Remembering Of Nations and States: CAA's Best RP

[Peanut]

Oh Boy. I just got done writing all of this and man. It turned into something significantly more than what I had originally envisioned. I am a Pastor in real life so being long winded is something I specialize in so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. For those of you who’ve stumbled in this thread, I asked everyone on CAA who were posting in the resurgence thread if they wanted to hear the history of the greatest RP ever played on CAA. I had already started writing at this point and was about 6 or 7 pages in. I kept writing and ended up basically creating a novella entirely about Of Nations and States. This is, actually, very fitting since Of Nations and States was known for its very long winded posts. The fact that I’m posting this here tells you that there was enough interest so you all now get to read the entire thing however I’m not posting it all at once. I’ve separated everything into sections and will be posting one a day for the next *checks his notes* 20 days (there’s 23 parts but I’m giving you the first 3 together.). This will allow for two things to happen. The first thing is that it will save you all from having to read a true wall of text all at once. I can’t stop you from doing this but please don’t read this all at once. Even if I’m done posting and you just now found it. There’s a lot here and there will probably be even more once I’m done. Second, this will allow other players who are still lurking around these parts (I’m mostly thinking of Dante and Kaligraphic though I’ll probably poke Jaden to let him know this is going on and I’m sure if Zarn logs on and sees this he’ll jump in to give his own commentary). This is far from a perfect account and, as I wrote it, I found myself forgetting a lot of details. In many ways this is a more accurate account of my own actions in said RP then everyone else's (and even there I think I messed up a few things).

Before we get into the main event I want to establish a few ground rules.

1. Don’t let any drama I recount color your views of anyone who was involved in either RP. This entire account is pretty personal for me and I give my thoughts not just on the events that happened in game but also out of it as well. Many of these things happened 15 years ago and everyone who was involved are very different persons now then they were back then.

2. Feel free to ask questions but understand that I might not answer them. It depends on if I can and if I don’t answer it later on. I’m going to try and stay on top of this thread but if I miss something any of you ask, I apologize.

3. At the end of one of these sections I suggest the idea of spamming Kaligraphic’s inbox. Please don’t do that unless you are going to send him actual Spam (as in the food). I have it good authority that its the sustenance he uses to stay looking youthful and full of energy.

Remembering Of Nations and States

I can only tell this story from my perspective and that’s a shame because this dumb RP wasn’t mine alone. I said I would talk about Of Nations and States but the reality is there are no words I can write that will fully capture what it was and what it meant to those involved. All I can give is my perspective, my limited view of it and the users other than me who brought it to life. Unfortunately, this places this account squarely within my own bias and so I have to lead with a disclaimer. Regardless of what you might think by the time you are done reading this, regardless of any negative things I say or seem to imply, I hold everyone who was involved in making this beautiful mess of a thing in high regards. In some cases, I really probably shouldn’t. In one case I definitely shouldn’t. If I’m honest with myself, though, I find that I can’t really bring myself to dislike anyone who was a part of Of Nations during its 3 year run. Whether this speaks to the impact that game had on me or my own personality quirks isn’t something I’m going to dwell on here nor should I. And yet I still have to bring this up because I cannot escape my own perspective nor my feelings nor my own experience. And that is all I can really relay to you all about this wonderful, dumb, beautiful game that was Of Nations and States

So what is Of Nations and States?

Of Nations and States was the greatest RP that has ever been played on CAA. I’m sure someone out there would like to object or even try to use my previous words about biases and perspective to invalidate this statement but, I’m sorry, this is a fact. Its 2 main RPs both ranked in the top 5, easily, for most posts within the RP forum. But what isn’t captured in that is the sheer length of those posts. Most RPs on CAA have been rather simple affairs and posts within them typically ran 1 or 2 sentences or, if someone really had a lot to say, maybe a paragraph in length. A short post in Of Nations and States was often several paragraphs in length, describing the actions of multiple characters in multiple locations at the same time. It was not uncommon for posts to be significantly longer than that, forming great walls of text that were essentially short stories, painstakingly written after classes, extra curricular activities, and jobs. I have no idea how many words we wrote in any of those games. I’m honestly scared to check. But it was easily enough to fill at least one very dense Science Fiction Novel if not more. I’m talking about Dune levels of word counts here.

To get more specific, Of Nations and States was a tale of just what its name suggests: Nations and States. Countries led by its players in a massive game of intrigue and strategic dominance. Both RPs contained these qualities but they also differed in their own unique ways. War and Peace is world building on a level that I think can only be accomplished through vast, quantities of time in thought and writing or massive amounts of collaboration with other people. War and Peace got both of these from its main players. It's a game that tells the story of countries on our own earth (and the moon) fighting for dominance and relevance until they spread to the stars itself. While it predominantly takes place on earth, it is 100% a Space Opera and contains about what you would expect from that kind of genre (not that any of us intended it to be that way, it just kind of happened).

New Era, its sequel, is probably the most unique RP ever played on this forum. The GM for both of these games, Dante, built an entire system to simulate military research and production, national economies and battles. I still have no idea how he pulled it off and I’ve seen the spreadsheets. I even learned during a short period of time the rather tedious process he had to go through to simulate everything in that world. In a weird way, it also managed to cover more and less ground then its predecessor War and Peace did. I know that makes no sense and I really can’t explain it but I think those who were involved in both games would agree with me (which comes to think of it is really just myself and Dante...so only he can agree or disagree with me). New Era covered the rise of nations from small, tribal communities all the way up to futuristic combat, which in game was a larger amount of time then what War and Peace actually seemed to cover. And yet War and Peace progressed further in terms of imagining what the future would be like. New Era also had a real end. Yeah, we finished the campaign and lost spectacularly resulting in the thread being locked forever. We managed to accomplish in that thread what only a handful of RPs on CAA accomplished: playing a complete campaign.

You promised us history, Peanut. HISTORY!

I can’t give you all a concise history of Of Nations and States. Both threads are gone now. I can’t remember if they were lost in the transfer over to a new server or if they were deleted when the mods decided to clean out the RP forum. Code D. Floss has also seen better days and some of its posts seem to be corrupted and longer ones are missing portions of text. I’m not sure why and I hope this isn’t a sign of something more serious going on with the hardware that keeps this site up, but it's impossible for me to go back.

The End.










All right, I’m lying. I can go back. Before those threads were lost, Kaligraphic saved them and I got the files from them. I’ve made a point to store them in multiple places including on my Google Drive which is probably the safest place for them (and I doubt google will get any nefarious ideas from them). The idea of them disappearing is something that honestly stressed me out, hence the decision to store them in a cloud service that I have no control over. The point is they’re safe but I still can’t work up the will to go back and read them. I’ve tried, believe me. I even got a little ways in but reading the entire thing is something I just don’t want to do. You see, this is some of those posts are things I wrote 15 years ago and I know that they are what the cool kids would call “cringe.” While we definitely tried to write masterpieces, it's not like we were all great writers. I just don’t want to ruin my memory of those threads. Still I promised you history so I will, to the best of my ability, recount the tale of these RPs. (Also don’t ask me for a copy. I won’t send it. But maybe if you ask nicely/spam his PM box, Kaligraphic will send you a copy). But first, we have to talk about something that happened in Goof Off a very long time ago.

[Peanut]

Once there was girl who wanted to rule the world

In 2006, USSRGirl decided to declare herself ruler of a nation on Goof Off called Temuopolis. It was based in Russia, was completely communistic (she was going through a phase) and it happened to take off. During the very height of CAA’s popularity, this dumb idea took off. Multiple members joined her nation and all got different roles. They completed their pretend take over of Russia and made all the kind of Cold War jokes you’d expect a bunch of high schoolers and College students with limited knowledge of world history would make. Soon, rival nations arose created by other members. I was one of those members.

I was and still am a very introverted individual who is way more comfortable working in the shadows but still also craves to be in the spotlight. I was (and to a degree still am) a massive daydreamer and loved to create worlds for my mind to wander in. I came to CAA with my three friends Mr. SmartyPants, meboek, and Linksquest. Linksquest and Mr. SmartyPants are incredibly extroverted and pretty much make tons of friends everywhere they go and tend to be the center of attention. At that time both of them (MSP especially), had built a bunch of connections within CAA and had that all so coveted by High Schoolers, a thing called popularity. I wouldn’t say I was jealous of them because that’s a bit too negative of an emotion to describe what I felt. I basically just wanted to be in the position they were as well. I didn’t want to take it from them, I just wanted my own spot and a trend that placed a single person at the center of others attention AND would allow me creative juices to flow was just the thing I needed.

This is all very personal but the truth is, I really can’t separate the history of Of Nations and States from that of my own life. It was a significant part of it and much of the why I got involved and threw myself so completely into this has to do with who I was and who I would become. Before you start feeling bad for High School me, please understand that my High School years weren’t bad at all. As a 32 year old whose a Youth Minister and has to talk about things like bullying, I’ve realized that despite being a lanky theater kid who once performed in drag in front of the majority of my High School (this was back before we understood how offensive that would actually be) and somehow I don’t have horrifying stories of being seriously bullied. I did have a bully, don’t get me wrong, but he was pretty terrible at the whole “making me dread my life thing.” I’m not sure how I got out of High School (and middle school come to think of it) without any of those emotional scars. It's possible that it was God protecting me from such things. It's possible that it was me. If there is one thing I’m incredibly talented at, it's relating to people and getting them to like me. In 32 years of life on this planet I have managed to make a bunch of friends and only **** one person off so much that they want nothing to do with me. I think it was more likely a combination of both.

I created the Peanutter Butter Empire after I had seen others (most notably Zarn Ishtare) do the same. There had already been a war and I believe USSRGirl had been overthrown and Puritan had taken over. Dante (then Pascal) had also done some sort of shenanigans and made himself known. I was late to the party and got not nearly the response I was hoping for but I was in, ruled the Moon, and had an army of Ninja Monkeys (or Monkies as I tended to call them back then). Why Ninja Monkeys? Where did they come from? Were you a Furry? I’ll start with that last one first: I had no clue what a Furry was until I was probably a senior in High School, more likely in College (so like a year or two after this). So that’s an emphatic No. I picked Ninja Monkeys because of Timesplitters: Future Perfect which was and still is my favorite FPS of all time. I liked playing as the Odd Job esque, fellows in a Ninja garb and with a prehensile tail and so I decided they were the perfect species to be representative of my country.

I started to get involved in Goof Off politics, threatening to teleport people to the Teletubbie dimension with The Peacemaker, an orbital weapon that could rip holes in dimensions. It's here that things really started to spiral out of control in Goof Off and people outside of this collection of nations were getting annoyed as imaginary wars, peace treaties and silly antics that filled multiple threads in Goof Off and even bleed into unrelated threads as well. They started to complain to mods. This has only happened twice to my knowledge in my time on CAA, here and when the My Little Pony reboot hit its critical mass of popularity. The mods suggested that we move the Role Playing we were clearly doing to the appropriate forum and so we did. It was decided by those involved that Dante and a user whose name escapes me (I think it was RabbidDuckie or something like that, he never posted in the thread so I don’t remember) would be Co-GMs and with that everything began.

[Kaori]

when the My Little Pony reboot hit its critical mass of popularity

You know, the funny thing about this is I vaguely remember the CAA of that time (I remember the My Little Pony reboot coming up in conversations and so on), but I had no idea all that stuff with fictional nations and rivalries was going on. Must be because I almost never pay any attention to the Goof Off forum.

[Peanut]

You know, the funny thing about this is I vaguely remember the CAA of that time (I remember the My Little Pony reboot coming up in conversations and so on), but I had no idea all that stuff with fictional nations and rivalries was going on. Must be because I almost never pay any attention to the Goof Off forum.

Goof Off is the Wild Wild West of CAA. Its always worth paying attention to for the sheer insanity that gets created.

[Peanut]

Every story needs its Characters

I believe there were about eight to ten of us who made the jump. Noticeably absent from this group was USSRGirl who just didn’t like the direction things were going. She admittingly tried throughout the years to get into Of Nations, created the thread Code D. Floss, which became our unofficial pub and eventually became pretty involved in New Era, but War and Peace never appealed to her. I think it really didn’t appeal to most of those who started out playing the game. They gave it a shot but quickly lost interest like most players tend to in RPs. Not surprisingly, the majority of these players were just side characters in other nations and as it turns out, being an average joe whose helping someone else play ruler isn’t as interesting as actually being ruler.

There are stories to tell from these individuals though, one of my favorite is that of Nate. I was not friends with Nate at this time and didn’t even remember that he was involved in Of Nations until a few years ago when I attempted to re-read all of Of Nations and States again. When I told Nate he admitted that he didn’t really remember either. He may have posted like 3 times so this isn’t surprising. His character’s story can be summed up as thus. Nate saw tanks and stuff in the streets of Moscow as he was wandering around the streets of Moscow. So he grabbed his sword to go off and fight and stuff and instead just never made it to the fight. I like to think his character is still wandering out there, completely confused and lost as to where he needs to go.

Another individual who was only there for a short while but left a more significant impact was Scribs. Scribs was a part of Zarn Ishtare’s nation of Pacifica and was a member of his research team. He had a lab in Madagascar and was weaponizing Lemurs into War Lemurs. As someone who was heading up a nation of similar primates, this excited me to no end. The thought of War Lemurs fighting Ninja Monkeys danced through my mind and I even mentioned that I couldn’t wait for this to happen. And then Scribs was gone. Like gone off of CAA entirely. I will always remember Scribs for leaving me hanging out to dry in this way as well as his very funny Celebrity Deathmatch style threads involving CAA members. These threads would later serve as inspiration for a side project I did in Code D. Floss that has a special place in every Of Nations player’s heart.

The truth is, the appeal of being a cog in a nation as opposed to running one just really isn’t that appealing in an RP like Of Nations and States. We didn’t realize this at that time but it seems pretty obvious now. As a result of this, the number of those who really matter in the history of Of Nations and States can be counted on one hand. There was myself and my motley crew of Monkeys who know ninjitsu, Puritan, who led the rebellion against USSRGirl and taken over Temuopolis, Zarn Ishtare and his nation of Pacifica which existed beneath the waves of the Pacific ocean and was filled with immortals, Kaligraphic who would go on to turn a rather normal, average zombie outbreak into the Behemoth that was the Obsidian Empire, and then Dante who served as our main GM but also created the one actual villain for War and Peace. Of Nations and States: War and Peace was a game that was built on the back of five guys ranging in ages from late teens to early 20s and it reflected it immensely. I can’t take credit for this observation, it’s 100% Zarn’s and he was dead right about it. This is a story of 5 guys wrestling with life and all the problems that come with it when you're in High School, College or just graduated. The ups and downs, the highs and lows, the camaraderie and loneliness. Of Nations and States: War and Peace was our escape from all of this and at the same time a reflection of it as well. No wonder USSRGirl wanted no part of it.

[Ante Bellum]

You know, the funny thing about this is I vaguely remember the CAA of that time (I remember the My Little Pony reboot coming up in conversations and so on), but I had no idea all that stuff with fictional nations and rivalries was going on. Must be because I almost never pay any attention to the Goof Off forum.

Goof Off is the Wild Wild West of CAA. Its always worth paying attention to for the sheer insanity that gets created.

Touchdown Jesus has entered the chat.

[Peanut]

Touchdown Jesus has entered the chat.

Who can forget Touchdown Jesus. Anyway.

Those are Authors Peanut, not Characters

This isn't really a story about the game. It's a story about the people but I guess I have to talk about those characters that we choose to represent ourselves in. They were all self-insert Mary-Sues and while it disgusts me to think of that, I find that I can’t hate them. My own character went on a journey that actually contained a bit of hardship. Humiliated in his first real war leading a country, overthrown and left for dead. Trying to find a place in the only human country there was only to get kidnapped by an illuminati esque organization. Inheriting an immense power (being able to completely control the movement and state of water is incredibly broken when you give it any thought) thanks to having the soul of a Leviathan named Lotan sealed into him. The powers which he obtained, ultimately being insignificant compared to ridiculous power scaling our self-inserts were reaching (more on that later). Peanut was a wanderer and a strangely apt metaphor for what my life would become. Almost like I was predicting how things would go for me after entering adulthood. I still envision my creative spark as being Lotan. Steven King has his roommate, I have my lurking sea monster that is always beneath the surface and merely lends me a portion of his power when I need it. Peanut was a representation, like all self insert, Mary Sue characters, of what I wanted to be. How I wanted to view myself and also at the same time is me while also being nothing like me. I hate and love him at the same time.

Zarn Ishtare’s self insert was in a similar mold except there was no gaining power. He was an immortal, trained by the best and immediately gifted with incredible power. I said that my own broken powers left me low on the power scale, and Zarn is the first example of why as even before we decided to include magic into our world (or the Arcane Arts as we called them) he already had the advantage of not being able to die. Truthfully, none of our characters could “die” or “be killed” unless we, ourselves decided they should be and this was a rule we all accepted. And yet if you were to actually stack all of the characters in Of Nations against each other, Zarn would end up in second and Peanut a distant third. Neither of our characters being this overpowered should come as a surprise when you consider that we were both around 17 at the time we were coming up with them.

Our age also connected Zarn to me in a way that the other players and characters didn’t and couldn’t. I always viewed Zarn as a rival when it came to Of Nations and States. Kind of like Goku and Vegeta with him being Goku and me being Vegeta. This never really manifested in the way you’d think. I consider Zarn a friend and I’m sure he considers me as well but more in the slightly more than acquaintances kind of way. To me at this time Zarn seemed like an incredibly cool guy and I wanted to be as cool as him as well. This probably pushed that idea in my head to some degree and ultimately pushed me to hang out with him via YIM and Skype a few times with other people. While we were never the closest of friends, my life and his were strangely connected for like a year of college as I found myself bumping into and hanging out with someone who knew him in real life thanks to my longtime friend Mr. Smartypants. This was a simultaneously cool and somewhat stressful and infuriating thing for reasons that are not appropriate to talk about in this thread. I think I’m still friends with Zarn on facebook (I think) but, admittingly, I haven’t talked to him in years and hope that he is doing well. I wish he’d come back on CAA and post in his poetry thread so I can sit there and struggle with trying to find words about his poems that aren’t just “I like this poem Zarn.”

Speaking of people I haven’t talked to in years, Puritan was incredibly important to the course of Of Nations and States War and Peace despite having, objectively, one of the weaker characters. His self-insert Puritan was a Cyborg and also the head scientist of Temuopolis and eventually the Imperium. While Zarn and I were flying around punching robotic constructs in the face, Puritan was a more grounded ruler who ended up marrying (if I’m remembering correctly) his own dragon waifu. Real life Puritan would eventually be elevated to Co-GM for a variety of reasons, one of the big ones being that he was a Nuclear Engineer in real life and could actually explain how some of these crazy weapons we were coming up with would work. I’m getting ahead of myself though. Tech in War and Peace really deserves its own section anyway. The thing to take away from all of this is that Puritan was an incredibly smart guy and looks almost exactly like me. I’m not joking, at the time this RP was going on Puritan posted a picture of himself and we literally could have passed each other off as being brothers. Puritan would eventually leave CAA due to his job and just not having the time to dedicate to it anymore. I’ve literally not talked to him something like 13 years and I miss him. He was a real cool dude.

Kaligraphic is the first of our players to have a self insert that didn’t take his literal user name. Lord Kalvin was a space Vampire who showed up on earth one day and started the Zombie Apocalypse. In about a year he would be fleshed out to be essentially God and by far the most overpowered character in all of Of Nations and States. Lord Kalvin could show up, snap his fingers and turn everyone of our characters into Salads and we would have all started roleplaying as Salads. You might be wondering how Kali managed to pull this one off and honestly I have no idea. He didn’t have Lord Kalvin do anything that would lead us to assume he was this powerful, we just kind of all accepted that he was. What’s more amazing is that Kali never, once abused this in any way. Pretty early on in the RP, he had Lord Kalvin leave earth to never return. He sent him off to just run his massive Obsidian Empire and sent other characters to run his country. I’m pretty sure this contributed to our impressions of Lord Kalvin as this Omnipotent being since unlike the rest of our self-insert characters, Lord Kalvin wasn’t there. Almost like he saw what was going on and recognized it wasn’t important enough for him to bother with. This perceived in character indifference pushes him to levels that no character in any Role Playing game, tabletop or otherwise should ever reach. And Kali didn’t abuse him. If there is one thing you should take away from this thread it's that Kaligraphic is an awesome human being who deserves your respect and admiration.

Finally there was Dante, who also killed off his self-insert character only to recreate him. Dante went by Pascal back then and his character bore the same name. He was a scientist in Temuopolis who created a Quantum Computer AI named, appropriately, PASCAL. He also made the bomb. Not the Hydrogen bomb, the Zero Point Energy Bomb. A weapon so devastating we eventually banned it until it was brought back briefly to nuke Ryuken in the face (we’ll get to that eventually, I promise). Joining Puritan in the “actually knows the science behind these things club,” Dante was a Physics major who eventually got his masters (I believe, you can correct me if I’m wrong Dante) in the same subject. This will become relevant later on

Pascal (the character) was assassinated during the end of the Goof Off era and so Dante’s new character was Rei who was essentially a clone of Pascal or something? I don’t remember though I do know that Rei was a rather pathetic dope at the start of the RP who shot down all my satellites, so Peanut kidnapped him and handed him over to PASCAL who is a much more significant character. PASCAL is the villain of Of Nations and States: War and Peace, the very specter of the dead Pascal haunting all those who allowed his creator to die and maybe even contributed to it. He was a great villain and I’ll get more into him later. Dante and I ended up being rather close friends by the end of War and Peace and I probably talked to him more than any of the other players over the years and have managed to stay in touch with him more than the others in the original set of players.

[Dante]

Dante was a Physics major who eventually got his masters (I believe, you can correct me if I’m wrong Dante) in the same subject. This will become relevant later on

Applied Physics... I studied frozen fart balls out past Uranus... Err... the methane-nitrogen concentrations on Pluto and Eris.

[Peanut]

Applied Physics... I studied frozen fart balls out past Uranus... Err... the methane-nitrogen concentrations on Pluto and Eris.

Still counts.

[Peanut]

We aren’t in Goof Off Anymore part 1: The Pacifica-Peanutter Butter War

There had already been wars between the nations. So tensions already existed for a first major conflict. These tensions revolved around Temuopolis, which by virtue of being first immediately had the largest target on its back. Zarn wanted to take out Temuopolis and establish his nation of Pacifica as the major power. Our nations at this time were much more nebulous entities. Temuopolis was basically Russia and some of Europe (I think). It might have been larger at some point, but eventually shrunk down. Pacifica was a collection of cities beneath the Pacific Oceans. My own Peanutter Butter Empire held the Moon, a village in Africa, two villages in South America and a Prison in Oklahoma (no idea why I chose that last one).

Our militaries were more nebulous. I mentioned the ZPEB earlier. If you’ve ever played Half Life 2 then you’ve heard the term “Zero Point Energy” before. This was a bomb utilizing it and I’m not even sure if that’s possible. The most popular fighter at this time was actually a space ship from Final Fantasy VIII, The Ragnarok. Zarn was running around with Mecha which, while cool, are incredibly impractical from a military standpoint once you give them any serious thought. None of us were really equipped for a war grounded in reality and in the pages of Goof Off this was fine. Anything goes there and logic really doesn’t matter. But we were not playing a game and we all needed to have some rules and guidelines to avoid the classic school yard game of “I shot you. Nuh Uh I have a force field.” There was an agreement before we got into this that we would willingly accept losses and make an effort to explain why our tactics and technology, whatever they may be, would work in that situation. The GM would have final say as to whether that would work or not. This was an incredibly flawed system that should of doomed this RP from the start. Somehow we made it work with minimal problems.

Under this new scrutiny, my country was in the worse position of the three. I couldn’t see it at the time, but there was no way I was going to win a war. The first real casualty was my signature super weapon, The Peacemaker. Apparently opening dimensional rifts to the Teletubbie dimension was too silly for this establishment and so it was retired very quickly. In its place, I went for another form of Orbital Weaponry that is a classic in Science Fiction: the rail gun. I named it Mjollnir and stationed several of them in Earth’s orbit. This was around the time Zarn invaded America. Given the fact that I had land in America, I would not stand for this aggression and thus the Pacifica-Peanutter Butter War began. Temuopolis offered some troops to help in the fighting but it was largely a one sided slaughter. The truth is my nation had no military. I had no Air Force and no Navy. My strategy for dealing with Zarn’s Air Force was to try and hit them with a Rail Gun from Orbit (I’m not sure why I thought that would even work). Needless to say I got rolled and, upon recognizing this, I removed my character from power entirely and started thinking of ways to move the Ninja Monkeys in a different and better direction.

Peanut would be dropped off in a dumpster and hired by PASCAL to kidnap Rei. Which I did. Rei got almost killed and PASCAL got a swanky new body. Dante used a picture of the villain from (I believe) Xenosaga episode 1 to represent him and, character wise, he was basically going to become agent Smith. While I did lose the war I had at least contributed in releasing the number one villain for this entire RP. So I guess that’s something. Of course you wouldn’t have known this at the time. There were significantly bigger problems going on.

[Dante]

Side Note: Rei, or Rei Juuryoku, was my other character in the RP. He was what? A 14 year boy that split off from the scientist Pascal. Part became the essence for PASCAL a mad delusional artificial intelligence, and part became the boy, who had no idea who he was (classic amnesia Mary Sue). His name meant zero gravity in Japanese, which I thought was cool. He, I believe, had access to full control over everything Pascal had because he shared the same DNA. Ultimately, his lack of memory made him less powerful then Pascal, which is great, I had an army to control using PASCAL, who did indeed look like Albedo from Xenosaga and had that full crazy nutjob thing going on (He seriously needed to see a good psychotherapist but didn't know enough to do so - but he built some awesome weapons!). I don't know if Rei ever was important to the story, he probably just ended up in an orphanage somewhere in the Imperium.

[Peanut]

[quote="Dante"] His name meant zero gravity in Japanese, which I thought was cool.{/quote]
Huh...this explains a lot since Rei was always kind of just floating around (feel free to groan at the dad joke everyone. I'm sure there will be more from where this one came from at some point).

“Beware the quiet man. For while others speak, he watched. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest… he strikes.”

I’ve never hung out with Kaligraphic in real life. I’ve talked to him once or twice on Skype and few other times over instant messenger. One of my long time friends, Mr. Smartypants met him once during Anime Expo years ago and assured me that he’s a very quiet guy. The few times we actually talked on Skype over voice seemed to confirm this assessment. Had Kali been louder, I’m not sure he would have been able to pull this off. While everything was happening with the Pacifica-Peanutter Butter War, Kali decided to unleash a Zombie Apocalypse. He didn’t start it off as some sort of massive major event, he did it subtly.

A Shark eats a fish and is swimming, suddenly the fish eats its way out of the Sharks body and swims off. The Shark dies and then comes back to life and keeps swimming. This is just about word for word one of his posts signaling that an undead virus was spreading. There is no justifiable way to respond to this. I mean, sure, we all could have said “This seems concerning, we have to put a stop to it!” But that would have murdered the realism we had just established we wanted in this game. Hilariously, we responded to the Zombie Apocalypse much in the way our leaders responded to our own Global Pandemic: by not doing anything about it until it was too late.

Pacifica and Temuopolis probably would have gone into full out war if they didn’t one day look at the maps so graciously put together by Dante to represent our nations borders and see that Kali’s Undead Empire had spread into a lot more countries then they should be comfortable with. A truce was called, and an Expedition force was established led by Puritan and Zarn Ishtare themselves. And hey, Peanut was there too. Apparently kidnapping Zarn’s head scientist and almost having him murdered was completely ok with him. Together we set off into the Undead lands to prove to them that the living were stronger than the dead. Zarn swore that this was going to end with him dueling Lord Kalvin.

So how did it go? Well we didn’t all die and we did give some redshirts some cinematic deaths. I humiliated myself by trying to equip myself with wooden stakes since we heard that Vampires were leading these swarms of Zombies (in my defense, no one said “Hey Peanut, here’s a weapon for you to carry.” until after I started sharpening the wood branches into impromptu, Vampire impaling implements). Peanut, being a bit of a third wheel in all of this, was whisked away for reasons and eventually the force returned home and a defensive line was established to “contain” the undead threat. I think at this point, The undead controlled all of Africa, India, half of Australia, South America and Latin America as well. In games like these it's unfair to declare one person a winner but, in truth, Kali won Of Nations and States War and Peace.

[Kaori]

Mary Sue

Or Gary Stu?

Your posts from Monday and Tuesday sound basically like an explanation of why traditional tabletop RPGs have rulebooks.

This was an incredibly flawed system that should of doomed this RP from the start. Somehow we made it work with minimal problems.

Which makes this part　↑ that much more remarkable.

Sounds like it was a lot of fun!

[Peanut]

Your posts from Monday and Tuesday sound basically like an explanation of why traditional tabletop RPGs have rulebooks.

This was an incredibly flawed system that should of doomed this RP from the start. Somehow we made it work with minimal problems.

Which makes this part　↑ that much more remarkable.

Sounds like it was a lot of fun!

This is one of the major lessons I learned from Of Nations. Systems are good for Tabletop RPGs. With that said, when you have the right players, you can really make anything work.

[Peanut]

We Aren’t in Goof Off anymore Part 2: The world is built and a Mythology is established

Kali might have won War and Peace, but I think the most important player was Zarn. Sometime after the incursion into undead space, Zarn decided to delve into his character’s back story and in doing so, established a mythology for our world. I don’t remember everything Zarn wrote in those posts. There were at least 2 of them and they were literal walls of text (something that would come to characterize all of our posts after that point). I might have read them word for word back then but I honestly can’t remember much from them. Maybe if he sees this thread and reads this part of the story he can chime in and give a more detailed account. All I remember is that Zarn was revealed to have had a brother, Loki, who betrayed his family and nation by siding with the beast Fenris. Almost destroyed the world and I think Fenris was sealed away in Zarn’s sword (or something like that) and would later have something to do with Rei (this is the area honestly where my memory is at its foggiest unfortunately)? I also think it was here that he talked about how Zarn was trained by Lord Kalvin and seemed to have nothing but a positive relationship with him, putting a final nail in the coffin of Zarn dueling him for unleashing the undead on our planet and also beginning Lord Kalvin’s ascension to omnipotence.

In doing this, Zarn separated his self-insert character from himself. Zarn Ishtare of Of Nations and States was no longer Zarn Ishtare the player, he was his own individual with his own childhood, motivations and character quirks. This also separated the world from our own, making it completely unique and not merely Earth but with us in charge and sentient apes who liked Naruto. And with him taking those first steps, it opened us all up to place our own characters and people within the context of this mythology.

For me this led to the establishment that the Ninja Monkeys had been isolationists until Peanut found them on accident. They never wanted to have an empire but, under his leadership, ended up there. I always visualized them as having been previously persecuted and maybe hunted in the past. I might have even established this later on when I decided to give Peanut his own deeper lineage. But the most significant thing that this led me to create was one of my favorite ideas I’ve ever come up with: The Invisible Hand.

I mentioned that Peanut was removed from power at the end of the first war and these were the folks who did it. I mentioned that Peanut was whisked away in the undead expedition and these were the guys who did it. The Invisible Hand were basically the Ninja Monkey illuminati. They were a group of shadowy figures made up of members of Ninja Monkey society who conspired together to guide the history of those people in the direction they saw fit. I stole the term “Invisible Hand” from Adam Smith since I thought it sounded cool (they as an organization weren’t capitalists necessarily). I tended to write my posts in a play-esque format, with character names placed before what they would say and asterix marking off actions. Whenever I had an Invisible Hand member speak their name was merely question marks. They all wore black, hooded robes that hid their faces. All of this sounds menacing, and it was, but the secret of the Invisible Hand is that they only did things that they whole heartedily believed would help the Ninja Monkeys as a people. In my mind these guys were why Peanut was Emperor originally, they were also why he was removed later on. In a society that valued stealth and subterfuge, these guys were masters of it to a degree that no one else could match. Only members of their organization and those unfortunate enough to cross them knew of their existence (at least initially)

In their introduction, though, they had more terrible plans for Peanut. The undead expedition was a not so fun experience for me and I felt that my character needed to be stronger. Nowadays, I wish I had chosen a different path for Peanut (for those curious, it would have been to turn him into basically Caiaphas Cain within Temuopolis and its predecessor The Imperium. If you don’t know who that is, TTS has an excellent video that summarizes his character hilariously in about 5 minutes). Instead I had a spear stabbed into him and the spirit of a Leviathan sealed away in him. Leviathans are one of my favorite mythological creatures. I have no idea why but something about them has always seemed cool to me. So, I wanted to make one which (and this is a very silly quote in hind sight) was the Lord Kalvin of the seas and let Peanut mooch power off of him. Lotan was born and approved and given the incredibly broken power to completely control water within a certain radius around him (I don’t remember the exact radiuses I used, though I do remember that they increased if I was in water). Peanut, after getting control of the beast, would also get a lesser version of these powers. If he ever got knocked unconscious, Lotan would take over his body.

I gave Lotan a backstory as well that goes about how you would expect. He’s the last of his kind who waged war on humanity. A bunch of people teamed up together and hunted his people to extinction before sealing his spirit away in a weapon blah blah. I wasn’t (and still am) not the most original or writer but I was at least trying. Lotan, now being free, went on a rampage until Peanut defeated him in his mind and took back control. Peanut killed a man in the Imperium who did nothing wrong and was just doing his job and somehow was never wanted for murder in that country, adding to the tally of crimes my name sake character commited with no repercussions.

The one other contribution of the Invisible Hand was passing the “crown” off to my nation's next leader, Corby. Corby was a General in what was left of the USA at this point. I have no idea how he got to that position or how he was able to then run for president, but we got there. The Invisible Hand may have handed him the crown, but PASCAL was the one who put it on his head. Some subtle manipulation of the population and bam, a Ninja Monkey is your new president and the URS was born (I don’t remember what that stood for. United Restored States?).

[Peanut]

Let’s take a moment to talk Tech

The URS was my way to bring the Ninja Monkeys in line with the reality that was War and Peace. I built a military that made sense with a Navy, Air Force, tanks and everything else you’d expect. Getting to this was more difficult than you might think. With the push to be grounded mildly in realism, we made the decision to require all pieces of technology to be approved by the GM. You might think that this was as simple as writing “This is what the technology I want my country to develop and here is what it will do.” Oh man, if you only knew.

With the URS I wanted another new orbital super weapon to join my railguns and so I went to one of my favorite sources for these types of things, Command and Conquer. I told Dante that I was going to produce an Ion Cannon. I did a little bit of research on wikipedia which confirmed that this is a plausible thing that we could develop. I sent my idea to him and he thought it was a good one and then he asked me what I was going to do about blooming. This was all over YIM so he couldn’t see my confused face when he brought this up. As he explained, when a concentrated beam of particles hits another particle (like the molecules that make up our atmosphere) they can bounce in various directions. This causes the beam to loose intensity the longer it has to travel and is part of the reason we don’t see such weapons wide spread today (among numerous other things). I went back to my wikipedia pages in a vain attempt to answer this new problem that was stopping what was to become a central piece of technology for my army (I was planning to mount it on my aircraft and tanks as well) but couldn’t find the answer. Finally, Dante threw me a life raft and just told me how to get around it since he had already done the same thing for Zarn when he gifted him a set of Chemical lasers that could shoot satellites out of the sky.

Dante wasn’t the only one involved in these tech decisions though. I mentioned earlier that Puritan was a Nuclear Engineer in real life and he too would chime in on things. There were arguments that went way over everyone’s head. If you look, you can still find evidence in one in the lone remaining remnant of War and Peace on this site, the thread where we posted our characters and submitted the idea to the mods for approval. Back in the old days, we had multiple RP threads that filled various roles and to actually have an RP thread in the appropriate section required approval, the purpose of these threads was just to give a basic idea of what that RP would be as well as a place for GMs to keep track of characters and stuff. So, unfortunately, there isn’t much there for you all to gleam from. You can still find the post where Puritan moved an argument about the feasibility of a Neutron bomb from the RP thread because it was actually getting distracting. To give you all a sense of what these arguments were like, here is a literal quote from that post in case you are too lazy to seek it out yourself.

Your Neutron blast cannon's ability to penetrate any and all armor is insane and illogical. Neutronium is so dense that firing it would likely be utterly impossible, it would begin to attract the matter around it. You are talking about producing matter with densities on the order of 10E13 g/cm^3 or higher and FIRING it. The gravitational pull would prohibitively large, as would be the amount of energy needed to produce the monstrous forces required to overcome the inherant instability of matter lacking protons and bind it together so it doesn't fly apart instantly (this requires massive gravitational forces, which is why neutronium only exists in neutron stars). In essence, firing the neutronium or anti-neutronium without containment would, to the best of my knowledge, result in the instant dissasociation of the neutronium and anti-neutronium and an explosion immediately after it left containment, making the weapon worse than useless. That is so absurd I wouldn't dignify it with a response if you weren't trying to turn it into a weapon. Even ignoring the instability of pure neutronium in Earth conditions, consider the effect of the anti-neutronium interacting with other matter. You are firing it pure, consider the explosion that would take place the instant it interacted with the air, as any sizable chunk of this stuff would inevitably interact moving at the speeds it is. Then you claim it penetrates armor, ignoring all the normal atoms there, until it ignites exactly where you want it to, undeterred by any physical force. Why does it ignore all matter, including any type of highly-dense material, yet only have a range of 40 km in air? It simply doesn't compute. Pascal, you are now trying to create a superweapon that is, quite honestly, bending physics to obtain your goals. Better weapons and penetration are acceptable within parameters, but this is getting into the hazy realm of uberweapons of doom that really make no sense. This is a cosmic twinkie, a weapon that is both absurd and unstoppable, and even the most powerful and as-yet unveiled weapons in my arsenal at least play by normal rules (except for the ZPEB weapons and ZPE generators you yourself created). Scale your weapons to a reasonable level and follow your own rules, because this is both irrational and an attempt at creating an unstoppable weapon that can destroy anything and everything. Antimatter charges or ZPEB weapons in highly-dense penetrating covering, fine, but this is a travesty.

These kind of conversations happened quite a bit in the early days. Somehow things always ended up being fine probably because with this kind of Physics there is at least some kind of definitive answer that can be given. The rest of us plebs would sit on the sidelines and read through the Out of Character Posts as Dante and Puritan would collide arguing about things that were way over our heads. It was like watching two heavyweight boxers duke it out and hilariously, I probably learned more about physics from it then I learned from the class I took in high school. This quote is also where we developed the inside joke of a “cosmic twinkie.” Something that represented anything technology wise that ignored the laws of physics to such a degree that it deserved this level of response.

[Peanut]

The Birth of the Imperium

I consider everyone who was a significant part of Of Nations and States: War and Peace a friend. It's kind of hard not too when you all dedicated so much time into something together. But things weren’t always rosy. There were a lot of fights out of character and these fights led to division. Zarn and Puritan felt that Dante was abusing his power as a GM a bit too much. They felt that they had to band together to be able to stand up to it. I think this might have been motivated after a post Puritan made that essentially nuked the Earth entirely as a consequence from us using so many gravity bombs. Dante didn’t approve and completely undid everything via a clever homage to V for Vendetta. I didn’t care either way and thought either direction was fine but I think it might have been the straw that broke Puritan’s back. The idea itself wasn’t even thought up by Puritan, it was thought up by Zarn. Puritan just put things in motion with a post.

In hindsight, I can honestly say that they both over reached. Puritan should not have gone that route as immediately as he did. He should of allowed all of us to give our thoughts and then cleared it with Dante as well. I’m pretty confident that if every player agreed it was a good idea, Dante would have allowed it to go forward. On the flip side, Dante probably shouldn’t of just erased everything. Basically if there had been more communication and a group discussion this probably wouldn’t of been a problem but really I can’t blame anyone for any of this. Both Puritan and Dante were around 20 at the time and definitely didn’t have the experience of navigating the complexities of human reactions and emotions. Even seasoned pros at that kind of stuff get caught up in this kind of stuff. Its part of being human.

Regardless, an “Us’ versus “Him” mentality was born and from that, Temuopolis and Pacifica fused into the Imperium. As in the Imperium of Mankind. We had some references to Warhammer 40k before this (Chainswords had a made an appearance at least) but it was here that we would really start leaning into that world for inspiration for things. There are a lot of things with this that I’m pretty sure I didn’t pick up at the time. I didn’t get into 40k until I was in my mid 20s, years after both Of Nations and States games had ran their courses. A friend of mine did try to get me into the game around that time but the cost of entry scared me off and I, unfortunately, missed out on my chance to really jump in.

The Imperium of War and Peace wasn’t an exact replica of the Imperium from 40k. Zarn was crowned emperor but was significantly different from The Emperor of Mankind found in that material. The biggest difference being that I don’t think Zarn would have ever allowed his name sake character to be transformed into a skeletal husk, only being kept alive by ten thousand souls being fed to him on his Golden Throne. We did have Space Marines in the form of the Storm Crows, Zarn’s elite infantry creation. They had wings like angels, were experts in combat and the Arcane Arts. We also had Servitors which were a natural evolution from the cyborgs Puritan had established in Temuopolis previously.

The Ragnaroks and ZPEBs of old were retired and new weapons were dreamt up by them to replace them. Things were escalating and it was clear there was going to be another war. This one being the largest and most significant one in the entire RP.

[Peanut]

The Dark Alliance

PASCAL was a very memorable villain. He was smart, powerful and a massive threat to everyone. Dante also made him incredibly difficult to reach. There was a pocket dimension that Pascal either created or discovered while he was alive called Neverwhen. PASCAL decided to use it as his staging area, moving there to build up his forces safe from the nations of the world. He also forged an alliance with Loki and his rather corrupted forces. We got a nice two towers reference from this but, truthfully, this wasn’t the strength of the alliance. The out of character tensions made it kind of impossible for Zarn to build a convincing alliance between these two characters that felt like a threat. We all knew how Loki’s story was going to end, with Zarn’s blade through his chest. This was the role he was created for, to give Zarn something to overcome and I don’t think that made him a bad character. It just made him feel like less of a threat. PASCAL was different. He was independent and was the only character Dante controlled that had a true nation behind him. It was not implausible that if war broke out between the Imperium and him that he could win.

For me, aligning my nation with PASCAL just felt like the logical next step for my country. In my mind, the Ninja Monkeys were kind of like Germany post WW1 and would be very open to a Nazi style dictatorship (minus the Holocaust and other atrocities they did). For them, working with PASCAL represented a chance at revenge on the nation that had bested them earlier. It also represented a chance to strike back at their former ally who barely helped in their conflict and then made peace with their hated enemy without even including them in the conversation (this wasn’t really true but it's definitely how I thought they would feel if they were real). I always tried to run my nation thinking this way. Trying to put myself in their shoes and ask what I would do if I had those feelings and had experienced those things. But I would be lying if I said this was the only reason I directed them in that direction. I kind of wanted to stick it to Zarn and Puritan as well.

I like both Puritan and Zarn. They’re good people and please don’t take what I’m about to say as massive assessments of their character as who they are now. This was, after all, fifteen years ago. We’ve all grown since then and I doubt if we were to play these things out now that we would have the issues that we had back then. Zarn came off back then as, I don’t know, arrogant I guess? There was just a tone that he wrote that really made me want to punch him in the face in a metaphorical sense. He also had a tendency to dislike people for no good reason at the time and voice these opinions behind their backs. For me, an individual who wants nothing more than for people to like me and is fiercely loyal to those I consider to be friends, this always rubbed me the wrong way. So, I did what I did best and internalized those emotions, not expressing or conversing about them at all to anyone (until now) and sympathize with those Zarn was critical about. When it came to Puritan, Dante wasn’t the only one who got into dust ups with him.

The Vampire Expedition was the first time I butted heads with him. I was trying to be included in the whole thing and the second I started to try and do something (sharpening sticks into stakes) to be included, Puritan shot it down and commented on how stupid of an idea it was (to be fair, it was a very stupid idea). That and the fact that I was just kind of there as a third wheel didn’t sit well with me. It's nothing compared to the Dragons though.

When we decided to include magic in our game we made the decision to approach it the way we did tech. In this case, though, we established ground rules to keep things reasonable and we called dibs on different “schools’ of magic that we would focus on. We even changed the term “magic” to “Arcane Arts” to A). Avoid any issues with the mods and B) give it a feeling that this was something more than just party tricks. The idea was great but the execution created some problems. We thought that allowing us to pick schools to flesh out would be splitting the load of creating this system, in reality we were fostering an unhealthy sense of ownership. Namely the school you worked on was yours and yours alone and no one else was allowed to contribute. As we started to add mythical creatures to our game, this seemed to continue as Dragons were introduced. I didn’t pay too close attention to this. I really didn’t read every word in the RP at this time, so I hadn’t seen what these Dragons were.

The URS was going great. I had my military and I wanted to add more flair to it and I thought it would be neat to have a subfaction of mythical creatures, resurrected from Earth’s past, to fight alongside my Ninja Monkeys. For inspiration I went to one of my favorite video game series, Heroes of Might and Magic. But I didn’t go to it for the lore because, frankly, I didn’t really care about the lore. For most video games I played back then and I now I generally don’t care about the lore. I just kind of want the main story or to experience it as a competitive game. As a result, the inspiration I was pulling was how the factions were structured and I built a component to my army full of mythical creatures that aligned with the tiers found within those factions. These creatures were just tools, weapons to be used in my war and at the top of that list was the Storm Dragons. I got GM approval and went forward with unveiling it only to have Puritan flip out about it. Everything about what I was doing there seemed like it was offensive to him and he refused to recognize my already GM approved creation as being a real Dragon. This is an incredibly dumb argument to be having but we were having it and it irked me back then. In recent years, I’ve come to realize that I am someone who bears grudges very easily. While I might forgive someone who wrongs me, I don’t forget and sometimes I can be very sarcastic in response to this. In this case, I decided to completely redo my Storm Dragons and turned them into pompous, arrogant jerks who wanted nothing to do with the lesser races. War for them was a young dragons game and the elders didn’t care for it. Their language was the very clouds in the skies and only their servants, a bunch of humanoid looking Dragon creatures I called Dragon Knights, were able to understand them. This was nothing but me metaphorically flipping the bird to Puritan but it did get me my dragons.

There was one other member of this alliance and I’ve waited until now to talk about them. I said before that there were 5 players in Of Nations and States. Truthfully there were 6. Hakai joined the game as things were ramping up for this war. He was a real life friend of Dante and was roped into playing this dumb game with the rest of us. Hakai created a nation of Reploids. As in the Mega Man X Reploids and I can’t really remember how he made them different from them (or if he did at all). It honestly didn’t matter because an evil robotic faction was the exact type of faction you’d expect to be aligned with PASCAL. Zarn never really got along with Hakai. He just rubbed him the wrong way. I never fully understood it since Hakai seemed like a decent enough fellow. I can imagine the fact that he was a friend of Dante’s that now had joined probably didn’t make Zarn or Puritan feel better about the whole RP situation either.

Hakaii, myself and Dante were now aligned though. And this was a problem. War was definitely on the horizon and we were already planning. Our Dark Alliance was beginning to scheme and would enact something that was both memorable and RP altering in ways we couldn’t imagine (Note: We didn’t have a name for our alliance, but from henceforth I will be referring to it as the Dark Alliance because I need some sort of name to shorten things down and that sounds edgy enough to fit with this RP).

[Dante]

I recall our alliance was the Aetherium Empire, or wast hat just the name of my nation? I forget. It even had that logo that has been removed because Photobucket got all cheap .

[Peanut]

I recall our alliance was the Aetherium Empire, or wast hat just the name of my nation? I forget. It even had that logo that has been removed because Photobucket got all cheap .

I don't remember either. I don't think we named the alliance so that might be the name of your nation at the time but I really can't say. The point is, I've made a new name for said alliance so I don't have to write out "the alliance between Dante, Hakaii and myself" every single time I refer to it.


The Second War: What happens when In character and Out of Character collide

We always made a point to separate our In character conversations and Out of Character conversations with proper notation so that we could easily read things. OOC became a common term that opened posts and it was here that we argued, shared jokes and talked about life in general. In any RP, OOC is a sacred space and you should revere it as such. It's a place to be honest and tell the truth. So we, the dark alliance, decided to use it to spring a surprise attack.

We couldn’t see a way to actually catch Zarn and Puritan off guard with an attack. We were, for some reason, afraid that they would abuse Out of Character knowledge to make In Character actions. Looking back there really wasn’t a lot of evidence for this and if it did happen, we were all doing it. In RPs like these, it's impossible not to to some degree. We never should have planned to do this but we wanted to win and this was the way to do it.

It started with Dante making PASCAL “die” and replacing him with an Old Woman. Then the Undead, now known as the Obsidian Empire, invaded. They “crushed,” our forces but in truth all they were doing was moving into our territory and setting up towers that would blacken the skies and disguise our troop movements. It was around this time that, I think, someone asked Dante what was going on OOC and he lied. I think we all were asked at some point or it was implied. Like someone would say OOC “Man I can’t believe your nations are all destroyed by Kali.” and we’d respond “Yeah it sucks man” or something like that. We were blatantly lying and I think we all knew that this wasn’t going to end well but we didn’t really care. It was honestly pretty terrible.

Kaligraphic, to his credit, never seemed to really get involved in that part (Not that I can remember at least). He was a part of the plan but in a purely IC state and just kind of let things progress. And progress they did. Dante wanted this attack to be big. He wanted us to all write our posts out ahead of time and really plan what we were going to do. We had a specific set or words we were to use to start it for cinematic effect. I took this opportunity to engage in trying to solve the age old question of how to take Russia in a land war and, to my credit, I think I came up with a pretty good answer. Cut Russia into pieces by driving North from the southern border and once you’ve made it to the northern coast, then take the territory that is surrounded. Having the largest empire in the world allowing us to launch these invasions had its advantages. I still like this plan, though it didn’t get executed in its entirety. As it turns out, having a force that is primarily robotic (which PASCAL had) and doesn’t really need a supply chain kind of makes Russia’s historical advantage completely moot.

The day came and we let loose our trap. Zarn was livid. As we were posting Dante was giving me updates on his reaction over YIM. We were crushing his nation in effortless fashion and it was all because we went for a low blow. He knew it and at the time we didn’t care. Puritan came back and was equally angry and it was about then that it started to dawn on us that maybe this approach was a bad idea. Any other RP, this would have been it. This would have been the end. Players would have rage quit and left and that would be it. In our case it didn’t play out that way.

Zarn and Puritan blamed Dante entirely, but really we all had a hand in it. I made a point to apologize and stood up for Dante and Dante followed suit. I think Hakai apologized as well but I don’t entirely remember. We promised to never do it again and the game moved on. The last few posts I’ve given have been exceedingly negative I recognize, but I had to tell this part to get to this point. It's an important lesson. The reason I considered these guys friends (and in the case of those I still have contact with, still do) is because, even though we fought we got over it and moved on. This is a sign of a quality friendship/relationship. The sign that both parties value having that person in their life enough that they are willing to allow mistakes to slide and just continue on. These are the type of people you should surround yourself with and the opposite should be avoided entirely. People who constantly find themselves cutting others out of their lives probably aren’t doing so because they're unlucky. They might not see it, but the only common factor in each of those situations is themselves. It's their inability to do this one simple thing and thus show that they actually value the people around them that leads to it and you should avoid them like the plague. They aren’t worth your time, trust me.

[Peanut]

The Imperium Strikes Back

The Imperium didn’t die though. We never intended it too. PASCAL, the URS and everything around it was meant to be an obstacle, something for everyone to overcome. We knew we were going to lose eventually and we were fine with this. And (spoilers) we did. But first the Imperium had to get off the planet to avoid annihilation. Earlier in the game, sometime during all our petty squabbling, Puritan colonized Mars with a Nuke powered spaceship. Not a nuclear powered spaceship, a Nuke powered spaceship. I’m talking about a ship that drops nuclear warheads behind it to propel it through space. This turned out to be fortunate in this case since it allowed them to fall back and regroup somewhere where we couldn’t reach them (yet).

And so Zarn and Puritan stayed there and plotted their revenge. Everyone went full on Space Opera at this point and started building space armadas. This was the starting point where tech began to progress further than anyone’s knowledge could really enforce and we were getting back into anything goes territory. Besides this there wasn’t much that I can remember from this part of the story. It was the literal calm before the storm. I think Puritan became Co-GM at this time which, given what had happened, was a good thing. While they argued a ton, having two individuals who knew what they were talking about who could approve tech was a major benefit to everyone. I’m sure it made Pascal’s life easier as well and ensured that some of the crazy tech arguing they did didn’t spill over into our thread (now it was all just in PM).

The day finally came and the Imperium struck back. A big space battle happened and it was incredibly one sided. Puritan had developed Electron Beams that could kill any missile or automated interceptor craft and he also developed tech that could detect gravity waves from anything (such as a spaceship) in range. I had developed Carriers filled with missiles and automated interceptors that could bend light and cloak. All things hard countered by what Puritan had made. After taking out our space forces, they began to target major facilities on Earth. I had moved my army into being heavily robotic as well and one of the facilities that was hit happened to hold the main frame that took care of all of that. I could have just said there were back ups (and I even did) but I made the decision that they would take a while to come back up. I mean, the Imperium was supposed to win this. They were the heroes returning to Earth to take out the evil PASCAL and Corby. So maybe I pulled punches. Either way, they made earth fall (I think they landed in The Obsidian Empire territory. Kali was helping them with the invasion but I don’t really remember what he did or how he went about it. If he wants to fill in this gap in my memory I would very much appreciate it). I thought I had time and that things would progress slowly. So, imagine my surprise when I came home from work one evening to find that the Imperium had conquered the entire east coast all the way into the midwest. There were other things. I had thought that Puritan missed something and that I had damaged his forces more and we both got snippy with each other over it in OOC.

It was about this point that I just kind of gave up on the URS. I had the Ninja Monkeys start taking up arms and basically to keep fighting until the end. It was definitely in character for them. Puritan kind of panicked at this and asked for me to not do this Out of Character. He eventually provided an out for me where I could allow that entire race to go off into the stars again and I accepted. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t. The URS should have been the Imperium’s Vietnam. I should have made Puritan and Zarn actually wrestle with that choice because it would have been interesting. They wouldn’t of committed genocide. I don’t think any of us would have even if we were playing the bad guys. But the thought of a constant insurgency against a nation that, in my mind, the Ninja Monkey’s hated made more sense than just leaving. And, at worse, if I was wrong about my assessment of Zarn and Puritan at that time we would have had a much more interesting story beat here then we ended up with. I also would imagine that Kali would have resurrected them all to join his undead horde as well, allowing me to run around with Zombie Ninja Monkeys. Anyway, that was the URS part of this story.

I’m going to save PASCAL for last because he deserves that. Also I don’t fully remember what happened with Hakai. I think this was around the time he got busy in real life and left but I can’t remember. Somehow, though, the Reploids all got sealed away on Mercury or Venus. So they were out of the picture. Loki just kind of died. I think Zarn (the character) killed him but it wasn’t the epic ending I was expecting. PASCAL, though, more than made up for all of that.

PASCAL had sealed himself in Neverwhen and it took some time for Puritan and Zarn to break down that door. When they did, they got into this massive fight on the top of a tower against thousands of PASCAL clones (this is the Agent Smith inspiration of PASCAL’s character on full display). I don’t remember exactly how PASCAL died, I think Rei had something to do with it. Hewas not the supremely pathetic character he once was anymore and I believe this was the time that he got Zarn’s sword Fenris. With PASCAL’s death, and all of the main enemy forces destroyed, the world went into a time of peace. We all thought there would be more after this but, well, there wasn’t.

[Peanut]

Fourteen Years Later, I’m Punching Holes in Forum RP logic

I wrote the previous section a day ago and moved onto everything you’re going to read in the next two posts. But I can’t stop thinking about this. I said before that I bear grudges and the dragon incident plus the way Puritan pretty much just said “Your army is dead because I say so” bothered me. Revisiting this has poked those old wounds a bit so that is definitely motivating this a little bit. But that isn’t all that is bothering me about this. What bothers me is that this entire event should not have played out this way. I’d argue it couldn’t have played out this way and I can’t figure out why none of us pointed this out. I want to think we all missed this and we probably did. Maybe Puritan thought of what I’m about to say and addressed it and I forgot (that’s very possible as well). But, and I’m confident saying this, as I remember things there is absolutely no way The Imperium could have won that fight in a direct invasion the way they tried to pull it off. I don’t consider this to be a real part of this story so if you skip it, that’s fine. I just can’t pass by this. The part of me that clings to things like this, that replays conversations and arguments in my head sometimes for years won’t allow me. You can think of this part as my own personal therapy. A way to comfort the kid that got his sand castle knocked over fourteen years ago. For all of you, this means you get two parts today and not one.

My memory is good but it's not perfect and with the sheer size of Of Nations and States, there was no way I was going to remember anything. We’re starting this off by talking about creating beachheads. That’s probably not the technical military term but it's the one that best gets the idea across. If a military force is crossing a body of water and trying to invade another continent that they don’t have land access to they have to first establish a place where they can get all of their equipment and forces onto that continent (after all, that equipment isn’t there). The most famous example of this is probably D-Day when allied forces stormed beaches in France to kick off a massive invasion of Europe. If you’ve studied history, you know how costly in terms of life that invasion was, well here in our story, this should have been the same. We held North America, Europe, most of Asia and Australia (at least). That’s plenty of territory to set up anti-air batteries meant to shoot shuttles or drop pods out of the air.

Ok, but I said the Imperium shot at things like that. Well, yes, but this leads to another problem, namely that it is very easy to sink any kind of facility like that deep enough under ground so that it can’t be taken out by one volley (we had actually done this). This also assumes that we don’t have any mobile, sea based lasers (which I think PASCAL might have had. And if he didn’t we really should have re-thought that) or other weapons to repel invaders. Are you hitting those from orbit as well? That’s a lot of Orbital Bombardments which is like throwing a meteor each time at the Earth. At some point, the dust from all of that is going to kill the environment off and make it rather inhospitable which kind of goes against everything the Imperium was trying to do.

For the sake of continuing the argument, let's assume that there wasn’t an extensive, world-wide anti-other-worldly invasion system, and that they didn’t have to nuke the world into oblivion to get past those defenses. You’ve now landed however it's not like your military is operational at this point. The Imperium didn’t have an army, navy or Air Force on the planet at this point. All three would have needed to be deployed to successfully perform operations. If you don’t have an ground forces, you can’t control any territory. If you don’t establish Air Superiority then the rest of you’re forces will be blown to pieces before they can do anything. If you don’t bring a Navy, you definitely won’t be able to take any coastal cities and run the risk of having your army divided and conquered quite easily. To establish these things would take some time and the entire time you will be pelted by defensive forces trying to take that beach head from you. The point on defending the beach head I’m willing to let slide. As I said in my previous post, I think Kali helped the Imperium invade Earth which would have created a safe beach head for them. It probably would have allowed them to land safely as well since at this point the Obsidian Empire held the majority of the world. Still, the speed with which things started to get moving on the ground was probably too fast. There should have been a bit more of a pause at this point.

This though isn’t what really has come to bother me. It’s actually a question of resources. The Imperium at its biggest covered three continents: Europe, most of Asia and Australia. This gave it a tremendous amount of resources and power. There was a time when the URS was coming into being that Puritan threatened me with something and I said the UN wouldn’t like that when I brought it up to them. Puritan laughed at this as he quickly pointed out that the Imperium basically was the UN and would have contained most of the members who sat on the security counsel even if it still existed in this world. The Imperium could bully who they wanted when it came to Earth and definitely had the resources to place a colony on Mars. But they ended up colonizing the whole planet. It wasn’t immediate but think about what that task would entail. You’re not on Earth anymore, you don’t have access to all of the factories or other means of production. Those have to be built and you’re not going to build them all at once. It doesn’t make sense either since if you don’t have anyone there to work in them, then its a waste of resources. While we’re on those people, they would need houses as well so that requires more workers and more materials. Maybe it was all self-replicating with some machines built on Earth and the rest being constructed on Mars. I think Puritan also went through with terra forming the planet which is a process that, I think, our best estimates say would take thousands of years. Let me tell you, thousands of years had not passed by the time that was done. Granted, we didn’t really pay attention to time that much in Of Nations and States with things getting really weird in both games so, fine, I’ll let both of these points slide. What I can’t let slide is the most important resource the Imperium had, its people.

The Imperium would have had a sizable population, yes, but it's not like they sent their entire population to begin with to Mars. At best you maybe had a quarter of the population move there. Even assuming that a generation had passed in game, that’s not going to be enough to colonize an entire planet. That wouldn’t even necessarily result in even making it to the population they started with. So would you actually move out to colonize the entire planet then? Probably not, it would be an extreme waste of resources. Maybe the colony there should have been roughly the size of The Imperium on Earth which would be a nice boast in terms of resources and people but the logistics of transporting things between both planets would make it very difficult to actually mobilize fully at that stage of the game.

But hey, maybe I missed something. Maybe the Imperium had a secret cloning program or vat-grown humans that allowed them to populate a whole planet in a completely unnatural way. Maybe these vat-grown humans also emerged from their vats fully developed, ready and capable to work. Lets just ignore the massive ethical issues there that definitely would have put the Imperium on the same level as PASCAL and all the horrors he committed. There was absolute no way that Mars had enough housing to deal with three continents worth of traumatized refugees who just watched their homes get destroyed. This would have been a massive stress on that planets economy and would have likely tied up a large chunk of its resources in just dealing with the humanitarian crisis on a scale that no one has ever seen. Actually, having more population on the planet probably would have made it worse because at least in the case of having roughly the same population, you’d have plenty of space to find a spot for these refugees to settle into their new lives. The loss of military lives would have been massive as well. While you could still assume the Imperium had a strong military, this was a blow that would have set them back significantly and it would have taken significant time to recoup their losses. To launch this invasion at the time that they did they would have had to deal with all of this AND build the space force I talked about. They were a country in complete crisis in reality but this crisis was ignored and never really pressed. No progress should have been made on building an army until, probably, they had solved that housing crisis. Meanwhile, on Earth, we had already established a pretty straightforward and logical case for us to just say “We now have all your resources at our disposal.” We were actually in the position to start expanding our military in that direction and it's actually very logical to assume that we would have been out building them. When the Imperium arrived it should have been greeted by an actual Space Armada. One that would have outnumbered it easily 2-1 and even if it was inferior tech wise would have won on sheer weight of numbers alone.

There was a way for the Imperium to win. The Obsidian Empire was established at this point as a multi-planet (actually much more than multi-planet) Empire and was equipped for this type of undertaking. It would not have been a hard sell to get Lord Kalvin to send a sizeable force to do all the heavy lifting needed for a planetary invasion while the Imperium struck right for PASCAL. This shouldn’t bother me, I know. But as I’ve remembered things and even revisited some old posts I keep coming across cases where Puritan got very critical and testy about the realism of a piece of tech. If he felt something was outright impossible he would aggressively make it clear that it was. And yet right here he did something that was absolutely not possible at all within the time frame that was given. He literally created another earth out of nothing and then an entire massive Army out of nothing and none of us thought to call him on it either time. I look around at all the people on Mars and what do I see? A cosmic twinkie each of them. In light of this, I have decided to declare the results of that part of the RP invalid. The Imperium lost, PASCAL never died, the URS still reigns, and the Reploids are running rampant wherever they feel like instead of being locked up on Venus or Mercury or wherever they got locked and sealed away.

[Dante]

But you weren't GM . And I still feel it's valid RP.

Things were a lot different back then we were young, and we didn't have Kersegacht videos to tell us why living on Mars was a horrible idea:
https://youtu.be/uqKGREZs6-w

I also intended for PASCAL to lose, it was the only way to validate remotely the OOC lying I did, I lied OOC mainly because I wanted to avoid spoilers. I think if Kaligraphic had sided with the Imperium, their towers could make-or-break PASCAL's army, it was entirely robotic and Kali had canon ability to shut off tech underneath his towers if I recall, so he had huge chunks of land for them to make a beach head.

That said, we never RP'd the logistical, economic and other aspects of nations in that first game. Resources weren't even truly RP'd until 2.0 in the slightest where different regions gave you different abilities - and it took Cybernations for me to really RP the more detailed aspects of logistics and such that were happening in 3.0. Even then, I didn't have the strategic insights like I do today from... sources that will not be named.

That said, if I did a Nations and States today... I promise you, it would be a very different game ;P. Our older wiser selves would have to work a lot harder to get to where we wanted, hopefully... I mean there's problems when one nation is allowed to build more advanced tech then another and there isn't backlash from failing to pursue a more rational nation building approach. It's tough, but we were young and so I give us a pass. That said, the URS should have had more respect then it deserved, it would have granted a better long term environment, but then we did get a second chance again with N&S 2.0

[Dante]

That said, you were right from the beginning and Puritan never realized this, the MOON was a WAY better location and strategically, invading Earth without a full on battle for the moon would be dumb, that WAS their first beach head, but invading the moon would be insanely difficult given your long term presence there. But once again, we were too stupid to realize these things.

[Peanut]

That said, you were right from the beginning and Puritan never realized this, the MOON was a WAY better location and strategically, invading Earth without a full on battle for the moon would be dumb, that WAS their first beach head, but invading the moon would be insanely difficult given your long term presence there. But once again, we were too stupid to realize these things.

Yet another great point. To take a planet like Earth, you would have to take the moon first (unless it had no defenses on it but even then, setting up a bases of operation on the dark side of the moon would seem like a decent plan to me). But yeah, we all intended to loose but we probably shouldn't of. Would of made things more interesting.

War and Peace Dies (also I talk about some other miscellaneous things that were RP related)

Post war was unremarkable. I don’t remember much and I actually looked back to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Pascal returned as a character which was a thing. I think I tried to create some sort of V for Vendetta reference or something? I don’t really remember. It was here that things pretty much fell apart as life started getting in the way. I mentioned that Hakaii had departed and Puritan followed. He got a new job that required him to move and then just disappeared. I had talked to Puritan a little bit outside of the RP. He was the first person who clued me into how good System Shock 2 was. This was around the time Bioshock was announced and he was pretty pumped. I played Bioshock my freshman year in college which, unfortunately, was when he was off CAA entirely. I wish he had been around then because it would have been cool to talk about it with him. See what his reaction to the twist was and stuff. I’m pretty sure that we talked about other things as well but that was the big one that sticks out in my memory. I know some of the things I’ve said here about him were a bit unflattering but, honestly, we were all kind of jerks to each other at times. We were a bunch of stubborn guys trying to win at a game of make believe army’s and countries. We probably cared a little too much about that. I doubt this will happen but if he somehow comes across this thread and reads this I hope he knows that I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing this game with him.

Zarn also got super busy at this time. He was still around CAA but he had less time to do Of Nations related things. And, honestly, that was the real killing blow to War and Peace. When I look back, Zarn was really the heart of this whole game. Without him we never would have developed a mythology for this world. He was the one who really pushed all of that forward and the fact that he was only occasionally involved with the New Era was a bit of a shame. I would have really liked to have seen what Zarn could have done with that setting.

There was still myself, Kali (who I think had taken Puritan’s seat as Co-GM at this point) and Dante. We tried to keep it going but things eventually died out. I was bummed about it but Dante did convince me to troll an RP Jaden was running which is actually very relevant. If we hadn’t of done that I’m not sure he would have joined New Era. Other then that, this part of War and Peace’s story is done. Though I should probably tell you about the tournament.

Code D. Floss was our pub. We mostly used it to hangout and talk about things unrelated to the RP. One day, though, I got an idea and that was to write up a Celebrity Deathmatch style tournament involving the main characters from Of Nations and States. It was meant as pure parody and was kind of a great way to just laugh at some of the more ridiculous elements of the setting. I set up a bracket and everything and randomized all of the results except for one. The very first match pitted Lord Kalvin, the omnipotent Space Vampire himself, vs Rei (back before he had any training). I had Lord Kalvin appear with this over the top entrance that involved the undead and displayed how completely overpowered he was. Then I had Rei just emerge. As the fight began, Lord Kalvin launches into this speech about how he was the very master of life and death. That the very shadows tremble at his site (or something like that). As he’s in the middle of this speech, Rei cuts his head off and wins. It was a great joke. Something I’m very proud of and led to, arguably, the best version of Lord Kalvin. You see, I didn’t have him die. He just now had a version of himself that had a disembodied head. And this disembodied head joined commentary, adding his sarcastic take to everything that was happening. The whole tournament was a hit and I did another one for New Era after we had played for a while. Code D. Floss was at times more fun then the RP itself. It's still there if you want to look through it but I have to warn you that when it comes to these tournaments, that post (at least) is messed up. It looks like the data that held that bit of history has gotten corrupted or lost somewhere along the road and there's some weird symbols and it just kind of cuts off. I think Kali has a back up of that thread too but if not, that part of my life is just gone. I can’t even remember who I had win that tournament.

[Davidizer13]

Fourteen Years Later, I’m Punching Holes in Forum RP logic

I don't see the problem you're getting at, it just looks like you wrote The Rise of Skywalker?

[Peanut]

I don't see the problem you're getting at, it just looks like you wrote The Rise of Skywalker?

It has to do with double standards. Dante tended to demand that tech be accurate but was a less dismissive of ideas. If you couldn't explain how something would work in the real world, he'd generally work with you to get it in line so that it would work. Puritan tended to be a bit more dismissive of things both in tech as well as other elements of the RP. If it wasn't realistic or fit what he thought was consistent with the world we were making in the RP, he had a tendency to tell you in rather confrontational language that you were wrong and that your idea needed to be removed or significantly changed such as the post I quoted about Dante's Neutron Blast Cannon. It should be noted that he did this with Dante as well even before he was Co-GM but because Puritan legitimately knew his stuff none of us cared that much. Generally, this kind of stuff seemed more important to him then the rest of us. Which is why I have a problem with that whole series of posts from said RP all these years later. Puritan, the man who in many ways was pushing hard for realism, consistency and a world that made sense completely ignored all of these things when it was convenient for him and allowed a straightforward victory. He was quick to criticize other people's ideas, but didn't really give the same level of scrutiny to one of his more significant contributions to the world of War and Peace. I can honestly say that I definitely wouldn't of cared about this all these years later if he didn't and if there weren't several examples that I stumbled across again trying to job my memory for this whole thing. I mean we all did stuff like this. Heck, as Dante pointed out, we pretty much ignored logistics and economics in the first Of Nations and States but most of us weren't writing long posts explaining why someone's idea for a shiny new weapon wouldn't work in the real world. Having people literally appear from no where would be easier for me to stomach from other players because of this.

Of course, as Dante and I have both said, we wanted to loose, that was the ultimate goal so, yes, this makes that entire post incredibly petty and silly. Then again, I'm the person who in 6th grade lost a game of StarCraft to MSP on a Use Map Settings Map that basically allowed him to cheat and have, thus, made sure to completely humiliate him in the game whenever we've played against each other. Part of getting older for me has been embracing my tendency to forgive people there trespasses but to never actually forget them. I am, simply put, an incredibly silly and petty person and I've come to embrace this.

[Peanut]

The Birth of New Era

After sometime not playing Of Nations and States, Dante, Kali and I started to get the itch for Of Nations and States again. Dante came to us with his idea and we all went for it. This game was going to be more structured with an actual system to determine combat and measure military strength. There was a low level measurement for economic strength as well if I recall but there was less interaction with it then with your military. He also limited the races that we could play to the ones we had created in War and Peace (there was a reason for this). You’d think we would have missed some of the freedom we lost in all of this but none of us did. It was actually refreshing to know that if my entire army was destroyed, it wasn’t because someone was really sure they could destroy my entire army. There were numbers behind it.I’m going to try and speed through the entirety of New Era which is a bit unfair to it but I’ve basically written a Novela already and I don’t remember as much of what happened in New Era as I did in War and Peace. With that said, I need to give special attention to one individual. If the heart of War and Peace was Zarn, the heart of New Era was Jaden.

I knew of Jaden and I had trolled Jaden. But New Era was where I would start becoming friends with Jaden. I talk to Jaden more than anyone else from Of Nations and States these days. For a long time, he was a regular in my Dungeons and Dragons group and we still swap horrible memes with each other regularly. Jaden is a swell guy. He’s also incredibly stubborn and a massive power gamer. Back then he was a straight up Munchkin, a power gamer who lacked any finesse. In other words he was a perfect fit. Jaden’s nation was lead by Ryuken, a character who could best be summed up as the love child of Raoh and Ryuken from Fist of the North Star. His entire nation was very much plucked from that universe of big burly men slapping meat.

Other sign ups for this RP included the likes of Althaia, ~darkelfgirl~, Taliesin, and, surprisingly, USSRGirl (I seem to recall that she thought a character Dante had created for the RP was cute and liked the idea of playing a strange hybrid of the races we could play). They all stuck around for a while as well and were all rather actie as I remember. Zarn eventually joined us down the line though being now fully in the military prevented him from being able to dedicate the time to this RP as opposed to his younger days. Dante assigned all of us a location on a map he made and soone we were off trying to conquer the world.

[Peanut]

New Era Part 1: Or how I learned to stop being so specific and actually summarize things.

Right, let’s bang out all of New Era in one post. Despite starting at a Bronze age level, we very quickly sprang into full fledged World War. We had all rapidly expanded, grabbing available land as quick as possible and all, somehow, had the technology necessary for circumnavigating the globe. This, to me, was a missed opportunity. It wasn’t a bad thing per se but I kind of wish we were all stuck to our own regions for a while, being forced to interact with our neighbors first before finally ending up in massive global conflicts. That’s not how things went though and I soon found myself in an alliance against Jaden.

The war didn’t go well for us. Neither I nor Jaden had played a ton of Grand Strategy games at this point, so honestly, our approaches were both pretty terrible but Jaden went all out on invading with everyone’s forces combined together and none of us really had a counter to it. USSRGirl was a part of my alliance and her country, being neighbors with Jaden’s, fell pretty quickly. I thought that I could possibly pull off a sneak attack and liberate her from Jaden’s oppression. I’m a loyal guy and this can lead to problems. In this case, that problem being the exact landing site being sold out and my forces being completely obliterated by the combined alliance Jaden had formed. I did some shenanigans to try and stabilize thing by surrendering to an ally to create the first real super nation but it didn’t matter. I didn’t understand how to play New Era enough to overcome 3 players teaming up and throwing everything that have at one spot. Jaden 1- Peanut 0.

Things quickly fell into a state of peace. My nation was occupied by Jaden’s for a while but eventually I was given autonomy again. As time went on we finally got into another war and, I believe, Jaden lost. I don’t remember everything that happened but I do recall that Ryuken was shot by an entire navy’s worth of fire and didn’t die do to his “Aura.” This is where I really started to hate Ryuken. Ok, it wasn’t just there. Like War and Peace, we introduced the Arcane Arts to New Era. For whatever reason I had decided to transition Peanut from War and Peace into New Era though I placed him in disguise. Ryuken was gathering a bunch of mages together to create a college (it wasn’t Hogwarts but from now on I’m calling it Hogwarts) and Peanut got invited. Hogwarts was basically, in my eyes, completely invalidating everything we had established about Arcane Arts in the previous RP. So I had Peanut show up and show how dumb these ideas were and bascially say “You can train all you want, but you’ll never be on my level.” Which was 100% true by the way. The next post Jaden has Ryuken do basically exactly what Peanut did without any training or supremely powerful Sea Serpents to help him. It was at this moment that I realized Hogwarts was going to be the justification for Ryuken to know all the Arcane Arts or, at least, have a very basic understanding of it. I said Jaden was a Munchkin back then, and this was the worst case that I can remember. Modern Jaden would not have been as nearly as embolden and blatant in an attempt like this.

It's around here that I started to look for a way to humble Jaden a bit. I gained my shot after Rruken came back, having fully recovered from his naval bombardment, and killed Rei (whom Dante had also moved over to New Era). So Peanut went on a Rampage that eventually led to a confrontation with Ryuken. We weren’t allowed to kill each others characters without permission so I couldn’t just, say, turn all of the water in Ryuken’s body into steam, thus disintegrating him instantly. I had to go about things different. Peanut had been around the Ninja Monkeys and knew some of their Arcane Arts. Their Arcane Arts specialized in illusions so, I told Dante ahead of time, I’m going to have Peanut throw a knife at Ryuken that will miss and from that point on, anything Jaden has him do is to an illusion until I decide to strike. In hindsight, I should have made things more obvious for Jaden. There was no way what was about to happen was going to feel like anything else but someone pulling out playground logic. I didn’t care. I wanted him to be put in his place. After beating up an illusion of Peanut for a bit, Ryuken was stunned to find a sword shoved through his chest. It missed every vital organ but it got the point across I was trying to make. Peanut was better than Ryuken. Jaden, though, really didn’t get that lesson.

[Dante]

I brought Rei into New Era O_O? Wow, even my memory doesn't remember that, I remember Genki, was Genki Rei? I'm not sure. Genki and the one girl character I drew and because I was bad with faces, she looked like a guy. I have a cute smol character in every RP O_O. I really really hated getting old apparently "It's not fair! I wanna be kawaii again!"