@Faraday Oh that’s not too bad, and I think I’ve still got some of the stuff around from last time I did an Ares game, might be worth a shot then. Thanks Faraday, very glad you’re still about the community.

so total shocker, Scott and Ruby reacted to these posts the way that like anyone who had to deal w them at literally any point as players or staffers would expect:

trying to figure out who posts under what name, smearing them to anybody who’ll listen, probably agitating to get ppl banned, and from what i’ve heard getting super paranoid about who i could be there

to keep some rando from getting sacrificed on the altar of their personality disorders, the last time i logged in to HAM except as a guest was when i claimed raven then got kicked off for a combination of making Chaucer mad and outing a sexual predator years ago, and the last time i logged in as a guest is in this thread

believe it or not it’s just that basically nobody likes either of you or enjoys tiptoeing around your explosive tempers and fragile egos, so shit gets around

@Selira I disagree.

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@imstillhere

louis rossman

One day this man will win you the right to shop for cheap repairs outside of warranty.

I love Frieren so much ❤

Much like @Jumpscare and Silent Heaven, and Clockwork and The Network, Andruid over on the blog Writing Games has put up an interview/review of Excelsior!, and we’re super stoked about it.

sandcastle

Resurrecting to share something I’ve been making pretty frequently because it’s really tasty and is a quick way to get my protein even on the fly (i double batch it) or to toss into a salad or whatever if i’m having to make a lunch for work last minute). I love all things smoky/burnt-ish, plus these things are nice and chewy too (also a lovely texture for me). I thought i’d share! the partner and kids tend to steal these too when they’re right out of the oven. Plus it’s easy and takes minutes to prep and just 20 minutes to bake.

Tofu Crumbles

About 400g Tofu (firm or extra firm, pressed so excess water is removed, I don’t bother pressing if it’s fresh/not packaged in water)
2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp sea salt
2 tsp liquid smoke
1 Tbsp oil of choice (i prefer avocado or sunflower for this one), or oil spray of choice.

Preheat oven to 400F

Combine all dry spices in small bowl and mix well.

Crumble the tofu into a large mixing bowl, crumb sizes should be chunky breadcrumb (stuffing?) sized but i like to have some bigger chunks in there too and the teeny ones get all nice and crunchy so it’s fine.

Put the spice mix in with the tofu and toss until everything is coated evenly. then pour in liquid smoke and toss again.

Spray a baking tray well with the oil spray or spread the oil in the pan. Put pan in the oven at temp for a couple of minutes until it starts to smoke a bit (around 5 minutes but if you’re using spray might wanna watch this closely).

Pull out tray and dump the crumbles on it, spread them evenly and return to oven for 20 minutes, stir about halfway through.

Once they’re done if you let them cool for about 5-10 minutes they get even crispier! I think they’re great over the next few days (store in fridge) but they don’t really last at my house more than one extra day.

@somasatori said in Installing Arxcode?:

If I recall @Jumpscare did something with Evennia that has a good crafting system. I didn’t roll a crafter on Silent Heaven when I did (Simon was a disgraced med student), but it looked super cool. Maybe that might be compatible?

I could pull out my crafting code and allow you all to shred it to bits.

I’m mired in to-dos, but remind me in about a week and I’ll look into it.

@MisterBoring Whether or not that’s better, I don’t know if it’s practicable. And there are folks that really like that down time between episodes (I like some, just I would prefer that it be a couple of weeks compared to a month or three, again, I know people who prefer the downtime to the episodes, so YMMV).

I think that the only way you could possible get anywhere near even just a couple of weeks between episodes is to have two Storyteller Staffs, because there’s going to be some cooldown time and some administrative ramp-up time on either end of an episode. Even then, I think it would entirely depend on the setting/theme of the game whether the shortest possible downtime is the best option, a medium length, or a long downtime. I think that if you have intense episodes without much time for the players or characters to catch their breath, you’re going to want a medium-long amount of downtime; if you have episodes that meander and have time to catch your breath in the midst, then I think you would want shorter amounts of downtime.

I could see, say, a WWII game that has people at the front (or on alert at the airbase or whatever), needing a month or so between campaigns, to let the characters (and players) breathe and find their new status quo. But I could see a murder mystery game needing much less time between cases (because you’re probably going to get a little bit of investigation time and some breathing room in there, and it isn’t likely to be as life or death all the time as a combat game.

Random observation: The telnet access is what makes Ares accessible to visually impaired players. Which of course doesn’t rule out having the coolest web portal ever.

In almost ten years at my company, I have only ever gotten one bad review – one! out of almost twenty! – from a person who was my manager for all of two months. It was from someone who not only didn’t understand what my job was, but who regularly gave conflicting instructions in the same day, would ignore when I pointed this out to her, and then wondered why I couldn’t do both of these things that were in direct opposition to one another. This manager then proceeded to be mean to me for the next two years straight, all the way up until I moved to a different subdivision, and still tries to pull my current boss into almost everything I work on that she’s involved in.

Today she was forced to acknowledge that my work is fast, thoughtful, and high quality despite being related to a request that is urgent, complex, and so confusing to convey to our audience that we need spreadsheets of who gets what messaging, when, and from whom.

And she had to say the nice thing in front of an entire committee.

Including my boss.

win

@Cobalt OKAY. WILL WE START FROM SCRATCH? Also I have Enshrouded too.

@Cobalt I could offer some recommendations there! Not for games, exactly, but for what sorts of games, in my experience, makes the difference between fun, impulsive editing, and editing where footage needs to be meticulously outlined.

@Raeras said in The Lost Realms Discussion:

@tighearna
Genuinely curious question. I’m not extremely familiar with Hobbit/LotR lore and I know it’s not D&D so

I can understand on some level why your policies say to keep romantic rp between the same species but is this primarily aimed at the physical aspect?

Or is this just across the board because it’s not thing at all in the lore? (Again, I can see other reasoning for wanting to keep things separated on the physical aspect)

This is the one at least a few people are going to deliberately flaunt in private scenes, guaranteed, lol.

It’s a problem created by the nature of a MU.

In a work of fiction, the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists are, a lot of the time, people whose circumstances are somehow special. In settings in which things like cross-species reproduction is rare but possible, that’s an easy way of making a “special person”.

In a tabletop game or a small group, your characters are the protagonists of the story, so them being special is not a big deal; you can play a half-elf because, despite being vanishingly rare (which automatically makes you special) there’s a lot more control over who can and can’t be that specific version of special, as there are only about 3-6 protagonists.

MUs, unfortunately, break this by catering to a much, much larger playerbase. Suddenly, if one out of every five characters is a half-elf, then being a half-elf isn’t special because it ceases to be vanishingly rare.

Do I agree with this policy? Ehn, not really. I think once the characters hit the grid they should be able to fall in love and have the lives they choose (if they are rosters, they should probably be played by the same person for a long-enough period of time before they can do things like get pregnant or married or whatever, just to avoid people doing that and then bailing on the character).

This is especially true given that the game has a policy of one character per player, which means the pool wherein you can find someone to play a romantic storyline with is extremely limited. Even aiming high and saying that you’ve got 50 players, lets say you’re playing a Hobbit… but most people are playing Humans or Elves, there’s maybe at BEST another 9 Hobbits on the game. Let’s say your character is bisexual/biromantic, that’s 9 people – once you start eliminating through schedule, chemistry, RP preferences… yeah.

I personally would bend a little and let interspecies relationships just be more common, but that’s just my take. Clearly @tighearna has their own vision for their game, which is how it should be.

The current story line we’re doing is finding a kingdom and having an ‘enemy’ starting to get really active. A special request for people to play the ‘bad guys’ is given with reward things for it. The post:

~~

Staff Special Request Minerva
Recruitment (5/2) Wed Apr 03, 2024 8:45am

~~

The next major plot point for Atharia is to reveal Ren to be a villain. He is likely a part of the Council of the Devoted. I repeatedly say that I don’t really hide what is intended to happen, even if I don’t give all the details. What happens to Ren will depend on players (kill him, convert him, save him, etc).

I explained all that for a reason. My semi-plan is that Ren is the current leader of the Council of the Devoted. What I would like is a couple people willing to play members of the Council, publicly known as such. This means the character will be a villain and likely temporary, though, I am not against the character becoming permanent if people end up enjoying the story line for the character, which will likely be a redemption arch to where they ‘become Good’ (or at least an anti-hero type) since sometimes people have issues with getting into scenes with villains.

You can totally be part of the Council on a current character that gets exposed along with Ren or before him. IF you’re worried your character concept won’t work, we can figure it out to make it happen.

[[[Council of the Devoted]]] (https://atharia.net/wiki/council_of_the_devoted) for more details on the Council.

My ideal would be at least 1 sub-leader and 2 or 3 ‘general members’.

As this will be a temporary character (unless you decide otherwise), 50% of any XP you earn on the character can be transferred to an alt, if you desire. If you don’t care about the XP we can discuss alternative ideas for a ‘reward’ for playing a character that is destined to be ‘dealt with’ in some form. Rewards can be anything, within reason. It can be you can ask for a plot line that is strictly geared for your character, work out an angle of getting a position you would like for your alt, you can add some specific details to theme files that you feel would add to the game (subject to review and possible modifications if it is to off theme), etc. If it works for the game IC or OOC, I’m willing to talk it over. You can play more than 1 Council member but the ‘reward’ only applies once. So, if you play 5 characters the reward will be once over all not once for each character.

Contact me if interested.
~~
(1) Minerva replied on Sat Apr 06, 2024 8:03am
These temporary characters can absolutely be Children of Gods but it needs to fit with the alts rules. That is to say, if you have a Child of Gods PC already, the temporary one can not be one. This is so that if you decide you enjoy playing the character’s story you don’t need to give up either character unless you want too.

~~

The ability to go beyond available CG points is no longer a thing. We’ve transferred everything over.