Welcome to Pericles!
Pericles is a modern-tech, human-only region with three main focuses - realism, fairness, and consensus. In Pericles, we operate with respect and consideration for one another and a healthy regard for writing stories that we can all enjoy. We take everyone's views into account, no matter how new they are. Our goal is quality RPing, and we enjoy character-based stories, diplomatic intrigue, geopolitical crises, armed conflict, and even slice-of-life pieces, all held together by a rich and vibrant canon. As long as you are considerate of others, you can lead your nation down the path of malevolent dictatorship or towards the perfect republic. If all of this interests you, give us an application and we'll see where it goes!
As said, Pericles has three main guidelines that we all strive to live by.
Realism: One of the principal joys of Pericles is our commitment to verisimilitude. This doesn't mean that we're "the real world;" we welcome countries with conlangs and entirely new cultures. But at the same time, we strive to create and embody countries that feel as real and life-like as possible. As such, we have a few sub-guidelines to follow.
1) We enforce population, economic, and military caps in order to keep things reasonable. A country can elect to be small and wealthy, or it can be large and poor, but overall we like to cap things at the 60-100 million and 2 to 3 trillion GDP mark.
2) In order to keep things fair for our geopolitical RPs, we adhere to realistic military number and budget standards. These will depend on your nation's size and economy, of course, but the general rule is that the larger one's army, the poorer it generally is man-to-man. Our general peerage is on the level of France, Germany, or Japan; basing one's armed forces on the USA or China will be out-of-place on our general standards.
3) MT here refers to anything that reasonably exists on a commercial and production level at the current moment in time. It's up to interpretation, to a degree, but a good guideline is that if it's recently entered regular service with one of the real-world superpowers, it's probably on the bleeding-edge of our world.
4) Finally, there are two kinds of countries that we take a particularly dim view of. The first, obviously, is the 'dream country' - a country where the people have, en masse, embraced national glory and victory as a dream worth toiling and fighting for, suspicious of outsiders and exultant in their national leadership - usually an absolute monarch, often suspiciously young and hyper-competant. We view this sort of country as a kind of personal power-fantasy, and we consider that sort of thing to be beneath us. Thes second is what we call the 'vindication country' - a communist, fascist, or anarchist/libertarian paradise where everybody has gotten on board with a particular ideology (often one that's been discredited in the real world) and achieved spectacular results, or at least done better than all expectations. The purpose of these countries is usually not to roleplay in a satisfying manner, but to facilitate fantasies about how great their ideological systems are.
Fairness: Pericles is a region where everyne can RP in the style of their choice. There are always going to be differences between nations, but we try to make sure that no one nation can dominate others, either within or outside of RPs. Our guidelines on realism are designed to prevent one nation overpowering others, but we also have the generalized concept of 'peerage.'
A 'peer' is a country that is, overall, as "strong" as any other peer. It's fine - in fact, it's really cool - to have a deep interest in ammunition calibers, military orders of battle, aircraft design, and public finance, but a player's interest in one of these topics doesn't mean that they can exploit these mechanics in order to gain an advantage over another country, played by someone who isn't as interested in this stuff.
Finally, as a third point, there are no nuclear exchanges in Pericles. To be more precise, no nation may ever use nuclear weapons on another nation without their explicit and meaningful consent. There's no compromise on this point - if your country has them, and if you would get in a situation where it might make sense to use them, then the onus is still on you to think of a reason at the last minute why they don't end up being used.
Consensus: Pericles' consensus system is simple: everyone's views matter and everyone's views are important. When it comes to important decisions, we don't just take a vote and call it a day - we constructively air our opinions and try to reach an agreement that everyone can live with.
The most important expression of this system is in our recruitment process. Everybody has to approve of, or at least abstain on or show no resistance to, any new recruit. This includes everybody, even our newest members. If anybody in the group has a strong negative feeling about any move, then we work out our differences and come to terms - and if we can't, then we respect their objections. If there's a general group feeling that somebody is being unnecessarily obstructionist, then - once again - we work that out as a group and decide mutually what action to take.
Another important form of consensus is that when two countries start an RP with each other, we generally expect them to have an idea of how it will end, and that ending should be acceptable to both of them. If two countries go to war, it's very important that they both know, right at the outset, who's going to win and what's going to happen to the loser; the alternative is hurt feelings and bitter recriminations.
If you need clarification on any of these points, feel free to telegram me, Aurinsula, or else you can hop onto IRC channel #Pericles. Either way, we'll do our best to make sure all your questions are answered.
Useful Roleplay Links:
On Population
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=170201
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=113182
On Armaments
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=158614
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=105678
On Role-playing
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=103236
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=69551
viewtopic.php?p=1354539#p1354539
viewtopic.php?ns=1&f=5&t=128633
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=128219
While these aren't hard-and-fast rules, we generally find it helpful to think of countries in terms of the following categories, and we encourage you to pick one that applies to you.
First-rate Peers: A first-rate peer is a regional power-player. With a total GDP of 2.5 to 3.5 trillion, a population over 60 million, a GDP per capita of over 30,000, and no serious structural weaknesses, the first-rates are forces to be reckoned with. We call them Peers because, specifics notwithstanding, they are all approximately on the same level. In real life, Peers of the First include Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan.
Second-rate Peers: A peer of the second is, as the name implies, a second-rate but still significant country. Because they are less powerful overall, second-rate peers can be a little weirder, and any special concerns over their realism or balance can be waived a little bit. Good examples of second-rates are Canada (which is just a little smaller), Mexico (with its many, somewhat poor people), or Indonesia (with lots and lots of quite poor people.) In Pericles, second-rate peers include Defese (with its teeming, impoverished hordes), Aurinsula (recovering slowly from a disasterous war), and Lanos (which is a relatively large but still developing country).
Third-rate Peers: A third-rate country is another country with nothing particularly wrong, but is just, for whatever reason, even smaller in magnitude than a second-rate. Third-rate countries - generally with a total GDP of less than 1.5 trillion - have a lot more freedom to be unique or unusual. A good third-rate country, in real life, is modern Turkemistan - which, until very recently, was a surreally autocratic country with an all-dominating cult of personality around the leader, and an inexhaustible supply of natural gas to fund their weird ambitions.
Brilliant Isles: Brilliant Isles are a little bit of a special case. While these countries are often very small - their population generally maxes out at only 5 million people - the people who live there are unquestionably the wealthiest, most productive, best-educated people in the region, with a GDP per capita of perhaps as much as 75,000. Real-life Brilliant Isles include Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates; in Pericles, we have Phonox (an island city-state) and Esperance (a quasi-stateless charitable NGO that is also a petro-state).
Houses of Trouble: A House of Trouble is a country that, for whatever reason, just isn't making it - torn asunder by war, poverty, natural disaster, or intractable social dysfunction. A good example of a real-life House of Trouble is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Pericles, our current House of Trouble is Demphor, which has suffered a devastating military coup.
Finally, let's have a word on the map and grain cultures. This is an ingenious idea, originally dreamed up by Neo Prutenia and suggested to us by Hostillia, that states that each of our four major continents has a historical 'grain culture' - that one of the four major cereals (wheat, millet, maize, and rice) is native to one and only one of the four continents. Nowadays, of course, everything grows everywhere, but the grain-culture map is our way of gently suggesting where to put new countries based on their culture and ethnicity. Agenor is wheat, Carpathia is millet, Plata is maize, and Mineas is rice.
