Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms

Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms is an accessory for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game.

Contents

Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms details a Forgotten Realms campaign setting for use with Oriental Adventures, which describes the eastern land of Kara-Tur and its geography, population, society, government, history, languages, and opportunities for adventure. Like the original Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, this set only lightly details the vast land of Kara-Tur, leaving room for the DM's creativity.

"Volume I" covers the lands of Shou Lung, T'u Lung, Tabot, the Plain of Horses, and the Northern Wastes (analogs of China, Tibet, Mongolia, and Siberia), while "Volume II" covers the Jungle Lands, the Island Kingdoms, Koryo, Kozakura, and Wa (analogs of Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Korea, and Japan).

Publication history

Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms was written by Mike Pondsmith, Jay Batista, Rick Swan, John Nephew and Deborah Christian, with a cover by Jeff Easley and interior illustrations by Jim Holloway, and was published by TSR in 1988 as a boxed set with two 96-page books, four large color maps, and two plastic overlays.

Realm

A realm /ˈrɛlm/ is a community or territory over which a sovereign rules; it is commonly used to describe a kingdom or other monarchical or dynastic state.

The Old French word reaume, modern French royaume, was the word first adopted in English; the fixed modern spelling does not appear until the beginning of the 17th century. The word supposedly derives from medieval Latin regalimen, from regalis, of or belonging to a rex, (king). The word rex itself is derived from the Latin verb regere, which means "to rule". Thus the literally meaning of the word realm is the territory of a ruler, traditionally a monarch (emperor, king, grand duke, prince, etc.).

"Realm" is particularly used for those states whose name includes the word kingdom (for example, the United Kingdom), as elegant variation, to avoid clumsy repetition of the word in a sentence (for example, "The Queen's realm, the United Kingdom..."). It is also useful to describe those countries whose monarchs are called something other than "king" or "queen"; for example, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a realm but not a kingdom since its monarch holds the title Grand Duke rather than King.

Realms (video game)

Realms is a 1991 video game produced by Graftgold Ltd. for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST. It is considered a real-time strategy game. It was published by Virgin Games.

In it, the player has to build cities, raise taxes, create troops and fight enemy cities and troops in order to defeat his opponents.

Introduction

Like most games of its time, Realms keeps the player occupied by showing an intro during the loading of the game. During this intro, it tells the story of a prince watching his late father, the king being immolated at sea. Mourning, he sheds a tear, and his mourning is rewarded by the gods. He is struck by lightning, which forms and serpent in hands, an emblem of his right to rule the world. A tagline appears afterwards, stating "There can only be one... just make sure it's yours." After inserting and loading the second disk, the game can start.

Gameplay

First, the player must choose a race to control. Each of the six races is based on a fantasy race ala Tolkien. Each race have their own attributes, including some strengths and weaknesses. For example, Dwarves prefer having an axe as a weapon, but Elves are the best archers.

8Realms

8realms was a Browser based empire-building Massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game developed by Jagex Games Studio. It is the company's first internally developed MMORTS, and second published MMORTS, after War of Legends.

History

The 8Realms closed beta was released on 5 May 2011 as Jagex's first HTML-based game. Players were given advanced access to the closed beta by invitation through e-mail and through the game's Facebook page.

Shutdown

Jagex shut down 8Realms 1 July 2012, having met only 10% of their sales target for the game. Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard released a closure statement on the 8Realms website as follows:

"We have decided to withdraw 8Realms from the market on the 1st of July for a number of reasons, chief amongst those was to focus sharply on our three priorities for this year namely continuing to grow RuneScape, developing a great Transformers MMO and the launch of another game that is currently a closely guarded secret.

I know that this news will be disappointing to many of you and I want to express my sincere thanks to everyone who has taken part in the 8Realms beta. We have really valued your feedback and strong support and to show our appreciation we will be gifting everyone that has previously bought Gems with double the amount in WoL-cash!