Guide to Ruling

You are the petty-king/queen of the realm of Rockhill, a rather tiny and insignificant fief. You command barely fifteen soldiers to your garrison and a few minor nobles who act as your guard. Your town is wracked by frequent famines and crop failures, and you are beset on all sides by brigands, greenskins, and creatures of the nite.

But the Ten have blessed your rule, and you will be damned if you let your kingdom fall into darkness.

This guide will teach you the basic tenets of being a ruler, how to use the royal equipment provided to you, and a few pointers on being an engaging ruler. Keep in mind you don’t necessarily need to be an effective one.

Ruler Philosophy

Historical real-life nobility were rarely the best people suited to be in charge of a kingdom. They could be petty, stupid, arrogant, cruel, psychotic, plain weird, or a combination of all of the above. They were also in their political office for most of their lifespan, and their legitimacy was often backed by a religious institution, powerful in and of itself.

With all that being said, you are not under any obligation to play a king who is “good”, or cleaves to conventional modern morality. You are perfectly within your right to play a tyrannical jerk of a ruler. But in order to promote an enjoyable round for people, it’s important to remember the following points.

1. Don’t break the rules. Obviously, the rules still apply to you. Play a realistic character and don’t break the immersion of the setting.
2. Don’t be impossible. If your ruler is a tyrant, or even if your ruler is good, they should be able to be convinced to do compassionate or cruel things, respectively. It’s advised you pick at least one character whose advice your ruler will listen to. The rest of the royal family, the Hand, the Priest, or even the Jester can all be people whose advice you prioritize, and make you do things you wouldn’t normally do.
   1. Don’t ban all of [insert race here] from the town right off the bat. You can definitely be racist against elves, dwarves, tieflings, what-have-you, it’s just not very OOCly fun for towners of such-and-such race to be completely thrown out of roleplaying with the town. Instead, consider enacting harsher laws or steeper taxes on the races you want to be discriminatory against.
3. Interact with people in-depth when you can. Obviously, you can’t roleplay with everyone, but the people playing opposite you are trying to play a character and tell a story. Talk to them, give them opportunities to do stuff, and they will return the favour.

As a side note, the monarch of Rockhill technically does not have the divine right of kings. To have divine right as a monarch means your authority is unassailable by any earthly authority, including the head of the church. But since the monarch was officially appointed by the Priest (who is generally going to decide based on line of succession anyway), they can be removed by the Priest in equal measure. So, if you want to keep your throne, don’t piss the Priest off. Or do!

Equipment

Whether or not you are a sole King or a sole Queen, you will have a few very important items on your person.

• The lord’s scepter, a diamond-headed scepter that can electrocute or silence anyone with a bank account with the meister. Electrocuting someone is the rightmost USE intent; silencing someone is the bottom USE intent.
• An old sabre in your closet. Useful for killing fools at close range, since no matter your gender you will have very good sword-fighting skills.
• The crown of Rockhill. A symbol of your sovereignty! Allows you to access the functions of the throne of Rockhill, which we’ll get to in a minute.
• The master key, which will spawn on your belt or somewhere nearby in your room. Has access to every door in the game; as such, DO NOT LOSE THE MASTER KEY. You should probably only give it to the nobles directly working for you, like the Queen, Hand, or Steward.

Your Throne

The throne of Rockhill is probably the most important tool you have at your disposal. With it, you can exercise your authority through making decrees, new laws, and changing the positions and responsibilities of your subjects, among other things.

First, buckle yourself to the throne the same way you sit on any other chair, by click-dragging yourself on to the sprite. The throne will give you a list of commands. You can also say “Help” if you need the commands repeated.

To use a command, say the command; the next text you speak will be put into effect as a law, decree, announcement, et cetera.

• Make Announcement: Announce something to your realm with big red text and a loud bell. Useful for making everyone aware of some important current events.
• Make Decree: Essentially, a status update or reminder of your judgment on some issue or another, that will regularly be announced to citizens through the SCOM. You can use it to announce you’re seeking suitors for your heir, that there’s going to be a festival in three daes, or that curfew for elves is at dusk.
• Make Law: Adds a law to the list of laws already present.
• Remove Law: Say the number of the law you want removed to remove it.
• Purge Laws: Gets rid of all the laws in the realm, for you to add your own or to declare anarchy.
• Declare Outlaw: Say someone’s name to declare them an outlaw. This will cause them to be immediately recognizable as an outlaw on examination.
• Set Taxes: Say numbers to set the tax rate, from 1-99 percent.
• Change Position: Change a subject’s job. That subject has to be within a few tiles of you to have their position changed. Select their name from a pop-up menu, then go through another menu to select the job they should be swapped to.
• Summon Crown: Brings your crown back to your position (if you have a way to access the throne, of course).
• Nevermind: Cancels the throne commands.

How to Rule Effectively

Again, you have a lot of freedom to move the round basically as you wish. You can plan a festival, organize an expedition to retrieve the Grail of Psydon, call the royal court to order to debate on new laws for the town…

But let’s say for this round, you’d like to be an effective monarch. You want your coffers to be full, as few of your citizens to die as possible, and everyone to be dissuaded from starting a rebellion and putting your head on a pike. Surprisingly, this is a lot easier than being a ruler who isn’t good at their job.

Basic Pointers

If you’ve ever played command on any other Space Station 13 server, you’ll find that the rules of leadership are pretty much the same whether you’re roleplaying in a sci-fi or medieval fantasy setting. They boil down to:

1. Delegate your work as much as you can. If someone else can do it, you shouldn’t be doing it. Ask your Queen or Hand to meet with petitioners, ask your Steward to order the soilbride to bring grain to the keep, and so on. You were raised to believe that people should leap to your will, so act like it!
2. Keep your citizens informed. Announcements and Decrees are a great way to do this. If there’s rumors of vampires in the woods, inform your citizens of such! As well, you should also make sure your court is keeping their underlings informed. When communication breaks down, so too does the town.
3. Don’t frontline. This falls under the delegation advice, somewhat. Don’t get in the way of your guards or the garrison when a dastardly villain is about town, and don’t run off with saber in hand to combat the latest threat to the village (unless there is no guard). If you get killed, it’s going to be a whole lot of trouble for the town.

The Treasury and Vault

In the basement of the keep, there is a vault which contains the valuables of the royal family. It passively generates income based on how much valuables (which can be any item with mammon value) are inside the vault. This income is then dumped into the treasury every so often. To make the vault generate as much value as possible, you have to make some minor changes to it once you start a round.

Once you enter the vault, you should open all of the chests. You don’t need to remove anything from the chests, it’s just that the valuables inside the chest won’t be counted as part of the total vault value unless they’re visible. Once that’s done, the little notification of the vault’s income you receive in your chat will increase.

You can take as much money from the treasury as you’d like, in theory, but assuming you’re trying not to be a complete fool you should be careful with it. You can also increase the mammon in the treasury by getting the Steward or Merchant to export resources that your loyal townsfolk have collected.

Ideas for Entertaining the Round

Here are some ideas for a “gimmick” you can introduce to the round to create some fun for players.

• The Prince or Princess should be wed. How are you to find a good suitor for your precious heirs?
  • Hold a grand ball to scope out suitors and invite dignitaries from far away.
  • A classic engagement challenge; whosoever finds the Grail of Psydon shall wed your child and become inheritor of the kingdom, have the suitors run a race or perform a hunt, craft a riddle for suitors to solve.
• You are ill in the mind or body. Unfortunately, the townsfolk are suffering from your infirmity.
  • You are steadily going senile or insane. As your behavior becomes increasingly erratic, your court must decide if they should depose you before your death, or bend to your mad whims.
    • Your degree of madness entirely depends on how you’d like to play it. You can be insane already, or gradually losing your faculties due to age, and you resent it. The latter has great tragic potential, particularly if you play your court as having known you for a lifetime.
  • You aren’t as young as you used to be, but you are a devoted servant of one of the gods of duty or war (like Astrata or Ravox) and you are determined to go out fighting or prove that you are still in your prime.
    • Similar to the “engagement challenge”, you can forgo the typical line of succession to start a tournament. Whoever defeats you earns the crown.
• War will likely be coming to the shores of Enigma, and you must prepare the townsfolk! Organize the garrison to train these peaceful villagers against external threats, and have the masonry fortify the town.
• You suspect one of your court is conspiring against you, and you want to enlist someone to keep an eye on them.
  • Whether you’re actually being conspired against doesn’t matter, although this presents the opportunity for one of your court to make up a scenario where they wanted to overthrow you for some reason.
• You just think that morale could use some boosting, and you’d like to throw a fun event.
  • A ball for nobles!
  • A festival!
    • Can be a holy festival that involves lots of praying and tithes to the church, or something that involves a lot of revelry and dancing.
  • A tournament of strength/gambling/drinking/racing!
    • Make sure to offer a prize or incentive.
• The laws of your land seem no longer to fit the changing world around you. You want to summon your court, and some commoner petitioners, to offer changes to the law.
• You suspect a peasant rebellion of brewing, and you have sent your guards to root out the cause of disloyalty. If this lands on an actual peasant rebellion antagonist round, even better.