Announcing Glass Empires
The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
—Frank Herbert, Dune
Glass is an island drunk on the twilight remnants of its own dying empire. Twenty years ago, the immortal phoenix-Emperor abdicated his throne in the Autumn Massacre & left to cloister himself in the Temple-Mountain. Ten years ago, the Magistrates pretended to integrity while Glass’s exorbitant debts caught up with it. Five years ago, cephalopod pillagers from the center of the discworld invaded, seeking a new home. And before the Lords could expel the foreign hordes, the Mother Empress went insane.
One year ago, civil war erupted.
Glass Empires simulates pre-industrial human power dynamics on an animistic discworld where there is no distinction between magic & nature. It is about relationships, rulership, debt, and the nature of the divine. It is about factions & power. The war-band, kingdom, or business you lead is more important than your character alone.
You can play as a bank. Your Capital is a banking family’s palace. Your Followers are civilian depositors. You extend promissory loans without losing money because your IOUs are as good as silver. If your loans go bad, you suffer a liquidity crisis. If you can’t recover, your faction implodes & potentially takes the entire island’s economy with it. There are rules for this.
Your Level is your number of Followers. Lose your Faction, lose your Level & the HP that came with it. Your personal power is structurally dependent on the people who follow you. Your Retainers are both force multipliers & your primary threat vector. This isn’t B/X’s “You get a castle at Level 10.” This is “You get to Level 10 by building a warband that can seize a castle.”
Eat your enemies to gain their power. Ritually dissect & sacrifice beasts & enemy lords alike. It is as taboo as it is honored & mandatory for the pursuit of physical power. This is the source of beastmen, and it is the reason why Flower Wars have consumed the Disc.
All magic is blood sacrifice. There is no fireball that costs a “Level 3 slot.” Every spell-cast is a deal with a spirit you may have personally hunted down & trapped in a Totem. Magic is never safe, never predictable, and never free.
Gods can be killed. Multiple factions in the default setting have victory conditions that require mass deicide. The boundary between man & divinity is a matter of degree, not kind. You can become a god by getting your cult big enough.
Built for Braunsteins. This game is designed from the ground up for asynchronous PvP with dozens of contestants. This is the oldest format in the hobby, predating D&D itself & arguably dating to the original Prussian Kriegspiel wargames, all but forgotten until relatively recently.
Every important NPC & organization in the system runs on the same framework whose sole purpose is to answer one question: “What do the NPCs do?” You set motivations & resources, and the engine translates them into short- and long-term actions. The game spirals outward into actor-driven chaos without the GM having to improvise a dozen power players’ daily agendas from scratch every session.
What This Is Not
This is not a dungeon crawler. This is not a hero’s journey. This is absolutely not a game that pretends law or morality exists outside of economic & entropic incentives.
Free At GlassEmpires.com
The entire system is free at https://glassempires.com & will remain so forever. It is in an early beta. It’s playable, but rough around the edges, and I’m still filling in content, but I believe quite firmly that building in the open as soon as possible is much better than building quietly by myself. Your feedback shapes what I write next! Future updates & devblogs will be posted here on Sakiroku, so do subscribe for news & releases.
Why
I’ve been making battlemaps for years under DnDungeon & Miscellanea Maps, and I’m good at it. But I’ve been developing whole games from the ground-up for much longer, and Glass Empires is the first one I’ve felt absolutely, unshakably confident in publishing. I am very eager to present it, and to complete it.
Will Glass know your name?
Glass Empires sounds interesting. Downloaded the beta. I will try to get to reading it and possibly play it.
I will figure something out to run PvP. I got an idea that might just work.