Inspiration:

Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim

Slave Maker… you can google that yourself. Just be aware that it’s one of those horrifying-yet-strangely-arousing-my-god-what-is-wrong-with-me Hentai games with a little bit of everything. It also gets old really really fast.

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

YOU, yes that’s right YOU sitting in front of your computer and drinking a can of grape soda, YOU are the leader of an adventurer’s guild. Your mission?  Hire adventurers, train them, send them out to save the town, and milk the king (and other people) for all he’s worth while you’re at it.

There are two aspects to the gameplay: The Majesty-inspired heroes running around doing quests, and the Slave Maker-inspired training adventurers/support staff.

In the Majesty Inspired aspect, someone gives you a quest, and you negotiate a price they’ll pay you upon successful completion. Once the quest starts, you’ll then go to a Majesty-esque screen, where your adventurers are wandering around town doing whatever it is they do (fighters might hunt wandering monsters, thieves try to steal without getting caught, paladins patrol the town, etc). Your job is then to cajole your adventurers into successfully completing the quest. You have two ways of cajoling them: Monetary rewards, and spankings. The higher the monetary reward, the more likely they are to do whatever you want them to do (attack a monster/lair, explore a part of the map, whatever), but the less profit you’ll make. Similarly, if you have a few rewards floating around, but none of your adventurers are pursuing them (or there’s a particular adventurer you want to pursue it), then you can either increase the reward, or give the adventurers who are lazing around a few swats to get them going. But be careful! Spankings can decrease mood, while money and success can increase mood. If an adventurer’s mood gets too low, she may quit! So you need to balance the carrot and the stick to keep the adventurers pursuing your quests without bleeding you dry.

In the SlaveMaker aspect, you train your adventurers and support staff. First, we’ll talk about adventurers.

Adventurers will periodically show up and ask to join your guild. The starting level and frequency of new adventurers will depend on your fame. At first, you’ll get nothing but barely grown street urchins, and runaway brats, none of whom can fight worth a darn. As your fame grows, you’ll start getting more and more experienced adventurers offering to join the guild. However, experience is a double-edged sword. Each adventurer would have certain personality continua (for example, bravery, pride, loyalty), and this will affect their actions both in training and adventuring. For example, a character with too much bravery is likely to take on a quest way above her head without help, while a character with too little will refuse to challenge a level 1 rat even if she’s level 50. On the other hand, various traits may provide bonuses depending on their class (a berserker gets bonuses for having a high bravery, a paladin for having a high pride etc). So naturally, you want your adventurers to have a good balance of each trait, whatever that may mean for their class. These traits can be affected both by training and in the field. So if you see a reckless level 5 character charging a level 50 Eldritch Demon, you can grab her and give her a hard spanking to discourage her from continuing her charge. The spanking will reduce her recklessness and may (or may not) convince her to stop her foolish charge. Similarly, if you see a level 50 mage cowering before the might of a level 1 rat, you can give her a solid spanking and get her to attack the damned thing, and her bravery will go up. Traits will also go up based on successes. If a character defeats an enemy much stronger than they are, both their pride and bravery will greatly increase. Being defeated by a weaker enemy will see a large decrease in pride and bravery. Meanwhile, you can increase recklessness by having them spar with a more experienced adventurer/you with the more experienced one purposefully losing, and you can decrease pride by having them spar with a more experienced character, who doesn’t hold back.

However, the higher a character’s level, the slower traits change. So that level 0 spoiled brat you took in might act out at first, and might be useless on the battlefield, but a little bit of tough love and care, and she’ll turn into a loyal, dependable, skilled adventurer. Meanwhile that haughty level 50 paladin who joined your guild will require a lot of spankings before she starts actually listening to your opinion. Assuming she ever does. On the flip side, higher level adventurers can also be trained and used as teachers. So maybe that haughty paladin isn’t much good for you in the field, but she turns out to be a gifted teacher. So then you push her into a teacher role, and give her guidelines on how hard to push the students, what to teach them, etc. (naturally, you may still have to apply a yard stick to her ass every now and then if she messes up).

Furthermore, the higher a character’s level, the more money they’ll need to get their attention, and the more spankings will need to be applied to get their attention, and the faster their mood will drop when you try to spank them into doing a low level quest. A level 50 sorceress is well aware of the fact that a quest to slay a couple of goblins for 100 gold is well beneath her, and spanking her is just going to make her more likely to ditch your guild for greener pastures. So it may be more economical to push your higher level characters into being teachers, or just let them do their thing until a major threat shows up. Finally, higher level characters’ mood will grow more slowly, and fall more rapidly. This is to represent the fact that as they get more experienced, they’ll find themselves feeling more and more constrained by the guild, and more and more interested in going their own way. Of course, this would depend on traits and skills. Someone who loves teaching may never see their mood drop if they’re made a teacher, while someone who isn’t particularly ambitious may be content to stick around town. Levels of enemies would also have an impact. If there are a lot of high level enemies around, high level characters will stick around. If the enemies are low level, high level characters are more likely to leave (probably also be a good sign that you should finish up that darned major quest already, and move on to the next one).

Of course, there’s more to an adventurer’s guild than herding adventurers. You also need to negotiate the prices for quests, manage your finances, keep your guild clean and well-repaired, feed your adventurers if you have a kitchen, keep them from getting drunk and trashing the place if you have a bar and/or dormitories. Fortunately, you can hire/train support staff as well. Maybe you have a street urchin who is just hopelessly cowardly. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t get her to fight with any sort of aggression. She hates fighting, she freezes in battle, and all the gold and spankings in the world won’t get her to help raid that goblin lair. On the other hand, she’s whip-smart, got a mean poker face, is very stubborn (in non-life-threatening situations) and is a savvy negotiator. So instead of forcing her to be an adventurer, you train her to be a diplomat. Now, you don’t have to negotiate for better prices, she’ll do it for you. Furthermore, once she gets experienced enough, you can have her train any new diplomats. Pretty soon, you can have a whole team of diplomats making sure you get the best damned price for your quests (plus perhaps other bonuses, like negotiating special deals for your adventurers with the local armories and spell shops, or smoothing over ruffled feathers after your drunken barbarian got into a bar brawl). Of course, you can also hire a diplomat, and train her in how you want your negotiations to go. Naturally of course, if at any time your diplomat messes up or goes against your wishes, you bust out your handy-dandy belt 😉

Support staff may include: maids, dorm monitors, cooks, diplomats, handlers (keep an eye on your adventurers so you don’t have to micro-manage them, i.e. stopping and spanking an adventurer charging into something over her head, or giving a timid adventurer some “encouragement”), secretaries, and so on.

Furthermore, rather than taking the Majesty style where each new quest you start off from scratch, each quest would preserve your state from the previous one. So that way you can gradually expand as you complete more and more challenging quests, and you don’t find yourself training a new maid over and over again. You’d also have minor quests, randomly generated “slay that monster and I’ll give you 500 gold” type quests. This would allow for a sandbox mode.

Note that you would be able to swap between the two modes at will. The Majesty-esque screen would be a real-time with pause situation, which pauses whenever you go to the Training Screen. While on the training screen you could also skip ahead a day, in which case the computer calculates a day’s worth of activities for the characters wandering around town and executes them behind the scenes (if any events occur, you’d then be faced with them when you get up in the morning. Nothing like having to chastise your barbarian and thief first thing in the morning, because your thief was caught cheating at cards, and your barbarian tore apart a bar while defending her). Obviously, this is useful if things are relatively peaceful, but not if you’re under attack!

Now, there are a few issues in the game as layed out above.

1. The above would be a pretty massive undertaking. But these are mostly ideas, and pie-in-the-sky thoughts. Obviously you’d start much much simpler, and gradually add new features as you go. You could easily spend a decade (or more) working on this.

2. The spankings could get repetitive. On the other hand, this kind of situation would be very conducive to a large number of people each contributing, writing/drawing a spanking scene here or there, and then moving on. So you could gradually build up a large library of scenes for different scenes, which are selected from randomly depending on the situation (i.e. adventuring/support staff class, the event type).  Plus, I think if you made the gameplay even half as good as the gameplay in Majesty, by the time the spankings got repetitive, people would be immersed enough in the game that they’d be playing it for its own merits, with the spankings just icing on the cake. Furthermore, since more and more automation would be introduced as you go (by hiring more support staff and teachers) as people can black box more and more of the micro managing as they get tired of it. So you go from constantly spanking bratty students, to spanking bratty teachers, a refreshing change that can help stave off the “oh yay, another student who lit a teacher’s skirt on fire. Not like I haven’t seen that before.”

3. Trying to provide a good interface that keeps things manageable as the guild expands would be challenging. My thoughts would be that, for the support staff, you would have a “representative” of the staff (i.e. head secretary), and hiring/training new secretaries essentially just gives the head secretary bonuses. Most of the events would involve either you punishing the head secretary, or a random event where you read about the head secretary punishing one of her employees. You could probably also have a similar thing for adventurers called “parties.” Essentially, you’d group into parties, with a party leader. You would then spank the party leader, and she would be responsible for keeping her adventurers in line.  You could of course, choose to spank a particularly adventurer (or everyone in the party) rather than letting the leader do it, but it’d be up to you whether or not you want to open up the black box. This could introduce all sorts of interesting events, like two characters in the same party who don’t get along bickering, then starting a fight, so both they and their leader get punished. Them for starting the fight, their leader for not being able to control them. You could also of course, decide if you want to try to shift them into different parties, or force them together. Party members would develop camaraderie as they adventure together, and again the speed would depend on levels.  So if a street-smart urchin adventurers with a spoiled brat from level 0 to level 50, they may be joined at the hip, despite the fact that the urchin is a quiet, and cunning thief, while the spoiled brat is a loud and proud paladin. On the other hand, trying to put a quiet, cunning, level 50 thief with a loud and proud level 50 paladin could spell disaster. All sorts of arguments, the leader ripping her hair out, and everyone in the party seeing their moods drop drastically. Of course, splitting up people with a high camaraderie would also result in a mood penalty. So if the ranger is close friends with the thief, she’d take a hit in her mood when you moved the thief, unless you also moved the ranger. On the other hand, characters would receive a mood bonus if they adventurer with close friends.

4. Not sure if this is an issue or not, but you’d also want an option for gender: All Female, All Male, Mix of Male and Female. So All Female: all of your recruits are women (including the support staff), All Male: they’re all men, Mix of Male and Female: obvious, though you’d also able to control probabilities, i.e. a 70% probability that a random recruit is female, and a 30% that at random recruit is male. You might also want to put in something involving allowed tops and bottoms. So if you check only M/F, and F/F, then women would get spanked, but men would not be. Instead, punishment for men would be a pay cut, or washing dishes, or being fined, some sort of non-spanking punishment that would have the same impact on gameplay as a spanking, but wouldn’t be a spanking.  That way, you could have literally any combination of gender spankings you wanted. So long as everyone is an adult.

Argh, I wish I had more time. This would be a hell of a lot of fun to write, and a hell of a lot more fun to play. Maybe someday.