The commands and skills and finding things.. You're not supposed to discuss it on their forums, but it's not in the help files so how am I supposed to figure it out..

Got rejected because nothing told me that Jarins are supposed to have dark skin. Well, here we go again.

It does too. It says it when you read about them. How else would I have known?

You can talk about that sort of thing in the forum. It's only IC knowledge you can't.





Sneaky of them, hiding it on the web site page about Jarin and in the chargen process notes about Jarin.

So... what do you do in Harshlands? Just play a peasant living his ordinary life? I've tried Armageddon and SoL and got tired of sitting in bars getting weird looks from strangers...

Harshlands is actually very fun. At least to me. The players are very friendly and will try to help you, unlike on Arm where everyone wants to kill, rape, and/or steal from you. I really like the crafting part too. Right now I've got to wait to get an apprenticeship though.

Oh and the admin are awesome. I petitioned for an npc to be animated and within 5 minutes it was done. I was rather impressed.

That's one option. Another is to play someone other than a peasant. Or a life that's not quite ordinary. There's no artifical "power balance" -- one person might start as a penniless beggar and another as a wealthy landed nobleman, if they like -- so basically, you can play anything (almost) that someone might do in this particular world.

Probably about half of people play middle-class guilded crafters within the Mangai (here, "guild" is used in the original sense: a trade cartel that enforces a monopoly on a particular trade and its associated skills). The rest are spread out over mercenaries, beggars, thieves, noblemen, prostitutes, clergy, soldiers, watchmen, the idle rich, cultists, fishermen, hunters, and anything else the world offers. And many people are more than one of these.

The limits are mostly those imposed by the world. It's a realistic, medieval (actually, not faux-medieval) world, with very little magic. There are always slim chances that an unimportant person might happen to change the world. But the world is inherently stable; the social, economic, and political structures in place have lasted for hundreds of years because they have measures within them to ensure their stability and endurance. The odds that you're going to be the one to overturn all of that are very slim.

Even when game mechanics don't prevent you from doing something that can't be justified IC, you're expected and absolutely required to do so yourself. For instance, suppose the city has trained men-at-arms (mobiles) as city guards patrolling in groups to prevent criminals like you from getting around. You figure out a trick to lure one off, taking advantage of their limited AI, and kill him. You then repeat that over and over since the AI's not smart enough to learn from the past. Do you congratulate yourself for tactical cleverness, or hurry to kill more before the admins change something? Not here. The guards mobilize, hiring mercenaries if necessary, to deal decisively with the threat against them; your character's corpse ends up hanging in a gibbet; and then you probably get banned for abuse of OOC. Sound like your kind of game?

You're right, I wouldn't enjoy it. I perfer participating in grandiose, epics tales with interesting metaphysics in which the world is changed, as opposed to going through the motions of "ordinary" life. It actually sounds really interesting though for the people who do enjoy that sort of thing