What This Game Is
The power to destroy a thing is to have complete control over it.
An institution is tribal knowledge & great leaders.
Bureaucracies do not know how to be a bureaucracy. The bureaucrat knows how to be a bureaucracy. The bank does not know how to be a bank. The banker knows how to be a bank. All social structures are held together by the invisible web of social relationships; any structure described in aggregate is a legal fiction. Remove the human, and the network dies.
Democracy is a détente; a failure to execute power. Oligarchs unable to conquer each other, buying time.
Finance is how humans compete to resolve debts. Economics is how to coordinate finance so that humans circularly resolve their debts.
The issuers of credit will always protect themselves.
All wars are bankers’ wars, and are means of resolving debts.
Every man is a bank, in different forms, and to varying degrees of competency.
What This Game Is
Glass Empires is a role-playing game that simulates pre-industrial human power dynamics on an animistic discworld where there is no distinction between magic & nature.
While Glass Empires is mostly OSR-compatible & can be played as a traditional (if odd) D&D-like title, it is not a game about dungeon-crawling (not primarily, at least) & the gameplay loop bears little resemblance to the loops most typified by other RPGs. This is a game about relationships, debt, rulership, & the nature of the divine. Glass Empires is a game about factions & power. In a very real way, your faction is both synonymous with & more important than your character. It is a critical assumption that you are at the very least interested in a cult of personality as a great hero, and far more preferably, that you will rule an empire or die trying.
To this end, the game contains a large number of critical diversions from what we might call a “baseline” fantasy RPG, outlined here to make the point clearly & early.
Level is Number of Followers
Your Level is spiritual energy backed by the number of Families who follow & depend upon you. That can be as economic dependence, heroic awe, or religious worship — but your power is intimately associated with your ability to command & lead your fellow Man. Your ability to obtain unlimited costless personal power is highly curtailed relative to mainstream D&D or even Old School Renaissance games.
Furthermore, your Retainers are critical to maintaining power. Because each Retainer can themselves lead a competent Subfaction as subordinate to a Faction you control, each loyal Retainer is an effective force multiplier on how much you can achieve … or a severe threat that can destabilize your realm.
Because your Level is based on your Families, you will lose your Level if you lose your Faction. Being ousted, overthrown, or annihilated in a battle or siege is a serious risk to your personal power. This is not as extreme as it may sound, because the only mechanical threat this has is that you lose your maximum Hit Points — you keep your Class Features — but it is something to remember. Your Level is literally your Followers.
Classes Are Not Combat-Only
Your Class is your social class & determines your social standing as much or moreso than your combat power. Because the most important thing in Glass Empires is your ability to command humans, the most important thing that Classes do is enable new ways for you to command people & manipulate the politics of your realm. While there are still combat-focused Classes (& these indeed provide utility for a conqueror, adventurer, or warlord), just as viable to glory are roles focused on stewardship, political maneuvering, & economic subterfuge.
Furthermore, once the game starts, all Classes are functionally mix-&-match with multiclassing as the assumed default. Each Level you gain grants you one additional Class Feature for any that you qualify for, each of which is fully modular. A Jester can become a Lord, then take a Rank in Gangster. Your Level is derived from your Faction & stat boosts (when they occur) come from elsewhere; your Class Ranks & Features are the entirety of your “Class.”
There is No Niche Protection
Some Classes can do the same thing as each other. The differentiation between characters (including PCs) in Glass Empires primarily comes from the factional & political level. Two warriors of identical powers can rule wildly different domains & derive their uniqueness from their differing strategic positions.
Furthermore, all characters, including NPCs & every monster, uses the same basic chassis & are subject to essentially the same rules. There are very few special functions that are unique to NPCs or PCs as a category. Animals, demons, ghosts & gods operate under the same framework as people. There are no ability scores to track (their role is filled by Facts).
Magic is Costly
All casting is a blood sacrifice to a god in exchange for a miracle. A fireball is never free. Magicians are Jester-priests & fringe freaks on the edge of society making deals to Totem-imprisoned spirits Totem they may have personally hunted down & killed to borrow their powers for but a moment. There is no such thing as safe, predictable, or stable magic.
This is a critical conceit of the setting & ruleset. Unconstrained abuse of blood magic results in divine Aztec state-managed sacrifices on crack — power optimized to maximally extract value from human lives (or whatever else is valuable) as cattle. Indeed, even with this severe limitation in place, the demands of power are so great that this very pattern forms consistently elsewhere within Aia.
Everything Is Magic
There is no magic. Everything is magic. Your spells are not some bizarre set of rules bolted onto the universe-as-is. Magic is spirits acting on your behalf — your spell to grow claws is a literal bear’s soul ripped out from its Flesh-elemental corpse-form & made into a supplicant. The earth is Stone elementals; there are only eight metals. The river is inhabited by a vast fractal kingdom of water elementals who care not to move from their dwelling. You could, in theory & with great practice, negotiate with a fire — but it usually only wants what fire does, in the end. Belief, in some ways, is said to beget reality, & all manner of new horrors can be birthed from the fears of Men. People have a limited grasp on science, meteorology, reason, & the mind. Those on Aia live in a dark world surrounded by terrors they do not understand for which there is no clear explanation.
Eating Things to Gain Power
If you ritualistically kill, cook, & eat a creature, you can gain its power. This works on every creature, including humans. Everyone knows it exists. It is a key part of the setting. This is the source of beastmen — men who ate beasts & grew to be like them. It is also the source of vast, systematized Flower War ritual violence across the rest of the Grand Disc whose sole purpose is to produce those beastmen for the benefit of godlike priest-kings, as well as the unending font of noble hunts for new, dangerous monsters to consume.
Ritual cannibalism is at once honored, taboo, & often mandatory for warriors.
Gods Are Physical Things That Can Be Killed
To a peasant, a king is a god. In Glass Empires, the notion of divinity is an open question. The things we would call gods may be spirits, men, wild animals, powerful kings, or any number of other oddball entities. There are multiple Factions in the default setting whose primary mode of victory demands the slaughter of many gods. You can feasibly become a “god” by figuring out how to become ageless & learning some magic while hiring some spirits as guardians or angels. You could also just build a cult.
Relationships & Obligations Rather Than Discrete Economics
You will not be bean-counting. Glass Empires’ power structures are principally driven by economics, but the vast majority of it is relational. Discrete quantities of coin (“I have $2,000”) is infinitely less significant to a ruler than revenues (“I earn $2,000 per month”), which for the most part are simplified into game rules that implicitly prove your financial capabilities rather than requiring you explicitly mark up & down fluctuating balances like a petty bookkeeper.
This also plays into how dungeon-crawling is mostly not relevant to anyone playing for keeps — the pile of gold you can drag out of a dungeon is insignificant next to the economic production of an entire empire, which is not measured in gold but in labor.
And speaking of labor…
Amoral Bronze Age Brutality
Because Glass Empires is pre-industrial, it is pre-modern in its morality. Christ has not died for you; there is no forgiveness for an absent sacrifice. The gods demand your blood, sweat, & tears — even if it kills you. The entirety of Glass Empires is about labor as the fundamental unit of power. Families are your resources. The game is about taking young men & marching them to die for personal rewards they may have never benefited from. Human power in this context consists of taking a civilization & treating every man & woman in it as an asset towards your conquest of the Grand Disc. Slavery is an integral component of every economic system on Glass; pre-industrial civilization struggles to exist without it, and the economic framework for alternative systems simply does not exist. Morality warps & bends, as with cannibalism & war, around the economic incentives of labor. Such is the nature of power; there is nothing that humans cannot under sufficient strain eventually normalize.
Players are Not Necessarily Moral
If you want to be a hero, go ahead and try. It is not mechanically prohibited, but it is also not incentivized. Every Faction in Glass is pursuing power through some combination of violence, manipulation, & ideology. The default victory condition is conquest and/or subjugation of all other actors. There is no grand heroic quest & no moralizing. This is a Bronze Age Renaissance civil war.
A key theory behind Glass Empires is that morality is downstream from behavioral incentives between comparably powerful agents. This game will not state that you are not heroes — but whether that is economically viable or not is an open question based on how you define heroism. In the end, the grandest of visionaries are also slaves to power. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, & the nature of the human condition may yet bring low the greatest of intentions.