14-AUG-2007

Pillars of Power

The first semi-official open beta for IMPERIVM occurred at a Symposion held on September 14-16, 2001. That’s right, almost 6 years ago. I had been tooling around with ideas for a fantasy world based in greco-roman trappings for over a year before that, building the gods, writing the creation and mythology of the world, and doing research. Lots of research – not to make this a historical recreation, but so that I’d have solidly plausible anchor points for the world and its story.

Along the way, it became apparent that one view of the ancient world revolved around four basic concepts: economics, politics, war, and religion. From this point, the possibilities seemed to cascade out of my head and into my computer. That leads me back to the Symposion.

I contacted a group of trusted friends, former co-workers, playtesters, artists, and general gamer personalities I knew at the time. A suite at a local hotel was reserved for the weekend and food was purchased, videos were rented, t-shirts made, and even laminated “guest passes” were printed up for everyone. In total, about 15 people showed up for a full weekend of brain-storming this new world setting, some from as far away as Georgia and Ohio.

One of the sessions we put together was: how many things can we pin on these four pillars? It became very obvious that the twelve city-states (each tied to one of the twelve gods) fit very nicely within the framework. Some connections were quick to form (Eutalas = politics and Austis = military), but others were a bit tricky. Eventually, we pinned each city-state to a primary pillar. Though the exact relationships of pillars to city-states changed over the years, it was clear that the concept had sparked a lot of creativity and, more importantly, enthusiasm.

Flash forward to the initial work on an RPG. One of the first set of notes written, was a short pdf that included some history, some world information, and a set of favored classes and stat adjustments for each city-state within a d20 mechanic system. Quickly it was decided that the traditional RPG classes didn’t fit well with the world. After some thought, I went back to the four pillars. With four base classes, a character could spend one to three levels learning the basics and then transition to any of three “character trees” for that base class – essentially giving us twelve classes.

While that project simmered on the back burner for a while, concepting started on the trading card game (roughly 2004). From the very beginning, it was decreed that the four pillars were going to play a strong role in shaping every aspect of the game. Looking at the pillars as areas of specialization led to the influence ratings which can represent personal ability or simply well-connected friends. No matter how you interpret the ratings, each character has a certain level of pull within each pillar.

As we developed mechanics for the game, the pillar concept became even more solidified. Eventually each pillar influenced a play zone within the game and certain stock TCG concepts were pillar identified. One example was looking at cards in a player’s hand. First, the hand was identified as political in that it represented the elements that you had current access to – the people and plans that were just waiting for the right opportunity to be put into motion. Looking at cards in someone else’s hand really felt like a political maneuver to spy on their plans, so that tagged one possible strategy to the political pillar.

All in all the concepts incorporated in the four Pillars of Power started as the foundation of the project and they’ve solidly worked their way into every aspect of game design, character personalities, and setting creation.