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 first days: a card for each page a new player has, what it offers and what it costs
• 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.

Names, and the words they may not hold

A name, whether of your character, your house, a child, a company, a faction, a warband or an order, may hold Latin letters, with or without accents, numbers and spaces. Letters from other scripts are refused, because some of them look exactly like Latin ones.

Some words may not appear in any name or message. When one does, the game refuses it before anything is spent, tells you which word it was, and leaves what you typed in place so you can change it. Short words are only refused on their own, so an ordinary name that happens to contain one is fine. If a name of yours is refused and you think it should not be, tell us which word was named.

A name that breaks the rules after the fact can be replaced by a moderator. A moderated name is final: the owner cannot choose another.

Credits

The list of words names may not hold starts from the List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words by Shutterstock and its contributors, used under CC BY 4.0. Which of its words this game leaves out, and how it matches the rest, is recorded beside the copy in the server's source.