It's Time To Bring Tuluk Back

If a dozen storytellers can't make anything happen in one city, what makes you think adding another will help? Just stop expecting Armageddon's staff to live up to any kind of expectations. They'll only disappoint you. Assume that they're doing nothing and you'll usually be right.

Tuluk was just mind-numbingly boring (and empty...) every time I played there, although that was ten years ago. Did it really get that much better?

Tuluk was always garbage.

Wow how about new ideas instead

I'd like to see Tuluk return as what it felt like back during the occupation/rebellion: a loose group of villages/outposts/estates. I thought the vibe of that region was best during that era, personally. Take that and flesh it out. Broken outer walls, each House/outpost/village/whatever with their own compound and walls. They could work together or against each other, which would create some intrigue right there. You could just have the templarate and Utep hole up in the Pyramid for whatever reason for eternity and who gives a fuck.

There should be a plot where either west of the mountains or east of the deserts there is a pathway unblocked and leads to an entire new city/society, something completely different. Not just a little lame outpost/village. I mean an entire sprawling city where they don't worship a Godking or a Dragon. Maybe they believe in a pantheon of gods. Maybe they elect their ruler on the shifting of power-tides, and that ruler when chosen assumes some great power enough to frighten the masses. This would allow the different "noble" houses to actually vie for power and not just vie for the longest lived. It isn't that hard to do something like this. At all. What Arm is now is just completely lazy. It is predictable and helicoptered so that it goes the way staff want it. Yes, Arm has been around, yes, change is natural, and yes, they need to pull their heads out of their buttholes.

Why does Tuluk have to be an old idea, bruh?

There were 3 problems with Tuluk. It attracted the most pretentious members of the playerbase, it never actually embodied its documented plan --a pretentious, mind-controlled society with rigid castes and norms--, and way too many people who were supposed to encourage PCs to fit the plan jumped from "detect a problem" to "ROFLstomp PC to death" without any steps between. So let's throw that away. Let's make Tuluki gameplay great again! Forget everything the happened before. Forget as hard as you can. Especially the headcrabs.

Instead, imagine Tuluk as a place to escape from. It's now a walled city whose gates are tightly controlled, partially-ruined by a civil war, partially infested by kryl. It is divided into factions currently in a ceasefire. Peasants (meaning you) dream of escape. Maybe they have something like the Nakki mage gem necklaces; unremovable and can be used to harm you at any distance. If you're a citizen it's a crime not to wear one, and there's a different version for visitors (if they have the clout to not be drafted into one of Tuluk's factions for stumbling inside the gates).

Your faction is assigned to you at character creation. You cannot change factions. Don't like it? Good! Because the theme is you want to escape, so your metagame is now also your game. However, this is balanced out by leader and templar characters being required to treat all PCs as a limited resource. In the case of leaders, well, there's no recruiting. Factions are assigned at creation, remember? They're stuck with you like you're stuck with them. Doing anything other than trying to get people up to speed is a guarantee you cannot accomplish anything. As for templars, they do not openly leave the pyramid. We can spitball who did what in the civil war, but the end result is Sun King loyalist templars are super unpopular with everyone else.

Instead of rolling through the streets giving orders, loyalist templars have to manipulate events in secret or remotely. Lirathuans and Jihaeans are the loyalists, I'll/we'll make up the traitor templars later. Oh, and that gender divide is gone because it was stupidly anachronistic for the game. Lirathuans are still primarily mindbenders, though some of their powers would be nerfed to require them to be in the same room as a target to initiate them. Jihaeans will still... whatever it is they do as martial artists, but they will have the added ability to change their appearance at will at large stun expense.

Lirathuans' main charges are now turning the populous back towards being ideal citizens, undermining disloyal factions, and restoring worship of the Sun King one individual at a time. If someone is not properly wearing a rictus grin despite the horror of their lives or is planning crimes or is a Nakki spy, Lirathuans don't drop 4 HGs on their head. Fucking up everyone's game was part of the old design and it was the staff's fault it happened. Under the new design, ALL PCS ARE TREATED AS RESOURCES. Lirathuan PCs are required to try to find a way to play malcontents against each other, or to use their powers to fuck with people until they fly right. This can be anything from making them superstitious through a combination hallucinations and engineered "coincidences", setting up two groups to fight each other, or really anything that involves manipulation without direct threat of force. Leaving the pyramid is reserved for severe cases where they need to use their in-person powers to move things along

I know the idea of a templar mindbender solving problems with cunning and mindbending is absurd, given that order all kill pc is a starting skill, but bear with me.

Jihaeans are now collectively James Bond. They are deployed out of the Pyramid, shifting their appearance to keep people unaware who they are really dealing with, and so separate groups don't know they're all working with the same person. Their goals are similar to the Lirathuans', but they do things that require a human element rather than a supernatural one. They need to be brave, inspirational figures who attribute their good fortune to the Sun Kind or rightthink or whatever's on sale from Pyramid Farms this week. Like Lirathuans, they have to treat ALL PCS AS RESOURCES. Ideally, the different loyalist templars would coordinate with each other to ruin PCs' lives until they're part of the solution instead of the problem.

I'm still forming this idea. I'd love some feedback. As for why Allanak hasn't invaded, I'd go with: "They know if they invade it will unite Tuluk and solidify Muk Utep's power. On the other hand, if they just build outposts for exploiting the natural resources and tax people for using the North Road, there's not much Tuluk can throw together to stop them with."