The God King Problem

Pour out a few souls. Then watch.

Tip a handful of people onto a meadow and they get straight to work: a fire, a hut, a field. Years pass in minutes. A camp becomes a village, then a town, then a walled city.

Paths wear into roads

Nobody plans the streets. Every trip to the well, the fields and the woodpile wears the grass down, and the paths people walk most become roads. Villages become towns. Towns become cities.

Every watchtower pushes the border out

A town builds a watchtower out on its edge, wears a road out to it, and its border swells to take in the land around. Sooner or later it runs into somebody else's.

They raise castles

A timber motte first, then a stone shell keep, then curtain walls and a concentric castle, raised piece by piece over the seasons. They breed horses. They arm knights.

Storms roll in. Blizzards bury them.

Rain feeds the fields, lightning strikes, and a hard winter buries the streets in snow while people dig themselves out. Play the Nords, and you can call the storm down yourself.

Then the neighbours get crowded

Kingdoms covet each other's land and iron. Armies muster under their banners and march: rams at the gate, trebuchets at the walls, and a town with no castle is razed. When it's over, the wolves come for the dead, and the living drink to them at the tavern.

Call down a meteor

You're their god, and you have a god's powers. Raise mountains and sink valleys. Hurl a fireball that bounces through a timber town, drop a meteor out of a clear sky, or burn a hole through the clouds with a column of the sun's fire. Feeling kind? Golden rain heals the hurt and greens the fields, and inside a ring of Deny Death nobody can die. When a town raises a temple, its priests pray with your voice.

You still can't give a single order. But you can pick people up and throw them.