Come and play Pern!

Think of it as Lords and Ladies with dragons… sort of.

It’s the 9th Pass of Pern, and the dragons have done an impressive job of growing the draconic population from nearly-none to over a thousand, enough that it’s time to open a new Weyr: desert-bound Igen.

Things we’re playing with at the moment:

Politics and machinations over who will lead the new Weyr. With Igen to be populated by riders from both Benden and Fort, and its leadership as-yet undecided, everyone has an opinion, and tensions are rising. Everyone knows that the ‘dragons decide’ but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to influence the process.

Fort’s latest hatching saw three Journeymen crafters Impress, including one from the Stands and one who distinctly did not have permission. Tensions are growing between the Weyr and the Crafts as a result: should the Weyr be able to steal the talented young people the Crafts have spent so much time training up? How much does the rest of the planet owe the Weyrs for keeping them safe? And if the answer is ‘less than the Weyrs think’ … what will the Weyrs do to change that balance back?

On Dragon Wings has some new staff on board, and we’re doing our best to cultivate play where character actions can influence both locally and globally. We’re using the world of Pern as a canvas to tell stories that range from exploration and adventure to political angling, with the (statted) combat of Threadfall lurking in the background as the omnipresent threat. We’re a small but friendly bunch, eager to tell interesting stories both big and small.

Never played Pern before? That’s okay! We can help with the important details… and handwave the rest. We welcome OCs (and are always happy to help brainstorm new ideas)– but we also have plenty of rosters available.

Come join us on https://pern.gaslightswitch.com!

Hey True Believers!

Excelsior is approaching our second anniversary (November 10th), and we’re incredibly excited about it! We’ve got plenty of stories left to share, and I’m here to update former players, future players, and everyone in between on what’s coming up. I’ll also give you a glimpse of the characters you can expect to see soon!

Yes, I did mention a limited roster. The admin team has received a lot of feedback about our roster-only approach, so I’d like to clarify why we’ve chosen this path. While our admin team may seem large and we do have all the Infinity Stones in attendance, not all of our staff are involved with rosters or storylines. We have a dedicated CSS admin (Hi Blu!) and a staff member handling administrative tasks (Hi Mind!), but only a few staffers focus on story development (Hi Power, Reality, and Time!).

We strive to maintain a roster that ensures our story staff can manage it without being overwhelmed.

Now, let’s talk about what’s coming soon!

Some upcoming characters will join an all-new team, while others will slot into existing teams. We’re currently running a storyline that will bring the Exiles into our world with a unique twist.

Here’s a list of characters to expect in the next few months:

Brielle Brooks, Cerise, Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan, Felicia Hardy, Hercules, Jacqueline Falsworth, Leiko Wu, Yelena Belova, America Chavez, Billy Maximoff, Brandy Selby, The Stepford Cuckoos, Daisy Johnson, Eli Bradley, Franklin Richards, Laura Kinney, Luna Maximoff, Madelyne Pryor, N’Jadaka, Nathaniel Richards, Rachel Summers, Talia Wagner, Teddy Altman, Tommy Maximoff, Valeria Richards and Vivian Vision.

This roster will be rolled out through the end of fall. The Exile characters will be introduced sporadically at the end of August, with some listed characters following through September and early October.

We’ll use storylines to introduce them and provide reasons for their interactions with existing characters in the game.

If any of these characters catch your interest, chat with us, and see what we have planned for the next few months. All of our characters have unique twists on their canon counterparts, and we hope you’ll join us for the adventure!

https://excelsior.troll20.com

Maybe I could convince you to put your updates in one thread instead of making a new one every time? It’ll still pop up as new forum activity for people.

The current story line we’re doing is finding a kingdom and having an ‘enemy’ starting to get really active. A special request for people to play the ‘bad guys’ is given with reward things for it. The post:

~~

Staff Special Request Minerva
Recruitment (5/2) Wed Apr 03, 2024 8:45am

~~

The next major plot point for Atharia is to reveal Ren to be a villain. He is likely a part of the Council of the Devoted. I repeatedly say that I don’t really hide what is intended to happen, even if I don’t give all the details. What happens to Ren will depend on players (kill him, convert him, save him, etc).

I explained all that for a reason. My semi-plan is that Ren is the current leader of the Council of the Devoted. What I would like is a couple people willing to play members of the Council, publicly known as such. This means the character will be a villain and likely temporary, though, I am not against the character becoming permanent if people end up enjoying the story line for the character, which will likely be a redemption arch to where they ‘become Good’ (or at least an anti-hero type) since sometimes people have issues with getting into scenes with villains.

You can totally be part of the Council on a current character that gets exposed along with Ren or before him. IF you’re worried your character concept won’t work, we can figure it out to make it happen.

[[[Council of the Devoted]]] (https://atharia.net/wiki/council_of_the_devoted) for more details on the Council.

My ideal would be at least 1 sub-leader and 2 or 3 ‘general members’.

As this will be a temporary character (unless you decide otherwise), 50% of any XP you earn on the character can be transferred to an alt, if you desire. If you don’t care about the XP we can discuss alternative ideas for a ‘reward’ for playing a character that is destined to be ‘dealt with’ in some form. Rewards can be anything, within reason. It can be you can ask for a plot line that is strictly geared for your character, work out an angle of getting a position you would like for your alt, you can add some specific details to theme files that you feel would add to the game (subject to review and possible modifications if it is to off theme), etc. If it works for the game IC or OOC, I’m willing to talk it over. You can play more than 1 Council member but the ‘reward’ only applies once. So, if you play 5 characters the reward will be once over all not once for each character.

Contact me if interested.
~~
(1) Minerva replied on Sat Apr 06, 2024 8:03am
These temporary characters can absolutely be Children of Gods but it needs to fit with the alts rules. That is to say, if you have a Child of Gods PC already, the temporary one can not be one. This is so that if you decide you enjoy playing the character’s story you don’t need to give up either character unless you want too.

~~

The ability to go beyond available CG points is no longer a thing. We’ve transferred everything over.

@EDI7078 Thanks for the heads-up. I’m already playing there, and have been enjoying the place.

So with the wrap of the final big story of the game, Arx goes into a GMing hiatus as work begins on Arx 2. It’s always hard to estimate how long a project like that will take, but ideally will be able to begin testing with players later this year. It will be a very far time skip, with the setting significantly different and new characters, and also a new code base.

For this version of Arx, it means it’s now a low touch sandbox environment. The game will continue to stay up in a low touch environment without active staff support, so players are welcome to sandbox RP and pursue whatever stories they want, but they shouldn’t expect any kind of GM response. I’ll keep the game running, but I also won’t do any kind of deeply involved work to support it. Which means if anything ever catastrophically breaks, that’ll be it. So while I don’t plan to take it down anytime soon, I’d really encourage everyone to save anything they want to keep now- logs, events, action responses, etc.

With that in mind, if anyone wants access to an old character to retrieve stuff, I’m also fine with that, and I’ll give whoever access if they want to grab old RP records for nostalgia’s sake or pop into the sandbox.

All that said, I want to say thank you to everyone. When I started work on Arx over 8 years ago, I thought it would be a small game for a few friends. I never planned for it to become what it did, and it was the tremendous creative energy inside this community which made that happen. It was a privilege to create stories with so many truly gifted writers over the years, and there’s quite a bit I’m very proud of. I made tons of mistakes, and have a lot of regrets as well, and in the times I fell short- I’m really sorry, and I hope you’re all doing well, and still enjoying creating, whether in this hobby or elsewhere. But I think the end of Arx I couldn’t have asked for better, and I’ll never stop being impressed by how positive the environment was and how great the final stories were. So for you folks at the end, I’m very grateful.

Thanks again, everyone. I’ll be around on the sandbox- not a lot, since I’ll be busy working on the next version of the game. Look forward to seeing you in the future.

@sonata The Grand Opening for Ascension Sojournes is December 8th! Now accepting group applications. Some bonus chargen dots will be given to each person applying in the group. This offer ends on December 8th!