Gralan Updates

[Andreas the Wise]

Greetings to our good friends in Shireroth! It's nice to see all that secession stuff sorted and Malarbor's awesomeness continuing to grow.

Since our last update, a lot of exciting things have happened in Gralus. A long Skype conversation between some of our leading citizens has led to a number of exciting ideas, most of which are now fully developed. We've given recwar a reboot, trying to come up with something that would resolve issues of disputes, descriptions and crazy missile launches, and also treat magic natively (unlike trying to impose a magic charter on Anunia/SNARL). What we've ended up with is a really exciting points based, division based framework, where your points represent resources, which are consumed in attacking, defending, moving and recon. Depending how awesome your tactics and backstory for your attack are compared to your opponent's defence, you'll get a tactics modifer chosen by the judge, which will determine how much damage they take (based on how many points you committed to the attack). We've given it a lot of further thought and are now having a test recwar starting next Monday. We're very excited, should be lots of fun.

A recwar system like this allows us to be much more flexible in magic, and that's exactly what we've done. While the details aren't quite sorted yet, we're going with the approach of creating a meta-system within which people can create and RP their own magic systems. Gone are the days when the whole world has to change from NCM to CCM when we do. The meta-system will have six overarching rules of magic which define how magic works in the world, and cannot be broken - very much like how physical laws determine how non-magic weapons work in the world, and cannot be broken. It will soon all be written up nicely in our guide which will be an OOC explanation of everything within Gralus. Pretty neat, eh?

Also neat is our shiny new wiki which is slowly getting populated. We're trying to make it a resource with a lot more direct and long term use - so we're adding things like pages on all our main characters as well as nice infoboxes and pictures for our articles on cities and regions. We're also hoping to soon install a mod that makes wiki accounts the same as accounts for our phpBB3 forum - won't that be awesomely useful!

On the IC front, we've been having some interesting events. Nargoth, our previous Lord General, is being tracked down (he was wanted for terrorism, though we expect he didn't do it). Meanwhile our new Lord General (me) has announced an exciting new institute to develop exciting Gralan military stuff and train crack teams in magic and non-magic fighting. The LG's also dealing with an influx of draconians from New Malthar and hoping our famed guild, the CAA, will return to Gralan soils and the defence of the Empire.

Finally, we continue to be excited by the awesome work VBNC is doing with the SCX, which now includes dividends every 60 days, and a host of other new features coming out soon.