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SOF Designs is in the process of creating a new Second Life role-play sim for release in Spring of 2021. This website and the sim build are all still in process. You are welcome to join our Discord or our Second Life Group to stay apprised of the development process and get sneak previews of the cultures, build, and upgrades to RPCSS. Most community polls and group discussions will be held in Discord as it is an easier platform for discussion.

The Arcovian Citadel is a natural successor to our Comraich project and is in fact set in the same universe.

It is our intention is to create a low fantasy backdrop to dark political role-play. The world is a human-only fantasy world that is by design intended to be unique enough to encourage creative expression yet familiar enough to reduce the initial learning curve.

Sim Premise

There are thirteen city-states on the Continent of Essealas which are in a constant state of shifting wars and alliances. Approximately 300 years ago, a guild from Arcovia gained control of the most advanced form of communication the land had ever seen -- nearly sentient messenger birds. This would change the face of political warfare forever. The Céon can quickly and intelligently deliver messages over long distances. How they do this so rapidly and how they are bred and trained is a mystery known only to the guild masters of the Arcovian Citadel.

The Citadel holds a monopoly on the birds and all messages. Communication can only be sent to and from a Citadel guildmember. Consequently, the small councils of each city-state are determined to keep a team of agents in Arcovia itself to assure that messages are not unscrupulously interfered with. This would further centralize much of the diplomacy, trade negotiation, and spycraft to Arcovia itself.

Unfortunately, the Arcovian Guild is not an impartial observer to the vulgarities of political practices, and maintain a nearly impossible standard of conservative moral laws. Intimidation, promiscuity, graft, drugs, and information theft are crimes -- as is practically everything else the agents must do to bribe, manipulate, seduce, steal, and bully information out of their peers.

Agent beware ...

Player Characters

This How to Join page will walk you through the general process for installing and using the hud and then direct you to various ways you can get involved in role-playing. It is our intention that a player's first and foremost goal will be to meet the other members of their city-state and then interact with all other player characters for the purpose of information gathering. As an agent, it will be your job to listen in on conversations, ask probing questions, and make personal alliances with other agents. No longer do you need to stand around thinking up a reason to talk to someone - it is quite literally your job.

Finally, all of that information will need to be reported back to one of your four head agents, who will in turn use the information to direct your city-state's small council in regards to troop deployment, merchant contracts, and espionage. In time, you may be promoted to the role of head agent and get to make the important calls yourself in RPCSS.

Further Reading

• Sim Layout
• Rentals
• Rules
• Groups

Create A Profile

When you land on sim you will be asked to approve an experience and have a hud attached, the hud will require you to set up your profile. This is really the only thing you need to do to join the sim. Applications are recommended and encouraged but optional. Read More ..

How to Get Ahead

Whenever I land on a sim I want to know what is it is I should be doing my first few weeks in roleplay. What did the sim owner imagine I'd be doing. In a slice-of-life role-play the answer is easy -- they expect me to go live my life. But in any other game that involves any type of social or political conflict I want to know what ways I have to advance.

Foundling, Servant or Slave

If you've begun your life as a founding, and intend to playout the story of a foundling I expect that most of your role-play will be working for an agent. This means you need to find another player character agent to work for, and their actions or instructions will drive your role-play. It might perhaps be better to seek out the head diplomat of a city-state, or at least one of the other head agents so that you might work for all of the agents in a city-state.

You may not wish to work for an agent or city-state and instead you will choose to play as a shopkeep. There are various shop rentals available for you.

You may also realize that you want a larger role in the storyline and choose to re-roll your character as an agent and member of a particular city-state.

Regular Agent, Employed or Otherwise

If you have begun your life as an agent, regardless of if you are already employed or not, your first task should be to find one of your city-state's head agents and introduce yourself to at least one or all of them. These head agents are tied directly into RPCCS which drives their role-play and which they should, in turn, be able to drive your role-play. Their goal should be to hire you and put you to work. Perhaps they will ask you to spy on someone, make friends with someone, or gain any useful information. Report back to them as often as feels comfortable.

While you should expect natural lulls in activity, if your head agent is not helping to drive your role-play you may wish to seek other employment -- either by directly joining another city-state, or by playing a double agent.

You should also consider your cover story, and occupation. We can't all be super-spy all the time, you might wish to engage in another occupation to flesh out the scope of your interactions.

Becoming a Head Agent

There are 24 RPCSS slots -- that's a lot of room for the community to grow and have active players in The Game. I believe that the ultimate goal should be to become one of four head agents in one of the six city-states. So how do you go about doing this?

• Wait Out: Turn over in online RP communities in SL is high. You can simply choose to wait out your predecessor and be offered the job when they fail to perform their weekly RPCSS actions. The game will automatically invite the next most active agent to be promoted at this time.
• Out Wit: The second way is to get your boss in trouble, either with the Head Diplomat, with society at large, or the wrong end of a dagger.

• The Head Diplomat has the ability to remove the three other head agents.
• Combat can cause a player to be so greviously wounded they can not perform their duties and another agent is promoted into their position.
• You can also disgrace the character so badly that they choose to return home and give up their position.

Head Agent

Once you have become a head agent (coin-master, warlord, or spymaster) you have three jobs. To receive all the intelligence produced by those agents working for you, to put your moves into RPCSS based on that information, and then to give new jobs to your agents based on what happens in RPCSS. You can of course take some of those jobs for yourself, but if you horde all the role-play you might lose your position -- delegation is an expected skill of a head agent.

Head Diplomat

If and when you are Head Diplomat you have really only one main job -- to ensure everyone else is doing their job. If they are not, then you can fire them from their job and allow their predecessor to be chosen. If you do not make sure that the others are doing their job, it is very likely your team will have no idea what is going on, or be prepared to handle conflict situations. Eventually, you may be attacked and forced into vassalage where you will essentially have a new boss who may, in turn, fire you.

Applications

Applications are optional. The Comraich application process was far too complicated and time-consuming for both players and staff. We hope that the new fiction which is inherently more adaptable to cultural shifts will eliminate the need for race/kingdom/city-state/culture gatekeeping.

We have created a #character-bio-feedback channel in discord for those who would like to receive feedback on their character backstory. Simply join discord, and find the right channel, where you can link a comments only google document for others to give feedback on.

How To

Prepare your document in Google Docs. When you are done and ready to share:

• Click on the blue share button in the upper right corner.
• Then click on the "Change to anyone link".
• Set the lower right corner option to "Commenter", then click "Copy Link" and finally "Done". Image Link
• Paste the link in the #character-bio-feedback with an introduction.

This is community feed back, not STAFF feed back. Please be patient with all levels of bios and bio commentary.

What do you need to answer

In creating your backstory, the main goal is to answer why is your character in Arcovia and why are they working as a spy or member of the diplomatic core. Keep your eye on this goal and you will likely craft a viable character for the sim plot lines.

We reserve the right

We strongly encourage everyone to share a bio and get some feed back. This is not an anything goes fiction. We simple feel that an experienced role-player can read the lore and craft a suitable character. If at any point staff feel that you are off page they have the right to request that you write a backstory for review and discussion.

Stay away from my canon

You are welcome to write yourself as a distant relative of one of the NPCs, or create names for obscure towns on the map. But you can not write a back story that impacts canon, or requires someone else to know your backstory when writing their own. I am not going to keep track of hundreds of backstories, nor am I going to ask future players to navigate other players' backstories. Stay in your own lane.

See Also

• Character Backstory

Comraich

Essealas is a continent within the Kingdoms of Comraich universe. It lays to the west of the previous incarnation of Comraich SL in 2017 and 200 years later. This incarnation comprises only human races and was populated during the invasion of the Tuatha de Dannan 1100 years ago. You will see both familiar and unfamiliar cultures in this new incarnation. Read More ..