| abstract | - Realpolitik is a forum game played on CFC based on the Paradoxplaza Realpolitik series. A Realpolitik is where the Game Master plays a turn-by-turn strategy game (in this example Civilization IV). The players role play as immortal politicians living in a democracy who want to become rulers of the said nation. An election would take place every turn set, where player characters (and sometimes non-player characters) would vote on who should rule the nation for the next turnset. Each player was awarded two votes to put into parties created by themselves or other players - with one catch: only one vote per party. Parties were thus encouraged to band together in "Coalitions" to unite voters. Some of the elections got quite vicious. After the second turnset, there would be another election. Elections were entirely thread-based affairs, taking about a week. The first one was created by Lighthearter (LH) who was the Game Master of it as well. It was played as the nation of England and went for about a year. Eventually, LH got tired of taking an hour to play each turnset and declared the game over, writing an epilogue that neatly wrapped up all storylines. After a brief stint of utter confusion LH resigned indefinitely as a Realpolitik GM, only to realize that what he thought had happened had happened but hadn't happened, even though it happened. There was a brief Beta that Lighthearter hosted as well. This introduced new rules such as NPC voting. These rules were refined for Realpolitik II: Dark Storm Rising. It began in March of 2011, and ran through early July. It had its fair share of challenges and difficulties, and there has been a reboot in Realpolitik III: Dark of the North. It included a lot of elements from the game genre of Action Chatroom and changed the setting from immortal politicians to LOTR style wraiths, who were the bad guys in Realpolitik II. Eventually, this became inactive as well. LH's current game is 'Star of the Shogun' in which the players are running Japan. A lot of the rules have been refined for this one, allowing the players more freedom with their options as politicians.
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