Ok, I appreciate this idea would require some major coding and would take years to fully impliment, but one of the things I've always thought about Lusternia and all IRE games is that they really haven't made as much use of personal land (i.e. manses) as they could.

A lot of people are very status concious. You spend a lot of time building up city/commune rank and if you get to some titled rank, many carry the prefix Lord, General, Baron, Earl, Guardian, Magistrate etc etc as a badge of honor/status/achievement. However if you move city/commune you lose all that and start again. There is also no way of attaining any kind of official title outside of the commune/city/guild system.

So, just as an idea to throw around, running in parrallel to the current manse system (i.e. keep those because they are good and lots of people like them), open up an immense aetherland where it is all public space. Just as with manses you can buy land in the aetherland and once you have a set amount of land you are entitled to build a castle or a manor house (at cost of considerable comms). For a given space of land with a castle you have Baron/ess (or perhaps Sheik or some other equivalent rank) of added to your honors list. With even more land, and perhaps at least one of a shop/forge/alchemy/etc or by adding other buildings you can buy (farm, stables etc etc) you become a Viscount (or Naqib etc) ... and so on up to Duke.

This then opens up lots of potential for further options like

1. With a particularly large mass of land you become a king (or queen or Sultan or emperor etc) and can then sublet parcels of lands to create barons etc within your kingdom.
2. You could buy guards for you land much as cities and communes do.
3. We could have wars between fiefdoms
4. You could possibly even put money into resources like farms that would in turn pay an annual tithe (varying depending on how good the season was, whether there were any wars that ravaged the land etc etc).
5. You could gain titles by marriage (marry the Count of Cesspelosia and you automatically become the Countess etc .. at least until the divorce)
6. You could open up a whole new skill set of archictecture and/or building allowing you to design and build specific buildings that may value add to your fiefdom (mills, granaries, taverns, guard towers etc etc) - by this I don't mean it to be the same as mortal builders, just the ability to build specific buildings
7. You could upgrade castles to fortressess, manors to palaces, etc etc

Yes, this would be mostly catering to the rich, but it gives an entirely new dimension for those people to explore RP wise. It would also open up whole new possibilities as far as family property and building offshoot communities (much like Richter has tried to do with Darknight but not really succeeded to due to the restrictions imposed by the current manse system). Finally economically it would give a whole new vehicle for sucking gold out of the economy (and driving the irl rich people to want to buy more credits to fund their expansion) - which can only be a good thing. As most people would still be tied to the existing communes/cities/guilds for power, access to skills and cheap credits it is unlikely to cause a marked drop in participation in those orgs.

While some of these things could be done inside the current manse system many of the nicer RP elements could not be.

I'm sure I've not thought of lots of other twists in such a system.

That should be its own game. Would be neat, but it kind of strikes me as becoming half the game. Also, would kind of forsake roleplay to have one big aethercity everyone can be a member of to that extent.

Not to mention all the credit saturated newbies being Kings and Queens. It'd dilute the novelty of royalty. We already have too many random Kings, Queens, Princes, etc, around the Basin. Though it's a neat idea.

While Deepnight (not Darknight!) is a player made city, it has its ties and influences in Lusternian history. This sounds like it could be it's own game almost...

I did say this was something that I thought would/could evolve over _years_ starting from the basic concept of buying public land and having that formally recognised somewhow.

And apologies to Richter on misnaming his ubermanse.

I don't feel it fits into the game. It just... doesn't mesh. Or even make sense in the context of the game. One of the cool things about Lusternia is that you basically can't function as a rgue. It's heavily org-centered. And that's cool. This aetherland stuff would mess around with that dynamic too much methinks. Also... nah. Just doesn't make sense.

It does sound like this could be it's own game. I've often wondered if it is very viable to make a MUD that works like a strategy/war game...

Yeah, I don't think this fits for Lusternia.

It's called rafermand and I believe it's gone down. It was a mud where effectively every room on the overworld could be converted into a builing and brought into your kingdom, one thing that didn't really work from what I saw (aside from low playerbase) was the concept of people working below the land owners because all newbies had the resources to have their own kingdom though I didn't really play too far into it because I felt like it was a single player game until you log in to find your kingdom oblitterated.

One thing I would like though is the ability to choose between an aethership or permanently linking your manse to one org or the aetherplex(err, districts?) or perhaps another manse, so you could say have Deepnight linked to the aetherplex in this way far off to the southeast is that other attempt at an aethercity. To the west is a small grove of trees, and etcetera.

In one version people could buy an arti? and link a room in their manse to an area (probably controlled by a ministry though this makes the aetherplex improbable) with ministerial control manses would be able to be restricted to being linked in a way that made sense.
In the second it's basically just linking one room in one manse to another in another, the primary manse would be bound to the portals in a way that would prevent an algontherine from being hatched inside. Then the manse could be linked to others, becomming similar to areas linked to each other.

either way would prevent the manse from becomming a ship and restrict the manse to being connected to only one portal room. Wars over the linked manses would be possible but really you would have to have an ooc discussion beforehand to decide on how the winner would be decided.

/Random ideas

At any rate I have a problem with leadership titles being used by people who don't have that right, for example I'd rather that Regent always meant the leader of one of the forest communes.