What is your favourite thing about Empire?

General
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I’m a new player joining at E4 and looking to get extra excited so I’m asking the forum:

What is your favourite thing about empire? What would you tell a new player to get them excited about empire? Anything along these lines!

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Things I like that are very your milage may vary about Empire:

  • It’s a weekend where I don’t have my phone and can just socialise with people as people
  • The community around smaller bits of the game (Anvil Hospital, my beloved group of gossips with a cause)
  • Emphasis upon constant improvement and development of kit
  • The community kit standards, which I know are daunting as all hell to new players…but the emphasis upon “keep on trying, keep on developing, keep on talking to folks about crafting and trade skills” has meant I’ve done a lot more art trades and embroidery bits than I would have without Empire
  • Weekend to be outdoors
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3

My favourite thing is that the story is living; if your character hits an obstacle in whatever they want to do, chances are it’s because of another player, and the fastest route to overcoming that obstacle is getting other players to help you.

My recruitment spiel;

  • LARP is the most immersive MMO or RPG you can play.
  • Empire is the most-attended UK LARP.
  • Your character is the hero of their story still but the world doesn’t wait for you to move it; it’s always in motion already. Sometimes that will help your character and sometimes it won’t.
  • You can play a character who’s basically yourself if you lived in this world, or play your complete opposite or somewhere in between.
  • “Gender” is practically a dirty word in the setting. It isn’t even a historical thing that’s been overcome; in it’s 400 years, the Empire hasn’t ever had gendered roles or clothes. Every nation has a costume brief but within that, wear the types of clothing that you (or your character) are comfortable in. Pronoun badges aren’t ubiquitous but they’re a normal thing and people respect them.
  • The game runs on groups. Players have achieved big titles without them but even a few characters working to a common goal or three, like an RPG party, makes it a lot easier.
  • The setting has it’s own state religion that’s different to everything in the real world.
  • Priests and mages work magic but it’s pretty low-profile, no bean-bags-for-fireballs to make you cringe.
  • The monster costumes can be amazing! Look at this war-rhino photo; that’s people powered under there and genuinely someone sat on top. There are two huge battles every event and a rule that if you want to go on the battlefield as your hero, you do the other as an orc/barbarian. So if you go out there with a thousand other characters, there’ll be about a thousand more facing you. They might not be as powerful but they get recycled so you’ll be part of a fight against 2, 3 or 4 thousand enemies and that fight goes on to change the story too.
  • But you don’t have to go fight; have a lazy morning out of character or keep playing with the other thousand-plus people who don’t do the battlefield.
  • Away from the battlefield, the event is a big political summit and festival combined. But that barkeep over there, selling booze or cake for the in-game money? They could be funding the campaign for a would-be senator, buying mana crystals to boost their groups income further, or even a secret cannibal cultist because most of the actual villains will be player characters too, making a choice to build extra game for other people. Point is, every player has an effect somewhere along the line.
  • You can play the villain if you want. It’s possible to poison, curse or murder people (or find someone to do it for you…). But the game isn’t focussed on that. Your character beats their rivals by doing better than them rather than stabbing them up. There’s a justice system and characters out to solve crimes. And player characters have faced the death penalty for their actions before.
  • It can be expensive, can’t lie. But most players are lovely (even if their character is an ar$ehole) and you can borrow a lot of stuff if you ask around ahead of a game. All you need is a pretty simple starting kit and existing players will happily help with advice on that too. And there are discounts to be had for your first ticket to give it a try -here’s my code, we both get a discount now- and worst case, if you don’t enjoy it you can probably sell most of your costume bits on for most of what you spent.
  • If you want to know more detail, there’s a huge great wiki full of info. Just look at these bits to start with, there’s 8 years of story in that thing plus “history” and setting, nobody is expected to know more than their core brief so relax.

And if nothing else, I’ve successfully hyped myself up now.

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Pretty much all of this!

Once upon a time I played Play-by-mail and the attraction was that the stories I heard about in the IC newspaper were “real”, referring to the actions of other PCs. That was with 100-200 players (Saturnalia if anyone’s interested). Empire has the same but ramped up another order of magnitude.

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