Ionia wins Nyroth!

The scoreboard is updated. The revision period is complete. (Thanks, by the way, to the many people who caught errors and sent them in for revision.) We have now confirmed Ionia as the ultimate victor of this arc, by a margin of nearly 20 points.

The Nyroth story is not yet complete, and we’ll need at least one more round of lore events for each faction. Since the arc is over, it’ll be easier to make these more about meaningful story decisions and less about numbers.

What does Ionia get?

Ionia will be given authority over the Nyrothian mainland, with particular sway over the Yanti region, while Bilgewater will retain its role as Valoran’s emissary to Nyroth, particularly in matters of trade. There are various ways each faction could use this authority, and that will be a primary subject of the upcoming lore events.

What about Yoroth?

First, we need to decide how the Freljord and Ionia will handle Yoroth. What they decide to do with the ruptured mega-nexus at the center of Yoroth will have serious repercussions for what this mainland ends up looking like. The basic options are likely to be:

What about the Shadow Isles?

We’re a little out of sequence here. One might say, more properly, that the story-time has not yet reached the end of the Nyroth dispute. We’re still in that critical period before the League edict comes down and resolves the dispute. In that time, the Isles have access to all of the mainland souls (outside of Yanti and Yoroth) of those Nyrothians killed in the cataclysm a thousand years ago. That will be the centerpiece of their lore event.

Stormhaven

Stormhaven was obviously a disaster. Once we discovered, on the day of the resolution, that we had the troop counts wrong in the polls, we knew we were in for trouble. We then performed a manual recount, but that only raised further problems as we realized that our jerry-rigged Military system had some serious gaps. In such situations, one cannot help but treat one faction or the other unfairly: ad hoc rulings are inherently somewhat unfair, and as they’ve got to go against one side or the other, there’s not much to be done. Naggarok and I went back and forth at length to patch up these gaps, and we gave the Isles a second chance to vote in light of the new numbers.

What we’ll probably do is this. We’ll spin it as Karthus retaking control of the Isles from Aatrox, who will get eaten by a kraken during what should be a fairly awesome battle scene. We’ll have Gangplank using a thrown bottle of his own citrus-infused brand of rum to help a Summoner ignite a zombie. We’ll have Mr. Chompers the Bone Dragon lifting a Bilgewater galleon out of the sea and hurling it through Stormhaven. We’ll have Nami summoning a tidal wave to crash through the undead legions. We’ll have Aatrox taunting Jax while he fishes on the pier, then getting eaten by a kraken. The Summoners and Champions of the Isles will retake control from Aatrox, leaving their options open for the final lore event, and losses will be limited to those Nyrothian units that would have been “lost” at the end of the arc anyway.

Again, not a great solution, but our best attempt at damage control, and a striking (if costly) illustration of the importance of revising these World Systems.

Agenda items

I’ll probably be making a formal agenda GDoc and posting it up publicly in the near future, but here’s a previous.

Priority tasks

Here are the most urgent tasks:

• Intermission. I have plans for a scored intermission as a way to pass the time while we take as long as we need to get everything set up for the next arc. Basically, we’ll need to set up new intermission rosters (I plan to have a community discussion about that) for each faction, featuring both Primary and Allied Champions. Factions always get their Primary Champions, and also get their Allied Champions so long as they’re not Primary to the faction they’re facing. For example, Demacia might have Poppy as an Allied Champion, giving Demacia the right to summon her except when facing Bandle City. We’ll set up an all-faction Balance of Power and track matches as usual. There will be no declarations, and also no central dispute: the idea will just be to let everyone “test drive” all the various factions. We may toss in a few minor story-points as we’re able.
• Lore Event VI. This lore event will give each faction some significant story decisions.
  • The Freljord and Ionia will be exploring Yoroth together. (The Freljord will take the lead.) The key decision point here will be how to approach the mega-nexus: what are their objectives, and how much risk will they accept in the pursuit of those objectives?
  • Bilgewater will have a diplomatic lore event focusing on their relations with the winged Nyrothians in the floating city, which we actually still haven’t named yet, and Nyroth’s islands.
  • the Shadow Isles will have a lore event focusing on the spirits of the slain Nyrothians.
• Post-arc lore event. We’ll then have a final lore event, in which each faction’s Summoners will set the faction’s “AI” going forward. This will formally conclude the Nyroth arc.

Intermission objectives

These are the main targets for Intermission, or at least the ones that occur to me off the top of my head.

• Run matches. The skill-gap adjust system used in scoring matches is adaptive. Every match entered into the database increases its accuracy. One advantage of a scored intermission is that it will give us multi-faction datapoints, and hopefully lots of them. Also, it’s fun!
• Write Nyroth lore. There’s still some unfinished lore for Nyroth. I’ll either write that myself or (to the extent possible) hire more lore-writers. This will hopefully include a couple issues of the Herald.
• Revise World Systems. One thing’s for sure: we’re not going to make the World Systems any MORE complicated than they were in Nyroth. Instead, we’re going to focus on revising and redoing the extant systems. Most likely, Naggarok and I will handle the first sweep, fixing the really obviously broken stuff and making some “duh” changes; we’ll then use that revised draft as the starting point for community discussion.
• Revise rules. We also want to start the process of revising the rules generally, such as the rules for counting ranks for match-scoring purposes.
• Hire staff. We need more staff, as always, but the midst of an arc is a difficult time to recruit people. This break will provide time to more deliberately expand our staff list. I’d also like to formalize the staff structure a little more clearly.
• Plan the next arc. The usual procedure is to select two to four factions first, then make up a story for those factions. (Traditionally, staff selects one faction, the community as a whole votes in two more, and then the victor of the previous arc gets to add a fourth.) We might change that this time, e.g. deciding on a story first and then selecting factions to participate; that’s the sort of thing we should discuss.

Wishlist

There are also some things I’ve been really keen to do for a while.

• Factions wiki. I really, really want to get a wiki going to summarize Factions lore in a more encyclopedic way. This will also provide a platform where people can write up their Summoner characters in greater detail.
• Roleplay. I’ve been doing online roleplay for a long time, and I really want to encourage this aspect of Factions. One idea would be to set up a project to create a sort of League tabletop system and draft guidelines for running Factions adventures. In theory, these adventures could even become part of Factions lore, in the style of a BtB entry.

Anyway, time for a little more holiday merriment, but I wanted to get an overview post together first.

—CupcakeTrap

About CupcakeTrap

Caitlyn, you monster.