When starting your game of Rulers the GM should make some decisions about what the overall story of the game should be. Invite the other players into this conversation, so that they feel more invested in the story and also to share the workload, but it’s helpful to at least provide a broad concept for the setting.
Here are a couple of questions to help establish your world and the story your game will endeavor to tell.
The assumption of Rulers is that each player controls their own civilizations, with their own peoples, cultures, history, systems of worship, style of warfare and so on. These civilizations are also assumed to be sizable but together with GMRs, only span the size of one continent.
However, Rulers can be played on a smaller of grander scale. All of the player Rulers could be minor lords in a larger civilization, only about the size of a single country. This may also mean that these player Realms have much more in common culturally, ethnically, and socially. On a grander scale, player Realms may span their own continents, and together make up the entirety of the whole world.
Apply this same conversation to Settlements and Armies. Roughly how big is a Minor Settlement in your game? How large are the Armies players will be able to muster? Is a Minor Settlement barely a hundred people or over ten thousand? Is a Might 5 Army, 50,000 pikemen, archers and cavalry? Or is a Might 5 Army literally just 5 warriors with very large swords?
Rulers is designed to the best of our ability to allow any scale to work within the mechanics of the game. It’s up to you and your table to come to an agreement on what that will look like.
Before beginning play, the GM and the other players should agree upon how long they should play for.
It is strongly recommended to have a pre-determined point in the story where the game could end, such as repelling an other-worldly threat. The GM should also have a suggestion for how many turns or sessions of play it will take to get to that moment.
If the players wish to continue after that moment, then you may do so! It is my personal experience that open-ended sandbox game with no clear goal or end in sight, almost always fizzle out. This is why I encourage you to structure Rulers (or any TTRPG campaign) as a series of story arcs, with short term story goals that can be accomplished. This will give you many moments where it is satisfying to conclude playing. If it has worked for the anime One Piece since it first aired in 1997, then endlessly stringing together smaller arcs can work for you too.
Firstly, all the players should have a conversation about game visibility. Rulers always have visibility to a distance of one Region, at minimum, but this may be difficult to enforce depending on how you are playing. For example, if you are playing around a table with one world map, players would expect to be able to see everything going on in the world at once, much like a board game. Whereas, if you are playing asynchronously online, it becomes possible for information to remain hidden from players, creating a dense Fog of War. However, this can become burdensome to enforce. So the GM and the other players should decide how much of the map each Ruler can see, according to everyone’s preference.
Secondly, there needs to be a conversation about how much of the world has been explored. Do all Rulers know what lies beyond their Realm, up to the edge of the world map? Do Rulers know the names and locations of other Settlements in other Realms? There are many dimensions to these questions, but consider how much of the world is understood by each Ruler.
Decide amongst yourselves if the focus of your game of Rulers is one of exploration and hidden information, or if you’d rather have complete visibility of a fully explored world, so that play can focus on different aspects of the game.