Promises are whispered in the age of darkness

[impersona]

HEY 

HEY 

HEY 

HEY LISTEN!

Someone is working on Restless Heavens again :D   Just spent a half hour clearing all of the spam out of the wiki , need to fix things tomorrow so that only the moderator can edit stuff cause the spam was SO BAD GUYS I suck. 

(For all the new kids to my DW - The Restless Heavens, A Fracture in the Sea of Clouds is the Twelve Kingdoms RPG that I've had in the works for a year now.  Though due to moving across the country and general flakeyness I haven't actually worked on it in eight months.  Restless Heavens takes place in an AU version of the world - all of the mechanics and geography and etc are still the same as in the book/anime, but we are working with an entirely new cast of people, meaning Keiki and Youko and Rakushun never exist in the context of this game.  New sandbox, baby.)

BUT YES, PROGRESS IS BEING HAD.



I do have something to say regarding my vision for the game, mostly about the broad aim of the game and what I imagine and want to achieve with it. 
 

• I have decided to nix the gameplay requirements (must post once every 4 months, etc) except where they pertain to having king/kirin characters (like, you only get more than one if you are a regularly active member). 

• I was thinking about some of the RPGs that I've really enjoyed in the past, and I remembered how much fun there was in developing ANCD's history, timeline, worlds and characters.  That was definitely taking away from the actual RP log-writing element of ANCD, yes, but I think it might be something refreshing to do with RH guilt-free.  Obviously I would still want stories within the fifteen-year period I'd distinguish as the 'present' (2005-2020), but I also want people to go ape-shit in building a rich history and world in RH, so we can really take ownership of the Twelve Kingdoms.  I will have to figure out ways to regulate the crafting of the history, so that a single player isn't dictating the 5000 years of Kei history with their army of shiny sues (I think the group of us is better than that though), but I think encouraging filling in the past could be really self-indulgent and hopefully refreshing.  

• Tossing out limits on how many characters you have, except where they pertain to kings and kirin.  We are going to need A LOT of NPCs for this game.  

• I need to write up a 'sample' of the kind of story I'd love to see being written in RH.  I am totally cool with people writing stories in our traditional log format, but I really want to experiment with doing what I can best call collaborative novellas - if a pair of people are writing together, they aren't just writing a scene, but they are writing what happened before the scene, what happened after the scene, the scene after that scene and the climax and the resolution - basically, an entire storyline rather than a snippet.  It is daunting and will take a lot longer than our usual logs, but I want to experiment with something new.  I am inspired a lot by a novella-length story that Pixie and Dani did a million years ago with Tabris and Israfel, which I've been yearning to emulate myself ever since I read it so long ago. 

• I want to be aggressive about community activities.  I want to involve a lot of ficathons into RH - rallies to get short-stories based on certain themes, probably with the theme rotating every month or every season.  I would also want to host book-rereads every few months with discussion threads - like if we all read Demon Child within a certain month and then had talks, discussions, and comments on it, even ideas of how to integrate some of the ideas from that story into RH.  It could even be non-12k books, like if enough people want to read a book off of the Recommended Reading page (which is very bare now) and want to discuss that. 

As you can tell, Restless Heavens is becoming very much an experimental place.  The reason why I nixed the gameplay requirement was because I wanted to give us some license and lee-way to fail without me having a nervous breakdown.  If that's one thing I've learned, it is that all RPGs fail at one point or another, and I want to be willing and able to pull it up and make RH emerge as a better creature after it stumbles.
  I need to play more Pokemon (I need to play Pokemon my life depends on it), but I hope those of you who were interested in RH are still with me after all this!  Thank you! 

Comments

[ru]

I AM RU, AND I APPROVE OF THIS IDEA. :D

The idea of making it more experimental is an interesting one, kind of more like an uber sandbox. I like the idea of trying out some more non traditional RP strategies to mix it up and keep things interesting.

It's actually kind of funny that you are working on this now, as yesterday I was thinking about Ryuurin and my rabbit boy. XD. I'm excited to do something with them, and RH in general! :D

[glitterbeastlightning]

* Tossing out limits on how many characters you have, except where they pertain to kings and kirin. We are going to need A LOT of NPCs for this game.

I kind of all sorts of love this. I'm a person who, if they play social characters, TONS of background people end up popping up. One of my pet peeves is how many 'social butterfly' characters there are in games, yet all their non-game contacts are faceless shadows. If you play a 15 year old girl in America, for example, chances are she will have someone or someoneZZZZ that she calls 'bestie' 'bff' or what have you. They should have a name, a personality, and an offscreen way of affecting her.

I've played in rps where you were allowed to not only make npc's, but if applicable, play them (usually for brief periods of time). I always took advantage of that and, usually, ended up NPC'ing for other people. Also, I like to make those utterly insane and sometimes socially retarded people we all marvel and gawk at. Fun to NPC, not very interesting to play.

ALSO: How far are you in Pokemon? I'm about to get my third badge, but I also obsessively level. I'm having trouble committing to Pokemon. That damn lillipup/herdier is too useful and, while in the long run, I know it'll be better to put a good tri-evolving water type in my party, I'm having trouble letting my only remaining normal type go!