Hi all! This is a workshopping post for a plot that I think will be fun to run long-term: Due to the concerning assertions of the Orlesian play, Diplomacy has been backed into a corner and made to agree to 1-3 Chantry "guests" coming to observe Riftwatch until Divine Beatrix is reassured, Corypheus is dead, or some secret third option. Essentially, with Ser Keen gone and Riftwatch made up of mostly like-minded liberals, these NPCs would serve to add some friction back to the Gallows and encourage a little more circumspection.

There would be lead-up to the plot in order to let Diplomacy play out the process of agreeing to the observation, with the guests themselves arriving in a month or two. These guests would be as much or as little of a day-to-day problem as would be fun to play with—they'd have no authority to issue threats or make any demands of Riftwatch leadership, nor would they have sending crystal or eluvian access, but they'd be in close contact with the main body of the Chantry and would be sending back reports on any concerning activity. Common areas and division offices would be fair game for their observations, and if they were to come across an unattended sending crystal, well, of course they would return it eventually! Each guest would swear up and down they were only in the Gallows to observe and that they had every confidence that their post here was going to be very boring for both them and anyone in Val Royeaux reading their reports.

Below are comments for questions, suggestions, NPC building, and plotting for how their presence might change the Gallows. © tessisamess

PLAYER
Name: nina
Contact + Notes: supersoldier / compels @ discord
Anything We Should Know: i've wanted to app steve literally the entire time i've been here
Favorite GIF:

CHARACTER
Name: steve rogers
Info Page/App: Click
Who They Are: the star-spangled man with a plan, captain america, a 100 lb asthmatic in the body of a tank
Where They've Been: fighting bullies in brooklyn, fighting nazis in europe, fighting aliens in new york... he's been doing a lot of fighting. most recently, he fought tony stark and the other aveengers over the sokovia accords and his best friend's freedom. it didn't go great, so he gave up his shield and superhero mantle to be a secret avenger.
What They Want: to stop losing everyone who's ever meant anything to him every couple years, for a start! more concretely, he's a man who doesn't know what to do with himself when he's not fighting something, so being dropped straight in the middle of a war he can help win is actually great for him!
Plot & CR Desires:

steve is really easy to be friendly with and very difficult to befriend—he's looking for shared life experience, which is usually difficult for him to come by. not so in riftwatch! please befriend the dinosaur.

steve has a very strong sense of justice and is a terrible liar! take him to tevinter and watch disaster unfold before your very eyes!

i struggle with writing action scenes but if steve doesn't get to fight things he gets sad, please take him as muscle on field assignments and bear with me

i'm just so excited to have him here i'll do literally anything

Ten years ago this week, we announced that we'd be opening a new game called Fade Rift. ('We' being Cass pretending to be a fully-staffed mod team while she tried to lure MJ into coming on board. Thank god it worked.) It's been a ride since then, with its highs and lows, missteps and triumphs, sex amoebas and blood sharks and many ruined Satinalias. More than once we thought the game's end might be near only for it to be kicked back to life by some new burst of enthusiasm, yours or ours, the one feeding the other until the whole engine turned over and started running again for a few years more.

For all of the time and interest and creativity that our players past and present have contributed over this literal decade; for your patience with our total inability to meet a self-imposed deadline and our endless capacity for reinventing the wheel; for your willingness to embrace a different style of game and make the most of its opportunities; for your ideas and your encouragement and your April Fools jokes; for reading at least some of the surely hundreds of thousands of words we've written and for writing so many of your own, thanks.

This sounds like a goodbye, so important note: we're not closing the game. It is, however, time for yet another of our great restructuring experiments. It's probably no shock to hear that our tanks are running low, and after some reflection on what we can realistically handle it's time for us to admit that this isn't a busy patch we'll get past in another month or two, we just no longer have the bandwidth to continue modding the way we used to.

The good news is, you don't really need us to do that anyway. It's always been the case that much of the game's plot is player-generated, including many of its most successful and impactful events. And Fade Rift's strength has always been in the combination of a collaborative atmosphere, an open world, and everyone's "yes, and/no, but" mindset. So we're going to lean into this and try officially stepping back from plot/content production and into being administrators and facilitators for a more collaborative game.

Basically: we don't want to quit, but we also can't write mod plots anymore. And we think that turning the main, overarching plot into a community effort is a viable alternative that will let everyone have more agency and make things happen more quickly, since lately we've been doing more to hold things up than to drive them forward.

So from now on, the kinds of major developments that would traditionally have been mod plots will instead be done via player plots and community consensus. If you think it's high time for Ferelden to get consumed by the Blight, you can propose it to the game for brainstorming or requests like "could you have it not affect my character's hometown though, I need it for reasons"; then you can make it happen, no plot request/mod approval required. The same goes for killing Corypheus, tearing down the Veil, destroying the Gallows so Riftwatch has to move, etc. With a common-sense "give everyone who might be interested or affected time to weigh in before you do anything huge" rule, we think we're small enough and communicative enough for this to work, with minimal conflict and maximum people having a good time. And we'll still be on hand to facilitate and help find compromises when there are impasses.

In addition, this is what we will continue to do:

1. Support RP and plotting by answering questions about the rules, lore, or game history, like about whether entering the raw Fade is generally deadly in FR or not (it is).
   
2. Handle applications for new players (more below).
   
3. Maintain lists, stamp rewards approved, and other admin duties.
   
4. Post activity check-ins and game updates, which will now double as plotting posts/bulletins where you can let everyone know that you're blighting Ferelden in case they missed it elsewhere.
   
5. Handle conflicts and help maintain plot consistency as needed, such as stepping in to untangle the timeline if someone's about to destroy the same city someone else is planning a long-term arc for, or organizing votes/discussion if there's not a clear community consensus on something.

We'll also still be in the game, plotting and posting things! Like, for real, we have a thousand ideas still. Just not the ability to turn them into large-scale plots for the full game on a regular schedule anymore. So we'll be around brainstorming and doing plot things in the same capacity any of you now can.

Survey Results

We've put the results of our gamewide survey in a doc — the raw charts and summarized takeaways from the open-ended responses. The overall result is that despite some of us being here for ten (TEN!) years as of this October, most people in the game have some game left in them! People have things left they want to do and are open to shaking things up and taking big swings and have thoughts on what sorts of swings might be fun. That's neat, and we look forward to seeing where things go next!

IC Leadership

Since we're now asking everyone to do what we'd previously asked Division Heads to do, which is proactively create plots for everyone else, we're also going to expand the Division Head system into a larger leadership council. Every player can pick one of their characters to be on the council and have an IC vote in gamewide decisions. Within that council characters can have areas of expertise or oversight — it isn't a big deal if there's overlap in people's spheres, so don't stress about that — and collectively lead the divisions they respectively belong to.

While we think it's overall the best way to proceed with making things more collaborative in the future, it is kind of a bummer for our existing Division Heads, who have been doing a great job. So we're going to start off with those two characters (Cosima and Gela) being co-chairs of the new council, in charge of driving this change ICly, shepherding everyone through and directing those meetings for the foreseeable future.

This system isn't being implemented immediately IC. There will be an IC announcement when it does, and we'll have a spreadsheet similar to the housing spreadsheet where everyone can indicate which of their characters (if any) join the council at that time.

Likewise, we're going to keep the other leadership positions (head archivist, mediation officer, etc.) as-is, but we're not going to take new applications for them. They'll be grandfathered out as people vacate them in the future, replaced by an "anyone can sign a character up for this responsibility at any time" structure that allows those jobs to have teams of multiple people at a time rather than just one.

Survey Results

Since we won't be posting mod plots, we'll also be unhitching our rewards system from them. We'll go back to a static list of rewards, and you'll be able to buy them each quarter during the activity check with links to three on-the-comm log threads.

Applications

We're going to continue to screen and respond to applications from brand new players as we always have, to make sure we don't run into major issues from folks who don't yet know the vibe and history of the game. For existing players apping new characters, you already know what you're doing by now, including how to nerf your character's abilities to meet our "no more powerful on the whole than a native mage and that includes taking into account non-magic skills and resources" standards, so we won't be processing apps for you anymore unless you all go mad with power and force us to revoke your privileges (please don't). There will still be a place to post your apps so everyone knows who's here and what their deal is, but you'll no longer have to wait for us to respond to begin RP.

Timeline

Everyone has permission to start plotting collaboratively and posting big plots starting right now. ICly transitioning to the council leadership will happen over the course of the next month or so to give Ammmy and Cadence a chance to RP about making it happen.

Implementing these changes will require updating our info pages, so we've put a moratorium on new applications from new players until October 1, 2025, so we can update the information pages and make sure any newcomers know what they're signing up for (and do it in the right spot). Existing players can continue to app new characters as described above.

Howdy! It's finally mod plot time. Head on over to investigate an odd occurrence in a village on the edge of the Tirashan Forest. Highlights include demons aplenty, rocks where rocks ought not be, a guy in a tree, and the introduction (see rewards, below) of magic for people who have no business doing magic.


Rewards are earned by writing tags in the mod plot. For each thread you complete that has at least five tags from you, up to three total, you unlock a tier and earn a reward. In its most basic form this will look like choosing one Tier 1, one Tier 2, and one Tier 3 reward if you complete three threads. But you can also choose from lower tiers if the higher tiers don't appeal to you – three Tier 1 rewards, for example, or two Tier 1 and one Tier 3.

As you may have noticed, we're currently struggling with some burn-out, so we're not currently creating a bunch of unique rewards for every plot. (We're not saying there will never be any ever again, just that we're going to stop promising them and then not delivering so hopefully you can be pleasantly surprised if they do appear instead of disappointed when they don't.) Instead we've added a "plot-related item" reward at each tier that you can use to create your own if you're so inclined. These items must be themed on the current mod plot in some way (e.g., Nevarran/necromancy related artifacts from a plot set the Necropolis, elven artifacts or odd spontaneously-enchanted items here). If you have an idea and aren't sure which category or tier it would fall under, ask us! For special items unrelated to the plot, use the Enchanted Items reward.

We've also added a new reward: Fade-touched person. This is only available for characters who don't already have magic (or special rifter abilities, which in Thedas are all functionally magic). It may come with potential in-world consequences, such as potential for future plot developments and for being politically lumped in with mages and included in whatever may happen with them in the future, so purchase with caution.

To claim a reward, reply here.

Since we didn't get a rewards post up for the Nevarra plot, you can submit reward requests for that one in this post as well. We have a separate top-level comment here to help us keep track of what's being claimed for what.

Tier 1

• Runes. You can acquire any one canonical runestone to add to your character's weapon or armor so their sword has fire or their armor is imbued with some magical protection.
  
• Rift items, gag/simple variety. Your character can find an item that came through a rift from another world, their own or not. Snack foods, posters of pop idols, underpants with elastic, etc. Things that are fun or sentimental but don't have much in the way of moving parts and won't generally be useful on missions.
  
• Weird pets. Bring home a monkey or a wolf. The pet must be something that can semi-realistically be either permanently contained (sharks in tanks, small rodents, etc.) or trained/tamed out of being dangerous to the general populace. No dragons, nothing rideable (see mounts under Tier 2).
  
• First anchor ability. If your character currently has a vanilla anchor, the anchor can develop either an offensive (shooting small rift-energy projectiles) or defensive (generating a small rift-energy protective barrier, similar in size to a personal shield) capability.
  
• Plot-related item. An item of your choosing, enchanted or not, that your character finds on-site over the course of the plot. For Tier 1, these items can be enchanted for minor quality of life improvements — things like a magically powered fan, enchanted game boards for playing in a bumpy wagon, or other things that are primarily about entertainment, etc. — but cannot not be weapons or otherwise have significant work/plot-related utility.

Tier 2

• Fade-touched materials. Your character can acquire materials that have been touched by the Fade and have them made into a weapon, armor, or other item that has special abilities. There's a list here.
  
• Half of a specialization. To reflect the time and effort it requires to actually learn a new specialization, acquiring a new one requires two rewards spread across two mod plots. You can use one of the canon specializations or create your own. If you create your own, put it in mod contact for us to review and approve.
  
• Mabari. A mabari can imprint on your character. How your character acquires the mabari—getting unwillingly adopted by an old one without a master, intentionally buying a puppy, etc.—is up to you.
  
• Weird mounts. A hart (or equivalent), dracolisk, or nuggalope.
  
• Second anchor ability. If your character has a first anchor ability (see Tier 1), they can now have the second one, too.
  
• Fade-touched person. Available only to characters without powers (i.e. not to native mages or rifters with any special abilities). Your character's prolonged exposure to the energies of the Fade has, you know, touched them. They will permanently acquire one magical ability — for inspiration you can look at this list of Fade-touched materials and their effects, but you're not restricted to what's on the list and welcome to propose your own effect based on Thedosian spells or enchantments. For the foreseeable future, a character's access to this ability will be unpredictable; they may not always (or ever!) be able to do it on command, and when they do it will typically be weak, with unpredictable power spikes, especially under emotional duress.
  
• Plot-related item. An item of your choosing, enchanted or not, that your character finds on-site over the course of the plot. For Tier 2, these items can be weapons with minor effects or other items with minor work/plot-related utility, such as lockpicks that hum at different frequencies to help guide you or griffon-riding goggles that never fog up, or be QOL items with bigger and more useful effects, like a box enchanted to be a deep freezer.

Tier 3

• Enchanted or legendary items. You can use named items from canon, invent your own named item from made-up Thedasosian history, or have an enchanted item of your own invention or discovery that doesn't have a name and/or former owner. These can be items that are useful in combat, like weapons and armor, but they don't have to be. E.g., a self-filling tea pot.
  
• Rift items (magical/useful/complex). Your character can come across an item from another world. This tier is for things more serious and useful than snacks and underwear. As a rule, advanced technology (if it is allowed at all) will be converted into something enchanted.
  
• Griffon tamer. Now that the griffons are breeding freely in the mountains around Kirkwall (and the original griffons are reaching middle age), your character can befriend, tame, and ride a wild griffon that you invent and name yourself.
  
• Anchor upgrade. This reward is only available to characters who have had their anchors for more than nine months. With this upgrade anchor can grow to the size of the Herald’s anchor, allowing them to close rifts alone. They'll also exhibit more powerful versions of the anchor abilities (if they have them).
  
• Plot-related item. An item of your choosing, enchanted or not, that your character finds on-site over the course of the plot. For Tier 3, these items can have significant utility for combat or for other types of work, within the bounds of what is possible with Thedosian magic; the only upper power limit being whether we'd allow it in the game at all.