The Court of the Empress: a LJ based game-- Call for Players

[mcroft]

Update: The game has started. Rules are, unless changed, here.

I read Neel Krishnaswami's The Court of the Empress (a complete RPG in a single 20x20 room blog post!) and my immediate thought was that it would be easy to play it in LiveJournal. It's a simple, interesting RPG that starts en media res and unfolds in a series of formal statements and responses.

The Empress is an immensely powerful and utterly unchallenged despot over a vast empire. A single word from her can cause a city to be built, and a second word could take all the lives within an entire nation. She lives within a vast palace filled with the wonders received as tribute from every nation under the sun. Thousands live within, spending their lives maintaining the gardens, cooking the delicacies, playing the songs, and guarding the jewels that make her life the most opulent in the world.

The players of this game take on the roles of the Empress herself, and of minor courtiers who seek her out, chancing death to petition her for a favor.

As I said on that blog, if we were to run this game in LJ,

it would be a writing exercise in portraying emotion, feeling, body language, tone, and picking up on them, as well as an opportunity for persuasive writing to shine.

Neel didn't know if it would work in LJ, so I figured, I'd try it.

So, as I see it, the way this would work on LJ would be that the person who started the game would be the Empress, Opening the Scene in the initial post and bringing forth her servants in the first comment. All courtier introductions shall be in reply to this comment.

Once the courtiers are introduced, then the Empress will begin commanding service of them. All living courtiers are allowed (and encouraged!) to comment upon their rival's efforts, until the Empress moves on to a new courtier and a new service.

Once every courtier has been asked to provide a service to the Empress, if there are more than one living courtier, the process repeats, per the game rules, the Empress is obliged to choose all living courtiers in a round robin, but is not obliged to follow any particular order.

The round ends when the last courtier standing is allowed to request a boon of the Empress. Her whim is, as expected, law, so make the request and the reason are convincing...

--
Implementation notes.

• Read the rules before starting to play.


• All comments must be in character speech only, without describing actions, feelings, background, tone except through words stated by the character.


• Please put your courtier's name in the subject of your reply every time.


• The Empress's decisions regarding life-and-death are arbitrary, unfair, and can only be appealed in game (until you're killed).


• If play stalls due to slow/non-responsive players, the Empress will move on.


• Dead players cannot talk until they have a new courtier in the next round.


• I intend to play this exactly as written to see how it works.


• Players may join at any time before the first cycle of couriers is complete. After that they must wait for the next round.


• I will start a second post at the same time for OOC discussion and commentary on the game. Lurkers and dead players may discuss the game there.


• Player roster and scores will be kept, probably in the OOC post.Edit: Scores are kept so that players can track their own strategies in each round. They don't compare validly between players.


• Only the Empress may respond to the main post, all other comments must be in response to her Edit: or to another Courtier.


• No pictures, unless they're in the Empress' initial description of the Court.


• Chains of Comments will be Frozen when they are complete, which will be when the Empress says.


• The Empress declares that she will willfully delete inappropriate off-topic threads and willfully execute inappropriate on-topic courtiers.


• The Empress decrees that foul language is not permitted at court, and directs her courtiers to eschew it.


• The Empress is fond of the Euphamism "cuddle" for most things that are beyond the bounds of accepted taste. Courtiers are instructed to use it cleverly.


• Cute use of LJ Icons does not count as disallowed use of Images, unless the Empress feels it is interfering with the exercise, in which case the rule will be changed.


• Courtiers have 24 hours to respond to the Empress (unless they can cite significant RL interference (internet outage, hospitalization, stuff like that)), with IC kibitzing and criticizing others' responses at whatever pace is deemed mete by the player.

The game will start Thursday night, Jan 5th. This will give us a few days to discuss the rules and let everyone who might consider participating some time to think.
Edit : As rules changes and clarifications are made in the comments, they'll be incorporated here. Anything changed after play starts will be marked as such.
Rule Clarifications:

• The Empress will wait for an adequate number of Courtiers to present themselves before calling upon them for her amusement.


• (Proposed, still under discussion) The Empress is expecting the Courtiers to entertain her with their discourse. She will not speak in a Service thread except to end it.
• 
  

[updated: game closed, some time ago...]

Comments

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

I don't think you get to ask the favour until you're the sole survivor. First you have to impress the Empress.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

We'll ask Neel about this. As I read the rules, there's nowhere that you state your desired favour until the moment of truth.

For our game, since the comments are all IC, you don't know anyone else's favor unless it's revealed in discussion of a service. This may help or hinder you.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

Neel suggests that in a F2F game, this would be publicly discussed prior to the start of play. It sounds like (since the name and favor are the only characteristics you have) there is effectively a "character generation" phase that is done publicly.

We'll know for future rounds and try it the other way.

For this round, we'll go with Neel's suggestion that "The Empress does not like to be surprised by Boons Requested", so try to work it in to your services.