Exploration

Traverse 13 wondrous planets with a life-sustaining and magic-emitting main sun, Adoria, and its sister, the dying star Tawdry Dwarf. Each planet features a gate to its own hell domain, found in throne rooms of extravagant labyrinths. Exploration is not just travel, but discovery, challenge, and encounter with the unknown.

Backgrounds and Mission Statements

Backgrounds: A character’s background describes their personal history, upbringing and formative experiences before play begins. Typical backgrounds may include details such as family, culture, education, hardships, and pivotal events that shape worldview and personality. Your background is a foundation for roleplay, providing depth and context, and may include features like family ties, prior occupations, secrets, and cultural influences. Use your background to inform decisions, relationships, and how you respond to the world around you. All background information is logged in the character journal, and, when they're least expecting it, characters will often discover new information about their background.

Mission Statements: Every character has a mission statement, which is their central goal or driving force. This could be revenge for a past wrong, a pursuit of freedom, devotion to a cause or deity, ambition to become a leader, the search for lost family, or any other core motivation. Mission statements can evolve over time as the character grows, and is a powerful tool for shaping narrative and roleplay. Mission statements are logged in the character journal, and completed missions may be archived.

Prestige and Legacy

Prestige in SorC measures your character’s identity, reputation, and ultimately their legacy. Prestige develops through your choices, actions, accomplishments, and even failures. It determines how NPCs, creatures, and other players respond to you, whether it's with respect, fear, admiration, or hostility. Your character’s profile (appearance, race, class, attire, reputation) is the world’s first impression of your character, but prestige grows as you play. Achievements that build reputation, a big part of prestige, may be applied as your character’s title, but you must keep the title for a certain period of time before you can save it and add new titles. Saved titles can be switched at the player's will; however, shamed titles are applied by GMs, and this can cause strife to the character, even leading to bounties, and other misfortunes, including being killed on site.

Stance: Stance reflects a character’s conscience and moral compass, based on alignment, religion, and politics. It evolves as you interact with the world, face dilemmas, and choose sides in great conflicts. Stance represents your relationship and standing with various factions, cultures, and organizations. High stance with a group brings favor, while low stance can mean suspicion or trouble. Stance opens up new avenues and items between your character and other factions in a good, bad or ambivalent manner. Your stance changes as you make decisions in the game world, so as you do favors for on group, even if you're associated with them, you'll lose stance if you do favors for a group they oppose.

Alignment: Your character may be Lawful, Neutral, Evil, or anywhere in between, and this alignment influences behavior and how you are perceived. Characters don't choose their alignments, they earn them by their actions. Characters must sometimes adhere to certain alignments to keep their stance with others.

Discipline: Discipline describes your position on religion, ranging from Ambivalent, Asmodeum, Moralism, Naturality, or Norkal, to other faiths and philosophies. Discipline paths can have prerequisites like alignment, pilgrimages, or academic study. Many classes and vocational schools require a particular discipline and those that want to pursue this, must follow the respective conduct.

Politics: Your stance on politics - be it indifferent, ambivalent, partisan, or centrist - can affect affiliations and opportunities. There are many advantages to being politically inclined, such as; diplomacy, trade, and power.

Prestige, similarly to alignment, is not chosen directly, but is shaped throughout your character’s journey. Affiliations and associations require earning faction stance and reputation through actions, quests, and choices. Titles, whether they be Boasted or Shamed are earned or assigned respectively, each with positive or negative values, and can be highlighted or swapped, by you and the gm respectively, as your character’s story unfolds. Titles and shames can both provide advantages and disadvantages, depending on the point of view perceiving them. Shamed titles may dissipate with good deeds or become harder to remove with continued wrongdoing; however if there are witnesses to the events they'd either need to be manipulated to forget your bad deeds, or they'd (and anyone that believed them) need to be done away with entirely. But, shamed titles can dissipate with work.

Titles and achievements, such as Dragon Slayer or Master Alchemist, bring reputation and bonuses. Conversely, negative actions may earn infamous titles like Frog Skinner or Elder Thief, which influence interactions and consequences in play, but again, it depends on who or what is judging your character. Evil beings don't look at bad deeds rge same way lawful ones do.

Legacy is the lasting impression your character leaves on the world, built from years of play and accumulated Prestige. Legacy persists beyond your character’s lifetime, reflected in stories, records, and the world’s memory. Your Legacy, which begins while your character is alive, will also be viewed differently by m different hosts of Essentia. How far into Essentia, or how long your legacy carries on will depend on the significance of your character’s achievements and feats. There are many game modes, features, quests and trials that will lead characters into epic/memorable.

Reputation, reputation, affiliation, and association all play a part in your character’s Prestige and Legacy, shaping the opportunities, challenges, and relationships encountered throughout your journey in SorC.

Home & Family

Your home and family are more than flavor, they’re a living part of your story and your character’s legacy. Track your home and family details in your journal, whether you possess a humble tent, a wagon, a modest village hut, or a sprawling mansion on a grand estate. Some adventurers travel light, carrying their lives in a pack, while others build lasting roots in Essentia’s lands.

Home: The nature of your home is entirely up to you (and sometimes, fate). It could be a tent carried by a loyal henchman’s horse, a rustic cabin, or a vast estate with a kennel, barn, farm, gardens and such. Your dwelling grows and changes through your journey, and the pursuit of a dedicated home offers not only stability but also a host of functional advantages, such as; farming, gardening, crafting workshops, storage for items, a safe keep for your fellowships and family, achievement and trophy displays, and a place for family and pets.

Family: Having and protecting a family is a huge task that requires responsibility. Perhaps you’re a notorious “Romeo” with a surprise family, or you’ve chosen to settle down and role play as your children and spouse. Protecting your family and the home you share with them is a vital part of your legend. To begin a family, characters may embark on the path of Love Quests (link pending). Families may grow through adventure, romance, and circumstance, and can become central to your personal story, but be careful, losing a family can change your character forever.

Plots and Dwellings: Whether you own a small plot, a cozy cottage, or a sprawling estate, your home evolves with your collectables and achievements. Expand your property, build gardens, open workshops, or nurture pets and children. The choices are yours, and every addition becomes part of your legacy. In SorC's ever-changing world, your home and family provide not just shelter, but meaningful connections, personal goals, and opportunities for story-driven play.