Latest Founder – Minty Jade

In recognition of the sheer amount of improvement and further focus on character development over the last year or so; I have added the newest member to our list of founders. The title of Founder is given to anyone who has significantly contributed to the setting itself; such a title has been previously given out to Yuu-Desi, for his contributions to the definition and nature of magic and how it works as well as to T0l for his significant contributions to the military structure of Solas Tempus and weaponry used by the site. Beyond simply contributing information to the Wiki or participating in role playing, Jade has made a distinct effort to swing through creative and well crafted arcs of character development which added significantly to the setting. The additions to the setting include the way death, the dead, the damned, and the saved are handled in the setting and defining an entire plane of existence while still maintaining an idea of balance within the playable characters she plays.

So, for that, we thank you @jade, congrats.

Writing Prompt: Frozen Gate

We’re going to try to get back into writing prompts again; I do hope everyone likes it. There is no contest with this one, but I would like everyone to participate.

The usual applies; there are no limits on what can be written. This can be cute, funny, vulgar, dark, angry, or anything in between any of it. Whatever floats your boat to write and of any length everyone feels comfortable. This should be consider a rough-rough-rough draft as well so don’t try to make it perfect, just get some ideas out there.

This image comes from Deviant Art, see the image page itself for citation.

A Most Unusual Distress Call

We’ve got a ship in trouble, doesn’t matter if we’ve never heard of it. All the questions can get asked later, for now we mean to find them and rescue them – whoever they are. Once the crew is safe, then I have some questions for them. Until then, it’s about making sure that we answer the voice from the darkness asking for help. No one gets left behind on my watch.

At 2300 hours on December 26th, 2385 reporters from the Soteria News Service received an unusual signal via the lower spectrum of the subspace local communications band. The signal is a repeating sequence spelling out coordinates and asking for assistance. The ship’s identification is encoded in the signal but the ship is not found in any database.

The ship identifies itself as the STV Arden Trinity, it identifies itself as registry number TOV-199257-D. The distress call itself has only a simple repeating digital message; repeatedly declaring the vessel to have suffered a catastrophic failure and requesting immediate assistance. There is no voice component to the message and reporters, upon receiving the signal, immediately attempted to raise the vessel on the same and tertiary subspace channels to no avail. The incident was reported to Solas Tempus and the Concord. Solas Tempus reported that no vessel has that designated under that name nor with that registry number, yet they have reported that they are attempting to pinpoint the location the signal has originated from so that they can dispatch rescue vessels. Apparently the coordinates given the message are for an area of deep space and there is too much space to cover, long range probes detect no vessel at those coordinates. Probes have been launched to search nearby areas of space, trying to locate the origin of the signal.

When asked for her comments on this unknown signal and if Solas Tempus had any issues responding to such an unusual signal; Vice Admiral Vermilion of the Search and Rescue division of Solas Tempus responded:

“We’ve got a ship in trouble, doesn’t matter if we’ve never heard of it. All the questions can get asked later, for now we mean to find them and rescue them – whoever they are. Once the crew is safe, then I have some questions for them. Until then, it’s about making sure that we answer the voice from the darkness asking for help. No one gets left behind on my watch.”

Vice Admiral Minute Vermilion, Rescue Services

Further investigation has revealed that the type and method of distress call are also not in use by any known race. Our investigation is ongoing to discover as much as possible and it has been requested that a reported be allowed to travel with the rescue team once dispatched.

Update: As of 0500 hours this morning, December 27th 2385, it is confirmed that the subspace signal originated in a different area of space, STR feels that they are close to pinpointing a location to send rescue vessels to.

This is the start of an extended story line that will become an event at some point. All players who with to participate are requested to respond in the forum thread. All characters approved for Blazing Umbra are welcome to participate in any capacity they wish.

Change to the Wiki

Over the last few days I have been making a lot of changes to the wiki, most everyone who has a character probably got an email. I went through every single character bio that we have there and reorganized them. All players that had 4 or more characters now have their own category, this helps keep the People category easier to read through. We also have categories for some of the races, organizations, and settings. There is also a new setting category of Cross Setting which is for characters in which the same version of the character crosses between settings; such has to be approved by staff of course.

The changes include the requirement of a setting field in the Character Box template, but more than that, we make more use of the player field, which we’ve always had but hasn’t been widely used. Now, the system will attempt to automatically categorize a character by the person who plays it. This does mean that we’re going to have to make sure the field is consistent, an excellent example is Neeko (going by many names, usually revolving around being on Spotify a lot). Now, his character pages are all listed under that name, Neeko. Thus all characters he plays have to be listed under that name. If the player name has a user page on the wiki, it will automatically be linked as well. This also means that if the player has a Wiki account, we should use that name for the name of the player. This will help keep it consistent and link into the user information on the wiki.

The other thing this means is there should no longer be a need to add categories to the character pages manually. Simply fill out the setting information in the template along with status and player, the wiki should do the rest.

We are also now going to be making better use of our category for NPCs. I was also inspired by something that Chaos Spartan said and from here on out, if someone would like to claim an NPC for themselves to play as a proper character, contact the staff; we should be able to arrange that. Character bios for NPCs will be filled in as needed during game play, it is important to keep track of details, so try to record traits that you want an NPC to have during play and slap them into the wiki, even informally, after.

Thank you to everyone. Happy gaming.

Awards & Prizes

Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others participated in our NaNoWriMo contest; for which I am very grateful. Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon. A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

For a while now I’ve been doing participation awards, those people who contribute the most, I believe, deserve to be recognized.  However, recently those participating have all been staff members, and I believe that we should focus on non-staff members for such awards.  It isn’t that I don’t appreciate our staff, I truly do, however the idea is to draw people to participate and contribute which staff members usually do anyway.

Whether it is due to multiple languishing storylines or due to everyone being busy with school, work, and/or life the server has seen a drastic dive in the amount of activity.  I am not very concerned with this, activity comes and goes and while I hope things don’t die off, if they do they do.  I wouldn’t be the first time I had to rework things and start again.

That all being said, my contribution / participation recognition has not gone as well as I’d hoped and I am actively looking for other options to accomplish that goal!  Please feel free to contact me with any ideas on how to increase participation, and such awards are on hold until I figure out a different way to do things.

NaNoWriMo Contest Results

This year I did something I’ve thought about doing for a while and opened up a new thread and a challenge.  That is, I wanted the server to write a novel!  There have been other crowd-sourced projects like this, my favorite (and perhaps the most funny) was put on by a guy named Brian Brushwood and was to troll the novel 50 Shades of Gray.  It’s a hilarious idea, while I didn’t want to troll anyone, I’ve seen first hand how creative everyone is.  To give some incentive, I said I would pay money to the top two contributors to the thread (excluding myself of course).  The thread can be read here.  While I do plan on continuing the thread with anyone who wants to participate, I was disappointed in the number of people who took me up on the offer.

Of course, Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others did participate; for which I am very grateful.  Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon.  A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

Moving Forward

I talk a lot about moving forward, I want to find out what everyone thinks we should do to increase our activity.  We’ve had some new players join, which I hope that they submit characters, and I know it is pretty standard on Discord to join a server and forget about it.  I’d like to try and refocus our strategy, we’ve got a lot of members, and it’s clear that our core people (staff mostly) play really well together.  I ask that everyone try to do a story with someone they don’t play with often, time permitting of course.  The more people we have playing the richer and more developed the setting and its history will become.

Thank you to everyone; happy gaming.

Mysterious deaths aboard Nimbus station

Today morning body was found near engineering section by Security Ensign Jonas Sanders, officer told us that it did not have any markings that wold indicate that it was crime. Medical team took body and after examining it, they determined natural cause of death, Heart Attack.

Later this day Petty Officer Gonzales found another body this time near victims living quarters, and while cause of death was also heart attack few people started to question if those were actually accidents. Speculations aroused that bot victims were given poisons but they were proven wrong after preliminary report from toxycology showed no trace of unussual substances.
For some context, both victims were areound early 30s man, with clean bill of health

We were able to recive short statement from witness of second body discovery

He looked like he fallen asleep, calm, with closed eyes. Only weird thing was that he was naked. He looked like he just woke up to fall asleep again. I noticed Petty officer Gonzales was checking him, but she soon declared <redacted> was dead and called coroner team

Anonymous source, not Affiliated to Solas Tempus staff

Is it really just a coincidence? Or maybe it’s targeted attack? Or maybe something else?

Stay tuned for more information on Soteria News Service!

//ooc: any character able to detect dark magic/energy would be able to sense presence of succubus on station, however they won’t be able to tell exactly what it is, nor track it unless they get really close