup as their unique style thing, using range to make up for slight fragility concerns. Variants exist to fill other roles, such as dedicated-archer, dedicated-stabber, digging, sea crew, and siege crew. Hauflin are most likely the default unspecialized commanders of your side until the techbase integrates something else, but the city can pop the regular infantry versions in a few-pack.

Owls are air scouts that pass themselves off as regular wildlife with a stalking problem. High move, ignorable if not being specifically watched for, and still alarmingly combat-capable for their fragility. Quite spammable, low upkeep units. This city could easily spit out a unit-scale combat group per turn, or even split a few owls with infantry. Owls are meant to be the 'round it off' answer to fractional production that can't or shouldn't be retasked into something else, and may produce owl-eggs that hatch next round if necessary to overcompensate.

You can also produce corvettes (the basic form of transport-ready combat ship, crew included) and administrators (non-combatant commanders to do administration and clerk-ordery-stuff), but those're multi-turn things and therefore worth saving for later. The city can also be configured to produce buildings to upgrade itself, technology, and a bunch of miscellaneous options like wagons, pack animals, or general provisions to satisfy upkeep of existing units. But it's preferred to get some base staff before you get into...much else, such as if those random animals decide to attack.

The city will need an expensive 'general upgrade' before it can not-greatly-inconveniently produce combat-effective mounts, on-spawn combat commanders, bigger-than-individual siege, and a number of other advanced unit types in the Inherent Techbase.

So, that leaves the question of starting strategy.

ask many questions you'll need 'em

In all cases, this is just for the first few turns while building up treasury to unlock more of an arsenal. Once commanders are reasonably cost-effective to acquire and you have a basic force, things can be rethought. It will likely be a roll to encounter anything and another roll to see how that goes....assuming the tables get built.

[ ] UNLIMITED OWL WORKS
Just spam owls. Fill the city with owls for a few days as defense, and then use your terrifying bird swarm to scout while Lapi oversees the city, saving funds while waiting for a substantial reason to change tack. Spawn corvettes as necessary to serve as airbeast carriers and as minimal marine infantry. Scoutspam and quickgrab anything cool!

[ ] COMBINED ARMS
Start with owls and hauflin, clear out any dangerous animals from the immediate surroundings. Build a few ships, and start scouting the coastlines for cities using it as a platform for owls outside bird range from the Ocean's Fledge main island chain. While this all is happening, shore yourself up with a few dorfs, rocks, and hauflin of varying types so you're not too tied to any one strategy. Adapt in response to what if anything the owls find.

[ ] BLOCK BEFORE YOU LOOK
Build a minimal force of hauflin for general garrison coverage, then some dorfs, then ships. Owls generated along the way could get caught and merit something else doing a time-consuming dedicated sweep: scout very little until you're ready to follow up that scouting with real force.

[ ] (write-in)
There are a lot of ideas and this game's strategic balance is VERY unsound.

In addition to your vote plan, feel free to suggest specific nuances, ask questions, or request that Lapi test things. After the first few units are popped, they can test things as well while waiting for the strategy to bear out.

[X] UNLIMITED OWL WORKS.

oops! all owls