Best posts made by Taika

I'm waiting for WoD: Australia. Where you fear Drop Bears more than Vampires.

After a good sized slump and bit of burn out, I'm looking to get the ball rolling on this again. Unless I can find staff, it'll be slated to open as m/m+/vampire. I have code in for werewolf and mage, with the intention of adding changeling as the code comes to completion.

Things needed to finish this thing off:

• Grid descs
• Minor codey stuff (mini maps, tweaks, some data entry for +equip and bloodlines/lodges, etc) I'd love to add a Supernatural type of currency to buy favors and boons with. It will need a fancy name.
• Wiki work. The wiki is up (cityofshadowsmux.com), and there's templates and prettiness, but I am not a wiki person. I'm more liable to fuck it up than make it work if I touch it.
• Theme work. Some theme stuff, little bit of world building.

Overall, I'd say she's probably about 70% done, since most of the workload is in the code, and that's more or less done, barring a few tweaks to customize the game and getting all the equipment updated to current books.

The game is set in Chicago.

Looking for a few folks to get in on the ground with the new project. nWoD 2e. So far there's m/m+/wolf/vamp code in, if I can find reliable staffers for other spheres, I can try to obtain the code (looking at you, @Thenomain)

City of Shadows will be set in Chicago, and pull from darker modern themes. Think robocop/constantine/Luke Cage/the punisher (netflix series). Taking @Ganymede's suggestion and running with a darker/grittier theme.

I plan on running it +job-lite, meaning the tedious jobs that tend to sit, won't really be an issue. Most xp spends are automated (and the others are just a bit of code tweakery and need a note), leaving more energy for running plots and telling stories. I don't really separate the spheres, not in the classic sense of it. I want templates to be secondary to story. Yes, this means I plan on learning any other splats that get brought in - enough to ST for them, anyway.

I'm aiming for a place that's low/slow xp gain, with a bunch of ways to supplement that - you gain xp as fast as you contribute to the game. Want to be a high end heavy hitter? Be active, his the random scene lists, run plots, be in plots, etc. Low, low red tape. A malleable world that players can have large effect in.

There's not much on the wiki (cityofshadowsmux.com) or on the game, yet (cityofshadowsmux.com 2860 or 178.128.159.23 for direct connect), I'm working on finding a smaller map (77 neighborhoods is a lot!) or getting some extra hands to help with desc'ing once I get it all built out. I may consider (depending on the plot arc) starting in a small portion of the grid and opening it via unlocks and exploration as I did with the first run of Descent.

Anyway! Hop on, say hi, I'm Chupathingy (subject to change). Basically if people want mage, want X, want Y, come and help built it with me.

Here's how it all went down:

It's a funny thing, peace. Hiroshima proved the power of nuclear weapons, and began a race to acquire frightening numbers of nuclear bombs. All justified with a need to protect themselves. The same thing happened with guns, ships, and aircraft

In other words: War Never Changes.

Weapons on Terra Firma are still a threat, but with more focus on finding a new planet to inhabit, some weapons have migrated to orbit around the Earth. Hundreds of innocuous seeming rods made of tungsten drift in orbit, asleep and unheard of by most of the population. Unlikely to ever be used, they are there to maintain the status quo, so everyone can feel safe that no one would be so foolish as to use a weapon that everyone has.

The problem with safety is that it is often an illusion.

And the problem with massive arsenals and maintaining them is human error.

No one can say for certain what caused it. Was it someone sneezing and hitting the wrong button on accident? Was it something more sinister that had been infiltrated into the code?

Speculation and rumor. That's all there is right now, because the end result is the same, regardless of the cause.

On March 13th, the orbiting satellites of Project: Thor awoke. Tiny LED lights sparked to life while the GPS system ran calculations and realigned the rods with the planet's surface.

Ten minutes later, each of the telephone pole sized tungsten rods slammed into the surface of the planet, each with a force equivalent to 7.2 tons of dynamite.

The world went black, and when it woke up, everything was changed.
Once fertile lands had become craters. Known waterways dried up and new areas were flooded as water sought the path of least resistance. Cenotes opened up and the faces of mountains were so changed by the impacts that some became unrecognizable.

The worst of the damages were caused by man made structures. The Hoover Dam didn't survive the onslaught, and the flooding that came with its collapse killed thousands. Nuclear waste storage facilities and nuclear power plants have created wastelands, dead zones of radioactivity that put Chernobyl to shame.

Food, water, shelter. The needs of the people have not changed, but the world has.

And now the future of the human race is uncertain.

Welcome to the Descent Mux.

What we offer:

• Mortal/M+, Vampire, and Werewolf using the nWod2.0 system.

• Easy, as painless as possible cgen to help get people on the grid faster.

• A system for people to pitch plot ideas, as well as claim and run 'on the spot' plots with elements that normally might require pre-approval - bridging the gap between wanting to ST right now, and the wait to have a prp idea reviewed.

• A dynamic grid. The game will open with 4 neighborhoods of Manhattan available. From there, people can plot to open new grid spaces - up to and including leaving the island to go exploring the world at large. This is not just an option, but encouraged.

• A setting that makes even coffee shop rp into a plottable topic! Want coffee with your friends? Sure! Go to the old warehouse, wade through a few draugr or revenants, and -get that coffee-. Then sip it while healing and snubbing others that have no caffeine. Or use it to barter for important things. Like bullets!

• A cross-sphere Boon system to keep track of favors.

• A certain scarcity of resources that makes conserving them important.. Blood for vamps, Essence for wolves, bullets, food, and water for mortals. Just -surviving- will be an important theme.

• A grid vs grid style territory system designed to be simple-but-complex. Similar to Go, it's easy to wrap one's head around, but the ways it can be used are many and subtle. (Example: Jimmy poisoned the well (used an action to reduce a grid space's Water attribute) and people are dropping like flies! (consequence: reduced Population for the square, weakening it to attack.)

Goals:

• Fostering a community of cooperative storytelling, with a lot of open communication about end goals and things people want to seee happen with a scene. PvP happens! And dramaless PK scenes will get xp goodies. Less drama; more communication and cooperation!

• To create a dynamic, living world of chaos that puts most of the control and direction in the hands of the players, wihin the given theme and setting.

• Want to run a merchant caravan? Please do! Want to take over a small, neighboring island and make raids on the mainland? HELL YES! Want to play politics? Totallly doable, because with the grid system, friends will be really important to helping to maintain territory. And vamps need territory and people.

What we need to get there:

• Code help (Install Theno's amazing code. I know someone that can help troubleshoot, but they've never done a full install before.)

• Wiki help (I am no good with wiki. I can put up a picture and information, but fancy formatting or making log and pc templates is beyond me)

• A wolf staffer would be great, to get early opinions and direction for wolf-specific theme.

• Opinions! More people to bounce ideas off of!

The barebones wiki lives here: http://descentmux.com/index.php/Main_Page

@Bellecourt >.> I didn't reply there cause I replied here. Just by happenstance, I saw the post here first. <.<

Fuck cancer. That is all.

Been meaning to post this one for a few days.

... when you're ST'ing for people you don't really know and the scene goes off the rails in unexpected and (by most MU* standards) crazy, somewhat campy ways and everyone is laughing and rolling with it and it's just -fun-. It really reminded me of a TT session in that way.

I had a Halfling Rogue on a DnD MU* named Taika Ovtings (Taker of Things).

So, I'm rewatching Inside Out, and I had an idea.

I know that nWoD2.0 has Aspirations, and Conditions, and Breaking Points.

But what if, instead of a bg, or just Breaking Points, there was a little section for 'Core Memories'? Little snippets of events that helped shape who that character is?

For example: Sally was bullied a lot, and one of her most remarkable memories, small as it is, was when Johnny stood up for her and saved the day, giving her a much needed break from the bullying but also a self-esteem and self-worth boost that helped her get through the bullying.

Thoughts?

There's just some arguments not worth having, and some things that, in the process of trying to fix them, get more broken.

For example:

I don't care about dinosaurs. We're low and slow xp, if someone is a dino? They busted their ass and helped build the game with their stories.

I don't care about trying to force an unnatural balance between spheres - I've seen it on a bunch of games and in debates here. People are never happy with the results, and often a handful of hr's throw things so out of wack tjat you need 10 more to try and fix it.

I hate hr's. It's hard enough for ST's to run stuff as it is, without adding 'Dig through an often disorganized wiki for obscure, badly written rulings' to the pile.

I find these things to be massive energy sinks with an itty bitty return that just isn't worth the amount of stress and burnout they can cause from arguing in circles.

@Ganymede is pretty familiar with my approach, by now, I feel. (Remember the dual praxes and the Diptheria plot, Gany? Man that was some backstabby fun.)

Make it easy for people to tell their stories. Hold people accountable and communicate about things. Be flexible as staff - if people wanna destroy chunks of grid? Let them. But you bet there will be consequences. @digging is easy. PK HAS to be warned of, and announced to staff ahead of time. No surprise kills, unless both parties are totally fine with it - yes, you can spend your own xp (mostly), yes staff will be watching and newspapering if a pk is requested/declared and someone dumps a bunch of xp.

Come, tell your crazy ass stories. DO over the top shit. Break things. Get your things broken. Live. Die. Start again. Fast, and fun, and simple. But also with a goal of creating that depth that makes people want to stick around. Some people want the kind of intensity and crazy from ye olde tabletop days of yore. Some people want the politics and the reasons to hold territory and work together. And I'm going to do my best to rally the growing team of folks on staff to give people that wild ride, those near death experiences that make people slump back in a chair after a scene and need a cigarette like: /fuck/.

Don't be afraid to lose, because losing can be amazing. Chicks dig scars.

This is where I'm coming from. I want to focus on story and building a fantastic game. I don't want to throw away energy worrying about things overly or getting sucked into arguments with no real end.

When we get moved into the new house (ha ha ha ha ha ha sob ha) we'll be about a hundred feet from an 8,000sqft lot we own and have enough space in the garage to finally dig into doing some small scale meat raising for the family, with intent to use mostly us-raised meats (so we know it isn't cruel), and have a massive 8,000sqft garden for the rest of our stuff. So we know what goes into.

The plan is to go keto/clean food, to give it the old college try to get my autoimmune shit under control (RA, fibro, chronic fatigue).

If we had Impossible Burgers, we would give them a try, for sure, but depending on how the label reads for carbs and sugars, etc, they might not get beyond being tried or had as a healthy 'treat' here and there.

Moar update! Theno's given me the go-ahead to start letting folks come and do some cgen. I still have a couple of places to desc (like 5 rooms) and there's equipment being updated, maps being made etc. BUT! If you want to come down, talk some shop, work on concepts while we work on these final few things, please join us! I'd love to help some folks get concepts sorted and built and talk some theme and ideas and see if the code dies.

thedescentmux.com for the wiki and login info!

ETA: Not tonight, though, I'm heading to bed >.> But tomorrow!

There's only a handful of things that aren't self spend, and that's because they need notes to be set (like safe place, haven, vinculum cause no one should spend xp on that, etc).

Honestly, I figure if someone has the xp they should be able to buy the thing. They've put in time, or effort, or ST'd or whatever. OOC devotion to the game, to get the xpses, for the ic goodies.

I'd totally accept a note for renown, because there IS a story that needs to be there. A handful of small things, one big one, a mix? Whatever.

I don't care about sheets and xps or dice pools.

I care about the stories of the game, of the individual, of having fun. In the end, the sheet is just a tool, a guide. A means to an end.

And I -know- that's probably going to get me some side eye.

But this loosely feeds back into not dying on the xp hill, or the balancing the spheres hill.

I don't want to throttle one sphere or boost that one. By the book. Minimal hr's. Cause most of us, I believe, just want to tell our stories - violent, or sexy, or domestic, or sad, whatever rp is fulfilling - and the sheet is just a guideline. And if you have the xp, you've been active and playing and being the sticky stuff that helps hold a game together.

I don't even know if this makes sense. I'm super sleepy/tired after running errands all day and liable to nap for a bit real soon.

Quick update:

We've got 7-8 pc's approved and on-grid. Started running some flavor scenes to build towards a couple different plot angles. Some +plots posted for each of the two praxes and their different approaches and some overlap.

Still a bit of tweaking to do and growing, but not as many bugs as I expected to find, just a couple of weird quirks that don't actually seem to be unworkable. They'll get hammered out as we go.

So far, so good!

@Kay >.> I suffer from 'stared at it too long' and 'I know the backside and forget people don't always see what I see'. If you're comfortable helping toss in a +request when you find missing stuff, I can try to make sure it gets added. Our 'ling staffer has Covid and I'm on the upswing (finally!) of a nasty sick of some sort.

I won't dismiss an idea to spread things a bit. The problem is a lot of the time it becomes 'x sphere jumps through y hoops' while 'z sphere has v hoops' and it's all a big, inconsistent mess between the spheres.

So I guess that's the root of my idea that it's one of those energy sink things.

I want my consistency and simplicity, damnit.

Theno worked some miracles and got TDM to boot up. Still missing a few bits and baubles, but it's up and running at like 80% or so functionality. I've already started cleaning up and removing the mage and werewolf things (bbs, channels, etc). It'll be a little while before she's ready to be invaded and re-opened.

We're planning to start as Vamp only. They're the sphere that really needs a functioning territory system, so figured it'd be easiest to start there and get a system up and running and playtested.

I'm also going to rip the grid out and relocate. The main suggestion on the table right now is St. Louis. It offers a lot of different terrains types (woods, city, grassland, etc). It's also on the main land, so less trouble with being on an island with limited space. It also offers interesting features like underground nuclear waste disposal, and a huge underground fire. I can totally picture a Mad Prince holding court and sacrificing people to the burning pit.

I'm open to suggestions, nothing is set in stone yet, except for the splat we're going to use as our starting point. I have a lot of work to do digging the place out of the dirt before I can build a new city.

That's a good question, and the answer I have is complicated. And I, of course, can't speak for @ShelBeast.

Let me start with how I see my role as headwiz/owner/whatever you want to call it.

I'm there to support my staff. I'll help idea bounce, process jobs, do apps, vet ideas, bring up things, etc. If someone is burning out, it's -my- job to step up and help them until they can catch their breath, or until they can find someone they want to work with. If they need to step down (no shame in it!), then it becomes my job to make sure plot balls don't get dropped and things chug along the best I can keep them going until another staffer is found.

It's part of why I want to keep things HR-lite and book-simple. I also have a vision of hooking plot and the grid vs grid system into +jobs so that facets off these are automated (For instance: having grid system queries go out automatically, beginning at X time on Y day, to collect the actions people want to do for the week), or having +plots generate a job automatically. (I have hot fantasies of a +query going out when a plot is +plot/claimed that contain all the juicy details of the plot, so a vague synopsis is what anyone can see without all the twists and good bits hanging out.)

Part of my mindset is that keeping gears turning is my job. I support my staff in all ways, the best I can. And I try to make sure that there are tools in place to help relieve some of the grindy gruntwork that is not as fun to do..

I also realizing that I might bee aimingg too high. But hey, if I aim for the stars and only hit a mountain top, I'll still count it a win.

Street Fighter was so fun.

Still here! Changeling is being slotted and tinkered. Maps are done, grid work is coming along. No one on my team knows wiki XD so it's ugly, but the info is getting there. Slowly. The game's up and visitors are welcome to come and inspire us to get more done. No guest logins, yet, but the create option is unlocked after the fun harassment issues.

Grid's about 30% desc'd, wiki is slooooowly being added to. The big struggle at the moment is no one knows wiki XD