This thread is for talking to each other out of character! I believe this will see a lot of use lmao.

Don't worry about proper grammar or whatever in the Chat, save your energy for the game haha

Hi everyone!

Welcome to our first two players!

I should mention that my time zone is EST (yes I am up at 4 AM - my sleep schedule is currently a huge mess) - I generally try to respond at least daily. You are encouraged to post daily as well, but there is no post minimum (for now - this may change if a player or two start falling behind the others).

I will generally slow the pace of the game rather than hasten it, since I believe it is vital that all players feel equally included and attended to.

When we get a third player, I will begin constructing your individual threads. These will be public threads (you are highly encouraged to read each other's work, unless you want to go in completely blind to your future encounters), but don't post somewhere your character is not present for haha

The first threads in this game will be based on the location of your characters. My original post in them will have two parts. The first part will be a description of the economy, environment, government, history, et cetera of your character's culture.

This will be mostly made up by me based on the input from your RTJs. You are also free to ask for details you want included, as well as offer real-world cultures for me to take inspiration from. This will only be a possibility before the threads are finished.

The second part of those threads will be a description of your current situation, which is what you will be responding to.

The first couple weeks of this game will be back-and-forth between your PC and myself.

This time will be spent building a foundation for your characters to soar from - but it will also serve the purpose of guiding your characters to an as-of-yet-undecided convergence.

After you have all met up, you are free to go your separate ways. The reason I need you to meet up is because I am hoping that you may choose to party up - this will save me from having to do as much work.

I will admit, it is not personally sustainable for me to respond to three to six players daily for the entirety of this game - so if it ends up that i have to do so, I will probably end up responding to your threads one at a time.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm just letting you know that I started this game while on holidays in order to ensure I had ample time and energy to respond as frequently as possible to all yalls actions.

I have to go back to university some point in January (havent found out when, yet) - so the game will either slow down or keep its same pace, depending on how many of you group up to interact with one another.

I should have mentioned this earlier in this post (which is too long for OOC, actually - my apologies) - but you do not have to wait for me to respond if you are posting in a thread with other players. Only if you need to learn the result of something in the world. Social interaction can be done between players freely.

Sorry for such a long post, these are just some things I thought I ought mention to avoid confusion. I will probably start working on your threads tomorrow, so feel free to post here or PM me (use your RTJ thread to avoid clutter) with any thoughts you have regarding your future homelands.

This is probably the only time I will do this kind of railroading, but this is necessary because I really want to avoid a situation where this game ends up being three to six completely independent stories. You will all of course have your own narrative throughlines, and time in the spotlight so to speak, but interaction with other players is going to be a big part of this game!

the only somewhat unfortunate consequence of starting like this is that there will be limited time to do hands-on exploration of your characters' birth cultures. Of course, you can always return to those places when you desire to.

Oh gosh, one last thing to discuss:
The ETERNAL part of the games title.

The way this will manifest changes from character to character. Some of you may be literally incapable of dying (that would get tricky if you were nuked, for example - since none of you are physically invincible from injury [[yet]]), while others may quickly be reborn after death. Some of you may be eternally youthful, while others will age normally.

It is even acceptable that maybe you want your characters Eternal power to manifest as causality reversal. Meaning, whenever you would die for any reason, the universe itself prevents it.

It is up to you how you want that to work, I will leave it to your discretion.

Keep in mind that in a world as magical as this one will eventually reveal itself to be, biological death is not the only way to cease existing. Imagine a Wizard appears and erases your consciousness entirely. This would qualify as a destruction of your existence, and so cannot be allowed to happen. But how is it avoided?

(this would not make you immune to ALL mind manipulation powers)

What if a cultivator or some other powerhouse appears and literally punches a hole into your soul/essence/origin. What now?

What I am getting at is this world has the potential for some insane feats (though not any time soon), and there may come a time when there are many more immortals than just 3-6. the difference is that these beings may have immortality derived from phylacteries (like a lich) or perhaps they have ascended to godhood - immortal unless all but their last follower is killed.

What if a being goes so far beyond mortality that they become existences tied to a very concept of reality? How then, could they be "killed"? Well, I have ideas, but let's not get ahead of yourselves.

The unique aspect of your characters - is that none of this applies to you. You have the absolute highest form of existence. Utterly eternal.

Therefore, "immortal" doesn't really describe your condition properly.

For now, it doesn't matter because none of you will begin the game aware of this ability.
Some of you may not learn the extent of this inherent power for many years - while others will learn about it the first time they escape death.

ultimately, you can consider your uniqueness separate (elevated above) any other power that appears in this game, no matter how grande. Your character might not know this, though, so they may avoid dangerous foes out of fear that they could actually be finally destroyed.

one thing that I predict coming up is that your characters may at some point desire death. This is totally understandable, as many people consider 'immortality' to be a curse, not a blessing. This will prevent sublime roleplay opportunities, but sadly the outcome is predetermined (your character may or may not know this right away) since even if you wanted to disappear, you could not.

If you have any questions about any of the stuff I rattled on about please feel free to ask here or in PMs

once again, huge apologies for the megapost. I realized there were a lot of things I had forgot to mention in the Game Info thread and RTJ text :SORRY:

Sorry for the double-post, all!

Welcome to our third player, though! Talonor, feel free to change your bio lines. I put those in case you want to use them. Please write a short description in your larger character bio, also. It can be just a couple lines on your apparent age and skin/hair/eye color. You can put more, if you like.

With this, we now have enough players to start. I will still be accepting more (up to five, not six like I mistakenly wrote before) in the future, but we have enough to start the game.

For your starting homelands, these are my thoughts but feel free to make suggestions since these will still be WIP until we are all happy enough for me to start their threads:

There is no better feeling than when your game turns out more popular than you thought it would be!

Welcome, @Asherah! Please put some basic appearance details in your character bio :3

We now have room for one more player :-)

And yes, I tripled posted. I will kowtow 1000 times in penance

Indeed so!

Welcome and Merry Christmas everyone.

Would you mind enabling character sheets for us GM? I like keeping notes there and I have a feeling that we will have a lot of notes in this game!

Sure thing! I forgot that was something I needed to manually do, haha

EDIT-

We are now full on players! Everyone welcome Sigismund :)

I set all your sheets to editable, so hopefully that works... if not, I'll figure it out lol

__________________

Asherah and Sigismund, here are the ideas i've come up for your homelands. Let me know if you want anything added, changed or removed!
This message was last edited by the GM at 10:16, Mon 25 Dec 2023.

I still can't get the character sheet I am afraid. I thin you have to create it first... You go edit it and then make it user editable. This is one of the few bad things in the RPOL gui

Hello all. I look forward to playing with ya'll.
I'll be your friendly bear of a cook, whose love for cooking for himself and others, is eating said food. Oh, and Merry christmas everyone. Hope the days are filled with good cheer, and better food ;)

I love what you wrote for my homeland, Froggychum. It's a perfect starting point, far as I can see. The only thing I envisioned differently was then maybe living in a place with more snow in winter, but that's only because my starting point was the early villages of the scandinavians. But that's no problem for me, this works great.

I'm contemplating my homeland as well. Interesting. Thought provoking. I think it's a super backdrop.

Yesss foood!! *cough* I’m excited to play with y’all as well [and very excited to find somebody else who says ‘yall’]

That looks wonderful FroggyChum thank you!

Heh, I'm not even sure why I do it. Not like I'm American and says it daily, or anything. I think it's just a subconscious way to seem more casual in text for me. 'You all' feels stuffy, somehow.

Im Canadian so y'all isn't really part of our dialectic either, but I do like using it, especially in text :-)



i caught onto that a bit late while writing, so I changed some names up and added snow into the backstory. the region you're in probably doesnt have much snow (though localized weather phenomena are not out of the question when magic is present) - and I thought it would be more convenient to have you closer to the action, rather than manufacturing an event to have you move closer (i'm doing that with some other players who I placed in farther regions, already).



A relief! I was least confident in my initial draft for you. I will be doing formatting but also a few tweaks for everyone's, but yours may get a bit more attention since I still feel like its not quite as elegant as I'd like.

---

@all - Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates! I'm hanging out with family today, so I won't get too much done GM-wise, at least not until later (though we are having turkey so I might fall asleep before then, lol)

Game should be up and running in just a day or two! Looking forward to it :-)



This is what I thought too. I will figure that out now.

Edit: should be done :) please lmk if there are any other issues. i use RPOL very infrequently when not running/particpating in a game :P
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:29, Mon 25 Dec 2023.

Well, I've got access to my character sheet. So I'm good, at least.

That worked. Thank you :)

JFC that took way too long - way way more than i thought it would (rip my free time today xD)

It's not even all that good or fully finished... but im out of time and sick of how finnicky that particular program seems to be (first time using it)

in the future I will probably stick to using paint.net to make my game maps

For now, just know a few things:
 - This map is to help visualize. its not perfect. in fact, the terrain is absolutely horrible i just couldn't be bothered to clean up what was randomly generated for me.
 - im not 100% happy with it, so I may change some of the names
 - some locations are missing. I couldn't fit everything I wanted, so the red arrow points to north Kalatoria, while the blue arrow points to Tzama. The Graff Ravine is also not visible, but it blocks off access to those two areas.
 - The Sram mountains and Azak Basin are part of Ghanbar, the part nearest to Iderran Wilds. I don't know how to draw those by hand, and the program was too difficult to figure it out
 - Jorgrim would technically be in the Iderran Wilds, using this map.
 - the land bridge between State of Fa and Cantel/Andorry should be smaller
 - there is no scale because the map is not to scale. Until I get an idea how long I want travel times to be, you won't know. For now, I am planning on having all of Kalatoria (both halves, including Tzama) be a continent a bit smaller than Australia.
 - since this is the ancient age, none of these borders are actually touching. think of it as territory claims rather than actually defended land.
 - i didnt draw the credi isles or Asherah's village. the former are in the Param Sea (which you can tell i put in by hand) and the latter is on the Kalatorian Coast, due south of the 'K' in Kingdom (not that this map is so accurate)

Okay, enjoy!

Paint is good. It's what I use all the time.

Right what do you want from us? I have a vision in my head now of Zhao (thank you for the background info) so would be happy to start RPing. Do you want anything before that?

Do you have an idea how we meet? Can we recognise each other as  'different' (Highlander has that, and it's quite effective as a plot device and I think adds to the world)

You guys are good to post as soon as I create your threads. That will be tomorrow, probably.

I have plans to have you all converge around Ghanbar, and I have different ways to drag/lead you there.

As for the recognition thing, I hadn't considered it. It's a good idea though, but since none of you are aware of your own natures yet, it will probably manifest as a feeling of similarity with each other (though not necessarily familiarness, intimacy, kinship or closeness).

Later, when you all begin to realize your nature (almost certainly will happen the first time you would be killed - or maybe when your aging catches up to you (or if it fails to)), you will be able to put two and two together, that all the people you felt that unique and unmistakeable sensation around are also the only beings with this same nature.

By the way, I'd like it if each of you can tell me how you want your 'eternal' ability to manifest. I have decided to call this ability "Eternal Existence" and one who possesses that power would be an "Eternal Existence" (different conjugation)

However, your characters will not know what it is called (likely for the entirety of the game), and may call it whatever they wish. Most likely, they will call it immortality - but that will get confusing when you encounter other immortals later who are not actually as permanent as you are.

Right - so just tell me how you want your ability to manifest. this is not a prerequisite to start posting, but we might as well get it out of the way. You should consider the things mentioned in the tail of msg #3 ITT - or you can leave them up to me to decide, which I am happy to do - but you might not expect it.

Keep in mind - again - that this ability does not have any sort of adjacent super powers or whatever.

You are not immune to damage, or the like - you just cant be destroyed by it, for example (the definition of this is variable, and may vary between your characters).

Ultimately, the distilled essence of this ability - if you need a single thought to focus on, is "Your existence is fundamentally a part of reality"

If I feel like your interpretation won't work too well, I will suggest changes until we are both happy. Again, it's fine to leave this part up to me to decide but I'm giving you freedom to do a little extra design work on your character.

No matter your choices here, in the long run your abilities will all act in the same way, more or less. Don't think you will have a 'higher level' of the ability than another PC, it doesn't work that way.

One last note: Remember that unless I post it in an IC thread (Known World, or your upcoming personal threads), its not canon. Currently, you can take the game map as noncanon as well. Just use it as a reference for visualization.

Generally, I create threads based on their physical location - but there is plenty room for exceptions depending on the circumstances.

I look forward to starting the game tomorrow! Rest well, all :D

So just to be clear, will each of our immortality powers work differently, except that we are all true immortals and will always return somehow, or are we each gonna suggest a way and work until we find one we're all happy with, which will then be the way it functions for all of us?

Either way, I was thinking something like always ending up back in prime condition. Like if I got wounded, or dead, I'd eventually end up back at my prime. A lost limb would take longer than a stab wound, a body burnt to a crisp would take longer to reconstitute than a body with a wound in the heart. But always, you eventually come to in perfect condition, including age. Somewhere in the mid twenties, I imagine. Unsure on whether this should involve aging. Like you could age normally, and when you die of old age, you come to at some point, somewhere, youth restored and strong of body. Or maybe you don't age at all beyond your physical prime, but the rest still applies.

EDIT: Oh also, I can't see the map. Might just be because I'm on my phone, not a computer. Just figured I'd mention it in case anyone else has the same problem. Otherwise I'll see it in two days when I'm back home and can get to my pc.
This message was last edited by the player at 01:39, Tue 26 Dec 2023.

I can see a map in the main game map.