Hi everyone, this is about an idea I had long ago, in fact posted in one of the RPOL sections quite a long while ago. Because I lack the experience necessary to run it on my own, it never came to be, but I would love it if someone could step up and make a game with similar premises.

A new continent has been discovered, it never happened before because most of the inhabitants of the world had a superstitious belief that something really terrible would happen to them if they sailed too far away from the coast line. But a brave captain decided to do what no one had done before and thus found there were lands beyond the already known. The Queen of a powerful kingdom, with many coastal cities and the means for a venture like this, saw the potential of the discovery and prepared everything to start a colony in the newly discovered area.
So we have a barebones settlement in a pretty much unexplored mass of land. The closest civilized area is on the main continent and only reachable by sea, which means supplies and help are very limited to start with.
A small group of people have been sent to survey and explore, while others are busy building the colony. They have started creating the settlement with the few supplies they brought with them. A governor has been appointed and they have sent two or three people to travel to the closest port town across the sea and recruit/convince more people to come along. They are looking for anyone who wants to try and thrive in the new environment; explorers, hunters and warriors to check out the surroundings of the settlement, survey the land, report what dangers or perils are about if any, fend off those dangers, see what the vegetation and fauna is like, and in the future perhaps even claim some more land and add more settlements; sea captains, sailors and longshoremen to bring more supplies; merchants and crafters to start putting those supplies to good use and establishing businesses; construction workers to build houses and shops and so on.
From here the idea is for those envoys sent to the closest port to recruit those that will be the players. Each interested player could choose a more typical adventuring type that would deal with dangers, explore, protect and such, or take the role of a civilian/colonist of their liking, anything that would contribute to make the settlement "alive".
Adventurers would hunt, survey, explore and protect the colony. The other characters would be working to improve their craft/profession, make fortune and help bring civilization to the new land.
I like to call it a "living" setting, mostly because I love detail and realism in games and I usually find that most people are the opposite, where most prefer simplicity, I choose complex. So for a small example of many possible, I have seen adventures where the characters are carrying a ridiculous amount of gems and jewelry, worth ten times what the average citizen would make in a year. They just get to the first settlement in their way, a 250 inhabitants village with a single jeweler (even when such a place should probably have none), they go to their shop and think about selling every single jewelry item they have in there. And it turns that the jeweler has more than enough to buy all they carry and they get out of the shop happily carrying out all those coins (I don't even know where they would store so much money). Another example is when shopkeepers seem to have unlimited numbers of certain items ready for sale, even in small populations.
In this environment I would like to see merchants that have a certain amount of money and stock, and they can only get more by actually buying and selling, trying to keep things realistic.
In the case of the civilian characters, they would also need to decide what their job is going to be and acquire anything they will need to perform this job. If someone wants to start a business, they would need to get the plot, get the building constructed, whatever furniture and/or equipment they're going to need, and the items they are going to sell or the materials for crafting them.
Changing conditions, weather, random events could be thrown in to keep things interesting, and still keep with the general level of realism. I would say any existant magic should be low level to keep with the concept.

If anyone is willing to run something along these lines I would love to be a part of it myself. Possibly I could even help with running some parts of the game if necessary.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:37, Thu 15 Sept 2016.

Well, if someone is out there with this, you have another player here.

Sounds like you guys are looking for Paizo''s Kingmaker AP -

http://pathfinder.wikia.com/wi...aker_(adventure_path)

How closely tied are you to the Mediaeval Fantasy setting that you seem to imply?

Suppose there were a similar game premise where you were RE-building civilization after a zombie apocalypse, hunting for supplies, fencing off farmland, seeking engineers, builders, farmers and medics. Figuring out what you can realistically take back and hold. A thinking-person's zombie game. Would that be to your taste?

To be honest, what little experience I have is mostly in fantasy/medieval/historical based settings, so a zombie apocalypse setting is far from what I was thinking of. The last two characters I played have been the two I've had more fun portraying as well. One of them was a journeyman clothier who started hidden as a stowaway in a big ship where more fighting oriented characters were travelling, just because she had spent most of her life in a city and a lot of that time in her apprenticeship and wanted to see the world before settling down again and trying to pass the tests to become a master. The second one was a sea elf, former pirate, trying to get into a more honest and respectable profession and become a merchant, and finding out the social stigma of having been a pirate in her former life kept following her one way or another.
I usually tend to prefer characters that don't fall into the most used archetypes like warriors, rangers, wizards and the like.
All this said, a zombie game where there is more focus in thinking and rebuilding rather than in zombie bashing, sounds an intriguing concept to me. I think the main problem in my case is that in recent years the idea of survival games where zombies are the main threat has been so overused, specially for videogames, that it has sort of put me off that sort of thing a little. So it's like I just hear or read the word zombie, and automatically my brain seems to react: Oh, no, not another one!
But if the main focus gets moved from the zombies to other aspects, it could be okay.

Coridan's suggestion of Kingmaker is, in my opinion, a fairly good one, though that adventure path focuses much more on taming the wilderness of an inland region filled with bandits, fey, and monsters of all sorts.

A couple years ago, however, I had a thought to 'reskin' the Kingmaker adventure path into something matching your concept a bit more closely: an expedition from the Inner Sea region across the Arcadian Sea to the continent of Arcadia, which is very much the Golarion setting's equivalent of the Americas. The idea was that the party would act as 'specialists' attached to a small colonization 'fleet' (3-4 ships) who would serve as troubleshooters for the new colonial governor alongside the military commander. By exploring the surrounding area, dealing with any threats found, and generally supporting the development of the new colony, the characters would gain noble titles, a position in the new colonial government, etc.

It has been a long while since I last looked at my notes for the concept, and there's been some really cool releases since then with content I would like to integrate in (especially Ultimate Intrigue), but if that sounds interesting and you don't mind a GM whose experience is primarily physical/virtual tabletops rather than the PbP environment, perhaps it's worth seeing if there's enough interest for a campaign.

I am actually running a game very similar to what you propose.

link to another game

New plane instead of new continent
Transport back to "mainland" is by portal which functions out going once every 21 in game days (21 real life weeks)
Homesteaders are given 9000 gp advance to build and invest in the colony.

Also new travelers are asked to seek any information about the wereabouts of 100 missing adventures.
Reward for proof of thier location.

Colony currently up and running and has

2 blacksmiths
No ready source of metals

1 experienced medic

2 carpenters
Near unlimited wood supply

0 fishermen
Near unlimited fishing water

0 hunters
Large herds of wild game

2 experianced ranchers
300,000+ domesticated head of livestock
This message was last edited by the user at 04:33, Tue 20 Sept 2016.

I've been thinking of doing a fantasy nation/community building game for a while now so I think I could be tempted to run something like this.

It wouldn't necessarily be focused on the players having individual characters but more on group decisions. Although there will be some kind of in game avatar.

My preference would be for a low fantasy setting probably starting with a classical/antiquity flavour but I'm open to almost anything.

The game would be homebrew and somewhat freeform. Freeform in the sense of freedom of action but with a dice system to determine the action success.