Principles

We want to simulate actual Elder Scrolls lore and the state of the actual Skyrim province. We have written the lore for the province of Skyrim and the Nords from the perspective of its citizens, not the hero or main character.

There will eventually be no admin-assigned roles on Aurbis. Initial seeding is necessary, but the goal is full community ownership of every leadership position through in-character achievement. Server systems are designed around this at its core.

Characters and Cohorts will be recognized by the community based on their actual abilities, achievements, and influence.

Powerful leadership positions are held by individuals and Cohorts of demonstrated significance in the game, not by those who know the right people or who say the right words.

Rules will be honest, transparent, and consistently applied. The community will always have a meaningful say on the direction of administration.

We have designed a public House/Clan/Family system called Cohorts which is available to everyone. We have designed factions with 5 base hard-coded succession systems with automatic cadence for disbandment. We have designed Holding, Nobility and Guard faction systems with their own internal features. We have designed the canonical Skyrim factions with their own unique features and massive room for updates and expansions. We have designed three functional admin controlled public institutions that will maintain and administrate the world.

Cohorts can be created in-game by any group of 3+ players. These Cohorts will be the foundation of the families, guilds and factions that end up forming our world. Faction and holding leadership positions will often be decided on a Cohort basis and not an individual one. We want to see real, functional blocs form and receive the rewards they earn. Existing groups can migrate to Aurbis and establish themselves as a collective, and even integrate themselves with our world and lore via the Lore Artifact system.

The canonical Elder Scrolls factions which have direct ports to our gamemode are: The Companions, College of Winterhold, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Bards College, Imperial Legion, Stormcloaks, Thalmor, The Blades, and The Vampire Lords. Each are built meticulously to integrate their vanilla features and integrate custom ones that will be discovered in-character. Other factions may be created over time as they become integrated into the world, often formed from coalitions of Cohorts.

There also exist Public Factions. Temple Factions of Priests and Priestesses of the Temples of the Divines, whose duty it is to rescue and tend to the wounded of body and spirit. Stable Factions to buy, sell, and maintain mounts and pets. Holding factions will maintain their own public affairs and manage businesses and properties within that holding. Guard factions are connected to Holdings and have their own ability to detain, arrest, and place bounties.

These are functions that we will ultimately all integrate into the gamemode as advanced systems in ways that no other MMO or roleplay server has. The idea is to build the foundation for something we can all enjoy fairly and freely. The admin team will have to seed the original holdings/factions and stimulate the environment with the goal of turning Skyrim into the grand Imperial province it is.

Staff in the server will operate through in-character admin-controlled civic institutions. Server administration will be done publicly through the Greybeards, the East Empire Company, the College of Winterhold, and The Grand Moot. This allows us to make acceptable authoritative statements on the state and direction of the server while remaining consistent and in-character. Admins will not be "playing" these characters, they are our version of admin duty.

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.

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.