Upcoming Dates

• Native Applications: Open until 11/24 at 11:59pm US Eastern (when our Mod Holiday Hiatus** begins)
  
• Rifter Applications: Closed until further notice
  
• CR Meme: December 5
  
• Next TDM: November 20
  
• Next Deadline for IC Leadership Applications: November 24

Our Calendar is now once again mostly accurate. Please make sure you add any assignments or player plots with plot impact/wide relevance to it!

** See below.

The Game Updates post has also been updated! You might notice that it's missing IC news updates. This is because we are now forcing a PC to read IC news via crystal, to allow people to react or ask questions. That will be up later this month! Any member of Base Operations may ICly volunteer (or OOCly ask to be ICly ordered) to take a turn presenting the news.

Rule Clarifications

Below are a couple clarifications on game rules/policies. Despite the length, these aren't huge problems, because you guys are all amazing like that. They're just small problems we want to make sure don't turn into bigger ones in the future.

NPC USE

A few notes about NPCs! As mentioned elsewhere, the Gallows is home to a small, indistinct, largely faceless blob of Inquisition NPCs like cooking/cleaning staff, guards, the ferryman, etc., who are there to do the work that no one really wants to RP about (and who can be easily disposed of if someone does want to app a ferryman). It's fine for everyone to use these NPCs, name them as needed, give them quirks, etc., to facilitate their other RP.

Beyond that, we ask everyone to exercise as much restraint as possible with the invention and use of permanent Inquisition NPCs or NPCs who are at PCs' personal disposal. In addition to wanting a more dynamic and less isolated setting, a big part of the reason we uprooted the game and made everyone move to Kirkwall was to cut down on the number of NPC coworkers who had to be accounted for all the time—resulting in people wondering why only our weird assortment of PCs were vocal on the crystals, in it making no sense for relatively inexperienced newcomers to be given responsibilities over a dozen seasoned NPC professionals, and in us needing to always scale plots and crises to take into account thousands of NPCs who could probably handle things with or without PCs' help. We'd like to avoid sliding back into those problems via the proliferation of player-invented NPC additions to the Kirkwall outpost's resources.

There are some things—like sailing a pirate ship—that just can't get done without a fair number of NPCs to assist, and that's okay. We have no desire to outlaw (ha ha) pirate ships. It's also obviously fine for your character to have friends, family, contacts, employees, etc., who are useful or facilitate plots. But there are a few things we need everyone to keep in mind:

1. Keep groups of NPCs like the blob of anonymous Inquisition personnel, your character's employees or networks of contacts, etc., limited to the minimum plausible number. It's fine for your character to lead a mercenary group or have a spy network, but don't say they have a hundred people under their command where five will do. If you want to claim your character has more than five NPCs under their command, or has any NPCs with significant useful abilities at their disposal, and that wasn't already specified in your app when we approved it or cleared through prior contact with us, please submit that to us for approval via the Mod Contact.

2. Outside the anonymous blob of Gallows staff doing boring work, NPCs can't join the Inquisition (at the Gallows outpost, anyway) or otherwise be directly involved with it—they have to go through your character. Your character's NPC cousin can send war-relevant information to your character, but he can't move into the Gallows and join the Forces Division, won't be issued a sending crystal, and can't be authorized to act as an Inquisition representative on his own.

3. We try to give people control over their own individual NPCs to whatever extent possible, but at the end of the day, all NPCs are ultimately under our control. We won't swoop in and kill or control them or whatever else without talking to you and trying to work out alternatives first (unless you want them killed), but if there's a situation where plot plans are hindered by the existence of NPCs, it will be your responsibility to either get them out of the way/explain why they're unavailable/etc., or to let us drop rocks on them if we tell you we need to.

4. Remember that all NPCs in the game should be doing the boring things necessary for PCs to go do cool things, never solving problems independently or stealing anyone's thunder, no matter how much sense it might make. Please don't jump in offering to have your NPCs be the sources of information that other players might want their own characters to figure out, don't take an assignment where the entire point is to find a piece of information (rather than finding information leading to something else more interesting to RP) and say the NPCs would just do it for you, that sort of thing. Even if the NPC is already in the area and it's sort of implausible for PCs to trek across the continent to do something, the whole point is to let PCs do something, so give the NPC the flu or whatever you have to do to make it work. Using NPCs as a shortcut so that PCs can get to the good stuff is great! Offering them as a solution that eliminates the need for PCs to do something cool is not.

We'll be adding some of this to the FAQ for reference.

PLOT SIGN-UPS AND INTERPERSONAL CONFLICTS

Not everyone in FR gets along, and that’s okay. It’s going to happen whenever a large group of people with diverse personalities has to deal with one another for a prolonged period of time. If you have a conflict that goes beyond just not liking somebody much and want to fully avoid contact with them IC and OOC, you have two options:

1. You can tell the player yourself that you would rather not play with a given character or have contact OOC, then take the initiative to remove yourself from situations or IC mission teams where you may need to interact in ways you don’t like. (We take a pretty loose “work it out, we’re not your mom” approach to interpersonal conflicts, but we don’t take a loose approach to people ignoring lines once those lines have been clearly drawn. If someone persists in contacting you when you’ve explicitly asked them not to, let us know and we will handle it.)

2. You can formally ask us to make sure you aren’t matched with a given player or character in plots, with the understanding that whenever both of you are chosen by RNG, the person asking not to be matched with someone else will be the person who isn’t selected. We’ll never bump anyone out of a plot because someone else has asked not to RP with them. If we have two people who have both asked not to play with each other, we’ll flip a coin.

These are the only options you have. One option you definitely don’t have, in particular, is contacting IC leaders’ players to ask them to choose or change the teams for assignments based on who you would like or not like to play with. Division Heads and Project Leaders are not mods, they are players who have volunteered to handle some OOC work in order to help create and facilitate RP for others, and it is not their job to have to manage interpersonal conflicts between players.

We will make sure any formal requests (option 2 above) are honored when IC leaders dole out assignments and handle it if you let us know we missed something and made a mistake. But if you've chosen not to make such a request formally in writing via the Mod Contact, and you’re matched with characters you don’t want to play with, or think there’s a chance you might be and don’t want to risk it, your only option is to withdraw from participation yourself. That’s it. Anyone who tries to influence team selections under the table by approaching Project Leaders or Division Heads and asking them to avoid or create certain combinations will get an automatic strike.

The exception to this is IC leaders themselves, who who are required to play with everyone else in the game if it relates to their sphere of leadership. That doesn’t mean they have to play with everyone else all the time; if you have an IC leadership role and don't want to RP with a player or character for whatever reason, you’re welcome to limit your interactions to plot-related RP or OOC discussions, and you can limit the methods people can contact you about your character’s IC job to easily found and accessible OOC or IC inboxes if you prefer. (We ask that all project or similar plot related plotting posts and sign-ups go on the OOC comm, anyway, so no one is required to add everyone else on Plurk or Discord to be an IC leader.) You can also make arrangements for an IC assistant or someone else to handle communication with given characters on your character’s behalf when possible.

What you can't do is wall off or exclude any player or character from fully participating in the division or project that your character oversees because you don’t get along OOC. This is a requirement you all agreed to when you applied for the position, and anyone who finds they can’t comply with that requirement will need to work with us to have their character removed from their role.

Mod Hiatus/Holiday AC

MOD HIATUS

Each year around the holidays, we mods take our Holiday Hiatus, a wonderful and astoundingly short month-ish period in which we do absolutely zero modwork. No apps, no posts, no plot requests, no answering questions, no AC, nothing. It's a necessary break to allow for holiday travel, and to recharge our batteries to continue running the game for a fourth year.

The hiatus officially runs from December 1 to January 5, but in order to make sure we can get everything squared away before we retreat into our caves for a long winter's nap, the deadline for new requests/questions/apps/etc. is 11:59pm Eastern on November 24th. Anything received before that deadline will be handled before we go.

Once the clock ticks over onto November 25, native apps will be closed, and we'll ask that you please refrain from submitting new plot requests/questions until we resume work on January 6. (Even if we don't have to answer things right away, seeing them pile up while we're trying to take a break can be stressful, and the urge to to just discuss them or handle a couple while we have a minute can be overwhelming, and then before you know it we're not really taking a break.) We'll post reminders when the deadline approaches, but this is your formal heads up to please keep this in mind as November winds down and make sure you plan in advance for any plots you want to run in December or early/mid January.

HOLIDAY AC

The good news for you is that our hiatus includes giving K2, our incredible and incredibly overworked list mod, a month off from processing AC. Everyone must submit AC as usual for November by November 30, but there is no AC requirement for the month of December. Threads RPed in December can still be counted for AC rewards as usual.


Firstfall Mod Plot

Information and sign-ups for this month's upcoming plot, focused on a major battle between Corypheus forces and those of Orlais and the Inquisition, have been posted here! The structure and sign-up method for this plot is a little different than our usual fare, so make sure you take a look and sign up before November 10 to avoid winding up with something you don't like.

The War Table

Reminder to turn in reports by the 10th for any plot-relevant assignment or player plot if you want the results taken into account in the mod plot. If you don't turn in a report by the 10th for any mission that requires it, we will assume that work wasn't done before the battle.

On the Horizon: Divine Election

One of last month's assignments for Chantry Relations involved acquiring the names of likely candidates for Divine since, in Fade Rift, Leliana and Cassandra will be declining the position due to the Inquisition's continued need for their leadership. The Divine Election will be a plot point in the first half of 2019, and we'll be doing our best to make the outcome dependent on player plots and project/division initiatives. We'll provide more guidance on that in the near future, so please hold off on making any grand plans for now, but since it's a big effing deal, we wanted to draw your attention to it early so you can start thinking about how your character might feel and what they might want to do. There's a post (closed to Chantry Relations project members, so IC your character may not have access to the information yet) about the candidates here, with further info in the report and linked assignment details!

And before anyone gets too worried, while the Chantry's choice of Divine will potentially have a huge influence on the game, it won't dictate the outcome of the Circle debate, future of elven rights, or other social issues the way the selection or Leliana, Cassandra, or Vivienne can singlehandedly determine the future in the video game. Characters will be able to continue to pursue goals and impact the far-future resolutions of those issues regardless of who is elected, but who is chosen may change precisely how steep various uphill battles are and what kind of work—playing to the sympathies of a conflicted Divine, pushing a stubborn one, or openly opposing her—is required to make gains.

Leadership Apps

We have no new appointments to announce this month! We do have some new and recent vacancies; read this post and check this list if you're interested in applying for an IC leadership role in the future. Due to our December hiatus, the deadline for IC leadership apps this month is November 24, rather than the end of the month, so we can process them before we disappear.

This cycle's mod plot is centered around a major battle between the forces of Corypheus on one side and the forces of Orlais, the Inquisition, and its allies on the other. It will take place in the Fields of Ghislain in mid-Firstfall (November). The battle's outcome will have major repercussions for Thedas and for the work of the Inquisition going forward, and as we spoiled last month, it will not go well—though just how badly and in what ways will be impacted by the work your characters have been doing through assignments and player plots this past month. Once all of your plot-relevant reports are submitted by November 10, we will review them all and factor them in to the overall plan.

The mod post will go up in mid-November, and it will focus on the aftermath of that battle rather than the battle itself. The results of the battle, both large-scale and some individual results, will be determined and distributed when the plot goes up.

We're doing it this way because we want to avoid issues we've caused in the past where, because RP is much slower than life, it takes a month or more for players to know the outcome of a mod plot and everyone is forced to RP in the dark for a while or hold off moving time forward altogether until the resolution is determined. Too often the aftermath of a major event gets skipped over because by the time we know what it might be, it's weeks old and we need to move on. We also know that combat is not everyone's favorite thing to RP, particularly against foes you have to NPC yourself. Our hope is that by announcing the results immediately, we'll allow people to focus on writing whatever parts of the event are most interesting to them, whether that's pre-battle jitters, the horrors of combat, or reeling and regrouping in the aftermath.

"But what did you mean individual results?" we hear you wondering through the microphones we've secretly installed in your brain. Here's what we mean: while the larger battle rages between armies of NPC soldiers, PCs will be assigned to teams that will have specific objectives within the context of that battle, things like "hold this hill as long as possible" or "flank that enemy position." We'll roll for each group's success based on the relative difficulty of what they've been asked to do. Success won't necessarily mean defeating the enemy, and failure won't necessarily mean your characters did anything wrong. Rather, the outcomes will be relative to the overall battle. For instance, a very successful roll could mean your characters hold that hill far longer than expected and minimize loss of life but are still ultimately forced to retreat, while a very bad roll could mean that intelligence underestimated the opposition your team would face and they're quickly overrun despite their best and most competent efforts. The RNGed success or failure of each team will contribute to the overall results of the battle.

In addition to success, we'll also be rolling for how badly combat teams are injured. These rolls will be separate: a team may be successful, but end up more severely wounded in the process, or fail but escape relatively unscathed. (For transparency we'll be doing these rolls on Discord, similar to how we did things during the Tourney.) If your character is participating in the battle, you cannot completely opt out of the potential for them to be injured, but you can indicate a preference to downgrade or a willingness to upgrade—to take on a higher level of damage for your character in order to decrease the severity of injuries suffered by teammates whose players would prefer their characters not be too battered. More on that below.

All of these rolls will be completed and laid out for everyone before the log is posted, so when you begin RP you will already know (1) how the overall battle turned out, (2) how your character's specific piece of that battle went, and (3) whether your character was injured and how.


You won't be signing up for specific missions or groups for this plot. Everyone participating will be assigned a group and objective, and objectives won't be finalized until we know how many groups we need to form and have reports for all of the plot-relevant assignments and player plots due on November 10. Groups will be on the larger side to make sure everyone has a good mix of characters to plot and RP with, and you will also be able to RP things occurring before and after the actual battle with people outside your assigned group.

This plot is also less optional than our usual mod plots. The Inquisition is ultimately a military organization, and this is a major battle in which they expect they might be outnumbered by the enemy. As a result, any character who is in the Forces or Scouting Divisions will be ordered to travel to the front and take on some sort of combat role (unless they're healers, in which case they'll be assigned to medical tents). Anyone outright refusing those orders could be subject to punishment for insubordination or as a potential deserter, so even if your character doesn't really feel like going, they probably have to. OOC, we obviously can't force anyone to RP things they're not interested in. So if your character is in Forces or Scouting, but you don't want them to be in combat, you will need to post below letting us know that, along with an IC reason why they are assigned elsewhere instead (injury, remaining on guard duty at the Gallows, urgent Inquisition assignment elsewhere, etc.).

Meanwhile, characters in the Diplomacy and Research Divisions, as well as characters who are only allies rather than members of the Inquisition, will be strongly encouraged to go fight if they're able and capable! You can say your diplomat who is also a skilled combatant has been singled out and told they're needed or that they chose to volunteer themselves. But they will not generally be ordered into combat, because they're generally assumed to be nerds. They'll have three options: to volunteer for combat, to be assigned a non-combat support role near (but not on) the battlefield, or to stay home and keep working at their desks.

Please read the sign-ups carefully! It's not our usual form. Here are some explanations of the various fields that will hopefully answer some questions you might have when you fill it out:

• Combat role opt in/out: Forces and Scouting characters will be included in combat groups by default, so you'll need to opt out and provide an IC reason why your character would be exempt if you don't want them to participate. If your character is in Diplomacy/Research, or is not formally a member of the Inquisition (Wardens, Rifters who haven't joined, etc.), characters will not be included by default, but you'll be able to opt in to a combat group or a non-combat support group.
  
  
• Focus/Background: If you have a character who should be participating (which is nearly everyone), but who you don't intend to RP during the plot (i.e. they're on hiatus, or you just want to focus on someone else right now) or would prefer to handwave the combat portions, that's fine. We'll group characters who are present but not being RPed together and give them the less interesting jobs and outcomes, so everyone still knows what their characters got up to but doesn't have to play it out. Then we'll group up the characters people do plan to RP and give them the more interesting assignments.
  
  
• Prioritization: If you have multiple characters you'd like to focus on, you'll need to rank them in order of preference. We might be able to give every character everyone wants to focus on a role in one of the focus assignments, but if we have too many characters, we'll start by shaving off the lowest-priority character for people who have six characters they want to focus on, then five, then four, and so on.
  
  
• Injuries: We can't guarantee that any particular character will or won't be injured (unless they're opted out altogether), and we can't juggle preferences about the type or degree of injury beyond that we promise not to inflict any mandatory permanent maiming that magical healing cannot fix (i.e., no lopping off limbs). If you have some kind of specific personal trigger you can let us know that, or give us a head's up via the mod contact page, but otherwise please don't indicate general preferences ("moderate only" "please not the face!") in your sign-up. War is dangerous! But magical healing exists, so ultimately you'll be able to get your characters patched up quickly if you don't want to RP about prolonged recovery, and nobody has to have facial scars unless they want them.
  
  Instead, you're going to tell us whether you'd like your character's injuries to be Downgraded, Upgraded, or neither. If Character A gets injured and has registered for a downgrade, and Character B on the same team has volunteered for an upgrade, we'll basically pretend that Character B threw themselves out in front and took extra damage to protect their teammates (or tripped into the line of fire, if they aren't that heroic—it will be up to you), so we'll make their injury more severe and Character A's less severe. If no one on your team volunteered for an upgrade, you may be out of luck; if multiple people did we'll flip a coin or you'll get double protected or something. You can also choose to neither upgrade or downgrade if you just want to get what you get.

That's about it! Sign-up forms are below.