abraxasooc | CR MEME #9 & GAME PLOT THEMES

CR MEME & GAME PLOT THEMES

Welcome to our OOC intro and CR meme. We encourage you all to get out there, plot, and introduce yourself!

For this round, we've added a separate form below for Game Plot Themes Of Interest. You can find the form on this comment. Fill it out and reply to the comment if you want to let us know what you're interested in for future mod plots.

Filling the form is optional, but we encourage you to do so as the mod team will take this into account when planning events and the game's direction. While Abraxas will overall retain its more serious tone to explore darker elements of war, horror, fantasy, and politics, any specifics regarding the above would help guide us in terms of what to emphasize and incorporate into the overarching plot.

You can list general themes such as body horror, cooperative missions, inter-faction fights, monster battles, festivals and mingles, etc. Or you can go into particulars such as "Events that create conflicting morals for my character."

If you want to fill out this form but not the CR Meme form, that's completely fine. You do not need to participate in the standard CR Meme to offer us your thoughts on the game's direction.

CR Meme Form

For the standard CR Meme, copy and paste the form below and post it as a regular comment as per usual:

Upcoming event plot will be announced on the OOC community and signal boosted on Plurk! Event #10's OOC plotting post is scheduled for the 12th of this month, while the IC event post itself is scheduled to go up on the 15th. Stay tuned! Characters will find that the arrival of war brings with it more than battles and politics. Other forces are beginning to stir, both in the real world and within the Horizon.

Reminder that the TDM, reserves, and applications have been moved slightly. Check the Calendar if you aren't sure about upcoming dates.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

GAME PLOT THEMES

PLAYER NAME: Elizabeth
CHARACTERS PLAYED: Jon Snow
FACTION(S): Thorne

GAME PLOT THEMES OF INTEREST:

I'm going to take a crack at this and hope it's helpful!

The best event advice I can give you (or at least the most subjective preference info) is to lean into themes that make this game relatively unique and events that play up the atmosphere of the setting. To me, that's fantasy:

Create more opportunities for adventure and discovery for all factions -- it seems like events like this were the norm in the early months of the game, less so recently (Free Cities seems to have a hard monopoly on this lately).

Play up the epic sweep of the setting: we get the mundane aspects when events aren't going on. It can be easy for fantasy elements to fall into set dressing ("elves over there") or skill sets ("I can magically pick a lock now") if care isn't taken to foreground them -- so events are a great opportunity to go big with them. This is also a good way to use external enemies.

Shape events around the numinous (which is a defining aspect of fantasy as a concept): if you evoke a sense of awe, it's easy for horror to come with it, without having to work to foreground horror.

You can lean more into politics, but doing it to any great extent would probably require a faster pace and much more intensive modding, which might not be feasible or desirable.

Psychological horror events are the bread and butter of DWRP. People will always say yes to them, because emotionally distressed characters are usually more interesting to write than placid ones. All three events since I apped have been good, but two were fairly standard DWRP psychological horror events with some interesting game-specific facets. I'm mentioning this because I think there will always be a place for this kind of event, but I also don't personally think this game is hurting for horror.

When we get horror, I'd love for it to come organically from metaplot events. If you've read The Old Kingdom books by Garth Nix (Sabriel/Lirael/Abhorsen plus more recent additions to the series), they are definitely fantasy, but much of what the protagonists encounter in them is horrifying -- eldritch and alien (thinking of things like the Greater Dead and the Stilken). The characters are small in a big world, the terrain and the weather can be quite hostile, and sometimes they tread into even more terrifying otherworld territory. That's a vibe you can lean into and a good example of what I'm trying to say here.

Some event suggestions:

Factions must travel to distant ruins (different ruins per faction -- maybe the powers that be each think the Cool Necessary Thing will be discovered in a different location) where faction members must face some hazards and eventually collaborate (within their own faction) to solve some puzzles to unlock important items. Solutions could be submitted screened, so everyone has time to play around. Characters may be in a race against time against other factions (the timing winner could be decided by RNG). The inspiration for something like this could be High Hrothgar in Skyrim, maybe with some Bleak Falls Barrow thrown in -- I have also been in two games that did something similar (I can drop links on the mod contact post).

A partial physical transformation event where magic goes kaput at a very inopportune time and sticks participants in partial transformations for a week. This can be body horror for those who want it, extra limbs or insect parts, or it can simply be "my body stayed human but I have the head of a boar/wolf/goat/etc" or "sure is inconvenient that my sword arm turned into a bird's wing when we're supposed to go to war tomorrow." Magic "exploding" and then disappearing for a week could be expressed with other potential effects (not just transformations), and there could be specific things player characters need to do to "get it working" again.

Some other things that come to mind:

Think about how events can have continuous impact and feel serialized rather than episodic. Nocwich did; memory and dream share really didn't, though there was some "you can see this one weird thing in the Horizon for a while". Some of this is tied to the pacing of the game and mod availability: there isn't wiggle room on that. You're entitled to downtime.

There is some suggestion of the presence of a big bad manipulating the factions (who would probably do better to unite to fight it than to fight with each other). Is it too early to reveal them? Events that tell us more about who they are and what they want would be good. This is another way of creating continuity between events and tying the events closely to metaplot.

Use events to give newer player characters skin in the game. What's their buy-in? CR isn't enough. Get the characters (esp Thorne and Solvunn) out in the world more often in a more immediate way, and give them greater stakes in it.

Maybe not feasible with mod availability, but more NPC interaction for characters would probably also help with that buy-in. It is currently not possible for most characters to develop much tangible rapport with them in the way that they'd actually probably have if they were around them for a commensurate amount of time IRL.

Finally, the one thing suggested in your top post that I think should be a hard no is any significant increase in anti-Summoned sentiment among native NPCs. I think this would really hang newer characters out to dry, in terms of being able to use NPCs in their personal plotting the way longer-term players have been able to all along. As I understand it, the current native attitude is neutral with pockets of greater positivity and negativity. That works to allow people who want their characters to experience that kind of pushback to make it happen, while not dictating that other characters will automatically have proverbial doors slammed in their faces.

Closing those doors with more profound/pervasive hostility just seems to me like making an element of the worldbuild useless to most player characters. RP is just a series of writing prompts: it is possible that there's a way to create that hostility without it seeming like contrived conflict for the sake of conflict, but on the whole, how does it really help the game? More toys in the toy box is always the better choice, especially in the long term. It helps keep the setting rich.

CR MEME #9 & GAME PLOT THEMES

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