Acies ab Vesania

No kidding. I was like, "How the hell did this get missed." Forgot it was the first yesterday. >_>

You've never seen Lonely Night's Hand at work. >D

Shivers: Acerbic. He had a rough life, made a bad decision that he never took full accountability for and put off a lot of the blame, had a disproportionate punishment handed down and learned to thrive through his anger and resentment of the "civilized" world. He's not a good guy, and he shouldn't be viewed as such, but in some ways, one can feel a little empathetic with regards to what happened to him, which makes his feelings more understandable. Chaflin: Apprehensive. Mostly due to social stuff, as he spends a lot of time worrying about what others think about him. To be apprehensive is also to be attentive to people, perceptive of their needs, and that is something Chaflin does well. He cares and has a good amount of emotional intelligence. It's just this one part of his brain that wants to jump into worst case scenarios about what others think, despite how intuitively he should know better. Stupple Hupple: Whimsical. If you've ever done a role-play thread with him, you know that this is the perfect word for him. Aurelius Lee: Tenacious. He sticks through his goals and is unyielding in his expectations. He can be doggedly determined when need be and is rather tough, despite being a cantankerous intellectual. A few notable ones.

I might have an idea for this.

My characters are variable. Aurelius is atheistic and believes science uncovers truths and that what people refer to as Gods are just powerful beings, but were random cosmological accidents like everyone else. Chaflin would have been raised a Gaian and still state that is his faith, though he is not a devout worshiper. Hemmit is devoted to "Gaia" though his relationship with it differs from most others from Terrenus. Stupple Hupple is devoted to a religion I wrote up called, "The Three Brothers" a minority religion in the Midlands of Genesaris. He is a priest of that faith, so he is committed. Shivers is more or less an atheist, but it is passionless. He does not feel a need to quash religious beliefs or even talk about it. He has no interest in it, and his shitty life made him inclined to believe there is nothing, or if there is, it is not intelligent nor caring.

None of mine do, for varying reasons. Two are infertile. One is asexual. One is too unstable to interact with the opposite sex in such a way as to produce offspring. One is gay. One does not want kids, ever. One is a careerist so he won't have any right now qnd it is debatable if he would ever want them. One is still a virgin due to his social anxieties (he is the one most likely to become a family man, however). Honestly though, it seems like if one of my characters became a parent, they would become a cameo character and not a regularly role-played one.

I have a few who are not originally from this world so they don't really have a primary residence. But of the others: Shivers: Originally Mezthaluen, now moves about based on work Stupple Hupple: Mezthaluen, remains in that area Aurelius: I believe he was from Telarian city originally, but I would need to look that up in my notes. Chaflin: He is from one of those small, unmarked towns in Terrenus. The nearest larger city would be Dougton.

I recommend perusing Sanderson's Laws of Magic. He has solid advice. https://coppermind.net/wiki/Sanderson's_Laws_of_Magic

Let's see how well I can condense a long, nearly 30-year spanning story. You could say that role-playing is in my blood: my mother and my uncle dabbled in D&D and similar games in the early eighties. They both fell out of it, but my mother rediscovered role-playing games in the early ’90s and got back into D&D in the mid-nineties. Hers and my story overlap in some places but that’s about the extent of that connection—I have a direct relative who has been playing RPGs off and on for nearly 40 years. The relevance is that it explains my early start with RPG like games. When I was around five, I created a game called “Super Heroes” with my younger sister. It was childish and silly, but it was already more complex than games like “house,” and it involved full on role-taking as well as world building. As I got older, we added details to this imaginary world (called Kendrillia) as well as the indigenous peoples, their abilities, and their adventures. We spent entire afternoons outside immersed in varying roles. At the age of eight, I was invited to play D&D with my parents. They made a new campaign for me to try out and I made my first character in AD&D (aka 2e) named Crittish Rockcrusher, a fighter. I got to play some here and there for a couple of years, participating more as I matured. At the same time, my “Super Heroes” game evolved to include fantasy elements. About this time I was devouring fantasy-based books (including Tolkien), so I was pulling from all kinds of sources. At about 12, we moved on from Super Heroes and created a game called “Wars of the Future” (an unintentionally similar acronym for Writers of the Future, which I did not know about for more than a decade). This game was a futuristic sci-fi-fi game with war themes; I worked up into a pen and paper RPG style game which I played with friends at school. I got to play D&D at an increasing rate as I got older and developed an array of characters. The oldest active character I have is a half-drow Fighter/Thief named William—I still play him off and on. He’s a total sociopath. As I got into high school, I had increased access to the internet and looked up D&D related material for character ideas as well as putting together a campaign I wanted to run at school with friends. I came across a Forum (now defunct) called The Dragon’s Breath, which discussed D&D and ran an online Shadowrun and D&D game. The idea of running a game online through text-based writing was foreign to me. This was the spring of 2003. I met some neat people, asked about getting in on the games but found out they were super strict about who they let in and when. Another member reached out to me about starting up our own place to run games for ourselves, since we didn’t want to wait. We did just that while maintaining our ties to that other place (we had great discussions and many friends from there). We made a site where I would run a D&D game, and my friend would create a Heroes Unlimited game (Super Hero RPG). We both ran games as well as some other games that were more strategy based rather than RPGs and writing. We had a lot of fun, and eventually, another friend of ours ran a villains Heroes Unlimited campaign. Sometime during all this, a person registered on our site and told us of this place he came from where he was bullied. Well, my friends and I didn’t suffer bullies, so we went and registered at this place called Ayenee to troll some assholes. Ayenee was an interesting place. They had role-playing tied to different worlds without a super structured system. We found it had their share of assholes, but it also had some cool folks. A couple of others and I kept hanging around. I got into play-by-post RP and found it was an excellent outlet for my desire to write, which I loved to do. It changed a lot of how I looked at online role-playing. It gave me a place to dabble in different styles and genres and contribute with people from a broader set of backgrounds. It also gave me a place to hang around more frequently after that good friend of mine took his life. Eventually, Ayenee burned out. I was mostly done with online role-playing. I ran one online D&D game for some close friends, but that was about it. In that time, I met my now wife, and she kept badgering me about coming over to Valucre, told me a lot of the Ayenee refuges had made their way over here. I was stubborn, if only for the sake of being stubborn (I can be). I eventually registered and came over. Found a lot of people I used to know, and I still drop posts here now and then despite how busy I can be. This also led to me running a D&D game over Discord (which I love doing). Nowadays, I run two campaigns for friends/family in person, I run the online Discord game, and I manage a D&D game for my patients at my workplace. I try to weave in life-lessons, collaborative problem solving, creative thinking, and prosocial behavior into the game to teach lessons while providing them with something fun to do. I like to think I have seen some therapeutic benefits from it. And if you read all that, pat yourself on the back. ?

Short posts I will write in the Valucre text box. If I am only dropping two to three paragraphs, I expect to finish quickly enough to forgo worrying about site crashes. Longer posts I do in MS Word mostly. On occasion, I have used Google Docs. I like to write with non-vocal music of varying kinds: epic, orchestral, ambiance, movie scores, etc. I find vocals can get distracting. I can get away with turning in college papers in classes outside the English department with little to no editing and revision, so I don't dabble in it much. If the document is especially long or I find the post is of greater importance, I will do a pass or two through it for revisions/fixes. Otherwise, I just scan for typos.

I have a character who lives with a severe case of schizophrenia. This is a disorder that has a significant effect on his ability to interact with people in everyday settings, as well as his perceived reality sometimes being incongruent with the perceived reality of everyone else. He still goes out and does heroic things and tries his best to help people, but his symptoms have gotten him into trouble more than a few times.

Seems kinda fun. Surprised I am still in the top ten for most content even though I only post here and there. Given how small the share of my posts are in occ sections (irony realized), I am pretty proud of that. I once posted in RP so prolifically, the legacy still maintains ;)

I have a couple characters who have had homelessness/poverty and thus had finding food and other resources a part of their posts (because it was a primary concern). I have on occasion had characters address concerns of hunger not for scene setting purposes, but because it made sense in the flow of the narrative: role-playing the course of a day, and at certain point, the character will be hungry. Since there is no planned times skip to occur, I will have them make some kind of detour to address food. It's not a common occurrence but I will throw it in if I think after a certain point, the character is going to want something to eat. I have also on occasion done eating scenes as a place for role-play (a dinner, a function, sitting in a bar). I suppose those more qualify as the tea and crumpets. I believe I have done tea a handful of times, but I cannot recall ever having any of my characters eating crumpets, lol.