People in Aldawyn grow old and die. This is the first thing the manual describes that is about you rather than about the world around you.
You need somebody to be. Until you have a character, the Account page is the only thing you can do, though the map and the statistics are open to anyone, because the world belongs to nobody.
Your Discord account is your account. You enter with Discord and nothing else: there is no password here, no sign-up form and no email. The first time you enter, that is your registration. What Aldawyn keeps is your Discord id and the name and avatar Discord showed for you at the moment you entered, and nothing else; a rename or a new avatar on Discord reaches Aldawyn the next time you enter. You can enter from any browser or device, and leaving on one of them does not leave on the others. Once you are in, you stay in for thirty days before Discord is asked again. The players talk in the game's own Discord server, at https://discord.gg/PFFQZ8vtah; the mark at the top of every page goes there.
The world itself needs no account: the map and the statistics are open to anyone. Entering is for having somebody in it.
Choose a people, a sex and a name. Your people decides where you begin and, with your sex, roughly how long you will live:
| people | homeland | you begin in |
|---|---|---|
| orc | Orcmorsult | Utokuzter |
| human | Arados | Cartacia |
| dwarf | Buldihndan | Stoukarbolg |
| kinnaera | Arbor lean | Bor Norex |
| elf | Sun cashai | Nai'ur |
Ents are not on that list. They are still in Arbor lean, and every region there is named for a tree, but they are the forest rather than a people you can be. The kinnaera are who lives among them.
You begin twenty years old, standing in your homeland's capital, a citizen of that country, with no strength and an empty purse: a balance of nothing in each of the five currencies and in gold. That is one of the two ways into the world. The other is to take up a living person nobody is playing, born into it and grown up in it, with the age, house and titles they already have: see Dynasties.
Your homeland does not move. If your people's capital is taken by another country, you are still born there and still their citizen, now living under somebody else's flag.
You gain a year each year of world time, the number in the header. That is a different clock from the one the seasons turn on: a great year is one full turn of the seasons and takes six of yours. See the map.
So an ordinary life contains about a dozen winters, not seventy-five. The world's weather is slower than the people living in it.
There is no age at which you die. Each year you have a chance of dying, and that chance climbs steeply as you get older.
a human man's chance of dying, that year
age 20 0.05% you will almost certainly see next year
age 40 0.3%
age 60 1.6%
age 70 3.8%
age 80 9% about one year in eleven
age 90 21%
age 100 49% a coin toss
Two things follow. Children almost never die of age, so a life is not a gamble from the start. And nobody survives indefinitely. The odds close in.
Because it is a chance and not a rule, lives vary. Half of human men are gone by 75, but one in ten dies before 53 and one in ten lives past 89. Two people of the same people and the same sex can have very different lives, and that is the model working rather than failing.
| people | typical man | typical woman |
|---|---|---|
| orc | 70 | 78 |
| human | 75 | 83 |
| dwarf | 89 | 97 |
| kinnaera | 110 | 118 |
| elf | 129 | 137 |
Women live about eight years longer, and it is the same eight years for every people. It is a real difference and a small one: worth knowing, never worth choosing on.
Ents are not on this list. They are still in Arbor lean, and every region there is named for a tree, but they are the forest rather than a people you can be.
Your character stops. They are still there. You can see them, and the age they reached, but they no longer act, and you are told what happened when you next look.
Then you begin again. A new character, a new people if you like, twenty years old in their own homeland.
What they owned comes with you. Your money in every currency, your goods of every kind and quality, every company you founded, every trading licence you bought, every standing offer you left on a market, and any warband you own pass to your next character the moment you create them, in one step and once. A warband waits for you: while you are between characters nobody can change its split or promote in it, and your share of what it earns gathers in the estate until your next character takes it up. You are not given the starting gold a second time: that belongs to the player and is given once.
What they were does not. Strength, training and spent health are the character's, not yours. Your next one begins at zero strength, untrained and in full health, however far the last one got. Nor does anything your character merely stood in relation to: their prestige, which is standing rather than property and starts again at the 10 everybody begins with; their place in a faction; their membership of a warband and whatever rank they held in one. A warband you owned is yours again; a warband you were merely in is not, and your next character joins whichever they choose, from nothing. The rule behind every case is the one under Titles: what was owned passes, and what was stood in relation to does not, so a new kind of thing to own passes without anyone having to say so.
A title is neither, and may be lost. Where a crown or a duchy goes is decided by succession at the moment its holder dies, and creating another character does not bring it back. A title follows the blood, to a named heir or a child, and what a child inherits from a parent is the business of Dynasties; see Titles for the rest.