The Aldawyn manual
How the world behaves, written for someone playing in it, not someone building
it. If you want to know why a value is what it is, or how it was recovered
from the 2018 archive, that is ../../README.md and ../../openspec/. This is
what to expect when you are there.
Chapters
- Your character: beginning, growing old, dying, and beginning
again
- The training ground: training, strength, health, and the one
thing you can do every day
- Companies: owning a company, what each kind makes, what it
costs to found and to upgrade
- A day's work: working, crops and the weather, territory, wages and
tax
- Titles: crowns and duchies, naming an heir, what a death costs,
how a vacant crown is filled, and what a king answers for
- Dynasties, marriage and children: houses, the two ways into
the world, marriage, births, heirs and inheritance claims, and adoption
- What you carry: traits, which of them the world shows to
others, what you are born with, moods, wounds and injuries
- Dueling: prestige, what a duel costs and pays, and why some
duels are decided before they are rolled
- Claims: claims from conquest and inheritance, what they cost to press, and
what winning one takes
- Factions: founding one, joining one, the treasury nobody can be
paid from, and standing for a seat
- The council: twelve seats, how votes become them, how a law
passes, and the fifteen laws it can pass
- Religion and the church: faith, preaching, orders, the conclave,
state religion, crusades, the orphanage, archprelates, and the relics and the
expeditions that find them
- The goods market: selling what a company makes, buying with
a country's money, licences and the sales tax
- The currency market: one money for another, and the one
road from a treasury to a purse
- War: warbands, fronts, what a swing costs and pays, uprisings, and
how ground changes hands
- Food: eating, health, and the loop that keeps a character going
- Travel: crossing a border, the borders that cannot be crossed,
and why where you stand decides what you can do
- The map: the world map, its four views, and reading a region
- Statistics: the world's record of its own weather, and how
to read it
- Rankings: the five public ledgers, characters, warbands, orders,
houses and factions, and how to sort and filter them
- Weather: the turning year, the seven climates, storms, snow,
floods and droughts
- Epidemics: how a plague begins, travels and burns out, and
what catching it does to you
- The chronicle: the world's record, and why you see some of it
What this manual promises
Everything here describes what the world actually does, and nothing here
describes what it will do. Where the world computes something that affects
nothing, it says so plainly rather than implying a consequence that is not
there. A manual that promises more than the game delivers is worse than no
manual.