Helping Me Out / New Category

Managing Updates

I have spent a long while trying to figure out exactly how I was going to keep up with everything going on. People are making their own stories but I don’t have a lot of time to keep up with what’s going on in them. This is an excellent problem to have but I had to discuss things with Staff in order to decide what to do about it. I want to keep everyone updated on what’s going on but I don’t have time to be updated myself! Thus, I’m opening up this WordPress to be contributed to by anyone who runs a story.

Anyone can join the site and after verification of who you are on Discord (anti-spam reasons), a Staff member can upgrade your access. Contributors cannot publish directly but their posts will be saved to be reviewed by Staff and published once they are cleared. This is so we can maintain consistency on what is posted where and the like.

Thus, I encourage all of our players who run stories to please join the WordPress and when appropriate make a post about what’s going on to keep everyone informed. Once it is saved it will get reviewed and posted. This will make a significant difference in the ability of our site to flourish.

New Area

We’ve also added a new posting area, Liz (Imperatoris Lacerta#8924) is going to start helping us out with the general political tension in Blazing Umbra by doing an Alex Jones style broadcast / postings here. The new area is called Providence Files and will have a very similar feel to it’s real world analog.

Ghostly Writing Prompt

So in coming up with the new monsters for the Embers of Soteria Setting and what they looked like I ran across a lot of images of ghosts and the like, most of which are clearly really bad photoshop stuff. The image here is no exception, but I like the image none the less.

I’m inviting everyone to look at this image and create a paragraph or more about it, what’s going on there? Who are the ghosts? Is someone watching them go down the paved road? Is another ghost watching them? Are they really ghosts or is this a Scooby Doo scenario? Just… Go fun places with it.

Upcoming Staff Elections

Starting today we will be going through nominations for Staff members. Existing staff will not continue their places unless they are both nominated and win except for those members of the SysOp group who are preeminent staff members. The purpose of holding nominations for so long is to allow those server members who are not online very often a voice. The election process will begin and elections will be held starting on September 14th and go until September 28th (the server’s birthday).

Number of Moderators

So far the poll on how many moderators there should be is centered pretty heavily on 4 moderators. So we’d then have a total staff of 3 SysOps and 4 Moderators. Thus, the election process will take the 4 nominee’s with the highest votes (see further down for details).

Criteria for Staff

Before nominating staff members consider the following suggested criteria for staff members.

Be able to remain calm and rational even while being insulted, trolled, or otherwise baited.
Be able to assist others with role play and writing; such as creating NPC’s to facilitate role play or help refine ideas during the creative process.
Create a foster a creative environment that is safe to express new ideas in.
Exhibit a lot of patience in the face of problems, particularly the attitudes of others.
Is well spoken and articulate while also not being afraid to speak up to other staff members or SysOps

I would like to build a server where the staff supports each other and the server. Thus, any one person having a bad time of things or perhaps losing their cool has the other 6 staff members to rely on to reign them in and keep things steady. As such, anyone elected to a staff position should be willing to listen to their fellow staff members.

Nomination Process

Nominations will be done via DM and the source of nominations is kept private and will not be disclosed. Once nominated, the person will be contacted privately and asked if they would like to accept the nomination. If they do not accept the nomination, their name will not be released onto the server. Public nominations will not be recorded and are considered to be unacceptable.

Nominee Approval

There is also the potential for a reverse-nomination, that is if a person would like to bring up a potential nominee who they feel would not make a good staff member, they are required to do so via DM to a SysOp only, public declarations against a potential nomination are not acceptable in any way. In the event of the nomination of someone who 2 or more people have presented concerns with, the SysOp’s will privately decide if the nomination should stand. Again, this will be kept private.

Election Process

Once we have the final nominations in place after the 2 week period, elections will be held. If there are 4 or less people nominated it does not mean that they will automatically become staff members, they will still need to be elected.

Number of Votes

Any nominee who gets less than 2 votes cannot be elected to staff even if there are still slots to be filled. This means if we only have 3 nominee’s and only 2 of them get 2 or more votes, we will only elect 2 staff members.

Filling Vacant Slots

In the event that there are still vacant slots after elections, the SysOps will decide if they wish to appoint other members or not. Such appointee’s would not necessarily require to be listed among the nominee’s. The appointing of a new staff member would be voted on by the SysOps alone to fill out the vacant moderation slots. This same process will be used in the event of a staff member leaving the group, unless a SysOp leaves and then the new SysOp will be appointed by myself, the server owner.

More Information on What is Needed

So, I posted a request not long ago for witnesses for Angelic Sins. To help with that, here is a post to the forum about what is happening and what people might witness, to give a good starting point. I also would like to point out a few other things that we need for various parts in the Game.

Thanks to Liz, there is the idea of an Alex Jones (Infowars) style character, which I think is a great idea, I posted a request for this kind of character to the forum. Not only that, but in our story with the Imperials and abducted Commander, it would be helpful to have someone do an interrogator.

I’m trying to push things along on all fronts, so finally here is what I’m looking for for Embers of Soteria. I’d love to get some ideas, it is largely undefined what is coming but we have some pretty powerful characters in play so it should be mysterious and vague at first but end up being huge and incredibly powerful / dangerous.

Requesting Players for Murder Witnesses

So, I’ve been thinking about how to advance the plot in Angelic Sins. We have a murder mystery / supernatural killer plot going on there. A team has been assembled to work on it but I realized they have no work to do yet. Thus, we need to provide witnesses.

To that end, I’m going to be putting it out there for people to bring forward witnesses. We’ll do the RP for the murder’s on the server, live. Most of the witnesses will be NPC’s, more than likely, so people are free to bring a character into that without approval. Some of the witnesses could be full characters as well.

I’d like to get this rolling as soon as possible, anyone wishing to participate, let me know.

Contribution Awards for July 2018

Along with some of the other recent changes to how we do things, I’ve decided that staff members are no longer going to be able to get awards for contributions to the forum or the wiki. The idea is that we’d like to use these awards to encourage people to play in our game. It was recently noted by more than one person that almost all of the role play is done by a select few, mostly staff members. As such, we would like to encourage players to contribute as well.

As a recap, we will still be doing awards for anyone who assists or runs a plot but contributions to the forum and wiki will contain only non-staff players.

Plot Contributions

First off, I would like to thank Liz, Imperatoris Lacerta#8924, for his continuing excellence in assisting the story move forward. Recently Liz decided that he would rather not be staff anymore. For a lot of people this might mean that he stops playing or stops spending time helping with the plot. He hasn’t done that, so Liz gets a special shout-out with my gratitude for the good job he continues to do.

Moving along there are a few other players I’d like to give credit for their efforts. Bucket, Buck Approves#3038, has pushed forward with his villain plot and has been doing an excellent job of it. Both KS, ks#0908, and him have done a superb job of not only moving plot forward but creating their own sub-plots which tie into the major things going on. We also have to give credit to Tim, timot1066#8017, who has been of great help in moving plot forward and playing around with the idea of the racial tensions in the game increasing.

Last, but not least, I’d like to thank Red (Red the 15th#2304) for continuing to play in the Angelic Sins setting which all-too-often gets ignored by me when I’m trying to push things forward.

Forum Contributions

This award is based on the number of replies a person has posted to the forum.

Buckethead AKA Bucket
Darktrooper501 AKA Liz
timot1066 AKA Tim

Wiki Contributions

This award is based on the contribution score provided by a MediaWiki plugin.

Darktrooper501 AKA Liz
Thatotakugalaxy AKA Jade
NigrantibusAlis AKA Aytise

Awards

The following is being added to the guild scores of each person mentioned here.

For Liz, the breakdown is 1000 for plot contributions, 750 for forum contributions, and 1000 for the wiki contributions with the total then being 2750. Bucket gets 1000 for plot contributions and 1000 for forum contributions with the total then being 2000. Time receives 500 for plot contributions and 500 for forum contributions with the total then being 1000. Following that ks gets a total of 1000 (for plot contributions), Jade gets a total of 750 (for wiki contributions), and Aytise gets a total of 500 (for wiki contributions). Finally, Red gets 500 for contributions to Angelic Sins.

New Point Score Totals

So here are the new score totals.

Name	Score
Imperatoris Lacerta	278293
Titan Shadow	241197
Red the 15th	212793
ks	159403
t0l	156906
The Chubby Gamer, Sloth Boi	151492
Dr. Winterdawn	104357
🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃	93308
Buck Approves	90268
JumpingScript	87047

Writing Prompt – Resurrection City from 1968

So this photo is a bit different, it is historical rather than abstract or fictitious. I would like to encourage people to consider taking this photo both in and out of context. The original article from the New York Times is from February 18th, 2017 and is about an attempt by Martin Luther King Jr. to confront the power structure with the poverty of the country.

Now, there is a lot of context that goes with the image, beyond that there is a lot of power in the image itself. The painted words juxtaposed with the nature of what else is in the photo and plywood walls set up by tents. There is also context of the general time in history this comes from, the late 60’s while King was still alive. There are a lot of places to go here, I encourage people to think a moment and pick a direction and just write about it, see where it takes you.

Update on Operation Succubus

The INV Serpent arrived at our facility Assyria Base on schedule and refit began immediately. Unfamiliar with the hyperdrive technology or hypermatter reactors, the refits are slower going than one would like. After some amount of argument with Admiral Vallan, he begrudgingly agreed to allow them to refit the reactors with matter-antimatter reactors which engineering crews are far more familiar with. The turbolaser designs appeared to require only minor adjustments to bring them up to speed to be comparable with phaser and disruptor designs. Transporters and expanded shields were also added tot he vessels. The full refit has taken longer than expected but is now complete.

The Duchess Malumnus has temporarily joined the Admiral’s Imperial fleet to assist in operations, part of the larger Operation Succubus to apply political pressure and undermine Solas Tempus. The fleet’s current task is already underway, they have successfully intercepted and captured the commanding officer of the Federation vessel dispatched to the Schatten Star System to assist and monitor Solas Tempus. The Commander has been detained aboard the Serpent who has already fended of one attempt to rescue her using their overwhelmingly superior numbers and firepower.

For this KS and Bucket would really like some people to play interrogators. KS plays Megan Shepard and while I play Angelique, I’d like to keep her more supervisory. Bucket, of course, plays Admiral Vallan. It would be very useful for someone to play an interrogator or similar part in the process, see both KS and Bucket for details on that.

Task Force for Operation Gray Angel

A new task force has been assembled to search for and rescue the missing Commander Megan Shepard of the USS Pegasus. Her XO from the Pegasus, Denver Tierny has been given a field commission of full Commander and placed in command of the small task force composed of the New Hope, Epoch, and Pegasus. All vessels are being retrofit with the Phasing Cloak to further assist in the operation code-named Gray Angel.

Background Information

Commander Shepard was abducted from the Aerowing belonging to the Pegasus at some point in time when returning to the Schatten Star System after a personal trip to Earth. The Pegasus along with the Epoch were dispatched at once to investigate, they later detected Shepard’s combadge on an Imperial vessel. The two vessels were attacked in an ambush and managed to return to the Schatten System after the Epoch suffered significant damage. The fabber, Vulcan, is quickly assisting with the vessels refit.

In accordance with existing treaties, Starfleet Command has expressed the desire to take over the operation, which Solas Tempus has politely declined to allow. Federation vessels, however, are also available to assist.

Speak to Buck and KS about entering this plot, I’m not sure what they need, but pilots for fighters perhaps or people to play Imperials.

Duranaia Establishes Foothold on Soteria

The colony site for the Serenity Concord on Soteria named Duranaia, which broke ground several months ago, has approved new residences who were not part of the initial start up team to being moving to the site. There is limited housing still, however, the colony site has successfully set up its own series of power sources and defenses in addition to commercial and industrial facilities there. The colony site opens up at the same time that food and textile productions from the Temperance and Sustenance communities of New Morning Fields and Moonshadow Gardens have begun ramping up production, mostly of food supplies with some textile production.

The Temperance and Sustenance communities are supplying food throughout the system, though still in limited quantities. The system will likely remain dependent on outside resources of raw materials for some time to come. However, having the farming communities focused on sustainable production of food and other resources which the colony site can then produce into other goods and services bodes well for the entire system.