By some amazing chance or maybe the game mechanics are supposed to be this way now, it seems all my characters thus far are spawned on different islands! Some are insanely far away, and more than one have no idea where they are in terms of the other islands... for one char, the only maps he can find are of the island he's on. This world is massive... One char has seen the sea and now desperately wants to be a sailor.
I've been browsing the forums for a few days before signing up, and I've seen there's quite a bit of variation on how players play their chars. The most successful ones I've seen are those who follow the "tabula rasa" model, where each char is born as a nobody and becomes pretty much whatever his environment makes of him/her. It's working pretty well for me; the few characters I have so far are already vastly different in ways I hadn't anticipated... a few days in, and I'm sure some might kill each other if they ever met.
And now for something completely different:
The big idea! In a word, it's... overhunting.
First of all, has it ever happened that an animal or all the animals in a location were hunted to extinction? If so, what was done about it—did the game gods of Cantr intervene to repopulate the place(s)?
If it's never happened in known history, which for some reason I have trouble believing (surely new player newspawns must have done this at some point?), and would not be immediately "fixed" by whichever department would take care of that "problem"... what would the consequences be of a town accidentally or purposefully killing off the animals? The idea occurred to me in-character (RP is the source of much wonder!), but then I started to consider the possibility after logging out. I mean, obviously it is theoretically possible, because towns have hunting restrictions. But what if they didn't?
Seems to me like the consequences would be drastically different depending on where you are. One of my chars is in the middle of nowhere, a small desert town of thankfully not-so-sleepy oil traders (just about the only resource they have), and the only local source of food is meat. Absolutely no plant life. If this town killed off its animals, it would likely end in mass starvation once the reserve ran out (would be pretty fast, surprisingly) and the survivors would flee for more stable food sources.
But this wouldn't be universal at all. Where plants support the population just fine, murdering the native animal life would eliminate the threat of animal attack and there would be one less reason for everyone to carry a shield.
What if this was done on a large scale? Whole groups dedicated to wiping out animal life on their island. If successful, the world could be forever changed... some places would be impossible to survive in without outside contact, and others would be left close to desolate with only a plant or two for food... enough of these areas together would create "dead zones" that would be difficult to travel through without a decent stash of food. The economy would finally have true scarcity, if only in a few regions.
But it wouldn't be the end in these regions. Eventually, people would have to go back there to exploit those few rare resources in the new dead zones. Mining towns would be reborn, but could die just as easily if trade would ever be cut off—after all, without regular shipments of food coming in, the miners will starve. The potential for complex systems of trade with distant cities, chains of transport that would span islands... and even the possibility of criminal organizations that prey on these fragile trading systems... and remaining bone tools would become a collectible treasure, a relic of past ages.
All of that could happen if we had real scarcity in the economy. Right now, there's no real incentive to connect towns; if you can get along just fine working on your own, why bother? Cities are rare and far apart, while potato-farmer villages are obnoxiously common to spawn in. Society simulations require incentives for trade. And the game mechanics don't need to change at all; it's just a matter of characters doing something admittedly sort of insane. Maybe a religion could take up the cause? The idea occurred to me in-character, actually... so maybe I'll try to spread this as a faith and hope it catches on, in case anyone is worried that implementing this in their own characters would be a CRB.
What says the forum? Is this impossible? Stupid? Would the staff stop it if it ever got serious?
