I was once an extremely avid Starcraft roleplayer. I spent hours of time carefully constructing cities and characters, although if you've ever played a Starcraft roleplay, you know how most of them end. Indeed, just getting a roleplay started was like the planets coming into alignment. An actually good roleplay with an actual ending was nearly unheard of. After nearly eight hundred attempted games, all I could come up with was probably two games that were actually fun.
The may sound psychotic to anyone that's never played one of Blizzard's games, and in fact you would be right. I tend to look back on those years with derision. Sure, I was young at the time, and one of those kids that didn't party much (obviously), but that was still a serious waste of time.
Perhaps to salvage that, or just because I really liked the universe I put together, I wrote up the general lore of that universe and kept it. I dabbled in board game design with only a few successes, and eventually created a Risk-style game based on alternate history, which I had gotten into in the course of my game design. I then got into RPG design.
I used the lore I had invented for my rp universe, and while I got a fair amount of praise from friends, the game itself sucked. it was a shallow, dry experience even though there were very interesting parts of the universe.
With the logical conslusion of my board game magnum opus Progressive Risk being reached, I've turned back to the RPG. In an attempt to overhaul the universe I've allowed four of my friends to pick/create a race that they'll follow through a fantasy historical setting and help me sculpt a convincing, interesting history.
To simplify things, we're going to use real-world dating structures, and real-world geography. Coming up with those from scratch would be a bit too much in and of itself. Otherwise, this universe will have realistic physics and such despite the addition of magic. This is added mostly to avoid the general fantasy issues, as well as the godawful conventions of modern fantasy and JRPG fantasy.
Since this is going to be a roughly historical setting, expect all the conventions you get from actual history; gore, mass murder, racisim, horrific weapons of warfare, lectures, and hypocrisy.
There'll be the occasional informational documents spliced in like any decent speculative fiction/alternate history as well. Updates may have some considerable period of time (a few weeks) between them given the unreliability of life in general and trying to align everyone's schedules to fit this.
