Character Development Thread--Discussion

Should probably pin down the hub, the rest groups could come up.

I think there should be a core set of basic rules, and a definite theme that people shouldn't break. Outside of that, maybe sketching out a few major locations/general regions.

So for adventure if we do go “here are a few areas to explore” and not “the great unknown (aka go wild)” maybe we could leave them largely undescribed, but just a small enough nugget of information to attract interest?

Like for one area it could go “To the north is Mount Bifrons, a twin mouthed volcano surrounded by a forest where rivers of lava flow around trees that have turned to black glass.”

Nothing major, just enough info to attract interest and then let people add anything from there.

An abandoned temple, a demon living in the lava, the lady of tie lava lake, anything.

Thanks everyone!

The current threads seem to be winding down, so I'll probably wait for Adventure. I have a few characters who should work decently well with that setting.

This sounds pretty alright to me.

Hey I'm full of a bunch of other ideas for places in Adventure.

E.g.:

• An abandoned battlefield warped by chaotic magics, where spellcasters must worry about magical backslash and possible (curable) mutations.
• A dried up sea where coral and other sea life still lives, while alien jellyfish float freely through the air, and various beasts roam the ground.
• The ruins of an ancient city where its rune-lined stone protectors still patrol.
• A pierce of Hell that's merged with the world, where devils roam seeking mortal souls.
• A swamp where giant insects and snakemen hunt for the humans who live there.
• Basically anything else, I can't make all of these up myself

Again, all of these are just enough so that they attract interest, but everything else is up for interpretations.

Wanna add a Nightguant to the dried up sea that hunts the dinosaurs who live on the ground? Freaking do it!

Wanna add a crashed space ship to the swamp and have undead aliens attack the people who find it? Hell yeah!

I mean, skies the limit on what you find exploring these weird environments.

(These are all open source btw, if you ever write a story and want to use these environments, feel free. I'll probably use this for a fantasy story/my D&D campaign setting in the future.)

edited 19th Jan '18 12:22:28 PM by DarkbloodCarnagefang

I also got some ideas (though yours sound more badass than mine's, lol)!

• Again, something like Snowpeircer but without the revolution plot; a train that never stops.

• Dig site 2.0

• A solarpunk area; heres an example pic

• Bikini Bottom

Those are my ideas, though I think we should make a poll for the other suggestions too.

The hub needn't be too large - just enough to support a number of hotels, motels, B&Bs, inns etc where visitors can have their choice of accommodation, bars/taverns/pubs, supply shops both mundane/scientific and mystical/magical, doctors/healers that can handle anything from curses to bioengineered plagues on any species.

Not Capital City scale, but probably a little larger than Frontier. Perhaps more like the town at the heart of Archipelago.

Solarpunk area as the hub!

That sounds cool! A nice light contrast with the often grim and dangerous surrounding areas.

edited 19th Jan '18 2:05:18 PM by Wolf1066

One thing I want to say now: let's not try and get too heavily referential with anything. Not everyone is familiar with everything everyone else is.

Some of the suggestions for areas/vibes - e.g. Hyper Light Drifter, Snowpiercer - I have never heard of, nor do I feel particularly inclined to go and look them up and I'm not well-enough versed in Cthulhu Mythos to know what a 'nightgaunt' is, so I agree with nrjxll: let's not make the areas or the overall setting too much like something that only fans of a genre or work would know about - or worse, base the descriptions on them ("... this area is Bladerunner meets Village of the Damned with a bit of Sailor Moon thrown in..." sort of stuff).

I do like a hub that could be described "as an attractive prosperous place where nature, science and magic exist in perfect harmony with one another" a la "Solarpunk" but we need to ensure it's well-enough defined that everyone can visualise/imagine it and their characters can interact with it regardless of their genre of origin.

edited 19th Jan '18 3:32:55 PM by Wolf1066

The Nightguant part was really just to emphasize how you can add whatever you want when exploring the environment, nothing specific. But yeah I agree with not specifically referencing any one piece of media.

How do we feel about having the general area be sort of quasi-post-apocalyptic?

Personally I don't feel like it's general enough for a hub area. Though I guess it depends on on your flavor of post-apocalypse.

edited 19th Jan '18 7:04:24 PM by DarkbloodCarnagefang

In the vague sense of "lots of ruins and other scenery scarring everywhere" would certainly work (and already seems to be the assumption, really).

I don't mean the hub, I mean just what the world in general is like. There's a reason post-apocalypse shows up so much in adventure-friendly worlds, it's great to have a reason for all this cool shit to be lying around.

Oh that's different then. Yeah that'd be neat, give a reason for the anachronistic feel of the world.

The hub could be the metaphorical phoenix, a new start amid the blasted landscape.

It would certainly fit the themes of Solarpunk. Cheers to Masterofchaos for floating that idea.

So, it sounds like a shiny new(ish) Solarpunk town amid a landscape strewn with the ruins left by some (near-)apocalyptic event(s) - haunted by who-knows-what threats.

Sounds excellent fun already. Definitely going to pull my characters from Space Liner (have someone give them a call and tell them to head back when the Adventure-Friendly thread is about to start) - will split my vast number of characters into groups of four or less to explore more areas and keep the numbers more manageable to write for in any one group.

I hope that Nana and Minerva head out to the Adventure setting - interested in seeing whatinell a "jurōgumo thora" is/can do and what Minerva's capable of.

And AGREED! Thanks Masterofchaos.

edited 19th Jan '18 9:42:05 PM by Wolf1066

I kind of ghosted for a while. Apologies. There's been a lot going on. College has been a long train of getting fucked over and I'll be glad to wash my hands of this godforsaken business in May.

I feel like I'd be cheating you guys if I made you wait this long for posts and my characters just vanished, but apparently the current threads are winding down and I just haven't been feeling it in a while. I've lost a lot of faith in my writing lately, especially the project where most of my CDT characters come from, and I think what I need is to just walk away from it for a bit. Rethink it all. If I ever come back, it'll be with very different stuff.

It's been a tough few years and thank you all for your patience.

edited 19th Jan '18 10:41:41 PM by SnowyFoxes

Great to hear from you, Snowy, sorry to hear that you're not feeling good about your writing. I sincerely hope that things come right and you feel inspired and confident again.

I've just been going through the Space Liner thread to jot down notes I didn't take at the time and discovered that on two separate occasions I had Wolfe and Teri discover Gwion's actual age and be amazed by it - and the age was different in each case.

I can only put these strange contradictions down to the fact that I didn't take proper notes of developments at the time and the posts were several months apart, either side of the IRL-related BSOD I underwent last year.

After a complex method of selection, I decided to go with the latter posts' "facts" over the earlier (all right, I had already done extensive note-taking based on the later information and didn't want to have to redo it all. Edit: and a check of the Frontier thread shows me that Sophia already identified the year as 2076, which agrees with the later figures).

Likewise, I have Pearl saying that she had little difficulty getting work similar to her former secretarial job in an earlier post and that she owns a café in a later one. This paradox I will just pass off as her changing her job and lifestyle sometime in the last "roughly twelve years".

edited 20th Jan '18 7:03:19 PM by Wolf1066

Also sympathizing that there's a lot of bullshit in college. I just finished my last semester in December, and I honestly haven't been happier. Mostly because I spent that entire semester in a constant, but low state of panic over whether or not we'd be able to get our senior design project done, and I no longer have to look at the culprit's stupid face ever again. No more sitting in fucking lectures, or taking closed-note tests, or writing code that has no real-world purpose. Now I'm just waiting for them to send me my $32,000 piece of paper.

With that, I've moved all of the characters that were at Vince's farm into the inactive folder. I will also be taking time off from the CDTs as a whole, effective immediately. I do still honestly believe that my writing process just isn't compatible anymore with an RPG or any other kind of on-the-fly writing format, but more than anything else, I need the time and extra creative juices to work on my solo writing. Especially now that the place I was interning at decided to hire me full-time, and I now have a slowly growing pile of big girl responsibilities that come along with having a livable income.

I don't know when, or if I'll come back to the threads, but I will continue to at least lurk Writer's Block every day. If anyone feels like chatting, you can hit me up on PM.

It's been fun, guys. Wishing you all luck on your writing endeavors; peace out.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Aug 9th 2019 at 9:38:55 AM

Sad to see you go, too, CG. All the best with your writing projects, looking forward to hearing that you've achieved your goals.

I'm really going to miss having you both around as contributors to the threads, Snowy and Glacia, but if you think it's best to leave, I understand.