Steps for Making and Developing a Realm
Creating a Realm is a large task, but luckily, it's designed from the ground up to be a community effort.
This is a list of the steps involved in creating a Realm, finishing the first Age, creating an (optional) Legendary card, and what happens if your Realm completes additional ages.
You can find a list of all Realms here!
Steps for Making and Developing a Realm
Prerequisite: Getting a card into the game
You cannot create a new Realm until you have successfully gotten a new card into the game. We recommend that you focus on that before even reading the rest of the information on Realms. Realms are primarily for advanced users who are already familiar with the process of creating new cards.
Part 1: Realm creation
Short version: To get started, just start submitting cards and mark them as coming from the same Realm.
When making a new card, you can choose to say that it came from a currently existing Realm or create your own.
If you want to create a new Realm, you may not be able to yet. New Realms can only be created by players who have successfully gotten a card voted in.
While building up your Realm, you can create a wiki page with whatever information you want (lore, design goals, etc.) You can find many examples at the bottom of this page.
Part 2: Finishing Age I
Short version: When your Realm has enough cards of appropriate rarity to complete Age I, contact Nick on Discord. We will invite you to a Google Doc where you can provide information for us to add into the game. All Realm Members will get gold when their Realm completes an Age.
Requirements
A Realm Age can be completed when the Realm has:
At least 3 Common rarity cards
At least 2 Uncommon or lower rarity cards
At least 2 Rare or lower rarity cards
An eighth card in addition to the above seven -- This can be a Legendary if all of the other requirements have been met.
This explanation is a bit formal and hard to parse, but essentially: it's possible for your Realm to finish Age I with eight Commons, but if your Realm is composed of eight Rares and no other cards (for example), you need to make at least 3 Commons and 2 more cards of Uncommon or Common rarity. This is because one of our goals when creating Realms was to reward the creation of cards with lower rarities.
Note: Undraftable rarity cards do not count for any of the above requirements; however, you can add as many Undraftable cards to your Realm as you'd like.
Realm Admin Assignment
When a Realm finishes Age I, Realm creators are assigned as a Realm Admin and can optionally assign a second user as a Realm Admin.
Realm Admins are tracked here. If this is out of date, please contact Nick on Discord and he will update it.
If the player who originally created the Realm is still around, they will probably become the Realm Admin; if not, we will default to whoever has submitted the most cards for that Realm, and finally, whoever was the most recent player to submit a card for that Realm (who is still around).
Updating the Google Doc
When the Realm is assigned an Realm Admin, they get access to this sheet, which is essentially a list of things they want to add to the game.
To complete an Age, just write “this realm has completed age I.” on the sheet and message Nick on Discord. You don’t have to list the cards that prove you have completed this age.
To make additional changes to your realm, follow the examples from the bottom of the Google Doc linked above. You can update aspects of your Realm whenever you want, however, the developers will generally check the Google Doc only when asked to, or when a Realm completes an Age.
When you finish your first Age, you probably want to supply these things out as well:
- If you want tooltips to show up in the Card Creator when someone selects your Realm, submit a bulleted list of things that contributors should be aware of. It will look like this:
These tooltips can also have a link to your wiki page, as in the above example.
If you submit a 300 character max blurb for your Realm's lore and the name of a card added to Collective which best represents your Realm, it will appear as a “waiting for game tooltip” while players are in queue.
For both of these, we may fix up the grammar or reword this text for clarity.
When we have approved your list of 8+ cards, the Age will be complete. 8000 Gold will be distributed evenly between all Realm Members, which includes all players who have created or collaborated on a card in the realm at any point in its history.
Part 3: Your first Legendary (If you want)
Short version: You can make a Legendary rarity card for each Age you’ve completed, or will complete with the acceptance of said Legendary card.
After you’ve submitted enough cards of the specified rarities to complete your first Age, you can submit a card of Legendary rarity.
If a Legendary card is submitted without fulfilling the rarity prerequisites, but is voted into the game, it will be downgraded to a Rare, or not allowed in (depending on if the text fits in the card at the Rare font size and if too many Rares were submitted that week).
When an age is completed, the realm creators may upgrade a Rare in the realm to Legendary.
If people abuse this system to try to “sneak” Legendaries into the game for the extra text space, we will change it so that stops happening.
If the 3 Commons, 2 Uncommons and 2 Rares requirement for your realm have already been completed, your final card can be a Legendary rarity which completes the age.
If you want to make more Legendary cards in the same Realm, you have to wait until you’ve completed another Age. Legendary cards can only be made in a Realm which has more completed Ages than its current number of Legendary cards.
Part 4: Completing additional Ages
Short version: Get another set of cards which completes the same rarity requirements and you’ll get more gold and rewards.
As long as your Realm has 6+ Commons, 4+ Uncommons, 4+ Rares and a fifteenth and sixteenth card (which can be Legendary rarity), you can complete Age II. This same system of multiplying the age requirements applies for all ages after Age I.
Ages no longer have any specific lore significance, but generally speaking, we want older card’s lore and theme to be protected, just so that nobody can totally transform someone’s old Realm if they leave the game for a bit. We have no exact rules around this yet.
You can submit any number of cards to your Realm as you want without even thinking about completing an Age. You just won’t get the rewards below.
Just like with Age I, additional Ages will be completed by writing “This realm has completed Age II” (or whichever age) in this doc.
Additional Information
Cards which refer to all denizens of a Realm can be made without having to finish an Age. The syntax for this should be “All Spideropolis units” if you want to refer to all cards from that Realm, or “All Spideropolis Spiders” if you want to refer to a specific tribe from that Realm. (This is a good reason to give your Realms short names.)
Check here for updated information on lore in realms.