Shattered Kingdoms

That's why the objects that hide sex, race, and description have a specific one for leaders. If you are talking about how to contact them and what not for the induction, that would be up to the leader's creativity. A leader could send them a tell when camo-ed or have a note planted on them or whatever else they come up with.

Lei Kung

Lei Kung and I talked extensivly recently on yim and although I was against dual memberships at first, after speaking with him and adding my own ideas to correct what I didn't like heres what I think would make it work.

This is all under the assumption that current CRS is moved to the tribunals away from cabals. Cabals will no longer have headquaters that are visible, they will go back to being secret locations that anyone can get into at anytime. They are NOT fortresses or safe houses. Its possible that given the nature of secrecy the cabals may not have any room associated with them as they will probably decide on their own secret places to meet.


Okay, first off, all cabals lose two abilities. They go to a respective tribunal. FIST gets made into a class. MC will be split into the Legions and the Midnight Council. Legions will be the governors of the empire and the council will become a secretive org with its own goals.

Tribunals as stated before get to carry tribunal NPCs with them into lands they are at war with, any tribunal can always bring a NPC into uxmaln. Bringing a tribunal NPC outside of your home costs a small fee (away pay).

Which two abilities they lose can be discussed later as it isn't important at the moment, but theoretically it would be at least one offensive ability.

Now, cabals get a new ability that effects economy. It is a group spell that can either hurt a city or help a city. The power of the spell is based upon how many cabal members use it at once. The effects of the spell range from ruining the economy, to draining bank accounts of people who are from the city, to killing named NPCs in the city for semi-permanent amount of time, raising shop prices dramatically...the impact felt will be based again on how many cabal members participate, more on that in a second.
The helpful version of the spell will help counter the effects of another cabal's harmful version of it. It may restore some dead NPCs, it will lower prices for all goods in the city drastically, it will restore damage done to the economy and make guards spawn cheaper...ect. Details on the exact specifications of what the spell does can be updated by dulrik based on what code he puts in for city warfare.

How the spell works for cabal members. The cabal members must be present within the city they are to effect. When using the spell they lose all their powers for X amount of time. The amount of time the lose their power is inverse to the number of people that join in. The amount of time the spell lasts and its power is proportional to how many use the spell.

In laymen's terms an example of this would be. 3 adepts cast blight on exile. They lose their powers for 4 real life days. The spell lasts for 1 real life day and inflicts small damage on the city. 10 adepts cast blight on exile, they lose their power for 2 real life days and the spell lasts for 3 real life days exacting a terrible toll. Now in theory, there would be a minimum down time for the cabal to lose its powers. even if you had umpteen million adepts they will lose their power for at least 1 day. And there should be a maximum damage too, or at least a point where the returning dividends should make it not worth going past.

Cabals would gain a new skill - cabal robe (arbitrary name for now).

Now the purpose of cabals is to be secret and we are going to fix it so they are. This skill will aid in that but let me cover the entire cabal secrecy movement. No concentration will be used to cast cabal spells. There will still be an amount of time it takes to cast it, but you won't see anyone concentrating on the spells. eight people in a room and suddenly deamon gate opens. Person number 4 cast it but no one saw any concentration and they have no way of knowing who it was.

Now the cabal robe comes in 3 types. Leader, member, inductee. Only the leader can create all three robes. All inducted members can make the member cloak. The inductee robe is for the leader to give to someone he wishes to bring into the cabal. While wearing the robe, no one can tell who you are. All any person will see is.

a robed humanoid is here.

This goes for griffons too.

I am going to stress again that the purpose of these robes are to keep people secret. So lets dispense with all the "oh but griffons aren't humanoid" shut up, its magic.

Moving on.

Anyone who dies while wearing the robe, all their things are immediatly junked and their corpse is made unidentifiably by magic. So while a cabal may decide to mount up and charge with no one able to tell who they are...if you die you lose all your lewt. While wearing the robes no item can be located on you. As far as being tracked goes, I would suggest that anyone wearing the robes not leave tracks. This steals from a certain cabal ability so I would add something to that particular abilty (such as that it allows people to climb mountains and walk on lava in addition to what it does now, its fiting with that cabal's theme).

Now, cabal chat channel will be changed. Currently the way it works is that if you chat on it you see

[MIDNIGHT] Slayne: Kobe, I'm leaving you in jail.

All cabal channels will be changed to this.

[MIDNIGHT] member: We have completed your task master.
[MIDNIGHT] Leader: Excellent.

No ones name will be shown. Everyone will be seen as member, only the leader will be different. This is to protect members from themselves. The leader himself will see all member's names but only he. Typing who will no longer show cabal flags beside fellow cabal mate's names. At the bottom of the who list you will see [MIDNIGHT] 6 members online, but unless you are the leader, you'll have no idea who they are. The leader will still see the flags beside the names however.

Cabal leaders get an extra cabal chat command, pcb, or personal cabal chat. Where as cb is global, pcb will be directed at one member.

examples as slayne I would type
pcb kobe I hope you rot in prison..
Kobe would see [MIDNIGHT] Leader: I hope you rot in prison.

all cabal members would receive lcb addition which means leader cabal chat so they can privately send their leader a message which works the same way as above only the leader will see the name of the person.

Leaders will also be the only members of the cabal that can't join a tribunal.

Leaders will also be given a more extensive list of punishments for members to keep their cabal in check. Tarnishing will have a graver consequence than merely taking cabal powers away. Perhaps all abilities will be lowered in some way. I was thinking something along the line of having maledictions inflicted on the memebers, skils and spells being stripped or weakened down to fair...ect ect. This can be hased out later just know that leaders need more leverage in controlling their people than a mere tarnish or uninduct.

Now some of you may wonder why all the need for this extra stuff.

With these addition of the robes, people will IC have no way of knowing who is in a cabal, ever. (at least not without using some weird twink method). Cabal members may choose to reveal themselves to each other but the purpose of changing the cabal chats is so that secret members can REMAIN secret even from OOC means. No one will be able to join a cabal then delete 3 days later because they got mad at someone and spill the list OOCLY. This is very important to me and I'm sure most of you can see why. The leader should be the only person to ever know who the entire cabal membership is. You will join a cabal blindly and follow its leader blindly until a time has come that you are trusted enough that someone reveals themself to you. This allows for people to recruit almost openly or at least not have to watch someone for 5 weeks to decide if they are worthy, you can invest any newb and not worry about breach of security since its possible they will never know who their co-conspirators are.

When it comes to inductions, leaders can make a temporary initiate robe that they can plant or somehow give to the person they wish to induct. (A note saying a location to meet, use your imagination on how to get them and the robe together) Then the person can be approached by the rest of the cabal with everyone robed so no one knows who anyone is. It would look something like this.

A grandly-robed humanoid is here (leader)
a robed humanoid is here
a robed humanoid is here
a poorly-robed humanoid is here (initiate)

Then they can do their induction.

The initiate robes will disentegrate on command of the leader, or they can be changed on command to a member robe. Initiate robes grant the same corpse desctruction that the others do, but they don't junk eq. (this is so people can't abuse them to trick people into meeting them for a cheap junk via voodoo or something else).


Essentially, your leader could be a beggar on the street and you may interact with them in the most innocent means every day and never know.

Now, tribunals have a honorable discharge and a dishonorable discharge.

With honorable discharge a tribunal member will not have an oath breaker flag and can jump to a different tribunal. With dishonorable they will receive a dishonorable flag and when anyone tries to induct them into an tribunal they will receive this message

This person is known to have served dishonorably in the past! Do you still wish to induct them?
(Y/N)

So you can still induct this person, but beware. Cabals may need to hop to a different tribunal but they will need to rp their way out of it honorably.

There will be no cabal hopping, once you're in a cabal its for life. If you're cast out you can never join another cabal but may be reinstated. Tribunals will not know that you were cast out of a cabal if you go to join one.

So what does this give us?

A ton of possibly combinations of cabal/tribunals to keep things really spicy for the powergamers and roleplayers as well.

You may be a keeper and secretly a druid with access to 3 druid spells or even an legionnaire with 2 former MC abilities and secretly have 3 hammer abilities.

The combinations with classes should make things really interesting.

(I wondered how to keep things secret with cabal skills and spells its pretty simple. With things like IA there would be no message when it occured, whatever you were IA against would simply miss. Same with other similar skills and spells. Lei kung and I came up with a way to make all of them secret but I won't name them all in the forums here for secretive purposes. Though there may be one or two that just need to be changed accordingly or given to another class and then replaced with something designed for secret stuff).

I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, but thats a long post already so I'll break here and update when I remember more.

[REDACTED], Lei Kung assimilated Cannibal Agent Smith style.

Hmmm . . .I still this as something being that no one will ever truly want to be a non-trib/cabal again. Independents need something that would be useful to them, and if so, then I think this was extremely well thought out.

Independents get nothing now. I don't see any reason they should get anything later.

I think "robed figure" would look better than "robed humanoid" and take care of the griffon and centaur issue at the same time.

I like some of the suggestions but I am against removal of cabal abilities unless they're to make new classes. I really don't see the point in shifting them to tribunals.

I still say the only change to be needed would be 'cb' and 'tb' for the channels.

cb= Cabal channel
tb= Tribunal channel

Yah, if you made mistakes it's your [REDACTED]...but thats the risk.

Far easier that some of the ideas.

Most of your ideas are like if congress wanted to pass a tobacco bill...but attached to the bill was the building of 3 battleships for the navy. No one is likely to get that. But alot of the posts had other agendas not directly aimed at this problem. Like...making new classes, and a WHOLE LOT OF OTHER STUFF.

For now the only problem with dual-membership is the channels.

Kingdom war-fare is a totally seperate issue. The CRS system is finally balanced to a point that no one uses it and has been used in the past to great effect in RP (the signs prophecies anyone?). Yes, it would be good to have destroyable kingdoms and what not, but that is there...not here.

Point out any problem you see with that SIMPLY. I will shoot it down in less than four sentences.

Theres no need for secret robes.

Indepependents already have all the "useful" they need or deserve. The opportunity to freely pick a suitable cabal or tribunal from amongst the various available options to which they can pledge their allegience to and thus reap their then deserved rewards

The point of the dual membership is to shift CRS and the bulk of offensive power to tribunals to make tribunals the openly powerful agents in the realms. They will have the offensive might to wage open warfare against other countries and it will work well if you look back in my ancient thread on city warfare where I outlined a way to bring crs into the cities.

Cabals then need something to make them worth getting into instead of just ignoring them and going into a tribunal alone. They also need a way to fade from being so visual in the open field now. The robes are merely a means to and end and the way I described them functioning certainly isn't set in stone. Its more the idea I'm pushing for than the how. The idea being that cabals need to be super secret as it is their perogative to control as many tribunals from the shadows as possible and to further their own agendas through infiltration into the offensive powerhouses.

My initial argument against all this was indeed that stripping two abilities from cabals was in fact weakening the cabals, but you have to look at the fact that you can change out for any two offensive abilities from any cabal currently in the game in the form of a tribunal AND you'll get a tribunal NPC to be your body guard and access to all the tribunal spells via trib NPCs. Its really strengthening cabals quite a bit once someone infiltrates a tribunal.

Cabal leaders, although they themselves can't join a cabal, will jockey for controlling as many as possible through their secret agents.

And it doesn't have to be a robe OVT it can be a mask or face paint and self inflicted razor blade scars. I merely offered examples as to how you can immerse cabals into total secrecy.

I dont know what you think and despite the fact that it all needs a MAJOR change, but I agree with what Cannibal said in all aspects.