I talked to Matt about some of this via IRC, but here's some of my thoughts organized here for the forum readers.
Depending on how large your guild gets, with the people of three realms in it, I think you're biggest issue will be message traffic. I stepped down as leader of Sanguis Astroism on Dwilight so I could get away from all the messages. I just couldn't handle the flood of traffic, hundreds of messages in a couple hours, when some topic came up that *everyone* had to argue over.
Might be a problem, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Ritualized combat? What if one of the realms is in danger of wiping out the other? How far will the Empire let things go before he steps in and stops it? War without risking your life, or the life of your realm, is a bit stale.
If your realm gets wiped out during a challenge, then tough luck. No one, Emperor included, will be able to intervene in challenges (with the
possible exception of some threat arising that is a danger to the existence of the Empire as a whole, but I'm not certain even that should be an acceptable excuse). In practice the only way I see challenges interrupted is if one of the Order of the Hawk military requirements is activated.
The Emperor will probably intervene with realms that are getting wiped out by out-Empire realms, but for internal wars, why would the Emperor care? Only changes who owes him fealty, not how much. Now, if you're wiping out the realm of, say, the Emperor's wife, when he's psychotically obsessed with her to the point where he thinks destroying realms and leveling cities and sowing the ground with salt because someone offered her a minor insult, then you may have a problem, but that's just politics.
I hope you get enough people interested in that many positions. That's always been one of the most difficult things I've encountered lately: Finding enough volunteers to fill position vacancies.
Oh, it'll be interesting, I'm sure, but even if I can't make it a hard rule it's going to be a rule to appoint anyone without a position over anyone with a position if they are a candidate.
