Thalmarkin is a small tyrany with a strong leadership and quite effective military, who will certainly be looking for war, but unfrotunatly i found it a poor place for RP, some characters there never even heard of the word honor.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of tyrannies and I think there's way too few of them but I don't count Thalmarkin among them. Yes, we have strong leaders, but they're far from unquestionable, we've got a pretty stable government at the moment but that comes only after our previous judge was protested out, a new one was voted and in and he has also suffered his share of protests and criticism, especially from the previous judge.
(Of course before that we had tons and tons of protests coming from the clan who I'm guessing inspired you to use "tyranny"
Glad we're rid of those tbh.)
Furthermore it's the Royal Advisors (containing 17 out of 32 of our nobles) that take most decisions, the King rarely acts alone. Oh, and all the positions are elected, the general even every month.
Anyway, no honour... let me explain our "switching of sides": we are traditionally allied with OG and things have now returned to their natural order, the reason we warred them before the invasion is because they chose Sint over us in their war against Fronen, Sint being the realm that nearly destroyed OG with the help of the daimons during the third invasion, and the ones who set this "invader-allying" fad in motion, a trend that Thalmarkin steered clear from.
This war, we were allied with both sides and OG and Sint supplied us with the food necessary to survive during the invasion while Fronen sent an army North once when the undead had already temporarily moved on, stationed it in Unger eating that precious food and then they moved blindly into the blight, losing their army. For some reason they never returned after that... Maybe they thought we used some sort of dark magic to destroy their army.
That aside, of course conquest was a defining factor as well, in particular the conquest of Jedinchel which was ours before our crazy general defected with it to Fronen and which they didn't want to return to us, because we were too "unstable"... But we could just as well have gone after OG for conquest, I had 15 knights in Unger, we definitely needed some new regions to load them off, damn knights ate away +60% of my income...
Melhed on the other hand doesn't even seem to take honour into account when making decisions, just the nobles' opinion of the moment. But well, I do applaud that you've finally managed to get into a war.
We also just had a very, very lengthy discussion because one of our nobles unsuspectingly admitted relation to a commoner (advy), duel threats were being thrown around and it climaxed with a failed assassination. Never did this affect the stability of our realm as a whole or the dedication our nobles show in the war. Sure, a few more vendettas may have been created to add to the existing one, but the loyalty to Thalmarkin and the will to work together was never in doubt. I love it.
But there characters are fun and a good potential to cause many real conflicts with other nations.
I consider it our duty to keep BT warring until the day the 5th invasion starts!
Anyway, that aside, Thalmarkin has a bit of both rp-wise. We don't really have much written roleplays, but we've definitely got a bunch of chars who take SMA very seriously, and then there's also a couple of silly chars. If for example a member of the Cosula family ever rises to the throne again, you can bet your account on it that sock-sucking is going to be publicly demanded from our enemies and that spanking will be promised. In other words: if you want hardcore SMA, then Thalmarkin probably isn't for you, we like our SMA sprinkled with some good old-fashioned silliness.
We do however have a high level of activity and it is not very hard to rise in our ranks if you are involved in the realm.
As for Riombara, the other realm I'm in (you might have noticed I'm not going for the usual semi-neutral report of all realms): it is indeed a very open republic where pretty much everything is voted on. We are fighting our eternal war against Enweil (now with extra mini-Enweil) and are doing pretty well even if the war has been pretty much of a stalemate so far. We are in dire need of nobles and it's easier to get a lordship position than to spot a rat in the sewer so to speak. All positions are voted on monthly and for every important decision a referendum for all nobles is held. In theory a weekly diplomacy report should be presented to the nobles but that is not really practice. There are a few (not very well defined) political factions, we've got the hardcore Enweil haters, the pragmatists, the monarchists and the republicanists. We tax every region 25% and every duchy 100% and then spread everything out amongst the nobility, ensuring everyone receives a good tax share.
We've got a decent SMA atmosphere (even though our tax system has been called communist
) driven by the desire to go medieval on Enweil and strong morals, SMA is not really a main concern but there's next to no silliness. But as Geronus has said, written rps are quite scarce as well, with the exception of Fleugs' descriptions of inventive ways of killing people.
So that's it, I find it hard to speak of things like atmosphere and roleplay as an outsider, so I'll leave that to the others.
