Looking at Turn #1

Overview:

Turn one was our entire "registration Phase" rolled into a single lump sum. Everyone got to see their people and environment right here. Then they all took their "free action" which evolved into the birth action, and they got to spend all their points at the same time. I was getting in players up until the last minute, making their private forums, and trying to figure out what their plans were and how everything should be processed. It was a lot of fun, but a bit messy. A lot depended on when I got your turn in and started processing it. Many players got interupts. One late starting player began on an "island" created as a side effect of another players free action. In some ways the entire flow of the game really depended on who got in when, and in what order I processed the turns. Thankfully it all came together pretty well and everyone did interesting things.

Cereal Turn #1

I've got to start with the cereal god because he really rattled the world right off the bat. Cereal started in a lush temperate forest on the north coast of africa. His people had just crossed the dry and forboding sahara and were rejoicing at their luck in finding a nice place to live when cereal entered the picture. Here is what he saw that turn:

You rise to awareness and look around to see the great green leaves of cork oak trees and the bright yellow of jasmine flowers growing around you. The people are eating wild grapes & and natural raisins, red Carob pods, and wild olives. A salty breeze blows south towards your people and they rejoice. You get the feeling they've had a long hard journey here, and have a shadowy memory of things with claws and teeth that ate some of them during the trip.

They babble at each other excitedly with each new discovery: a new plant, a small rodent, a stone oddly shaped with a round bottom, and a depression in the top - almost like a bowl, etc..etc.. They are obviously happy even though their language is close to the level of two cows mooing at each other. They laugh and wave around primitive stone knives and scrapers that might almost be unformed rocks. Your people don't realize it yet but the cereal god has awakened, and North Africa will never be the same!

I thought it was a good start but cereal figured the people would be better off as bird men, and since bird men should have a perch he used his free action to lift "as much land as I can" one mile up in the air and hold it there using antigravity to hold it up and make sure the rivers kept flowing and the land remained habitable. This action and the resulting antigravity feild would have a lot of impact on the world for the next seven hundred years.

Father/Axel/Kirin Turn #1

This player had a lot of identities and played a fairly devious high stakes game with the world. He set in motion a lot of the big events in the game. Sometimes things worked out for him, a few times he almost was wiped out but . . . in the end he was still standing as a major player when the dust finally settled on turn fifteen. Here is what he started with:

You rise to awareness and the first thing you notice is the smell of cool water and pine needles. Your people are a bunch of pale shivering men and women dressed in crude hides sewn together with animal sinew. It's not leather but it's better than nothing against the salty ocean air.

They scramble and climb over bare rocks hunting rabbits and other small game with stone knives, but they aren't very good at it. They suppliment this diet with olives from stunted bushlike trees growing along the shoreline. Above them steep rocky hills rise into cliffs which proceed to roll out into the water becoming rapids and small islands jutting forth from the cool blue waters of the mediteranean.

Sometimes one of your people disapear when out of sight, or at night, and remains are never found ... Hopefully it's just wolves

He planned out his turn aiming to be the god of information and technology. He'd planned to build Atlantis and have floating cities filled with high tech wonders as he floated over a stone age world. To impliment this plan he created the first of his crystals. A device that acted like a hologram projector capable of imparting vast amounts of information at reduced cost. The thing floated in the air about three feet above the ground and could be moved around at will by people who had faith in him.

Of course the more information he tried to impart, and the more detailed, the more it would cost. But it looked like a very powerful sort of artifact and it could breed new sorts of crystals every five turns which he'd have to first design and then buy with his points. He tried to force a partnership by explaining how he got more powerful with worship, and then he wanted to cement it by giving out a lot of information at once in a very vague way . . . but it backfired on him. A lot of folks didn't WANT this crystal thing to become more powerful, and thought his vague information and "suggestions" weren't right or really worth the hassle of listening to.

What saved him this turn was an interupt:

An event or events have happened that is having an effect on your area right now. Shortly after you bring your crystal forth from the sea and begin teaching your tribe the ground shakes and a great mighty roaring sound assaults the people's ears. The waters suddenly drain away leaving behind a wet sloping cliff face covered in drying seaweed, dead fish, and many exposed shellfish.

Islands that were positioned where the mountains meet the sea are now actual mountains rising from a series of silt covered wet hills, drying pools of water, and a few fast flowing rivers that churn and surge with strange waves and eddies for about a week surging and rolling back before settling down about a week later.

Eventually the sound quiets to a very soft roaring but it never goes away entirely and whenever your people look towards it's source they can see a vast black column of clouds which swirl and flash with lightning far off on the distant horizon. So far the column does not seem to have changed it's position at all.

He took credit for the act and that convinced a lot of folks decided that was a good reason to toe the line. They didn't want him mad at them. This was, of course, the result of cereals action. The other god had actually lifted a huge amount of land right on the sea floor causing the water to flow back a great gaping hole that pretty much doubled the size of the mediteranean. The antigravity feild caused that new area of sea to be filled with a constant storm which was visible. The player never learned that but the action really helped him out.

Bernedette Turn #1

Bernedette started out by pouring all her points into redesigning her humans making a human race that was both telepathically and soul bonded to wolves. Her free action and all her points went into this change. The result of these changes was a two part creature called a "Twirn" It was an interesting race.

The wolves held all the sensory data for both creatures and were about as smart as autistic children on their own. They matured fast and mated for life at the same point as wolves do . . . which also mated their still young human twins. The wolf part was called a "bernardo" and the mated pair of bernardos would have regular wolf children until their human partners matured at which point their gestation cycles linked up forcing them to bear twirn pairs at the exact same time for the rest of their lives.

The human side was blind, deaf, dumb, and mute. They saw everything through the eyes of the wolf and when the two were close together they upped the bernardos intelligence to full human levels. The soul bonded pair were both telepathic and shared thoughts with each other constantly. They also were able to project full ideas to other twirn pairs within shouting distance of themselves.

The humanoid Bernadines themself however had the strongest psychic gift. They were able to learn to share their senses with other animals, not just their bernardo companion. This psychic science allowed them to learn how to take over more and more control of the beasts. Eventually their control over each creature they studied could reach the point of full possession. It was very cool.

At night when they slept both parts of the pair united processing all information as a single being called a ghost wolf which manifested as a canine form made of purple lightnings. The entire thing had an instinctive super-pack structure where twirns gathered into packs, and all the alphas formed a ruling council. The super pack however would only hold 400 twirns after which the super pack would split into two territorial groups and need to either part ways or fight for the territory.

Here is what bernedette started with:

You wake looking out over a great distance. Your people are on a high plateau overooking a cold dry plain below where vast herds of Reindeer, Mastadon, and Whooly Rhino graze on sparse grasses between small strands of stunted pine trees. As you watch the plain below shakes with a mighty earth tremor startling a group of gigantic cave lions.

Nearby a broad placid river emerges from between two mountain ranges and course down over steep hills to the plains below and eventually to the sea that can be seen as a small strip of blue below the horizon. Your people are dressed in uncured animal hides and some of them try to hunt rabbits with primitive stone knives. Others gather shellfish from the river, or pick wild grapes amongst gigantic pines.

As the earth shakes gently for a second time a pack of large wolves emerges from the forest and your people scatter finding refuge on a nearby large limestone rock formation. From here they throw down rocks and babble at the creatures in a language not much better than gibberish until the things wander away.

It's 12000 years ago, and with your coming a new day has finally dawned over the Iberian Penninsula. Good luck!

And an immediate interupt:

The ground shakes again and the strip of blue in the distance vanishes. A low rumbling can be heard which continues for a long time followed by more accaisional shaking on the plain below, and eventually a sound like a gigantic toilet flushing. the river stops being placid and flows at a huge speed, lifting rock, dirt, the accaisional tree.

This goes on for about two weeks with your people staying well away from the water before it settles down into a much deeper and faster flowing river basin with steep canyonlike walls as it goes THROUGH the hills directly towards where you remember seeing the blue strip of ocean. In the distancy you can still hear the loud roaring of water flowing at high speeds.

This was of course another side effect from cereals action.

Damon Turn #1


Here is how Damon started. He was late enough into the game that he got his interupt before he ever moved:


You rise to consciousness from a nightmare vision of traumatic flooding and mighty storms. Shadowy images clear through your newborn mind as you suddenly look down at a huddled wretched band of refugees sitting sadly upon a large fallen long amidst what appears to be some moist empty grassland on the shore of a pale blue river.

The people are naked and lack even basic stone tools. They babble at each other in a language that is almost as primitive as the hooting of jungle monkeys. They look around and hoot at the large herds of wild aurochs, and elephant. They gasp at the glory of a pride of huge lions basking in the sun, and twitter in fear at the sight of a gigantic croc in the nearby water!

Eventually though they settle down and the women begin gathering wild wheat and barley while the men sift amongst the damp clay trying to find suitable rocks to make some of the most primitive stone knives you've ever imagined. It's a really sad sight, these wretches just lost everything they ever had.

Fortunately for them a new day has dawned in the Middle East, your day. Show them what it means to live beneath the gaze of Damon!

Events have happened elsewhere which are causing reprecussions in your area right now. As the tribe begins to gather food and make new stone tools a great roaring noise is heard and the river waters begin to swell with waves and strange currents. This speeds up into a single strong current running so fast that it cuts into the banks wearing away the soil and throwing fish and even the croc out of the water! Your people quickly start gathering fish while avoiding the croc. Eventually the waves subside and no more fish are tossed out of the river but the fast steady current continues at a slightly slower much much more constant pace.

As you haven't acted yet you can take full advantage of this event! Have fun.

Damon acted quickly moving his people a ways away from the river and claiming a bit of land. He made a deal with the staff where he got full sight within an area twenty miles across with a discount to effects that never can leave that radius. At the center of this area he got a pool of ever pure drinking water with a great eternal flame hovering above it. This flame was the only spot from which he could speak or otherwise contact his people.

Every five turns however Damon had to sacrifice 10% of his worshippers in a special brutal rite to form a second "sacred area" nearby. By the end of the game he was just about to make his fourth sacred area and had other cities settled between each pair of holy springs. It was a very nice localized strategy though in the end I think this player had larger ambitions and chafed under the restrictions he'd accepted.

After the free action Damon spent his first turns points uplifting lions to intelligence. The lions were specifically friendly to humans and retained their pack structure. They had no language or other ability to use their intellect such as psionics and spent the opening portion of the game as pets to the humans learning their culture and remaining part of their family. Eventually this system broke down and the "vadin" as they were called set up their own cities and seperate culture but the early bonds lasted and peace was maintained, just barely, till the end of the game.

CheetahCat Turn #1

You rise to awareness with vague memories of a vast and mighty shaking which tossed the sea from it's basin flooding the land and killing many people. You get shadowy images of waste and destruction, a great calamity in the not so distant past, perhaps it is only a nightmare.

The scene before you is tranquil. Vast mangrove trees grow at the edge of a calm and placid inland sea filled with tons of fish including quite large ones such as swordfish and sharks.

Men gather both oysters and clams from among the arching roots while women harvest wild colubrina seeds, goodberries and gooseberry leaves, and cotton tree flowers. You also notice wild peppers growing further inland among the tall grass.

Behind you the land becomes rocky and mountainous, covered in a light growth of trees and jungle vegetation. Most of the plants seem rather young, and you notice a lot of deadwood and fallen logs. In the distance something large, perhaps a tiger moves among the tall grass and you wonder what other dangers lurk in the darkness beyond the peoples sight.

Cheetahcat started late and found herself on a gigantic island made from most of eastern africa. Cereals action had set off earthquakes and caused the great rift valley to shift and break wide open. Lake victoria met the persian gulf and the entire rift valley and great lakes area of africa was flooded. The endless storm below the floating island also added to the areas normal monsoon weather pattern and in the end she wound up with a very damp jungle area home to many african plants as well as immigrants blown in from the shores of india and madagascar during the turmulent changes to the weather patterns.

Her opening move used up her free action and all her points uplifting a race of cheetahs to dominance. Cheetahcats had full human intelligence, telepathy, and powerful telekinisis. They could interbreed dominantly with regular cheetahs and started out as prophets for the goddess. Unfortunately over time this race would cause the player a lot of trouble.

The cheetahcats were programmed not to hunt the humans and to share their prey with them but . . . they weren't anything like human themselves. Cheetahs are only semi-social creatures. The females hunt alone in overlapping territories with their daughters protecting their cubs from aggressive males and other predators. Like housecats or lions these females will eat an injured or sickly cub to recover the protein and save herself if need be.

The smaller males form small packs early for protection. Only the alpha male is allowed to breed with the areas females. Prides of male cheetah normally wander far from their birthplace so as to avoid breeding with their mother or sisters, but in isolated ranges the species becomes inbred quickly. The intelligent cheetahcat kept this social arrangment and a cruel/playful cat temperment.

Compared to stone age humans they were a super race and I learned a lot about balancing nonhumans from their antics. However compared to civilized humans they were socially retarded. They didn't have any family structure, community, or other method of passing information from one generation to the next. They had no need or desire to build tools or learn science. This limited them for a long time to simply having cubs learn whatever they could from their mothers and developing from there. Yet on turn one they quickly dominated and enslaved the humans they were there to protect.

Tyleno Turn #1

You rise to consiousness looking down into the clear flowing blue waters of a deep river. Above you loom a grove of breadfruit trees. In the distance you can hear birdsong and the soft hooting of monkeys. In the distance something large and dangerous looking moves past your people through the tall reeds, ignoring them for now as it creeps towards a miniture deer browsing on the shrubbery nearby.

Your people would love to kill that deer, as what they can scavenge from a kill is often mangled, or useless. The local tigers and alligators are very wicked in how they kill, and have been known to eat some of the tribe as well if the people aren't very careful.

Lacking the ability to take down prey as large as the deer however your people are stuck eating smaller mammals, reptiles, and whatever game they can catch. Often what they can catch is very young animals. Even adult cats or birds are hard to catch. So mostly they just eat fallen breadfruit and gather wild yams.

It's early morning somewhere in Northern Africa and your people need you. They barely have a language and they still hunt animals naked using chipped stone knives! Fortunately for them a new day has dawned. Your Day.

As you watch trying to decide what to do the earth suddenly shakes with a loud and continuous roaring and a great sonic boom drives your people to the ground. The placid waters of the river suddenly speed up and overflow their banks as if being pulled towards the distant north west. Thankfully the people are on the eastern bank of the river and survive the devastation without any injury more serious than a sprained knees, but as they look northwest the sky above the trees is dark and flashes with what seems to be oddly colored purplish lightning bolts.

If you don't do something to alter things tremors and minor earthquakes will last for the next month or so, and the river will take about that long before settling down to a stable fast flowing deep body of water with a strong current in the center and many small eddies.

No matter how long you watch the dark clouds to the northwest don't vanish, and your lands begin to get a constant trickle of rainstorms flowing in from that directions. The land around the river becomes a lot damper, with wide areas of standing water along the edges of the deeper river basin.

Tyleno was another late start brought in by another player eager to get the game going. He actually was in the lead for a while when it comes to sheer OMFG power level. His actions are largely to blame for the new decay of points and for the new system where high level inborn psychic/mystical powers decreases overall income bracket.

His opening move was to put a huge dome over his area to prevent the constant rains from flooding his area, and keep out the earthquakes. In his own words he wanted to keep his people warm, dry, and safe. His dome controlled the flow of weather in and out of his area and earthquakes bounced right off it as it became a sphere beneath the ground. This bounced all of his exess rains onto another player who really wasn't happy but . . . for tyleno it worked out well. His area was a garden of eden.

He also spent all of his remaining points giving his people extreme pyrokinisis. That was their only psychic power . . . twenty points of fire control. They were immune to heat and flame. They could throw fireballs. They could mold molten metal in their bare hands like clay. It was very potent as a focused psionic ability is more powerful than a less specific one and he focused on developing his psionic potential to the fullest as a science.

Furuhoshi Turn #1

Creeping low to the ground your people spread out acrossed a wide open marshy plain. Small groups stealthily hunt flamingo and ground hornbill with crude stone knives. They only rarely get the birds but subsist on the ones they do catch plus scattered eggs and wild red african rice.

Every so often some member of the tribe will disturb a secretary bird on a stunted acacia shrub, but mostly even the small stunted shrub versions of these trees are absent from a vast wet plain. The gurgling of tiny streams and the song of birds in flight are the only noises.

Your people are naked and hungry. They direct each other in the search for food using a language that makes monkeys look like linguists, and the stone tools they carry are almost a joke . . . still a new day is dawning over western africa. Your Day.

I feel sorry for this player. She started in a tropical marsh but she really wanted a temperate forest, specifically ireland or england. To add insult to injury this is the player who got all of tyleno's extra rain turning the "marshy plain" into a real swamp after a few turns. It wasn't a bad starting location. It's actually the mouth of the niger river also known as the "river of gold" and this area specifically is known for it's oil. Yet the player wasn't willing or able to adjust to this starting location and it really spoiled her game. This is one reason why I want three DIFFERENT suggestions of terrain people like to play in for current registration. I may not be able to put you in your ideal location but if you choose three different kinds of terrain maybe I can get you something your willing to accept and play with. Rather than having a player completely turned off by his or her surroundings.

The player's opening action was to create a pocket dimension called "underhill" which was centered on her own imititation stone henge. We had to actually raise a rocky platform out of the muck to put this thing on, but it was still fairly cool. Underhill was a totally empty space that mimiced the geography, wind, temperature pattern, and water in her surface area at the moment of her birth.

She spent her points turning several individual humans into pixies, satyres, brownies, and other mythological creatures. Each one lived for a thousand years and would breed with humans every 500 years to produce offspring of their own type. These long lived slow breeding creatures were to inhabit underhill and be her priests. She had quite a nice temple standing in the stagnant muck below stonehenge. At her temple (and only there) they could also get a sort of dust to use in casting spells she would provide for them later. Pete handled this and it was always pretty abstract.

Later I spent a lot of time making a detailed magic system for the future based off of some more successful things other players had done. Specifically tattoo magic made by cereal, crystal crafting by Damon, and solar magic by Tyleno. I'm hoping if this player returns that the new setup will be more kind to her and pull her into the game. She had some good ideas.