Broken Lands Faction: Yuraquncha

From Phaeloses of Newharbour, regarding the establishment of the first trade posts of the South Oceans Company of Larn.

Good my lord,

May your storehouses be full, the king wise in his love of you, your children bringing honour to your house, your wife be a beacon of virtue, and so on and so forth.

We have heard excellent news since my last letter to you.

Events have taken a very bad turn for the Tallian colonists.

The priestesses of the local savages have bathed themselves in the blood of sacrificed beats, chewed upon their secret herbs, inhaled the smoke of sacred fires, and spoken in the language of the dead to deliver oracles as to the nature of the Tallian settlers. And their holy insights are, by all accounts, that the men of Tal are not, in fact, the gods returning.

That’s hardly a surprise to us. But it has caused chaos amongst these peoples, who are now fiercely divided. Some have sided with the Tallians. Most have stayed loyal to the war-chiefs and priestesses.

Even better, the oracles have pronounced that those who serve the False Gods are traitors and blasphemers whose crimes can never be forgiven. That means that we have a war on our doorstep, from which I expect that we can profit greatly.

In a way this is all predictable enough. These local savages, whose full name is, translated from the local tongue, something like the Ten Pure Tribes Who Follow in the Footsteps of the Fire Gods Who Graciously Sheltered the Revered Ancestors Behind the Divine Wall (more conveniently delivered in a shortened form, Yuraquncha) are held together by their reverence for the priestesses. The savages have many proud war-chiefs, each competing with one and other, but it is the priestesses who guide them, and ensure their unity.

The war-chiefs are prone to grandiose boasts, temper tantrums, and, especially if their pride is pricked, roaring threats. But they cannot shed blood unless the oracles of the priestesses permit it. Unsurprisingly these oracles usually forbid bloodshed, and chiefs who want oracles to favour them have to listen closely to the guidance of these priestesses. So, we can expect that the priestesses would not be impressed by the arrival of foreigners whom their people have started to revere as divine. The colonists are a threat to their authority. These recent oracles, denouncing the colonists and all who follow them, seem an inevitable defence of their authority.

Of course we have received desperate entreaties from the Tal colonists, who are terrified that the locals now wish to slaughter them as blasphemers. And we have made sympathetic replies, without committing ourselves to any action to help them.

Meanwhile, we have made embassies to the priestesses, and convinced them that the arrivals from Larn are quite distinct from the False Gods from Tal. We have shown them the shrines the we ourselves are building, and explained how important reverence and ritual are to us. Naturally we have sympathized with their outrage, and complimented them on their readiness to stand up for what is holy. They seem impressed.

This war seems set to become a permanent feature of the region, and, as we will remain uninvolved, this is much to our profit.

Broken Lands Faction: Tallian Colonies

From Phaeloses of Newharbour, regarding the establishment of the first trade posts of the South Oceans Company of Larn.

Good my lord,

As ever I pray that you are in fine health, in good favour at court, and such. As usual, parchment is in short supply, so please take the usual formalities as read.

I write to inform you that we are not, as we had hoped, the first to cross the ocean and establish a presence here. We were aware that the Illyria Trade Council have sent delegations and intend to establish fortified trade posts. But both they and we were chasing another. It seems that colonists have arrived from Port Tal.

They have made made camp on ancient temple ruins. The locals, being superstitious savages, believed that the temples were haunted, and so think that these exotic men who have sailed the endless ocean and driven the spirits from these temples must be the gods returning to claim their homes. They have therefore taken to revering the Tallian colonists. So, these warlike savages have submitted meekly, joyfully, to the instructions of their supposed deities.

I wish we had managed to pull off something like that.

Still, I cannot but fear that this might all end badly for the people of Tal. There are few of them, hugely outnumbered by their adoring subjects. What would happen if their followers lost faith in them, or became too demanding?

The savages believe that some centuries ago their gods raised a wall of stone and fire to protect them from horrendous magics unleashed in the far south, that their gods saved the whole jungle land from destruction. They may have high hopes for the might of returning divinities. And what might a horde of pious savages do to gods who fail them?

Broken Lands Faction: South Oceans Company of Larn

From Phaeloses of Newharbour, regarding the establishment of the first trade posts of the South Oceans Company of Larn.

Good my lord,

I pray that you are in fine health, standing in good regard with our blessed king, and so on and so forth. I am short of parchment, so please assume that the usual greetings are intended, even if I omit them here.

I thank you for the copy of the Charter which you have supplied. It is well that the king has blessed our venture. No doubt there will be criticisms. But with royal patronage these will be muted.

First, allow me to clarify the situation with regarding rare woods and herbs. There is no shortage of resources in this new land. But there is also no shortage of danger as the locals feud constantly with one and other in this lawless place, while there is a shortage in expertise for gathering such resources. So such goods are present, but hard to gather.

By contrast, life is cheap here, and so people are cheap. Slaves can be had at a low price. Either we can use these to work plantations here, or we can send them back to Larn. No doubt the royal court will benefit from the cheap labour, and mine owners are always happy for cheap and expendable workers.

I have noted that the royal Charter allows us only to buy slaves who are convicted felons. I have no doubt that when we buy slaves the seller will vouch that their captives have been convicted of something or other.

I was unsure what we could do about the youngest child slaves. We can say that we are saving them from penury and civilising them, but then what do we do when they are grown? But I have a solution to this.

The Charter stipulates that we must mourn for the loss of freedom of our slaves. The usual mourning rituals take some time, of course, and frankly I have a great deal to do. So, I intend that we should establish temples here which can adopt young child slaves. We can use them for these rituals, and to maintain the temples, so that they will become useful servants to us here. It is not ideal, but it will do until we can persuade our wise King to accept that we can trade in slaves beyond criminals; no doubt this change will come when the advantages become evident, as doctrine habitually follows the pragmatic course, just as rivers follow valleys, but this may take some time.

Beyond slaving, I am not certain what we will be able to secure here. Territorial conquest for the Kingdom of Larn seems unlikely, given the violent nature of these lands. But there may be more trade to do when we are better established.

To this end we now have two trade posts, unassailable due to their locations, and with further ancient fortifications which we can rebuild. Beyond these locations I do not advise that we expand. We will set up markets in both locations, and will see if those can grow, as the locals currently lack secure trade centres amidst the jungles. The tax revenue may allow us to become self-sustaining, and in time might allow us to impose our will upon the region if we so desire.

Indie MMO Illyriad becomes Develop Awards finalist

Indie strategy game, Illyriad, has been named a finalist in the Develop Awards for Online Innovation.

Illyriad has previously been applauded for its depth and richness, which mark it as distinct from the many browser city building and war games on the net, but this is the first major award for which the game has been considered.

Founder James Niesewand commented, “Working on Illyriad every day, the team are obviously aware of the levels on innovation in the game. The subtlety and range of strategies available to players are unique in browser strategy games, the quality of the lore has received a lot of praise, while invisibly, behind the scenes, there is a lot of cutting edge work on server-side technologies. But at heart we’re still a low-profile, Indie development team, so we don’t necessarily expect the world to notice what we’re doing. For this to be acknowledged by an award as prestigious as the Develop Awards, for our work to be considered alongside studios like IO or luminaries like Peter Molyneux, is wonderful. Everyone at Illyriad is honoured by the nomination.”

Illyriad’s development team continue to hone leading-edge, plug-in-free HTML5 innovations. At the front-end, our new world map illuminates both world continents in WebGL https://www.illyriad.co.uk/BrokenLands/Map, and at the back end our use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform allows thousands of concurrent players to interact on a single shard with realtime game state communication via websockets. Our first major content expansion, The Broken Lands, is due later in 2013.

Illyriad can be seen live at illyriad.co.uk , and the full list of Develop Awards finalists can be seen at https://www.develop-online.net/news/44031/Develop-Awards-2013-The-finalists-are