About Spirit Lake   ·   World Intro  ·   Policies  ·   Join Us  ·   Why Beta?

Set in the tiny Colorado town of Grand Lake, Spirit Lake is a game that explores what happens when magic re-enters the world. Grand Lake has long been known as the gateway to the Rockies. It turns out that it's also a gateway to other worlds. Portals have begun to open nearby, letting humans cross into other worlds - and letting things from those worlds cross into ours. At the same time, some have found themselves gifted with inexplicable powers that they don't understand and don't know how to control. Abruptly, the world is magical again.

Inspired by a host of modern fantasy and bump-in-the-dark sources such as The Magicians, Twin Peaks, and Stranger Things, Spirit Lake has its roots in stories about small towns beset by mystery, magic, and myths come to life

Characters can learn spells, find books, explore worlds, meet creatures, and uncover mysteries.

OOCly, Spirit Lake is about collaborative discovery and creating a world through play. Players are actively encouraged to run plots, write spells, create magical worlds, and invent creatures. We will build the world as we play in it, and we look forward to the surprises that lay in wait.

Spirit Lake is built in Ares and uses a modified version of @faraday's FS3 system for combat and spellcasting. After a fall spent Alpha testing (and many, many months spent developing), we are finally ready for open Beta.

Log-in and character creation will be turned on Wednesday, January 9. We hope to see you there!

Faraday once spent three days helping me debug a problem that ended up being a stupid server issue that had nothing at all to do with code. And when I say three days, I mean HOURS and HOURS over the course of three days. I definitely remember feeling like it consumed entire days.

She didn't know me at all beyond some passing forum conversations at the time. She's just that invested in helping people run stuff.

I can't even count the number of hours she's put in to helping me learn the ins and outs of everything Ares, starting from the existence of helpers all the way up to digging into javascript on the portal. I've never asked her a question and not gotten help - and I've asked her a LOT of questions.

I've watched the web portal on Ares go from 'hey this is kind of cool' to 'this is insanely revolutionary', mostly because she keeps listening to what people wish they could do, and making it happen. At a ridiculous pace, mind.

Faraday is a gift I'm not sure this community deserves, but I'm sure glad we've got her.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

Hi, I'm trying to get in touch with a Spirit Lake staff member - I can't contact them through the MUSH system itself, for reasons connected with why I'm trying to contact them in the first place, and I haven't been able to locate any other contact details for them anywhere on the website. Can somebody contact me by chat? (I sent a chat message to Tat a couple of days ago but haven't had any reply - maybe e didn't see it.)

Hi, I'm going to be brief here, since a few people have brought this to my attention (I am an occasional, but not regular, visitor to MSB).

I wasn't active online when you were banned as a guest, but it was pretty clear why. There's no need to re-hash it here; I'll simply say that there are plenty of games out there, and we wish you well in finding one that is a good fit for what you want.

But please don't track me or any other staff member down across other platforms. It's creepy and just not nice. If your behavior on game wasn't enough to enforce the ban (it was), then doing this would be.

This player had also picked up a roster on Spirit Lake. Thanks to folks who shared info about him - after getting the new Ares security upgrades in, he's been banned from us as well.

His behavior on our game never crossed a line (that we knew of), but given what we've seen from him from people I know and trust, we're not willing to give him that chance.

@silverfox said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Regardless: Totally not trying to shovel shit. I'd gotten the misunderstanding that the main strength of the web portal was to allow for those longer scenes as people were able to pose. I didn't realize it was generally used almost as a replacement client. My bad.

It's kind of hard to really get how transformational something like the scene system and the Ares web portal really is to the M*ing experience until you play with it. I feel like I was a solid 6 months in before I stopped regularly exclaiming over something - and I still do it on occasion.

A system like this has several main benefits, but by far the biggest one is the freedom from the need for a constant, active telnet connection, and the correlation of that connection to a single character bit.

Last night I was in a scene that went late, and when we decided to pause, I just closed my client and went to bed. This morning, the whole scene is still there, waiting for me. I can recall it in my client, or read it on the web portal.

I have small kids, and I often write up set poses for things I'm GMing that night during the day. On a persistent web platform, I can write it, start the scene, and leave it sit there until start time, when the other players can join the scene and see what I've already written while I finish up bedtime.

I go home for lunch. I don't have to pause scenes anymore. Instead, I can leave a scene I was RPing slowly in at work and toss in a pose while I'm home at lunch, from the web portal. Or shoot off an IC text on my walk to a meeting. We have players who RP on their long commute home, on their phones - another way the portal helps timezones be less of an issue.

If I'm going to be 30 minutes late to a scene, I don't have to be sure to log on and drop my character into the room or find someone to paste me what I'd missed. I just pull it up on the portal and read it. (Incidentally, this also cuts down on the need to 'scene set' every time someone new joins a scene, which is freeing).

I can GM for people in timezones vastly different from me over the course of a day or even two. It's not my ideal type of scene, but it lets me involve players who previously would have just had to suck it up and not be in GMed stuff on games that I run.

I can RP in other scenes while I do this. I can RP in several scenes at once, if my time, attention, and internal timeline allow. I can finish up that scene from last night, and also have a text scene throughout the course of my work day about something that's pressing to another character. I personally don't like to double up on 'real' scenes very often, but the CAPABILITY is so freeing when I want or need to.

These are the sorts of limitations I didn't even realize existed with telnet only until I was freed of them. And they're just the ones revolving around RP. There are dozens more. The ability to set up my character in a graphical interface. To search logs. To see the same thing on the game and the web according to my mood. To not spam my screen with 'combat' a billion times - or to spam it and not care, because the log will be clean anyway, and I can always pull up the scene on the portal to see it without the HUD displayed. To casually page someone with something and know that they'll see it as soon as they log back on (or check the web portal - it's basically the same thing these days). To organize and filter jobs and respond to them in a graphical interface.

All of these things that we've gotten used to are things that are barriers to entry, for new people (whether young or not). They increase how much you have to WANT to do this hobby. Most of them, we don't even notice anymore, I think. Until suddenly they're gone.

Noticing these things, and figuring out how to remove them, is important. And hard.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

You are trying to bring people that do not exist into a hobby by alienating the people that do.

You want to add ultimately pointless bells and whistles to things that will eliminate the people that phone MU.
You want to cut out the people that prefer (or can't for health reasons) not to use a mouse just to RP.

All to gain the one or two college kids that actually do enjoy reading and writing?

Wow. I mean. I just--

We know there are good RPers out there. It's a fact. I can link you to games full of people writing stories.

Speaking of stories people apparently aren't writing... Have you seen archiveofourown.org? Have you seen the drabbles on tumblr? The Secret Santa challenges with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of participants? Have you heard of Nanowrimo? People aren't /writing/? The internet is FULL of people writing! It is FULL of people living and breathing in franchises they love. They are so eager for this experience that they /RP on Tumblr/ where it is /horrible/. Imagine what they can and will do when they are given the tools we take for granted.

But beyond that, look. I'm pumped about the idea of new blood. But these bells and whistles? I want them for myself.

I want to be able to read bbs without cluttering my backscroll, I want to be able to arrange combat via dropdown menus instead of remembering commands, I want to look at a HUD without adding a second character to combat while I'm GMing just so I can keep track of the flow of the scene AND who's injured.

I want a web-based game for purely selfish reasons. Because after 20 years of M*ing, I'm fucking tired of things being harder than they have to be.

Difficult CGs (a web form only gives this a new interface; it doesn't make the core of CG easier)

No. Sorry. Totally not true.

I've run the same CG on Ares via telnet and via the web. I can tell you which one is a BILLION times easier. It's not the telnet.

And that's a pretty simple system. The numbers aren't complicated, there's not a lot of math to be done. But the UI makes it SO MUCH EASIER to track where I am, what I have left to spend, what things are at the right levels, etc. And I'm pretty sure that there's lots of room for improvement on what Ares has so far, even. Helpful error messages, tips and hints, auto-calculators, ALL KINDS OF THINGS.

I for one am PUMPED to welcome new players into this hobby, and I'm PUMPED to get to use these bells and whistles for myself.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@meg said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I have no way of knowing if she was speaking as just another poster or as a moderator.

We're working on making this clearer, and I'm not perfect on this either. It is safe to presume that unless I mark my comment clearly, I'm responding as a sour-old lawbot, and not as a moderator.

I don't think it's fair to ask people to make this presumption, at least not until there is a very long and clear history of clarity. And even then, I'm not sure. It sort of puts the onus on the people who are not moderators to not accidentally cross a line, and I really feel that it should go the opposite way. The burden should be on moderators to be clear, not on posters to interpret correctly.

I feel that it would be much safer to either not say things that sound moderatorish if you aren't in your mod suit, or label everything.

ETA: Whoa wait. @Auspice Not recognizing a voice that has been used inconsistently when not recognizing it means you might GET IN TROUBLE is not being /obtuse/.

I've had bosses like this. Bosses who were not clear about when they were joking around and when they were serious. I couldn't tell the difference. It was a nightmare. And they were not good bosses.

If you want to be a good moderator, be clear, and don't semi-insult people for not reading your mind. I mean. Man. We aren't in your brain, we cannot discern intent, even if we think we ought to be able to.

@Seamus

I'm sorry @Auspice but I really don't think they told them wrong. Faraday is real quick to say "no" to anything she doesn't agree with. And as you said, it's her right. But warning someone... That's a good thing too. I've contributed a "Dark Skin" for Ares.

This is bullshit.

I don't usually engage in this sort of stuff, but this is BULLSHIT.

Faraday is hands down the most patient, level headed person I think I've ever seen. I have seen her say no, firmly. I've also seen her spend a GREAT DEAL OF TIME explaining why she's saying no, what her philosophy is, and why it doesn't fit within that philosophy. Patiently. Clearly. Politely.

Including to you.

She's also spent a ton (and I mean a TON) of time helping me implement things that are never going to touch Ares core - some of which she doesn't particularly love philosophically. At least one of these things is now up as an Ares Extra for others who want to implement it.

Faraday is not only open to people modifying the server, but she actively supports it. I would not be half the ruby coder I am (whatever that is) without her continued patience and help.

I've also witnessed people being incredibly rude in the face of her helpfulness and generosity. Repeatedly. And it's bullshit, too.

@reason

Your game should, IMO, be largely done before launch. This means that, as @bear_necessities says, your theme files are in place and fleshed out, your policies are clear, your chargen guides are ready, your grid is built and desced, and you know what sort of RP you expect players to engage in on day one.

It also means that if you have extra systems - like, say, magic - that said system is LARGELY functional. I opened a game in Beta (technically it still is), and we did sometimes make some changes to the system over time, but the core of it had already been tested, the code worked (...mostly), and the policies surrounding it were things I was fairly certain about.

Personally I would not do that early 'is this even feasible, does combat break all the time' testing on an open game. That's the sort of thing I do with a small, trusted group of friends. Systems that don't matter to gameplay are fine to add later, but if it's important to your theme, I think you should have it at open.

All of these things will change - I update documentation constantly, I adjust policies as things come up, we expand the grid as we see what's missing. The magic system has grown as players have chased different things ICly. Growth is good. That's different from opening an unfinished game, though.

Is there a critical mass of initial staffers? - Yes, but the number depends on your game. Some can run with one person. Some really need a team. You should have an idea of what work you have to do and how much time it will take, and have a team to fit that. If you DON'T have an idea of that work, then you need to figure it out. Understanding the work you're getting yourself into is an important part of running a game.

Critical mass of initial players? - I personally would never work on a game I didn't know at least 6-10 people wanted to play - but I'm sure people HAVE and have gotten traction. Most games that look to be crafted with care and thought these days seem to get a pretty good crowd, so if you feel confident in your ability to design an interesting game to completion, I'd just go for it. But a few early sign ups can def ease the nerves.

An existing metaplot ready for day 1? Metaplot, no. An idea of what characters will be doing and fast ways for them to get hooked into it? Yes. Sometimes this IS metaplot, sometimes it's just flash in the pan stuff, sometimes it's parties. What you don't want is characters wandering the grid going 'what am I supposed to do?' for a week.

I think the process of building a game is in many ways preparation for running one. If you don't have the patience to get all your ducks in a row before opening, I suspect you'll struggle to have the patience to actually do all the minutiae that comes with game running. This doesn't have to be an arduous process - I've helped run games we took from idea to open in 6 weeks. I've also worked on games for 2 years before open. Your ambition, the game's complexity, your available time, your enthusiasm - these all vary. Understanding how they fit together is a really important part of the process, I think.

@WTFE said in MU and Data Organization:

Question 2

I'm going to come down on an unpopular side, I suspect. MU* servers are UTTERLY FUCKING TERRIBLE for navigating complicated or lengthy information. If the only "news" entry is "our web site at address http://foo.bar/baz contains all game information we have" then I'd be absolutely ecstatic (presuming it's an actual web site and not just "news"-style files hastily wrapped in <html></html> headers).

That being said, the advantages of web sites are lost if you don't make use of their advantages. Inline topical links (not links at the bottom where in news it would say "see also news foo, news bar, news baz") are vital. As is, unlike MU*-oriented information, not chunking the information at arbitrary levels. (That's what "paragraphs" are for, not entirely new pages.)

I'm with you. Put that shit in a window where I can read it in multiple tabs and it doesn't scroll my game screen. My /preference/ for this is a good wiki, because I think a good wiki, configured right, takes a lot of stress off staff and lets helpful players be helpful. But even a good webpage will do.

I'm actually kind of shocked that there are people who'd prefer to read things in their client still.

@thesuntsar said in Meshing Groups:

This is probably something I fail at. I get very caught up in going "Okay I started at 8 but I really need to be wrapping up what I'm doing by 11 or else I'll be too wound up to sleep!!!" and then I tend to push stuff along at my speed rather than a more natural pacing. It might help to just say "We're going for three hours and then pausing" than trying to hit a plot point in those three hours.

Or just be okay with less interaction IN the scene, and build in time for those characters to connect around what happened later. Honestly, in action scenes, I often feel like I'm doing good to track what's going on at all. But if the GM gives a few places where character actions affect each other - someone saves someone, or nearly hits them, or heals them or rallies them, or even they all see the same crazy thing - and there's a beat AFTER the action, then I can do all kinds of bonding.

Plots that build in social scenes for the aftermath are nice because then I don't have to personally go begging for it, or other people's timelines won't pass mine. If we all know 'we're RPing the aftermath tomorrow at X time', we can hold mental space and RL time for that and get that meaty goodness in.

Games full of people that give you so much joy, creativity, and imagination that it's heartbreaking to bring things to an end.

Sometimes this hobby gives us a whole lot of awesome. It's a strange joy to close wishing there was more. Keep being amazing, guys.

@thesuntsar said in Cat Character Drawings:

MOAR CATS. @Crawfish did this one for a pair of Spirit Lake characters! And it is

This is one of my favorite things ever.

@arkandel said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

@tat Also keep in mind balancing for a MUSH is much easier than doing so for a table-top RPG because you can always patch things retroactively, especially if it's automated.

If your 'real' metrics, unlike theorycrafting, show that +3 initiative is better than +3 defense you can adjust it on the fly. Maybe you'll refund some XP spends for those who invested based on the old system.

Once you print then ship rulebooks out it's a pain in the ass to create and distribute errata.

I play Magic: the Gathering which makes all of this even worse. You opened packs or traded for a mythic card that got banned? Well, sucks to be you!

I'm not entirely sure that's true. We're 3 years into this system now - at what point do we make giant changes and say that people who've invested in this system and RPed a lot of 'canon' stuff around it just suck up the changes?

We have made SOME changes - including actually some fairly big ones about how things roll, etc. But there are also changes that would be so fundamentally theme-changing or discount a lot of established RP that they'll absolutely wait on a sequel, if one happens. I'm not changing those things mid-stream, because the story and the characters are ultimately more important than the balanced numbers.

I mean, no, there's no cost associated - but something like Magic is also (presumably) doing a lot of their playtesting BEFORE they print materials. We had a pretty meaty Alpha period where we did the same, but we're a handful of people over here - there's only so much playtesting we can do before we go live.

I think the challenges (and solutions) are probably just different. And I imagine that if I end up doing a Magic System 2.0, it'll still have things I'd adjust if I were Doing It All Over Again.

@betternow said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

I was just kind of confused. I mean if they said Ethel or Eustice or Jehosephat, it would have landed the way they intended. I was just surprised they would think Bianca is an "old-fashioned" name.

THESE kinds of names actually very common now - among the preschool set. There seems to be a cycle of folks naming kids after their grandparents/looking backward for classic names. My kids' classes (preK and 1st) are full of kids with either the 'new spelling or variation' type name (think Jaxton, etc) or old-fashioned names that make me think of grandparents (their great-grandparents). Think: Eleanor, Maude, etc. Incidentally, I've noticed that boys names tend to stay more classic - Joseph, Benjamin - than girls names.

@faraday

Dice mechanics are HARD. You have to have something that is:

Intuitive enough for people to understand (FS3v1's custom dice curves did NOT go over well)
Have enough variation that the dice feel meaningful, but... not TOO much, because it's frustrating when your character's performance is wildly unpredictable (I'm looking at you D20).
Have enough ability for modifiers that you can account for difficulty/wounds/etc., but not SO much that a +2 mod changes you from a complete noob to a professional (I'm looking at you FUDGE).

Sometimes it feels like an impossible balancing act and at some point you just have to say "screw it, roll some dice and have some fun"

Oh my GOD I cannot even put into words how hard balancing a system is. I had an inkling before we started building ~400 custom-made spells to slide into FS3, but I had no true idea.

All the things Faraday says here, but also add things like

• Is a +3 initiative as useful as a +3 defense?
• How does being able to turn into a mouse balance against being able to turn into a bear?
• Is a stun that lasts 3 rounds for one person equal to a stun that lasts 1 round for 3 people (given that both have the possibility for being resisted)?
• Are 3 level 1 spells equal to 1 level 3 spell?

And on and on.

I think it IS an impossible balancing act. At the end of the day you just kind of do the best you can and go and hope your players show you grace and manage to have fun despite the fact that you sometimes got it wrong.

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

@cobalt That gets to what I was saying about how to learn the entire package, not just the language. Getting an attribute out of a room has very little to do with ruby itself, because the core language knows nothing about MUSH rooms or Database attributes. You'd have a similar challenge with coding in any modern full-stack application, regardless of language.

I'm someone who started from a base knowledge of 'can tweak some formatting stuff in PennMUSH and coded a couple of basic commands in MOO a few decades ago' who has now coded a fair number of Ares plug-ins, including a really, really large one that integrates magic with Ares' FS3 system.

From my perspective, what Faraday says here is true - but when I started, I didn't get enough about how modern code languages worked to even recognize the difference between 'the language' and the Ares framework (for lack of a better word). All I knew was that I didn't really understand where things were stored, how to get to them, how everything fit together, and how to make stuff GO.

It's actually really easy to find great documentation on almost everything in Ruby. Want to manipulate a string? Play around with an array? Do some math? Tons of examples!

Ares is well-documented, too, but the entire CONCEPT that I needed to learn Ares and not just Ruby was one that it took me awhile to wrap my head around. I think sometimes that's where some of the hurdle comes for folks (like me) who have very little coding experience. They GET how all the pieces of a MUSH fit together - but Ares fits them together somewhat differently, and you have to learn that structure, too.

One of my very first questions to Faraday was 'how do I make a command execute other commands?' (something I'd done in MUSH) and she told me 'that's generally a bad idea, use the helper functions instead'.

I don't know that I ever admitted that I had no idea what helper functions WERE, let alone how to use them. Now that I do, I understand why they're a better choice, but that mental leap took me awhile - as did figuring out where those functions lived and how to access them (pro tip: getting a real code editing program and learning a few shortcuts makes this much, much, MUCH easier).

I do think the Ares tutorials are very good (and getting better all the time, as I know Faraday makes adjustments as people find things that confuse them), but there's a bit of a mental shift that I think can be difficult if you're expecting Ares (I'd guess Evennia too, but I've never tried it, so I can't be sure) to function like a MUSH-but-with-different-syntax under the hood. It is-- but it also isn't.

Overall, I found Ares-and-ruby MUCH easier to pick up then PennMUSH. In particular, I find it much easier to learn how to do Big Stuff than I ever did in Penn. I doubt I'd ever have managed this sprawling, integrated, complicated magic system on Penn, because it's clunky and hard to read and there's no version control for when I really screw up and no easy-to-read config files. The leap from 'I can change the formatting on WHO' to 'I can code a new system' was much, much easier.

Also I can't say enough for the Ares discord community at large, who've helped me more than once on problems small and large and been really, really patient with questions of all sorts.

@lotherio said in Criticism: X-Men Divergence:

The only thing I could reason for requiring a guest bit to apply for a roster is to save DB clutter, but this isn't 1990 when total available/virtual space was MBs in some shell on someone's home box, which included space for web/graphics.

There's not a smooth way in Ares to require an application for a roster character without the email step. It's not this game trying to be obstructionist or anything - they're probably just using the tools they have. If you want to require an application for a roster (and you don't want to/don't know how to code a different solution), asking for an email for a response is the best you've got.

@reason

Your game should, IMO, be largely done before launch. This means that, as @bear_necessities says, your theme files are in place and fleshed out, your policies are clear, your chargen guides are ready, your grid is built and desced, and you know what sort of RP you expect players to engage in on day one.

It also means that if you have extra systems - like, say, magic - that said system is LARGELY functional. I opened a game in Beta (technically it still is), and we did sometimes make some changes to the system over time, but the core of it had already been tested, the code worked (...mostly), and the policies surrounding it were things I was fairly certain about.

Personally I would not do that early 'is this even feasible, does combat break all the time' testing on an open game. That's the sort of thing I do with a small, trusted group of friends. Systems that don't matter to gameplay are fine to add later, but if it's important to your theme, I think you should have it at open.

All of these things will change - I update documentation constantly, I adjust policies as things come up, we expand the grid as we see what's missing. The magic system has grown as players have chased different things ICly. Growth is good. That's different from opening an unfinished game, though.

Is there a critical mass of initial staffers? - Yes, but the number depends on your game. Some can run with one person. Some really need a team. You should have an idea of what work you have to do and how much time it will take, and have a team to fit that. If you DON'T have an idea of that work, then you need to figure it out. Understanding the work you're getting yourself into is an important part of running a game.

Critical mass of initial players? - I personally would never work on a game I didn't know at least 6-10 people wanted to play - but I'm sure people HAVE and have gotten traction. Most games that look to be crafted with care and thought these days seem to get a pretty good crowd, so if you feel confident in your ability to design an interesting game to completion, I'd just go for it. But a few early sign ups can def ease the nerves.

An existing metaplot ready for day 1? Metaplot, no. An idea of what characters will be doing and fast ways for them to get hooked into it? Yes. Sometimes this IS metaplot, sometimes it's just flash in the pan stuff, sometimes it's parties. What you don't want is characters wandering the grid going 'what am I supposed to do?' for a week.

I think the process of building a game is in many ways preparation for running one. If you don't have the patience to get all your ducks in a row before opening, I suspect you'll struggle to have the patience to actually do all the minutiae that comes with game running. This doesn't have to be an arduous process - I've helped run games we took from idea to open in 6 weeks. I've also worked on games for 2 years before open. Your ambition, the game's complexity, your available time, your enthusiasm - these all vary. Understanding how they fit together is a really important part of the process, I think.

When you watch a scene's rolls for days, desperately waiting for the amazing thing you know will be the log to appear.

And then it does, and it is even BETTER than you expected, and every single pose is a thing of pure 'yes, and' beauty and joy and you spend the whole time laughing.

God. Sometimes RP is just chef's kiss.

@faraday said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

@Tat said in 'The Magicians' again -- time period?:

It's not just 'earning' the pool, but limiting what happens when you don't have enough points in your pool (ie, what triggers that nosebleed).

As a generic "point tracker" system that's all done with manual effects, it could certainly be done as a separate plugin.

pools - Show your pools.
pool/award - Staff command to award pool points.
pool/spend - Player command to spend pool points.

That really has nothing whatsoever to do with FS3 though. A GM would have to manually apply modifiers or limit what abilities you could roll or whatever.

FS3 itself has no concept of point pools by design (apart from luck points) and as @Tat mentions, it would be impossible to build that in without some heavy custom modifications to the core code.

Good point - the complexity/plugin ability is really more about how much you want to be automated in things like combat and skill rolls vs having that extra step/thing for GMs to track.