Board Thread:Off-Topic/@comment-24108228-20150817004654

A long time ago I made a blog post about a survival 303 setting, with a huge backstory and history, copious amounts of detail and magiks to hide the fact that it's over 20k characters long, and I'd only done 3 islands. The end goal was for it to be a setting for a cool roleplay, but as it went on I realised that it was far too complicated to actually work, as nobody wants to read 150k characters before they play a forum game that will last a couple weeks at best. So that's going to be a personal project to see how far I can go without creating a plot-hole, and this roleplay gets its own setting.

Just to clarify. Because I'm certain that some memory champion would remember the old blog and get confused. =Industrial Revolution=

Setting
This roleplay is set in the old map (because nobody plays the new map and therefore nobody'll be familiar with it), and takes place in a technological period after the end of the usual game (hence "Off-Topic").

All the islands are 2x wider and longer than usual, and desert mountain is 2x as tall. This means that most islands are big enough to support a village of 50, and the hills found on many islands (such as paradise, teraphyx, and rockma) can be built on and around. This also means that forests, orchards, animal packs and ore veins are more plentiful, as there will be 4x as much space that is taken up by the aformentioned resource. The exception to this is mithril, which is therefore extremly rare due to the higher populations and yet still tiny amounts of the metal itself. Bluesteel, being mass productable, is therefore cheaper (although still far too expensive for common-folk, or any non-noble).

Here's the twist however: You can claim an island. Since we have far fewer active forumites than we do interesting islands, I'm going to take a risk and say you guys can invent what's on the islands. Is flax a barren wasteland, ravaged by war? You can plonk your character there at the start, and say "Blobby dismounted from his sailboat, and ate from his rations. Flax, a dead and desolate island which used to host an evil tribe of bandits- (and so on)". Obviously you can't claim all the islands, and I'll go into this in further detail later, but basically you can take an island that nobody's interacted with, and put something on it, say a tribe or a point of interest, and then I'll perhaps maybe try and keep the OP updated. Don't quote me on that.

Existing Islands
Mainland hosts a large tribe of 120, who are capitalist and semi-advanced into the Industrial Age. Unfortunately, they have no coal, and nothing to make gunpowder out of, so their inventors and engineers are few in number and mainly make basic clockwork machinery. Their guards are armed with steel-mithril weapons, albeit nothing more technologically advanced than a crossbow or yewbeam bow.

Bento is uninhabited by any tribe, but they used to have a small group of traders, which were attacked by a large pirate band and were killed. Remains of their settlement still exist today.

Spring is owned by a fierce gang of pirates, and is where they store all their loot (namely gold, the rest they eat or smith). The pirates have a wide range of weaponry, however their leader wields an extremely advanced gun, of which there is only one of known in existence, capable of holding up to 8 rounds and firing them in quick succession, despite being small enough to hold in one hand. The Isle is always guarded, however at times the guarding force is very small.

Plateau is capitalist, and hosts a village with stone buildings and numerous inventors. It is a very nice looking village, and does not suffer from overcrowding.

Desert has two tribes, which trade occasionally. I'll probably get more to write about in this section soon.

Magma was once a great power, producing metal and smithed goods, and creating bluesteel for the other tribes. Unfortunately, a lethal disease and cataclysmic explosion caused most the population to die, along with destroying much of the structures and buildings made there. The people who live there are currently recovering, trying to restore the island to it's former glory. You can find a more detailed backstory in this post.

Technology and Realism
When I say "Industrial Age", what I actually mean is "Extremely Basic Steampunk + Guns", but Industrial Age sounds better. Inventions range from clockwork clocks to mounted flamethrowers, and guns range from handcannon to six-shooter, the latter being extremely rare and made only by expert gunsmiths. Ideally however, I'd like to keep guns to a minimum, especially when fighting other participants of the roleplay, as they are irritatingly "Point and Click", which means combat is dull and resolved quickly. The mounted flamethrower is something that you choose to attack (or run past), while a gun is something that someone else can point at you.

With all that out of the way, I'd like to remind you that "No Godmodding" is really the key thing to bear in mind, and if you're inventing something new, you might want to read it over a couple times to make sure that you don't accidentally abuse it (or someone else get one themself, and they misinterpret and abuse it).

As for realism, the old 303 mechanics are being thrown out the window for something more industrial-age friendly, a full-on realistic world. It's basically real life with a couple convienient alterations here and there.

Existing Characters
Name: Banana I have no creativity. Age: 19 Other: Experienced smith. Knows little in the ways of creating machinery, but smiths enough parts to understand how they work.

Name: Ethan Age: 21 Other: A bandit who lived on desert through stealing from trade vessels that passed between the two tribes on the island. Owns a basic clockwork repeater, which can fire three times consecutively before being reloaded.

Name: Shayden Age: 25 Other: Enjoys tinkering with clockwork, and owns imported leather armour and a customised bow which fires arrows at great speeds.

Name: Vance Age: 23 Other: An avid tinkerer and inventor. Has a steam powered crossbow that can fire bolts with massive velocities depending on the charging time, and a power fist that he made.

Name: Strife Age: 23 Other: Assasin that lives on lynx island with his mentor. Almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world, and technology, as he believes in the old ways of the sword, and less so in giant explosive guns of ultimate doom.

Rules
Yay! Everyone loves rules! To keep it simple, the rules are stated in short, then expanded on. If you know what I'm referring to as "Godmodding", then you don't need to read the rest.
 * No godmodding.
 * Godmodding is where you do something really awesome. To be more precise, godmodding is where you do something really awesome, but to be honest you couldn't actually do that in real life. Ever. For instance, you get shot and ignore it, you take on a large group of people, or do epic backflips over loads of houses to persue an enemy.
 * Another definition is where you take control over someone else's character, and that's equally (if not moreso) irritating for the other people playing. Say I controlled the character "Blobby", and Qoazi controls "Bob". If Blobby encounters Bob and then persuades him to go on an adventure, despite Qoazi not actually saying "Sure, sounds like fun.", then I'm godmodding, because Qoazi might want to do other things than be Blobby's sidekick.
 * Respect the setting.
 * Although it's a lot of text up there, I'd like you to read it, as it makes sure everyone's on the right page. If you walk across mainland in 10 minutes, people are going to be confused, in particular the ones that live on mainland, since mainland is 2x larger in this roleplay, and their village accounts for that. If you comment on the fact that trees regrow in mere minutes and the the grass has been perfectly cut, I know that you've not taken the time to actually make sure that you're keeping everything consistent.
 * Poll large events.
 * I'm not going to insist you run every large event through me, I'm moderating this roleplay, I'm not here to make sure everything looks nice to me before it happens. However, some large events, such as blowing up an island, destroying a tribe, raiding a tribe that has other players in, or inventing something REALLY REALLY AWESOME, might spoil things for others. If you're going to do something big, such as tribal warfare, I'd appreciate if you made a on the subject so that people who don't want it to happen can say so. Some people may not want you to explode canyon, they might want to visit it later. But if, for some reason, most people playing want to explode canyon, the people who were going to visit it will have to change their plans. Just make sure that people did actually want to explode it first.
 * Island Claiming. I'd advise you read this bit.
 * You can only "claim" one island.
 * When I say "claim", I mean "write about what's on the island". Once the roleplay's a week or so old, you can probably go to unvisited islands and say "This has nothing on it.", but until then it would be good etiquette to let others take an island they want to revolve a story around. Once the week is up it's fair to say that newcomers will have to live with what already exists (which shouldn't be too bad, most islands'll probably have something interesting on them).
 * If you desperately need two islands, take it up with me, and I'll be an unbiased 3rd party to make the decision on whether it's not going to spoil someone else's day. You shouldn't need to take more than one island though, there's plenty of other interesting ones and this is a roleplay, not a setting written by one person.
 * Don't make your place the god place.
 * It's easy. It's a loophole in the godmodding rule. And chances are, you could do it subtly without anyone else noticing (yourself included). But does your tribe need to be rich? Why is the flax settlement fully armed with guns if they have no gunpowder? And does your tribe need to have a self-propelled flying island nearby, or was that just something you made up because I said "Steampunk" earlier? Having a tribe with iron and minimal amounts of coal and gunpowder is just as fun, if not moreso, than being the god. Don't be the god tribe.
 * Avoid being completely cut off.
 * This being less of a rule and more of advice, since this is tribes and islands rather than characters and players, it's ok to say "This tribe actively trades with the mainland tribe.", as people in mainland can choose to ignore it and put a small note halfway through the post about a trading vessel, or if they think it's interesting, they can hop in the merchant frigate and do something with that. It makes the world more alive. Don't be that one tribe who hides in a corner.
 * No conversation. Conversation is the root of all evil.
 * Ok, you can talk, but most roleplays die when all the active players spend 10 ingame days speaking to one another. It's ok to say "Do you want to follow me?", or "gimme all ur monies", as that can be answered in a single post. But if I say "How are you?" and then wait for an answer, you have to respond with "I'm _____.", which'll then result in some other question, and this'll continue until you then realise you spent 3 days talking, and you have no idea how to explain this sudden lack of food, water, or sleep that your character just experienced, and just silently drop out. So as silly as it sounds, I'm going to have to say "No." to being talkative. Commands and imperiatives are ok, questions that don't lead to other questions are also ok, but don't lead other people into the death-trap that is conversation. They might still want to play.

Joining Information and Time
Time will follow a simple rule: Each real day is 12 hours of one ingame day. If nobody posts on a real day, then we pretend that that day never happened, and we continue on with the same 12 hours until someone posts. To help avoid confusion, post the day number and time that you're writing for at the top of your post, and if you get it wrong, we can correct you and you can edit your post as neccesary.

To join, post; and shove some character information at the top, their name, age, and other information that we might want to know (such as them being an expert in martial arts). No application required, as I've yet to say "No." to one and I can't think of any reason why I might, except if you gave yourself magic powers or something.

Who knows? I might put it all in the OP if I'm feeling ambitious.  