Software:Lords of the Earth
Lords of the Earth (LOTE) is a play-by-email strategy game, first developed by Thomas Harlan in 1983 to entertain and confound his friends. The earliest version of the game was inspired by SPI's game Empires of the Middle Ages with the intent of overcoming the geographic and stylistic limits of that game by adding the rest of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and a distinct battle system. This early campaign covered only Eurasia and a short rulebook, but provided the basis for future expansion to cover the entire globe. Most LOTE campaigns, of which there are many, are set on Earth and in a historical context, or scenario. While there are many games, few run with any great regularity and almost all suffer from game master burn out, resulting in games starting and stopping and then sitting dormant until another GM can be found to run the game.
In all of the campaigns, players control nations, religious orders or primacies, merchant houses or secret societies struggling to survive, expand and overthrow their enemies. Play is handled in turns, where the players submit orders to the game master, then receive results in the form of a newsfax (newsletter) and a stat sheet (which describes their position after the results of the turn).
The scope of the game is vast, covering a thousand-year period of human history, from AD 1000 to AD 2000. A single game of Lords of the Earth, played to completion, has been determined to take some twenty-five years. But, despite this daunting length, Lords of the Earth offers great play value, as the players' actions directly affect the future. Indeed, it could be said that even as players fight for the present they are also fighting to rewrite the annals of history, which will affect the future of an alternate time line.
(From the Basic Rulebook, Introduction).
External links
 |
