Empire! is a community world building and strategy game where you play great states and their leaders. You will seek to conquer a world of magic and mystery, of shattered islands floating in a tempestuous void and linked by ancient portals.

Empire! 9: The Shattered World

In a time beyond memory, the world was whole.  Great realms rose and prospered beneath an azure sky, guided by star and sun to unveil the mysteries of the cosmos.  Arcanists of unfathomable power pulled aside the veil between worlds, mastering supernal forces that empowered them to ever-mounting heights.  The realms of the mage lords feuded and reconciled, consumed and were subsumed, and in the end the unyielding might of the High Dominions forged a peace that spanned this and other realities.  It was an age of wonders beyond counting.  It would not last.  

Born in ambition, none of the High Dominions could long endure the existence of equals, and so the blessings of peace were sacrificed on the altar of war.  A war unlike those that had come before, for the powers unleashed by the High Dominions could not be controlled.  The sky burned, the earth buckled, and the very essence of magic and reality was unmade at the word of overlords that were as gods.  Yet for all their power, they could not forestall their own demise, as the very fiends they had set upon their enemies recoiled to consume them.  And thence consumed the world.

The azure sky is not even a memory now.  Old and rotting texts in forgotten libraries speak of such things as stars, or the warm embrace of sunlight.  Now the sky ripples in the myriad colors of magic, raw power bleeding through from the thousand wounds inflicted on creation and no closer to healing even after a thousand, thousand years.  Storytellers enthrall children with tales of endless expanses of earth, for all they know are the shattered archipelagos floating in the eternal void.  The civilizations of the High Dominions are no more, even their echoes having faded in the first tumultuous centuries following the Age of Terrors.  All that remains are the broken artifacts of a time when mortals thought to control magic.

Your people have matured upon this fractured stage.  Magic is a fact of life, its calcified essence more valuable than gold, its fickle tides more dangerous than the mightiest storm.  Some fragments of wisdom from the Age of Wonders endure, and from them you have transcended the desperate meanness of survival that has weighed like a lodestone on mortalkind for generations.  Tall spires rise on fresh foundations, and ancient machines find themselves repurposed and repaired towards a new destiny.  Yet ambition and greed are immortal, and the lessons of the Age of Terrors are distant things compared to the powers offered by the last remnants of the High Dominions.  In every corner of the provinces, whispers stir of Places of Power untouched by catastrophe, sources of arcane might that would change the face of the world once more.  To what end, well.  That is for you to say.

 

Welcome to Empire! 9: The Shattered World, the ninth mainline iteration of the Empire! Ruleset.  In Empire, you will take on the dual roles of a newly ascendant culture and the rulers that guide their people.  You inhabit the remains of a planet without a name, whose surface was irrevocably broken in wars that have passed into myth.  The forces of magic unleashed in those titanic struggles continue to permeate the world you live in, the roiling mass of raw magic in the void an impassable barrier to transit beyond the relatively stable boundaries of individual Demesnes.  The one way of safely traveling between these isolated archipelagos of land and sanity are the great portals, artifacts from the Age of Wonders that have endured an age of neglect.

 

If you're interested in joining the game, please join our Discord server and post in the recruitment thread. If the game rules seem complicated, please do not hesitate to ask questions on the Discord. This same community of players has been playing variations of this game for over a decade; we get really excited over potential newcomers!

 

Empire! 9: The Shattered World Team

Head GM: TheDarkDM
Technology, Artifact, and High Arcana approvals: TheDarkDM
Organization & Local Events GM: Aerin
Round Opener Helpers: TBD
Battle Collator: TBD
Table Helpers: TBD
 

Many thanks to Aedilred, bc56, Galantyne, JBarca, MappyPK, mystic1110, PlainJane, PotatoPriest, SerakHawk, Stygian, and Zayuz for participating in the rules review and editing process.

 

Empire! is based off the original game run by Morph_Bark, and owes a continued debt to its previous GMs, QuintonBeck, Zayuz, Aedilred, Rolepgeek, Gengy, Avonthes, LapisCattis, Aerin, SerakHawk, Minescratcher, and PotatoPriest.

 

Banner art credit to Noah Bradley.

Thumbnail art credit to Oscar Bartle.