Shattered Kingdoms

There is no law in Uxmal. Therefore, how can you enforce your law there?

Good luck bringing law NPCs into the city. I think if you do, then everything in town should become aggro. Especially the thieves guild.

I think you should be able to bring your law NPCs into Uxmal. It increases the amount of fights there, at the very least.



That makes no sense to me. The city of lawlessness, selfishness and greed will suddenly band together to stop one law NPC (who looks about the same as every other heavily armed adventurer coming into town) who walks in?

By beating the other guy with bigger stick than he has, in best Teronian tradition. Or getting your friends to do it for you.



Absolutely not. Why would they? Peacekeepers, Talons, Guardians, Legionaires and Necromatic Council members walk through Teron all the time. Some even presume to "patrol" it, in an effort to enforce their own vision of the rule of law. Or just to sate their bloodlust and gank a few unprepared, unwitting or unfleet souls. All well and good if they have the muscle to back it up. And if (or when) it proves they don't, they get ganked in return. That's how Teron works.

So what if a few lawkeeper NPCs get brought in as well. As long as they don't enforce the law in the mechanically-coded sense, they're just more grist to add to the already somewhat bloody mill.

Nobody owns Teron, and everybody pretends to her throne. That's the beauty of the City of Chaos.

All that aside, I'm completely of the opinion that leadership should remain completely kingdom restricted in function, as it is now. The issue in hand is the question and implications of allowing concurrent joint membership of a cabal and tribunal. I don't see how the question of enhancing the leadership skill in such a way relates.

It relates because even though the question “should there be dual membership” sounds like an easy question, it is not. Allowing dual membership without adjusting the way cabals and tribunals currently work is an invitation for many problems, is short term thinking on the inactive membership problem (but is still a much better solution then merging), and does very little in actually enhancing the game. In other words, unadjusted dual membership addresses the problem of inactive organizations and offers more combinations for players but brings a number of problems with it.

One of the benefits mentioned is that cabals could move more to the shadows while tribunals move to the forefront. Here is where the idea for leadership comes into play. In order for this to take place a couple of things need to happen. You will note that these ideas work synergistically to accomplish the above goal.

1. Cabal’s lose powers (I’m suggesting two, the directly offensive first, except for that which is the identity of the cabal).
2. The remaining cabal powers are made to be used in a completely concealed manner.
3. Tribunals are allowed to bring leadership affected NPCs into countries they are at war with.
4. The powers removed from cabals are divided up and given to tribunals.

What we see happening here is that Cabal’s lose some of their tactical influence. Although, by allowing dual membership and actual secrecy, cabals gain in power as a group (see previous arguments) and individuals gain by being allowed dual membership. At the same time, tribunals gain some tactical advantages that will pull them to the forefront of SK conflict. But without allowing these organizations to have open conflict (a.k.a. war) the effective result is more powerful armies that are impotent to utilize their potency. Hence there is a need for tribunals to actually battle in defending and expanding the interests of the nation they represent, hence the reason for tribunal NPCs crossing boundaries. This is much more effective and important now that there is an economy in place.

I would like to point out that under this suggestion there is no net loss of powers an individual character has access to. In fact, any given player has access to basically the same amount of powers but has options on what powers he/she would like. Remember ABC and XYZ powers would be removed from every cabal and then divided up among the tribunals. Therefore, I could have a character that joins the Hammer and then could join the Talons gaining ABC-druid power and XYZ-hammer power, or I could join the guardians and gain ABC-hammer power and ABC-harlequin power. As you can see the options per character are greatly increased as well as the options for political and tactical involvement of every player organization as a whole.

Long story short, the leadership question came up here because it is entirely relevant to the issue of dual membership, when the goals of dual membership are considered.

Lei Kung

The easist and most rational thing to do would be just to rejoin the cabals/tribunals as they used to be Hammer+ keepers again, talons+fist again.


Keep the cabal skills, give them leadership.

Midnight gets a new skill....or perhaps the current one which allows them to forge certain items could be extended to weapons and maybe more armor pieces.

Allow tribunals to bring law NPCs into places they are at war with.

Anyone can bring law NPCs into uxmaln.

-MAYBE- thats a big maybe...reinstate the uxmaln deathmark where no NPCs will sell to you and perhaps certain types of NPCs will attack you on sight..much like the black list command, only add all the guild guards to the list of attackable NPCs. Perhaps code random gangs of teronians to appear to attack groups with deathmarked members.

Note, this would be an old school deathmark, not a banish. And harlequin leaders while responsible for deathmarking, would not be able to control any of these NPCs.



To be honest though, as much rp as has gone into making all the different factions unique, I'd hate to see them go back together, but if it would help the mud then I can't help but support it.

And as much as the twink in me has wet dreams about mixing and matching cabals and tribunals with duel memberships...

I think that would be more of a nightmare than its worth.

If Tribs can bring their NPCs to countries that they are at war with, then I say that any country can bring their law NPCs through Uxmal. Seeing that no one controls it. Of course for Ayamao, this would mean that they would need some way to get to uxmal without going to a different country.

Why? All it takes is proper planning and execution. Since when did you run from something just because it might be difficult? Think about all the benefits to players, characters, groups, organization, tactics, RP (depth and breath), and the whole of SK by the interaction of all these benefits. The payoff is there, so what if it takes a bit more work to make happen.

Lei Kung

I made a post sometime ago suggesting expanded skills for tribunals which would allow them to do their job more efficiently, or at least make them stronger in some sense. Among them were the ability to handcuff/bind/arrest people, barricade rooms to create a 'ranged hole' effect (that could be destroyed either by bashing it enough times) and others. Now with the economy, it could cost money to set up a barricade (and you could potentially barricade any indoor city area in the world at increasing costs for unusual places for the materials).

Another feature I'd suggested was the ability to drag corpses (and any other items along the ground) at a movement penalty; drag bound, unconscious or sleep-spelled players around for a slightly higher movement penalty.

There was also a 'gather information' skill, but I'm not even sure that is even necessary at this point.

If you give tribunals actual tactical military training and abilities that are useful in group VS group encounters and the ability to take troops at some price per day, then you would have managed to make tribunals actually strong.

I still don't think splitting the cabal skills would be a good idea, it will only create ever more overpowered combos than do exist. Players will now find the best race/class/cabal/tribunal combos and they will be played more often. It would jsu tbe better to leave cabals with their skills.