Life on the server

You make your character in a private scene before you arrive: a background, a name, a face built from the game’s own parts, and a description other people read when they look you over. Men and women can be played.

Nobody knows your name until you tell them. There are no names over heads: you introduce yourself, with your real name or any other, and people can keep their own name for you (“Remember as…”). A hood or a closed visor hides your face, and with it every name.

Each account has two characters. No coin or goods pass between them, and what one of them knows, the other doesn’t.

At the end of a fight you go down instead of dying. Others can bind your wounds or carry you. If nobody tends you, a watchman comes for you after a while (near Sedletz, a monk), carries you off, and you wake at the infirmary. Outlaws and the accused wake in jail instead.

The blow that put you down leaves a lasting wound on that part of the body until the infirmarian treats it.

A character dies only by a finishing blow, by a court’s sentence of death, or by the player’s own choice. Every death dealt by another player is reviewed by staff before it is final.

Every trade is real work done in the world, step by step, at a workstation, with tools that wear and goods whose quality depends on who made them. Some work takes days: beer ferments and hides cure while you are away.

No trade is self-sufficient. The smith needs the miner, the charcoal burner and the tanner; the baker needs the farmer, the miller and the woodcutter. Silver ore cut by players becomes the coin everyone spends.

A newcomer always finds paid work: in the fields and woods of the settlers’ lordship, in the Crown’s mines, or as a lay worker at the monastery.

You may rob, steal, cheat and fight in character, and the world answers. People who see a crime remember what they saw: your clothes, and your face if they were close. Guards come in numbers that fit the crime. Roads and districts grow quieter or more dangerous with what happens there, and people change their habits.

Crimes are reported to a guard, a reeve or a bailiff and become cases. Judges are players who hold the office: the town court sits in Kuttenberg, the Crown’s court covers the rest of the Crown’s lands, lords judge in their own lordships and the abbey has its Church court. A summons goes up on the notice boards; whoever doesn’t come is judged in their absence.

Sentences are fines, paying back the victim, the pillory, the gaol, banishment and outlawry, and for the worst crimes death, which staff review first. Striking someone is an assault, though most people forgive one light blow if you say sorry in time.

Two people marry before two witnesses, and the wedding goes into that place’s parish book. Families share a name and a home, and a will decides who gets what when someone dies. The dead are buried in a churchyard, and masses can be said for them. Confession is heard in a confessional, the parish priest asks for tithes, and the Church can excommunicate.

The bells ring the hours from every church and chapel, and Sunday is Sunday: the days of the week are the real ones.

Sedletz is a working Cistercian monastery, with its monks, its day and its bells. You can join as a novice and take vows as a monk. The Knights Hospitaller keep a house there, an order players join with its own ranks. Someone fleeing the law can claim sanctuary at the abbey.

A lord swears fealty at Kuttenberg and receives a sealed charter for a lordship: a seat, its villages and a treasury. The lord judges in the lordship’s court, sets the house dues and the tolls within the Crown’s limits, and keeps a steward who reads the accounts. A lord can hire patrols for the roads.

Coin moves between the seats as money shipments, by rider and escort, and a shipment can be robbed. Every week each lordship owes the Crown its share. When the Urburer calls a muster, the lordships send their men.

A lord who lets the roads go lawless, or stays away too long, is called to account and can lose the lordship.