The guiding light
Principles
The foundations for a fair, legible, self-organizing world.
Principles I
The Standard
Players set the standard and build the world piece by piece.
To make this possible there must be some Principles we agree upon and that we have decided to establish as our guiding light. No matter what the rules end up looking like, we must abide by our founding principles. With that being said, we have made a series of hard decisions in terms of gameplay and governance that we hope will form the foundation for a versatile gamemode that serves all types of players.
We currently don't know what the community will look like or how the game will play at scale. The main things we are trying to avoid are crafting unrealistic rulesets, hastily choosing leadership, and attempting to establish lore beyond our knowledge or station, these should all be up to the players. Ultimately we are attempting to build the gamemode from the ground up with scale and balancing in mind. It is complex work but rewarding when real heroes begin to emerge and genuine markets begin to form.
We have opened up every single state available to a Skyrim vanilla character to the public including supernatural states such as vampirism and lycanthropy. Your racial aspect spell will persist as will your Standing Stone buff. All magic will eventually become available but we are starting with the main combat spells for damage dealing, healing, resistances, and buffs/debuffs. All skills, combat, magic and potions are available but will be altered in rarity as balancing is required and gated when necessary. We have a stable job faction and mounts persist as active world NPCs, can be bought, sold, claimed or stolen.
The main goal will be to completely sync the vanilla world and attempt to fill it to capacity. When that happens we'll be ready to integrate mods and scripts to immediately expand all the existing holdings. Whiterun, Solitude, Windhelm, Markarth, all these look like grand cities but Bethesda took great pains to make the large scale fit on 2011 hardware. Fortunately they built everything broadly modular. This means we have the ability to expand these cities to the scale they actually appear and deserve. Other mod integrations will start in the form of quality-of-life RPG mods that add massive roleplay value or cleanly enrich the existing vanilla features.
Together we can raise up something primordial that stands like another Adamantine Tower that anchors our world. That struggle will be the Aurbis.
Principles II
Simulation and Authority
A real environment where anyone can rise.
Aurbis will start as a text-only heavy roleplay server but above all: Aurbis will be a simulation. An immersive environment where you have the opportunity to rise according to your capabilities and willpower. Roleplay is a valuable avenue for this sort of simulation and has proven to be the spot where real creatives and innovators can thrive. That latent intelligence has birthed the most impactful recreational communities that humanity has ever seen, worlds within worlds, societies within societies, history within history.
Countless people had a voice in these sagas that they wouldn't have had in their lives otherwise. They left a mark on the world that they wouldn't have otherwise. It gave them a chance to genuinely express their aspirations and abilities and live through actual history. This is an experience I want to be available to everyone. Modern roleplay servers and MMOs, while technically impressive, have fallen behind in terms of accessibility and authority.
Your project is only as impactful as its features are accessible to everyone. And your project is only as impressive as the individuals who control the levers of power. A community is not built from the top down but from the bottom up, and once you're working the lever it's easy to forget that. On Aurbis we want to see the right people in the right roles for the right reasons. Nothing is built or maintained by a single entity, and no legacy is ever left in a day.
Principles III
Emergence and Legacy
An achievement and landmark in gaming.
The Aurbis project's core functions are based on concepts and tech built for evolutionary simulation software, designed to model emergent, unpredictable, self-organizing behavior. Many of the systems were designed for simulating communities of tens, hundreds, thousands of individuals and groups interacting and evolving in a dynamic environment.
You cannot control this chaos, but you can give it the structure to become whatever the community makes of it. Most MMOs and roleplay games exist to have you rise and "evolve" through their systems to achieve your own immediate ends. Eventually these systems grow stale and you'll end up joining a community which provides just enough validation to continue playing a game that everyone knows was outgrown thousands of hours ago.
These games and communities freely spend your time for you and in the end give you nearly nothing in return. On Aurbis we want people to create legacies. To write stories that never die. To create art that never fades. To build structure that never falls. To leave scars that never heal. The Elder Scrolls world, TES V: Skyrim, and Aurbis are the platforms for us to do this.
Skyrim was designed as a single-player game, but it was designed to simulate medieval fantasy for the player in a vast feudal era. All the pieces are there to turn it into a functional massively multiplayer world where the story is just as real. Where the grand saga is forever written by the players into these Annals.