[Atgxtg]

Going along with Rurik's List and RMS's comment.

My two cents:

1. Each Author gets a good sized island, or chunk of an island for their "kingdom/empire, whatever". Islands give up a lot of advantages, both in terms of isolating and interacting with other lands.

2. Players can share landmassess if they choose to. So if two people want to have neighboring kingdoms that are at war or whatever, they can, but we don't get tiny pricipality right next to major empire by accident.

3. Any big freaking powers need to be approved. This is just so one guy doesn't writes up "Super Rome/Lunar Empire" and can eat up everyone else's land and culture right off the bat. At least not without other people wanting to do that sort of story. IF someone wants a huge empire that is isolated and has a bunch of nasty neighbors to deal with and doesn't bother the rest of us, that should be okay.

4. I'm for human centric. I think you get better cultures that way. That said we could tweak the humans by culture the way RQ3 did with LotN and Vikings. We could have a mysterious non-human culture or two, but overall I think the non-humans work best when they are exotic. A hostil "enemy" species might be a good addition.

5. I'd like to see a mix of technological ability. I'm not talking Conan with a laser pistol, but more along the lines of certain kingdoms being more advanced in one or more fields. For instance, some lands might be able to produce medieval or gothic plate while other might not. Another might have early cannon or just better seige engines, another the best mages, and so forth.

An example from history would be the Welsh warbow, or longbow. It tends to make every RPG weapon list, but historically is was a specialty and required the yeomanry to get it to work. Most of the really good bows in the past were cultural specialties, and we could do something similar on outr world.

6. Working up who has what resources would be nice for trading purposes.

7. Sea lanes. We can decide who is in contact with whom and how. Not to mention why.

8. Reglion. Like Rurik said. We can make it a central part of the cultures. Ideally we should link as cultural specialties with this. So the greatest sailors would probably hold a Sea or Strom god in high regard.



9. We could work up a "rating system" to sort of the various cultures if it would help. That could be useful it we wanted to give a thumbnail description of how they rate against each other. This could help with trading, and for the inevitable conflicts that will arise in play after we have the world worked up. This could be something simple, like rating countries in terms of size, military power etc, or more detailed, noting metallurgically level or some such. Something like Warlords of Alexandrias method might be a start.