The Chronicle of Karguun

1. The Realm and its Days
   Every real hour is a day in the realm, and the realm never waits for you. A province is protected for its first 72 days; use them to build. An age lasts about 2,184 days, and at its end the greatest provinces and kingdoms are carved into the Hall of Legends.
2. The Peoples and the Personalities
   Your people decide what your army is made of and what you do best; your personality sharpens it further. No choice is wrong, but each rewards a different way of ruling. Both are chosen when you found your province and cannot be changed until the next age.
3. Honour and Nobility
   Honour is won in battle and makes you noble. Nobility raises your income, your population, your armies, your magic and your thieves, and gives you more votes in your kingdom. It is never spent, but it can be lost to those who defeat you.
4. Kingdoms and their Monarchs
   Your kingdom is your alliance: up to 25 provinces who share a Paper, a Moot and a fate. It is led by a monarch chosen by vote, who speaks for the kingdom to the rest of the realm.
5. Land, Buildings and Gold
   Land is everything. Each acre houses people, and each building gives them work and gives you something in return. Build on every acre you hold, explore for more while your kingdom's uncharted lands last, and keep your people fed and employed: working peasants pay the taxes that pay for everything else.
6. Raising an Army
   Your army is drafted from your people, trained into specialists and elites, and paid every day. Keep enough defence at home to make attackers think twice, and enough offence to take land from those who do not.
7. Going to War
   The War Room sends your armies against other provinces. Choose a target close to your own size, send more than enough to break its defence, and your army comes home with land, gold or worse. The War Table beside the orders does the reckoning for you.
8. The Mystic Arts
   Wizards gather in your Guilds and cast spells with runes from your Towers. Spells on your own lands make your province stronger; spells on others scout them or weaken them. Every spell needs mana, which returns slowly each day.
9. The Arts & Sciences
   Scholars turn gold into knowledge, and knowledge into a stronger province. Science is cheapest late in the age, but it pays best when bought early. Each science gives less the more you already know.
10. Thieves and their Ways
    Thieves slip into other provinces to learn their secrets or carry off their wealth. They are cheap to train, they never tire for long, and a kingdom with good thieves always knows what its enemies hold.
11. Relations between Kingdoms
    Every attack, hostile spell and thieves' raid makes the attacker's kingdom angrier with its victim's. Anger turns to Unfriendly, then Hostile relations, and a kingdom faced with hostility may declare war. Wars end in peace, surrender or withdrawal, and are followed by a ceasefire.
12. Aid and Trade
    Kingdom-mates may send each other gold, food, runes and soldiers. Aid arrives at once, but every shipment is weighed in a trade balance, and those who take far more than they give pay a tax on what they receive.
13. Playing Alone
    Single player is your own world: a smaller realm of AI rulers where you are monarch from the first day, time runs as fast or as slow as you like, and every season is scored. The rules of the province are those of the realm, so all you learn here serves you there.