The Allerian Empire (also Aelyrian Empire) is a play-by-post collaborative fiction website where players interacted by role-playing over an internet bulletin board. The game has been running in various incarnations since 1989 until the present day. The Allerian Empire, or Alleria as it is commonly referred to, takes place on the fictitious planet of Telath on the continent of Medonia. All facets of the game environment including culture, economy, and politics are entirely player created. Players assume a character in the World of Telath, customizing its race, age, and background and tell its life tale through a series of narrative interactions with others.
Each beginning character is given a limitation on possessions; carrying only 500 golden crowns (the coin of the Realm), an Imperial Visa (identification papers), one set of clothing, a simple dagger, and the deed to a one-room house in the city of choice. Citizens of Alleria are taught reading, writing, and mathematics in Schola, though further education is required to be played in-game, and Players can certainly choose not to take advantage of the opening benefits.
Telath is a planet that circles a rare trinary star system. It has thirty recognised moons, though only the largest is named: Chaendar. The largest sun is Majora, and the smaller two are Apas and Nepas. The face of the planet is covered approximately fifty percent with water, which teems with oceanic life including several sentient species of Mer and Sea-elf.
There are many continents, each of which play home to a race of beings, but the game focuses on the eastern half of the continent of Medonia. The Western half hosts the Archaxetan Empire.
The Empire of Alleria is divided into nine Provinces: Arium, Arakmat, Carmelyn, Centripax, Enamoria, Eunesia, Lauryl, Prime, and Sherian. The Capitol city of the Empire is Alleria Prime, in Prime Province. Each Province is governed by a Governor, appointed by the Emperor or Empress and held for life. The Governor is responsible for appointing the Provincial positions of government.
The Allerian Empire appeared on the internet as alleria.org in 1996 after a six-year stint on the Prodigy Online Personal Service, and was soon a featured website on Netscape.com. With the feature, Alleria attracted hundreds of players and its no-rules story telling had to be replaced by a moderation system. The Game Master Council was created and moderators called "Game Masters" were assigned to geographic areas within the game play field.
After a couple of awards and features on popular tech networks and publications, the format which housed the Allerian playing experience needed to be revamped due to its new player load. Infinitely threaded topics made for a long and confusing experience. In 1999, Alleria moved to a dot-com address and began using the Ultimate Bulletin Board for its gameplay. With the new look and streamlined gameplay, The Allerian Empire's player base quickly grew into the thousands, and was featured on more prominent publications including Electronic Gaming Monthly.
Late in Generation Two, The Alleria Company and its founder took a back seat to creative development and allowed the game and its volunteer staff to move the game forward autonomously. The Game Master Council began to elect its own members and leaders from the gaming population which some say created an air of favoratism to the exclusion of those not friends with already established Game Masters. Criticism began to surface by the summer of 2001 that the game's ultimate goal was to become a Game Master and that characters played by members who could attain this status were given unbalanced preferential treatment.
he Allerian Empire survived a schism in the Game Master Council between the entrenched, ideolisitic, more experienced staff and the newer, more liberal electees as well as growing criticism by players, but a spectacular website crash crippled the alleria.com site in late 2001 and advertising revenues were not enough to keep the free-to-players website operating. The creator of the game pulled the plug on the site, much to the dismay of thousands of players that participated regularly in the game. A small group of players even took it upon themselves to recreate as much of the game as they could on the ezBoard system and started an aggressive e-mail campaign to attract the original gamers. The product of their efforts was dubbed nu-Alleria.
In 2002, The Alleria Company reorganized and became Play by Post, Inc. The goal of the new company was to not only bring The Allerian Empire back to life but to expand the game's focus from a single country to the entire world of Telath, allowing players to create more of the world than they had been confined to in previous incarnations of the game. The result was a web address change to telath.com and the launch of Telath: The Quest for Eternity, or what players simply referred to as Alleria II. Play by Post, Inc. also intended to bring its company out of the fantasy role-playing genre by launching Star Prophecy, a new science fiction based game with roughly the same mechanics. Unfortunately, none of this was ever actually achieved.
Both Telath and Star Prophecy failed. Later that year, Mr. Gonzalez took the Telath project and overhauled it creating Alleria: The Quest for Eternity and went back to the original game format with one major difference - players could now start to develop the new nations promised in Telath in the hope of having the environments opened eventually for in-character gameplay. The engine and website layout were both re-done, and Alleria returned to the alleria.com address. The company also introduced a subscription system for premium content to make up for the advertising revenues that had failed to meet maintenance budgets which made certain community members criticize the lack of promised privileges. Two years later, the size and scope of the game necessitated a revamp of their moderation and volunteer structures, and in 2005 the website underwent another upgrade, including an integrated Wiki, RSS feeds, and user-customizable content. A system crash in November, 2005, prompted Play by Post, Inc., to strike up a partnership with a design botique and the website was taken off the internet into the new year. Players logging on to the alleria.com site were greeted with a message stating "Alleria is Propagating" with little other explanation.
Alleria returned as of February 2006, lacking in many of its features and website, but still playable. As in Generation Three, core players, moderators, and Game Directors have driven ahead with re-building their community, this time with the upfront encouragement and support of Mr. Gonzalez. On April 11th, 2006, the Directorate launched the new Aliares Engine, a variation of vBDrupal. Based on Drupal and vBulletin, this new Engine is able to provide many of the features that were previously available to Players and Contributors.
On January 9, 2006, after roughly fifty days of disappointed players and no revival of the game, Play by Post, Inc., announced their intention to reopen the site, dissolving their partnership with the design boutique citing a "clear material breach of [the boutique's] obligations to ensure that Alleria continues to operate." On January 12 of that same year, Aerysia was announced as the newest installment of The Allerian Empire franchise which had been in preliminary development since late 2003. Expected to be released later in the season, Aerysia is the successor product to the The Allerian Empire with a core based extensively off its parent game.
Created in 1996, Play by Post, Inc., is the legal entity that was created to protect the copyright interests of the web sites it owns. Originally called The Alleria Company after its flagship game, the company reorganized and changed its name following the crash that destroyed its site in 2001.
Play by Post, Inc. credits itself for pioneering the play-by-post role-playing format and being the industry leader in such games.
