What is The Sword of Damocles?

The Sword of Damocles begins in the city of Amalin.  Why and how you are present in Amalin is very much up to you, because you are going to help create the part of the city's society from which your character hails.  I am leaving certain areas of the city's political structure, geography, and architecture intentionally undefined to give you the players maximum flexibility in shaping the story.  While there will be a through story, an ultimate goal, and an ending of the story, the exact way you arrive at the ending will be up to you.  There will be villains, and friends, and others who populate the world, but who they are and how they react to you will spring largely from who you are in the world that you've helped to create.

What does this mean?  Well, this is not freeform; we will need to collaborate on your ideas so that they fit in with both the main story and the parts of society that other characters are creating.  What, specifically, does this mean for you?  Well, while you won't be writing the story, you will be giving me material that helps to detail the world: Naming names, remembering legends, describing places that all will (or can) eventually appear in the campaign.

How does this work? During the adventure, your character(s) will be forced to make decisions not preprogrammed options fed to you by the GM, but real-life ones that someone in their situation would face. In other words, I will put you in situations where your choices determine what happens next.  Those choices are yours and yours alone, and I will have no idea what they may be or where they will take the game next, any more than you might. There are no cohesive plot points for you to be steered towards, no obvious leads for you to grab onto to haul the saga forward (beyond the minimum necessary to jumpstart the story); it will just be you and the consequences of your actions, whatever they are, until you finally reach the end of your journey.

As an example: Let's say the group agrees you have arrived at a point where you must travel elsewhere to locate some form of assistance in your quest. Where will you go? I don't know, either! I guess that means you'll have to invent somewhere. Sam the sorcerer wracks his brain and, finally, suggests that you travel northward, to the distant city of Kelthorn whose name you have heard once or twice the great city in the mountains, built by the hero-king of legend, Athwulf.

Congratulations, Sam; what have you just done to the game world? Let's evaluate:
There is a large city called Kelthorn.
Kelthorn is far away to the north of your current location.
There is now a legendary hero in the world's history Athwulf who supposedly founded Kelthorn.
Athwulf was a king.

That's impressive enough, but take a close look:
If Kelthorn really is a major city, it probably lies along at least one trade route or primary road.
There is not just a city to the north, but a whole mountain range, as well.
If Athwulf was a king, he had a kingdom, and Kelthorn was part of it. There must now be other evidence of Athwulf somewhere, if he was real: Monuments, a tomb, stories. Perhaps his kingdom still exists today; if not, it certainly must have been influential, if Kelthorn still stands after all this time.

Look how careless Sam was... He's invented an entire kingdom with just one sentence. I wonder if he meant to do that...?

Now, it's important to keep in mind that most of the additions you'll be making to the world will happen through your characters, not directly from you, as players. One of many benefits to beginning the game as borderline NPCs is that you can charge at the world with fewer preconceived notions of how it should operate than a well-traveled and experienced PC or at least, any ideas you may already have are more easily shattered and displaced by new experiences. As you progress and tack on further details to the environment, I will generally be the one to stat and develop them in the background and to produce an end result in line with the needs of the game as much as the intent of the character. So, the downside of being practically nobody? Things may not always be what you think, and the world will be full of surprises, many of them unpleasant. After all, if your entire life has been spent in a village so small it doesn't even have a name, then it would be difficult to conceive of a bustling, stone-walled metropolis you may get to Kelthorn and discover that the "great city" is actually just a town of four or five hundred people with only two paved roads. Disappointing to a player, perhaps but maybe still equally impressive to a character that knows no better.

Rules

Setting

[link]http://wiki.rpol.net/?edit=68851/rules[/link]