The Warlords of Krahl - A Collaborative Writing Adventure

Krahl was a small kingdom of no significance sandwiched between two mountain ranges. It was difficult to reach, and the few explorers who made the journey reported nothing interesting when they returned - it was just a kingdom like any other.

And so no one paid them any attention until, quite suddenly, they attacked the neighboring kingdom of Zadal. The attack caught Zadal by surprise, and their capital fell after only two weeks of fighting.

It didn't end there. Krahl continued expanding, installing powerful warlords in every new territory. The Kingdom of Krahl became the Empire of Krahl, and in the space of just five years, they were the dominant power on the continent.

And they showed no signs of slowing their ambitions.

One last hope remains. A small group of adventurers have infiltrated the stronghold of one of Krahl's warlords. Should they prevail, perhaps the tide of the war will start to turn against Krahl, and the kingdoms can be free once more...

Welcome to Warlords of Krahl! This is a hybrid roleplaying/collaborative writing game, inspired by Grand Battles. It does not follow their structure, however.

Here's how this is going to work. Some number of people will sign up with members of an adventuring party. You can come up with any sort of character you like for this. (And feel free to contribute to the details of the world while doing so!) I don't have a hard limit on signups right now, I'll just leave this open a few days and see how applications are going.

After our characters are picked out, I'm going to immediately dump everyone into a dungeon run, in order to skip past the part where everyone meets up and jump right into the action. I'll provide a general description of the place and come up with the warlord in charge. Everything else is going to be up to you.

However! There's a little more to it than that. As in a Grand Battle, you're going to have your writing quality evaluated, and this will have consequences! Not as severe as losing your character, but when the first area starts wrapping up, I'm going to take opinions on writing and figure out which players are in the bottom half of quality overall. So if we have six players total, I'll pick out the three who are doing worst.

I'm then going to come up with punishments for those players. They'll get to continue on, but they might end up being magically cursed, or losing some important piece of equipment, or something else drastic. These may be worked in during the final moments of an area, or early on in the next area. What matters is that they're going to be relevant for a good chunk of time.

(Of course, players are free to inflict these sorts of things on their own characters for fun! The difference is GM-inflicted punishments can't be lifted until I say so. I'm also willing to be flexible if I assign a punishment and you don't feel able to work with it at all; in that case, let me know and I'll try to come up with something different.)

Then this will keep going until we feel like stopping, basically. I haven't really planned this out much in detail, mostly I'm thinking "let's try this out and see where it goes".

So here's a signup form! Fill this out with character information.

Name: Self-explanatory.
Race: Human? Elf? Martian? Something else entirely? Put it here! Make something up and explain how it fits into the world! Go crazy.
Gender: Male? Female? Neither? Something else? Say it here and explain if necessary.
Color: Yeah, we're still doing text colors. For those not familiar: Pick a text color that you'll write for your character in. Make sure it's readable and doesn't conflict with other players' colors. (This can be adjusted before the actual game starts, so don't worry too much about it.)
I'm using #425B78 for administrative purposes, so please don't go with that or a color that closely resembles it.
Equipment and Abilities: What can they do? What do they have with them?
If they're an unusual race, this is a good place for explaining what members of that race can do.
Description: What do they look like? More importantly, what do they act like?
Biography: What were they doing before Krahl decided to take over? Why did they join the fight? Do they have some other goal besides stopping Krahl? Explain it all here!

Feel free to put Equipment/Abilities, Description, and Biography in any order that seems appropriate to you. You're also more than welcome to reference things that get mentioned in other players' profiles, or even to collaborate with them! Go crazy!

So let's see what you can come up with.

Players: