Feudal Feuding

Feudal Feuding
Version 1.0
By Savestate

—

Intro:

What a wretched isekai this is. Inserted into a primitive feudal hellhole. Level of technological development… somewhere around 800 AD, give or take a century or two. Culture approximately European, somehow, and only a single continent is known to exist. Let’s see what we have to work with.

—

Insertion:

You get to become a member of the nobility. Smoothly established within some position of power, with all the skills and memories you would be assumed to have.

• Rank
  How much authority do you want? Would you like to be absolute monarch of this world’s largest kingdom? If the responsibility concerns you, we could just as easily find a small manor, or some unlanded lordship.
  
  
• Location
  Where do you want to arrive? What sort of climate would you prefer? The cold shores of the Silent Sea, the deserts and jungles of the Rim? A place among the bustling trade networks of the riverlands, or somewhere nicely isolated?
  
  
• Form
  Slightly trickier, but entirely doable. You can have whatever human form you desire, in the prime of its life. The people you interact with will struggle to find any problem with the particulars of your form or identity.

—

Advantages:

Leaving you with only that would be pointless. Let’s see what we can scrounge up.

Take as many Advantages as Threats.

• Grand Banner
  A glorious banner made with rare materials and rarer expertise. Within the presence of this banner, any positive influence on your reputation is significantly amplified. It is easier to build prestige, to wield and gather political influence, to spread stories of your own wondrousness.
  
  
• Monument to Vanity
  A larger-than-life statue of yourself wrought in gold and marble. Any person exposed to its presence finds their opinions of you gradually improving. A few years living in the same building would turn an ordinary person into a fanatical loyalist.
  
  
• Silver Goblet
  A fine silver drinking vessel. Words spoken by a person that has recently drunk from the goblet are more persuasive, more difficult to doubt. Using the goblet like an inkwell, even the written word may be made unnaturally convincing.
  
  
• Red Band
  A simple cloth armband the color of fresh blood. While worn, the band prevents all weakness and incapacitation. Injuries and exhaustion and worse may still accumulate, but the wearer will retain life and action for as long as they remain the wearer.
  
  
• Warhorns
  A large collection of well-worn ivory horns. When one is sounded, every person who needs to hear the call will hear it, and know from where it came. Volume becomes as is most useful, deafening or silent or just loud enough to notify.
  
  
• Brilliant Sword
  A shining blade, undecorated yet beautiful in its flawless simplicity. While held high, every ally within several miles finds themselves bolstered- they have twice the stamina, their wounds stop bleeding immediately and are resistant to infection, their motivations are clearer and their will greater. Carrying the sword on your person at all confers the same benefits to you.
  
  
• Bottomless Bottle
  A dusty yet surprisingly sturdy wine-bottle. Everfull with a magical wine that can sustain a person indefinitely in place of food or drink, that invigorates the spirit without intoxicating. Sufficient to provide for several tens of thousands of people.
  
  
• Alchemical Vat
  A strange and complex alchemical apparatus. Running automatically, it can transmute metals from one form to another. Lead into gold is simple, but not fast.
  
  
• Black Forge
  A towering structure of black metal, within which strange lights flicker and a constant hum can be heard. Given instruction by the proper means, which you know intuitively, it can produce and precisely shape a strange black steel at a prodigious rate; tons per day. A hundred shirts of rustproof mail is only a small order.
  
  
• Ring of Invisibility
  A simple ring of pure gold. While worn, you are rendered invisible, inaudible, difficult to scent, difficult to track; your physical impact upon the world is reduced except where your will enforces it. Has no other properties of interest.
  
  
• Smouldering Page
  A large piece of parchment, constantly burning and regrowing at the ages. When information is written on this page and burned away, it is also burned in every other record, books and brains. Sturdier records, such as stone or metal tablets, may resist this burning.
  
  
• Codebook
  A compact and unassuming leatherbound journal. The codebook has an endless number of pages, and each page contains a unique cipher that can never be broken by ordinary means. To look upon a page, even removed from the codebook, is to perfectly and permanently memorize its particular cipher.
  
  
• Private Journal
  A well-worn leatherbound journal, its pages loose and its cover stained in ink. You may summon and dismiss this journal at will, and will find that it always has fresh pages. While the book is dismissed, you may peruse it mentally with a secondary train of thought that has access to your full mental faculties.
  
  
• Inventor’s Notes
  An endless shifting mound of mysterious drawings and scribbles. Searching and studying the contents of these notes, that only you can decipher, will provide you with guidance on any line of scientific inquiry, steering you away from dead-ends and providing useful info and inspiration. So long as you do not rely upon other people, your capacity for scientific research is increased greatly.
  
  
• Omniscope
  A brass telescope covered in knobs and dials. Looking through the scope and adjusting its settings, you may observe almost any phenomena, measuring heat or kinetic energy, observing cells and individual atoms. Normal physical obstructions are no obstacle; if you know where to point it, you can watch someone from the other side of the world.
  
  
• Fountain of Youth
  A pristine natural spring. Bathing in the fountain’s waters heals a person completely, rapidly bringing their body to its ideal form. The waters lose all magic once they leave the fountain, but you know exactly where it is, and have a safe, if inconvenient, route to it.
  
  
• Staff of Destruction
  A long jagged staff formed from black metal. Once per year, you may call upon the power of the staff to destroy a several square mile swathe of the world. Space simply collapses in on itself, leaving behind nothing but a permanent spatial distortion.
  
  
• Dim Ember
  A fading mote of something fragile that sinks into your chest. The warmth of some forgotten magic accumulates slowly but endlessly within you, and may be spent with the proper understanding to cast spells. A cantrip as deadly as an arrow takes a day’s warmth and a week’s research, something like a barrage of magic missiles ten days’ warmth and three months of research, and anything greater proportionately more.
  
  
• Hip Flask
  A small and unadorned metal flask. At all times, it contains whatever mundane drink you wish it to. Drinking from the flask heals all poison and disease, and splashing it on something disinfects and strips away toxins.
  
  
• Shifting Tool
  Up to 16 kilograms of any mixture of oak, brass, silk, silicone, latex, ceramic, and quartz. In response to your will, the tool can rapidly reconfigure itself into any form you can define that respects its limitations. Malleable enough that your armor doesn’t need joints.

—

Threats:

The necessary counterbalance.

Take as many Threats as Advantages.

• Rivalry
  A noble of similar stature to yourself is actively hostile to you. They will seek out your destruction.
  
  
• Insubordination
  A few of your underlings are actively hostile to you. Independently of each other, they undermine you and seek your destruction.
  
  
• Disfavour
  Your superior is significantly less fond of you. Should you have no superior, your people are generally less fond of you.
  
  
• Rebellion
  There exists a faction of “bandits” that seek to unseat you. They are well-organized under a charismatic leader that opposes you on moral grounds.
  
  
• Dire Beasts
  Worse things than ordinary animals live in the wild places of the world. All animals contain traces of the genetics of an ancient bioweapon; if not culled, they will rebuild over generations towards their monstrous origin.
  
  
• Goblinoids
  A race of eusocial goblins with a shared genetic memory and rapid asexual reproduction live on the fringes. They struggle to learn, but readily assimilate, and are capable of breeding with other organic creatures to create physically superior but sterile hybrids.
  
  
• Poverty
  You are deeply in debt, and your lands and holdings are notably poor. Even the peasants suffer from shortages of essential agricultural tools.
  
  
• Rot
  A great plague of decaying plant matter ravages the continent. Trees and crops and grasses struggle to grow; cold and hunger loom.
  
  
• Climatic Instability
  Your lands grow less hospitable- hotter, colder, dryer, wetter, their tendencies exaggerated harmfully. Storms become more frequent.
  
  
• Disloyalty
  Those you trust most- your family, your most important allies- care about you only as a pawn. They will sacrifice you without hesitation for their own purposes.
  
  
• Claimant
  Someone appears who has what seems to be a strong claim to all that you possess. They are charismatic, and wealthy, and singleminded in the acquisition of your domain.
  
  
• War
  A great war ravages the land, every kingdom thrown into intense conflict. All resources have been mustered for the sake of battle.
  
  
• Infirmity
  You are, or appear to be, increasingly decrepit. There is doubt that you can hold your position for much longer.
  
  
• Inhuman
  Your appearance is distinctly, notably inhuman. Pointy ears and unnatural perfection are the minimum- you do not look “normal”.
  
  
• Font of Life
  You do not age, and are exceptionally healthy. Should you touch another living creature, your life force will spill out into it to heal any wound or affliction it suffers from, draining you commensurately.
  
  
• Cult
  A cabal of primitive mages has made its nest within their lands. They wield dangerous words of power, and seek only the furtherance of their art, all consequences set aside.
  
  
• Arcane Blood
  The nobility of another kingdom wields a form of elemental magic, passed down through lineage. They have no regard for any noble not of their own kind, and seek to one day dominate the continent.
  
  
• Dragon Lords
  Three ancient dragons, unassailable by native weapons and intensely clever, have taken great swathes of the continent as their territory. They kill people, steal livestock, and claim tribute as they please.
  
  
• Doomed
  There is a curse upon your bloodline, affecting all your family and your descendants. Once in your life, in a moment of great need, you will fail completely.
  
  
• Disjunction
  Your insertion into the world is disrupted, taking months to years to finalize. Until it does, you struggle to recognize the world around you as anything more than a hypothetical, a game, a dream.
  

—

Yes, There’s More:

Hmm. Well that’s not nearly enough. Let’s look a little deeper, now that the basics are out of the way.

Your continent floats on the surface of an ancient star, cursed with eternal life. It is one of tens of thousands of similar continents, seperated only by the intense stellar plasma that surrounds each containment area. Life on each continent is made possible by the immense cooling pillar at the center.

This place has been running for a few billion years at least. Every 2,000 years, there’s a reset, adjusting the landscape, degrading technology and infrastructure, adjusting minds, all-in-all performing essential maintenance. You’re about 700 years from the next reset, at least on your particular continent. You should retain your advantages and most memories, but not all your skills and knowledge. You know, if you don’t escape. Want some help with that?

—

Greater Advantages:

Oh now we’re getting somewhere. These are entire forms of supernatural power, developmental paths that never need to end. Imagine them as tech trees that continuously extend themselves the more you advance. You’ll have to act as the focal point, if we’re to bring these back, which I suppose will let you restrict the use of these arts by others.

Take as many Greater Advantages as Greater Threats.

• Earth Wizardry
  By pure math, the substance of the earth may be manipulated and transformed. Immediately, this dramatically decreases the maintenance and construction costs of all infrastructure reliant on earthmoving or stoneworking. With some development, you can convert soil into its most fertile form and stone into its sturdiest form, extract metals from the earth without costly purification processes, and raise towering hive-citadels. In the longer term, you can transmute matter into increasingly exotic forms, and will eventually be able to manipulate even gravity.
  
  
• Growth Totems
  By representative totems, the growth of living things may be bolstered and controlled. Immediately, this more than doubles agricultural yields and allows disease to be suppressed. With some development, you can embed totems into people to create supersoldiers, create deadly targeted plagues, and create totem-spears that halt biological processes within their victims. In the longer term, you may construct micro-totems within individual cells, produce horrifying abominations of flesh, and manifest psychic abilities.
  
  
• Blue Rite
  By ritualism, those who die may yet linger. Immediately, this allows you to reanimate the newly dead as semi-tangible spectres, retaining all their skills but slaved to the will of their reanimator. With some development, you can reanimate more ancient dead, convert spectral essence into strange materials, and create more complex and capable forms of undead. In the longer term, you may fuse souls to create powerful spirits, construct unassailable spiritual realms, and anchor yourself to the world as an unkillable lich.
  
  
• Sign Glorious
  By the proper markings, force may be called into the world. Immediately, this allows you to drive carts without animals, ships without sails, mills without wind or water. With some development, you may build skyships and structures without foundations, enchant weapons to strike with greater force and armor to negate impacts. In the longer term, your signs can manifest increasingly diverse and esoteric forces, and bolster arbitrary things.
  
  
• Abyssal Ichor
  By careful alchemy, you may create the blood of something from the deep. Immediately, this allows you to create lakes and rivers and deep aquatic chasms. With some development, you may augment people with powerful aquatic mutations, submerge whole swathes of land into a strange sea. In the longer term, your ichor muddles distance and distinctions, allowing strange powers to more easily work in unison and focused abilities to act upon greater expanses, and manifests anything that could be plausibly derived from the qualities of a primordial sea.
  
  
• Symbolic Will
  By the interactions of symbols carrying meaning, logic may be carried out. Immediately, this allows for crude computation via ink on paper. With some development, you may construct intelligent inkminds, carry messages between far-distant papers on the absence of a medium, create living constructs of fluttering paper. In the longer term, you may create inkminds with ever-greater cognitive ability, and manifest quasi-real forms through sheer logic.
  
  
• Condensive Synthesis
  By costly fusion, something greater can be formed. Immediately, this allows you to fuse similar items to create modestly superior items of the same type. With some development, you may enhance tools, infrastructure, magic, and people in more esoteric ways, transform bulk commodities like water into varied and useful materials, unlimit people’s growth over time. In the longer term, you may pursue endless growth in sheer quality and supernatural potency constrained only by resource availability.
  
  
• Emergent Order
  By its own nature, things trend towards order. Immediately, this improves the efficiency of everything to a moderate degree. With some development, your economy will work better, hierarchies can be simplified and collapsed without loss of effectiveness, maintenance requirements decline, and corruption can be naturally ground away. In the longer term, fate and probability becomes an instrument to wield, and the future can be known.
  
  
• Dreams not Forgotten
  What once was is not forever lost. Immediately, people become more than they were- wiser, cleverer, more aware of what they want and better at using what they have to achieve it. With some development, lost legacies may be taken up once more, allowing people to accumulate strength, heroic nature, and lost lore. In the longer term, there is an almost endless ocean of loss to be brought back into the multiverse.
  
  
• Prismatic Seal
  By precise craft, dangers may be sealed away. Immediately, cargos can be folded away into spatial pockets and foodstuffs can be held in stasis. With some development, terrifying monsters or whole armies can be sealed away via careful preparation, physical space can be folded to ease navigation, and energy can be contained for later release. In the longer term, space can be twisted like putty, and increasingly profound and esoteric things can be bound, limited, or sealed away.
  

—

Greater Threats:

As was said before: the necessary counterbalance. These… will also start weak, and worsen.

Take as many Greater Threats as Greater Advantages.

• The Living World
  The natural world slowly begins to wake, and slowly begins to hate. Over the next hundred years, the trees, the soil, the mountains, the water, the ore, all things not brought under the dominion of man, will become animate and violent. Mines will actively try to collapse, rockslides will target villages; at times, stones will fly from the soil to strike at a human.
  
  
• Darkened Skies
  The sun above begins to go out. Cooling mechanisms adjust to compensate, preventing the continent’s freezing, but ecological devastation is bound to ensue. A simple death of hunger and darkness looms.
  
  
• All Rise
  Every scrap of flesh that was once part of a living creature will reanimate and try to kill. Simple violence can put the undead back down, but nothing short of fire, acid, or other transformation can prevent continued reanimation. Even ground to a fine paste, dead flesh will reanimate as a sort of amorphous blob.
  
  
• All-Cleansing Rain
  A function of the reset mechanism is activated improperly. An increasing portion of the rainfall will carry a magic of undoing, that will erase mankind and mankind’s influence on contact. A single raindrop can only erase as much as its own volume, and only until it hits the ground, but it adds up easily.
  
  
• Stellar War
  Someone, on one of these feudal stasis continents, has found a method of traversing the deadly inferno seperating containment zones. Others have come to copy them, and now an increasing number of multi-continental starfaring empires war against each other. In time, one will come to your little continent, seeking fresh resources; their technology is quite advanced.
  
  
• Fae Thickets
  From the darkest, wildest places, the Fae emerge, endlessly hungry and prideful. Their lands are entangled by vicious thorns that tear at the spirit, and far vaster on the inside. From fantasies, they can weave artifacts and soldiers and new fae nobles, and every slave they capture permanently increases their resource base.
  
  
• Deep Dwarves
  From the depths of the world, the dwarves emerge, endlessly greedy and arrogant. They eat into the very roots of the world, forging mighty artifacts from the foundation that maintains the continent’s stability and waging an endless war against demons from within the cursed sun. They are more than happy to shunt threats they do not care to handle to the surface, and to flood invading armies with torrents of solar plasma.
  
  
• Romans, I Guess?
  From the firestorm at the continent’s edge the romans emerge, driven to assimilate and expand. The ancient roads heed their call, granting them incredibly swift movement and shifting to point to whatever destination they seek. Anyone they conquer becomes yet another roman, assimilated spiritually and physically, and their crafts and soldiers are unnaturally effective for this.
  
  
• Monstergirls
  From another world, monstergirls emerge, endlessly lustful and little else. They are physical potent, possess unique magic, do not need any sustenance beyond sex, and breed rapidly provided they have sufficient human captives. All monstergirls emit a corrupting influence, tainting the world and its people, reducing them towards lustful near-animals.
  
  
• Gameplay
  From an optimal starting region, the new player arrives, caring only for victory. They do not live as normal beings, spending gold and food and metal to rapidly create and upgrade units and structures, with access to straightforward spells and skills and magic items. Under the control of a single guiding intelligence, aware of everything not smothered by the fog of war.