The Shadowstone Saga

The Shadowstone Saga is a fantasy/sci-fi war-game. It is set on a dying world, orbiting a morose, purple sun - a sentient star watching life fade away. The Eternal Empire has banished the shadow of death and outlived most other life on this world; the price they have paid for eternity is their flesh. After an epoch of stagnation, the birth of the prophetess Mantra heralds a threat to this Eternal Order. Driven by her creativity the Young Realms are formed; born out of the clash of arms. They seek to restore humanity to its former creativity, even at the price of regaining their mortality. The game can be played in two ways. The battle engine can be used for individual contests between two players, using armies selected with the games points system (for balanced battles). These battles are fought on a grid, using counters for pieces and are resolved using D6. The game uses a system of statistics which represent the abilities of each regiment. In addition to these random battles, there is the opportunity to play the full Shadowstone Saga campaign, which is more like an RPG - only one where you run an empire, as opposed to a single character! This is played on a larger 'overview' map of your Empire, and will utilise the battle engine when armies clash. The goal of the game is to overcome your opponent. In addition to straight out brawls, there are objective-based missions, headhunting missions, breakout missions, and even missions where the intention is to intentionally lose a battle without your opponent suspecting your motives (the campaign map creates all manner of intrigues!). -------- "Having fulfilled their destiny, the Phoenix Knights were granted independence, and left to safeguard the empire in their own manner. Phoenix stones were built in their honour; huge monoliths that dominated the landscape like mountains, forever breathing clouds of bone-white smoke (which could be cloying to those who lived near them) to purify the air. Decades came and went, then centuries, then a millennium, and then millennia. The other civilizations surrounding the Eternal Empire, rivals and allies, old friends and ancient grudges, slowly started to die out. And as for the wildlife of the world, that too started to dry up and die, and the world became more and more inhospitable, as the balance of life and death was grossly upset. Although they were free from mortality, the bodies of the eternal folk were still subject to rot. At first no one really noticed, then the younger ones grew into wrinkled bodies quite soon, and then skin started to peel, everyone had a smaller appetite, flowers blossomed later in the year and perished earlier – but no one talked about it, for it was happening to everyone. After a huge span of time (beyond the count of calendars, for these eternal folk started to lose track of the passing of years) they had lost their flesh, leaving nothing but their skeletons and their sentience. A child had not been birthed since the slaying of the last Shadow Knight an aeon ago, and not a single law had changed for an epoch, and so the order of the Eternal Empire persisted, still ruled by the benevolent High-King Druidainh. The art and culture of the Eternal empire had not progressed, and the lives of its people were a constant repetitious cycle, devoid of any excitement. The bards played the same old songs, which had long since fallen out of relevance, being endlessly repeated until every word became a cliché. The word humanity was losing its meaning, there was no nature to oppose itself too but for the long-living fungal blooms in their benign forests, the gnarled trees, and the older scaled-species who spent most of their time in dozing slumbers. Obscure wars broke out between barbarians and the borderguards, but these were easily quelled, and so governance of the empire required less and less innovation until it was merely a matter of course. The peasants tilled farms of dust, the merchants bartered between themselves, as if they were playing a pointless game. The beast-tamers snoozed beside their wyverns, the spell-callers animated their artificial creations (the dragon-like Draemh) and rode their backs over still nights, lost in their own dull thoughts. The royal philosophers had found all of the answers to life and sat idle, the astronomers stared up at the same old stars, now convinced that they never moved but sat perfectly still like the monks in their mountain retreats..."