Divine Right

created by Kalmakka

(thing) by Kalmakka (1.5 y) (print) ? (I like it!) Wed Jan 15 2003 at 21:08:54

Comic subtitled The Adventures of Max Faraday. It consists of two books of seven chapters each and was created by Jim Lee and Scott Williams.

The story is about how the student Max Faraday accidentaly gets his hands on the Creation Equation and how he is gradually turned into a rather unpopular god. John Lynch playes a major role and the rest of Gen 13 and Wildcats also show up for the final battle between Man and God.

The drawings are very good and the story is just great. It loses a few points for inconsistencies but is still a quite worthwile read. Even worth US$35.90.

(thing) by anyend (4 wk) (print) ? (I like it!) Sat Sep 18 2004 at 17:36:10

Divine Right is a board game published by TSR in 1979. The game is set in a mythical land called Minaria. Minaria, as laid out on the board's map, bears a striking resemblance to Greece, the Balkans, and Asia Minor. Thematically it's similar to Avalon Hill's King Maker and the venerable Diplomacy.

Players (from 2 to 6) use diplomacy and military force to rule Minaria. However unlike King Maker's historical war between the House of York and House of Lancaster or Diplomacy's battles between pissy Europeans, Minaria is firmly set in a fantasy realm with human, elvish, dwarven, and troll (trollish?) kingdoms.

The game is turned based. Each turn is made up of movement, diplomacy, siege, combat, and random event phases. Each player has twenty of these turns to amass as many points as possible. The player with the most points wins. Points are awarded for surrounding and sacking towns and castles as well as capturing foreign monarchs.

There are 15 kingdoms in Minaria, of which a maximum of 6 can be commanded by players. The remaining kingdoms are controlled via personality cards. To win against other human players, one has to send diplomats to these kingdoms and get them on side or at least remain neutral in a fight. How your diplomats win allies is determined partially by the randomly generated personalities. Sometimes bribes work. Sometimes they fail and result in random parts of your diplomat returned in a box.

Loyalty is not assured, however, and chance favors those making bold, calculated moves. Waiting too long to amass allies can result in a sudden shift in allegiances on the turn you decided to launch your massive assault. A player suddenly finds himself not marching along side an army of dwarves but having an army of dwarves attacking your flank.

The game did not last very long in TSR's catalogs. They discontinued the game in the early '80s. Although Divine Right never really found a D&D-sized audience it remained, like Junta, a cult classic for decades. Part of the game's cult appeal was its extensive back story. For a couple years TSR's Dragon magazine ran an ongoing feature called "Minarian Legends". While the column was no doubt a delight to hardcore fans who finally had a history as rich and as mythical as King Maker and Diplomacy's attendant back stories, to non-players it was probably one of the least read and most confusing columns to ever run in Dragon. People unfamiliar with the game had little to no idea what a Minarian was and what the legends were about or why they should care. Still it beat the ass off of Darlene Pekul's mercifully short-lived serial cartoon Jasmine.

Part of the game's problem was it was highly complex and the rules did little to aid novice players. Also the game tended to be most playable when one could drum up 4-6 players. As a two or three player game, the game played out like a staid game of tic-tac-toe. Everyone knows the next move and counter move. A larger number of players, however, creates a very fluid, ever changing game.

Drumming up 4 or 6 people created another problem. It's easy to find another lonely soul to hunker down for a Saturday night over Avalon Hill's Squad Leader with a PBS pledge drive Doctor Who marathon running in the background. However, if you were able to get 6 people willing to get together to game in a fantasy milieu, they probably wanted to play D&D.

Nothing is ever final in fantasy gaming, of course. A newly expanded 25th Anniversary has been released. More kingdoms and races have been added to the game along with some rule expansions.

printable version
chaos

Divine Right of Kings	Cardinal Richelieu	TSR	soft link
The Wisdom of the Babylonians	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed	Baroque	April 14, 2006
Whole Earth Catalog	Oxford	John Locke	manga
Link and Link	link	Monarchs of Russia	House of York
jasmine	Gen13	Doctor Who	cult classic
Asia Minor	Avalon Hill	Dragon	junta

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