Details of the Game

The Lords of Terre the Sword of Destiny is an open-ended hand moderated play by mail game, set on an imaginary world, which is at the technology level of the Middle Ages. The game world has been fully created, so the players start with existing nations, armies and events. The game has sophisticated combat models, which are described more fully in “Examples – Battles.”

The game is structured around cities, provinces and nations, while tribal positions are based on Clans as part of a tribe, as part of a Horde. Pirates operate in loose federations.

One city is the centre of a province, the province can be as small as one sector or as large as you want, though in truth as each sector is 10,000 square miles then anything over 30 sectors will not really be manageable without relying on NPC’s.

Each city is made of the following population types:

Nobility / Merchants / Craftsmen / Warriors / Workers / Poor

The same is true of both townsfolk and villagers though with the addition of Farmers as villagers and no Nobility or Merchants as villagers.

People have an assumed income, which is taxed at different rates depending on their class; the player as required can adjust these tax rates.

Religions exist and people may donate to the church.

Craftsmen are the people who make things such as weapons, armour, bows, saddles, or breed animals for sale in the city market, etc.

Raw materials are produced within the sector based on the primary terrain type to calculate yields, as an example a sector with a primary terrain of mountain would yield more stone and metal. Then there are transport costs and the costs of the assumed wages to extract the items, plus the merchants profit. All these costs are then used to produce a weighted average price for those items from the province.

All weapons, armour ships etc are produced using the cost of the raw materials and the salary of the craftsmen making those items, so the cost of goods are directly related to the cost of producing them in that province.

The player can employ people or create production facilities to produce these items if they want and there are advantages in doing so.

Each sector has a disruption modifier, which directly feeds through into farming and production. Farming is directly related to the terrain type and tech level of the nation.
There are various tech levels used in the game, they are hidden from the player but are used as benchmarks by the GM, players will have to do some research to develop new ships types and armour and weapons.

As the military is a key aspect in any PBM, the system has been created to keep records at the warrior level. There are a number of unit types, the majority require no base level to allocate warriors to, however there are some elite types and others that require a certain competency. Each warrior has the following statistics, Morale, Discipline, Melee CE, Skirmish CE, Organisation, Experience, Vitality, Sword Training, Spear Training, Javelin Training and Bow Training.

The unit stats, which are used for the battles, are directly calculated as an average of the warrior stats, this means that you can move warriors into other units to improve the units stats, mix veterans with new recruits etc, cream off the best warriors, its your call. To develop the warriors you just develop training routines, apply them to the units, put the warriors in training facilities, or just rely on good old-fashioned combat experience.

At the start of the game the players are given maps of the world as known by their nation, it will include other nations, provinces and roads. The full world map is not known. Furthermore even though you as a player may know that another nation exists your character will not.

Players can play more then one character, this character can be either within the nation of their existing character or in a completely unrelated area. Actions by characters in another area that directly impact their other positions will be carefully scrutinized by the GM for role-playing reasons.

There are around 98 cities and 130 provinces, 13 tribal hordes which breaks out into numerous tribal clans and many pirate captains.

The tribal part of the game encompasses tribes, pirates, mercenary captains and religious orders, these are people that are part of a group and are not tied to a sector, though of course they may own sectors.

If this interests you then feel free to download the rulebook or contact me by clicking the "Contact the GM" button at the top of the page.

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