Found at: http://etheria.org/article/articleprint/37/-1/4/
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If you wonder whether Etheria is a good world for you to play in, then read this article, it describes our philosophy and how Etheria differs from other virtual Ultima Online worlds.
Introduction - Why should I read this article?
As the intro of the game called Ultima Online tells you there was once a world, trapped in a gem which was shattered to a thousand pieces each holding a similar image of the world trapped therein... but are all worlds really the same? The truth could not have been further away - there are huge differences and as such you better choose wisely as to where you want to live your virtual life.
This article is here to guide you on your way - but I'm not writing this to list server features and to convince you to stay - rather I'm here to act as a guide and to tell to you about what I think is far more important - about the spirit of Etheria - how is it led, about it's philosophy - and about it's people.
I'll make no secret of it, the best world for one, might be the nightmare of another... thus I'll merely ask you to read this in order to find out to which category this world belongs to. Should you then decide to leave for good I shall wish you a good journey to find your place of dreams, should you decide to stay, I'll look forward to someday meet you in game.
- Firedancer
The spirit of Etheria - why the shard was founded
After first playing Ultima Online I soon had enough - enough of its abundance of power gamers, of worlds where everyone was a great fighter and mage, its surplus of goods and the generic "paradise" feeling it showed. Life isn't so easy in real I thought... yet, with all the "power" players possessed, they were still thrown around like puppets at the game master's will... and in my mind formed a dream... little later I ended on a private hosted shard and really - what an improvement! The influence of my character in game would even extend to my real life - but still my character was little less than a toy of those who ran their shard. Conflicts were inevitable - and in November 1999 Etheria was born.
That much to history - but what was this dream that made this shard comes to live?
A world of outmost realism and limitless possibilities that is centered around your character - a world whose future is not yet written - a future that you as a player can change!
To do so, all our attempts in making this world come to live centre on four pillars...
The first pillar: Role-play
The first pillar actually is you - you should become one with your character. When you join the shard, you are "born" as an adult who is a mere survivor in a cold, poor and unfriendly world. Just another lonely and freezing being looking for food and shelter... Accept that your character is just that and nothing more and life his life as he possibly would - try to be him/her.
At any time, act accordingly, feel like your character who knows nothing about school or computer science. You're nothing but a small and unimportant part of this world called Etheria, with not even as much as a history worth mentioning.
As soon as you do that, you can start to change it - both your life and the world around you. Which takes us to the second pillar.
The second pillar - unlimited possibilities
Now you are a soul in this world, but what good is it if you have no control over this life? You want to be more... you want something of your own. You want to be famous...
But heroes aren't simply invented.. they are known for their deeds. (Know that if you make up a storyline as immortal or fallen god or such for your character, then you'll find yourself banned faster than you can ask "why?")
While you are born as nothing, it doesn't have to stay that way... and even more so, because no fame can be brought from outside this shard, this allows him to become anything he can imagine within. Your character may become more powerful than you could ever imagine...
If you thought this PK with his mighty sword you saw to be powerful - think again... what about founding your own city, or conquering an empire with hundreds of soldiers awaiting your commands... Or to run a guild controlling all merchandise? Then people might really fear your name!
It won't be easy... you cannot simply draw your sword and conquer the world; true power lies in your words. Rally your friends, make them accept you as their leader, drive them to thrive, to evolve and send them on quests to expand your empire - be it worldly, religious or commercial. This is where real power lies and where history is forged - and unlike on other shards, our GM's will preferably not make quests on their own to amuse players, but rather, once you gathered enough influence on the shard, assist you on making your own events become reality - this is the right world for it!
Of course not everyone will wish to lead - most people with a hard real life would shun the responsibility and would rather serve - or at least pay their taxes to live a nice quiet life in a well organized city with flowers and shrines that you had built. I myself would be happy enough to run a small shop, to have a regular income and to spend it again in my friends bar - drinking his home brewed brand of beer.
There is plenty room for all - you can still live your life as a local farmer or a hired sword - but if you have the courage and charisma you can thrive to lead - and maybe one day you will be known as the king or hero that you've always wanted to be.
So if you just want to be a farmer why should that influence you? Because not even we can tell you what will happen, like in real life you might be well advised to arrange with your local lords and neighbours, to bribe the orcish tribes nearby, for unlike on an OSI shard, nothing is 100% safe. This is a real world, and you should be aware that your fellow players could very well influence it.
Ps: as a remark here: The generic shard language is English, however if you and a punch your fellow friends want to found a town speaking your own language it's possible too. You need however at least two English speaking spokesman to communicate and interact with GM's, and other player towns.
The third pillar: Realism
Now that you live your life in this world, and now that you have an aim of what you want to become - how do you do that? Would you just tell a game master to build a city for you? If everyone could do that, what fun would it be? The best magic sword is worthless if anyone can have one - but imagine finding the same item in Real Life!
Now Etheria is set into a gruesome background, disasters have struck the world, and as a result the planets axis had shifted. Previously rich northern areas have been covered in ice, killing the population with starvation and deserting the ruined cities, while other, southern regions are slowly warming up, waiting to be colonized and explored.
Now there are many changes brought by that in our scenario:
a.) Availability of goods
The previous powers in this world are gone - their cities destroyed, their armies starved, their temples plundered.
With the cities destroyed, their supply of food and goods have stopped - and while they are still surviving bands of creatures (mostly so called monsters) they possess little of worth - unless you can eat them you'll likely not find anything useful on them when you slay them - except maybe some old imperial gold coins - whatever they are worth. These groups simply lack both tools and intellect to craft any more advanced weaponry and tools and their only way to procure them, will be to invade your cities and steal them from your dead cold hands.
This however leads to a major guideline of this shard, which is true to 99% of all cases: Either an item was crafter by a player or it doesn't exist!
Spin this thought further and you'll come to the following conclusion: The best fighter is nothing unarmed - and it needs groups of crafters to produce good tools and weapons. Yet on the other hand the crafters need regular protection of fighters to keep the monsters at bay or they will invade your cities - one without the other cannot succeed, thus the high importance of cities and communities.
Thus a lot of the shards life will happen in the streets and homes of your cities, and rather than exploring dungeons all the time a fighter might more often find himself defending his city walls.
b.) Crafts
With more life happening in towns, crafts now are a far more an important aspect than on other shards and many players being crafters might wish to choose to stay in town most of his time (or simply not have the skills to go on lengthy dungeon crawls) – for this much more focus must be brought toward them.
Our shard does so with far more complex crafting processes that not only take more time and steps but also give you more room to experiment. Also there is a far broader range of goods that can be produced, from farming to masonry.
We have invested a lot of time to make crafts more interesting and to take them away from OSI’s double click resource -> select item to make style. Our skill system also was adapted to allow our focus on this topic. Rather than double clicking you will have to figure the required materials and processes and once you found working combinations you might wish to treat them very secretive – the knowledge of such combinations might mean the difference of being a well known and respected crafter or just that other unpleasant fellow who lives next door.
If you wish to know more details here, I recommend you to go to the manuals section of www.etheria.org and read the player manual there.
c.) Combat & Death
As the role-playing focused world we wish to be, and our high requests for realism that we seek, death shouldn’t be some state that you may simply pass – and such death will be far more fatal and lethal than on other shards. (Far more so to the illegal beings of our worlds like murders and thief’s – while tolerated principally any overdoing on their side will make it more difficult for them to return to life if slain – this is because their influence on the shard is very harmful and annoying for other, more peaceful people – and as such overly high activity of them cannot be ignored.) – Yet as death becomes more fatal, death should not await you at every corner. It will definitely be harder to die and we even have an all-new combat system to give a fighter more interaction and opportunities in battle. Wounds will also be more severe though and you are likely well advised to seek combat only in either duels or preferably in larger numbers. Once injured by a goblin horde you might not have the ability to fight or retreat properly anymore, and a friend at your sight might very well make the difference between life and death, which while not permanent, might well put a stop on your game life for a while. (Finally a time to remember real life, to eat and take care of your girl/boyfriend? But you still might wish to avoid it...)
d) Magic
Now there is no good role-playing system without magic.. it’s like the spice in your food – don’t take too much, but without it there’s a bad taste to everything.
Now most shards definitely have too much of it… even other role-playing games – you often see so much of it that it becomes a part of everything, the essence of existence – but our view of magic is different – remember the books? The old long bearded man with his funny hat sitting in his study? He could summon things out of thin air, but still he calls for his servant to light his candle… he could levitate, but still he has himself carried…. why? Because the energy required in twisting nature to do his bidding, these powers are far beyond the advantage he gains from using them.
Etheria will have little magic. Mages are mostly and widely blamed for the destruction of their old empires and the catastrophes that came thereafter. Magic is feared by most, and the fact that only highly intelligent beings can master it, doesn’t really help to it. (If playing a mage try to keep your powers mostly hidden unless you feel you are in a “safe place”).
Magic is hard to learn and requires lots of time to study. (Additionally you may find GM’s watching a bit closer over your shoulder.) And while you may find the resulting powers “awesome” to say the least… you might find it by far too draining for daily use – definitely a sword does a better job in fighting monsters than a mages spells. (Unless you consider slaying all living beings in sight, including your friends a valid approach – but since that would drain you enough to make you spend the next three days meditating only to recover, it would hardly get you deeper into a dungeon either…. Now that example sure is a bit of overkill – it is to illustrate you that as powerful as magic might become, its usefulness might still be limited.)
So far we expect to see three types of magery in Etheria:
The first would be elemental magery – drawing it’s energy from the planet, or rather from the regions around you… forming a golem out of the ice around you, or changing the flows of a nearby volcano to send a ball of fire at your enemies… This form of magery would be comparably easy… you “bend” nature instead of having to completely pervert it. Thus it would need less energy, yet on the other hand also would mean that your environment restricts the availability of your spells. Additionally the more of this magic is used in a certain area, the harder it will be to use any further.
The second type of magic to be expected would be that of spiritual beings. Drawing upon the energy of multiple intelligent beings you can channel it to serve your purpose. Using this kind of magic may equally drain your fellows. Often users of this magic tend to found “religions” uniting people in their beliefs, claiming these powers are coming from certain gods – as they find the more followers there are – the more powerful the miracles they can perform. This is fairly safe magic – as only little energy is used of each individual… but using only your own spiritual energy you can achieve little.
The last and most powerful (and most hated) magic is more or less the traditional ethereal magic: Opening channels directly to the void (the plane of existence between the universes) With this magic nothing you can imagine seems impossible, and you can create things seemingly out of nowhere… however these power are also the most dangerous to temper with, and often were mages found vaporizing themselves or worse as they lost control of the powers they had summoned…
All in all though expect mages to be rare on Etheria. The hard study it requires, and the dangerous experiments involved, the fact of the high intelligence required to use it as well as it’s limited usefulness in daily life make it only a tool very few are ready to dedicate their lives to.
The fourth pillar: Freedom
Now all these things are nice to have but what good would it be if we told you what or how you have to do things. Thus the last pillar is to give you as much freedom in anything you do as we can.
Starting from the freedom to experiment in your craft, be it mixing your alchemical potions yourself or trying to figure out what can be made of certain ores… Etheria asks you to experiment with your imagination.
Also Etheria knows of several races, each with their advantages and disadvantages, but there are no classes – each individual may learn any skills they like – only the total amount is limited – you cannot advance endlessly and you will have to sacrifice skill points in one skill in order to advance in another.
Note though that your basic stats, strength dexterity and intelligence affect the outcome of your skills far more than on other shards. Within these limits you are free though to pursue any combination of skills.
Epilogue
If this is the world you’ve dreamed of too, then we’ll welcome you with open arms. To get to know further details I strongly suggest you to seek out the manuals section of this homepage, and to read the player manual there.
Etheria shall live forever - but it's future lies in your hands...
