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MOD ANNOUNCEMENTS: JULY
OOC & ADMIN UPDATES
Notable Dates
APPLICATION RULE CHANGES
Remember when we used to change the application rules every couple months to try to better balance the character base and ensure things felt sufficiently Thedas-y? We've resisted for a while now but in a blast from the past, we are reinstituting a cap on rifter characters. Going forward, rifter characters are limited to 1 per player. All current rifters will be grandfathered in, so anyone who has two right now is allowed to keep them both, but if you drop one in the future the rule will apply from then on.
We don't ever want to take rifters completely off the table because we know that in addition to just generally being fun they're a great way into the game for players who don't feel comfortable with the canon setting. But we've had a much higher ratio of new rifters over the last year compared to new natives (AUs or OCs) and we want to make sure Fade Rift continues to feel like a canon world game so a 1-per-player cap will help balance those goals.
We'll periodically reevaluate the need for this (and all) application rules, but you should expect it to remain in place indefinitely unless there's a significant demographic shift.
AC REMINDERS
As a reminder, we're now doing a quarterly summary-based AC. The current check post is here, responses are due by July 15. Please consult the post (and the previous example from April) for instructions.
Instead of permanent side characters we're now allowing voice-testing applications, which are permitted to hang around for three months of voice testing. After that point they must be apped as full characters or dropped.
Gallows upgrades remain available—keep submitting your plot reports for those! We're also taking suggestions for additions to the list.
NEW PROJECTS
As previously mentioned, we've changed the way we handle projects! (Except for Haven and Sashamiri, which are grandfathered in as they are.) Projects are now custom short-term endeavors with definite end-goals–essentially a planned series of connected player plots and related IC efforts where we work with you to decide in advance what steps are necessary to solve a mystery or achieve a specific goal, rather than making players propose individual plots one step at a time and hope they eventually reach the end of figuring something out someday somehow. Think of them sort of like special task forces, temporary bodies organized to deal with a particular issue or achieve a particular end. Which you get to choose!
Our hope is that this will make it easier for players to make concrete progress on plot endeavors that interest them and also open up more opportunities for characters to take initiative and lead something without it needing to be a permanent OOC commitment. Anyone can propose a project and any character can lead one, including characters who have other IC leadership roles.
You can find the form to propose a project on the plot request page. The form contains more guidelines and specific advice. (Silly project code names are not optional.) If after reading all the info in the form you're still not sure if what you have in mind could fit in the new project format, feel free to ask on the Mod Contact!
IC & PLOT UPDATES
Sea Monster Aftermath
OSTWICK: Riftwatch witnessed firsthand the destruction of Ostwick's harbor, along with many of the ships that were at anchor in it when the red lyrium sea monsters arrived. Deaths number in the low hundreds, and Ostwick's navy lost several ships and its main docks. The Teryn has recalled most of his naval force from patrolling the Waking Sea shipping lanes to protect the city and its immediate coastline, operating out of a secondary base west of the capital.
HERCINIA: To the east, Hercinia suffered the same fate as Ostwick but without the intervention of Riftwatch to mitigate the damage. Its harbor has been smashed to pieces, including its drydocks and roughly a quarter of its navy. The dead number at least a thousand. Hercinia, like Ostwick, has long taken a proactive lead role in combating piracy in the Waking Sea, but has been forced to recall most of its ships to assist with recovery and protecting the coastal communities and the gaping wound of the central harbor.
TRADE IMPACT: Ostwick and Hercinia are both mercantile powers in the Free Marches and common waypoints for goods traveling between Orlais and Antiva (and to a lesser extent, Ferelden). With both of their harbors out of commission, numerous shipments have been diverted to Kirkwall in the west and Wycome in the east, packing their harbors and throwing trade in the region back into disarray. The textile industry—already battered by the loss of Tantervale and Starkhaven—will feel it first, as Ostwick produces and ships a great deal of wool products and Hercinia is responsible for some of the most coveted dyes. Prices on clothing will skyrocket across the board, but especially the luxury apparel that requires the rare dyes and finest wool, already in short supply. (Reminder that we have a trade map for reference on major exports from different parts of Thedas.)
There are also intermittent shortages of other goods as shipments are missed, forced to reroute, or canceled by merchants for whom the trip is no longer worth the risk right now. Prices and stocks of all sorts of things fluctuate daily, spiking based on the uncertainty of a ship's non-arrival and then returning to normal the next day.
KIRKWALL: Kirkwall is now absorbing most of the traffic that would have gone to Ostwick, which has its upsides. The influx of visitors and business of course brings money to the city, especially for dockland businesses of all kinds and merchant middlemen. Shops are flush with goods from Orlais and Nevarra whose owners no longer want to risk traveling further east. But the harbor is dangerously overcrowded and already there have been two minor collisions and a near-miss that almost sunk a small-ish merchant ship. And even as the coin flows in no one has forgotten why this is happening—the merchants and dockworkers alike remain on edge, wary of being the next target for more than a single beast.
SECURITY IMPACT: both Ostwick and Hercinia pushed into defensive postures, the Waking Sea shipping lanes have never been more vulnerable. The area at the confluence of the Waking Sea and the Amaranthine between Brandel's Reach and Estwatch (both pirate havens) has always been dangerous, but had been made safer through heavy patrols in recent years by the forces of Ostwick and Hercinia, allowing trade to thrive.
Already, there has been an uptick in reports of sightings and attacks by pirates and Tevinter ships, including further west past Ostwick toward Kirkwall in what are normally safer waters. Combined with the significant loss of life, damage to major shipping hub harbors, and disruption of trade, this is a major blow to regional morale.
ESTWATCH: The pirates aren't without troubles of their own, though. Reports have reached Riftwatch that shortly before Hercinia was attacked, the island of Estwatch—long a pirate stronghold—was attacked by a gigantic red lyrium octopus that destroyed the rickety harbor area and smashed a number of prominent ships at anchor before abruptly departing to reappear later at Ostwick.
RED LYRIUM VOLCANO: Having dismantled the Venatori operation around the site, Riftwatch carefully mapped the location, set up a warning buoy, and brought all the research material it collected back to the Gallows for analysis. The constant flow of red lyrium into this spot in the Amaranthine is a troubling addition to the to-do list, but not a problem that has an immediate solution.
Upcoming Events
We're leaving July and August free for war table and player plots, and will be back with a mod plot in the first half of September. If it feels like more things to do are needed, we may adjust to throw in an event before then, but there seems to be plenty on the calendar right now!
IC Leader Updates
Effective immediately, Obeisance Barrow will be the Master of Works.
This is the final month for the current round of temp postings. If anybody would like to sign up to be semi-randomly assigned a temp job beginning in August, please use the form in the comments below and sign up by July 31.
PLOT RESOURCES
Some probably repetitive reminders below regarding the plot and game info resources that exist, because we can't remember when we last gave them to you so we assume you don't either.
And a related reminder that if you have questions about what information is out there and where to find it, what's already happened in the game, what's the status is of X place, how plot creation works and what's allowed, how to get your character involved in a topic that interests you, or anything else on these subjects: ask! Simple questions are welcome on the Mod Question channel on discord, and anything more complex you can throw at the Mod Contact, or, if it's an IC question, Info Requests, submittable on the Plot Request page.
We know the fact that the game has been around for 84 years and there's theoretically a bunch of information out there somewhere (that's probably not complete or up to date or easily located) can be intimidating or just frustrating to deal with, and we're here to help. We promise things are usually less complicated than you imagine/than we make them sound. If the below isn't getting you what you need, we're always happy to help point you in the right direction or confirm that you're right, there isn't an answer to that out there that you're missing.
GOALS: Division and the remaining Project pages on the wiki each have a list of priorities for the year. These will continue to drive most Riftwatch work in the near future, and are an IC focus, so you should feel free to RP about your characters doing related day-to-day tasks, and to propose related player plots. (You can also still propose unrelated player plots too, of course! We just don't want you to feel like these topics are now solely the province of official war table missions.)
REPORTS: It's vital to have records we can all look back at so we can build on things and incorporate PC actions and accomplishments into future activities rather than letting everyone's work disappear into the ether over time. Being able to call back to some mission your character or someone else's did in the past and build off what they learned there is worth a little extra admin. And if there's no report, it effectively didn't happen.
We'd also like to encourage thinking of reports as their own form of RP, rather than just OOC busywork. Reports are IC documents, and while there are definitely some IC minimum guidelines about what sort of information must be included to keep the document useful and avoid your character getting into trouble with their Division Head/Project Leader, that doesn't mean you can't have some fun with it. Consider, for instance, a few examples of character-flavored reports.
They're also a good chance to describe and memorialize PC activities you don't actually play out, like using the report to write a thrilling account of the successful ambush your characters staged, while threading just the aftermath around the campfire, or threading a disastrous attempt to steal Venatori uniforms for disguises and then using the report to describe how your characters improvised and persuaded some NPCs to give up useful intelligence anyway. You can also submit plot requests for solo missions or info requests for research that would be too dull to play out, but use reports to document what your character got up to off-screen.
Tl;dr: Do reports. They're good, actually.
RESOURCES: We know the search function on the wiki remains broken and the google replacement sucks (we won't bore you with the technical reasons it sucks; suffice to say we've done everything we can). To help make it easier to find reports and event pages on various topics, we've added new subject matter tags and have created a couple pages to help navigate those:
- Report Sorters: Reports pre-sorted by topic, by year, by country.
- Events & Reports Masterlist: A complete list of every report and event on the wiki, which are also (for now at least) up to date with the game. Useful for ctrl-F searching report summaries.
- Tag Cloud: Not new, but lets you see all the tags on the wiki and click on them to get a list of all pages with a given tag.
- Most Division and Project pages will now have their own collection of report archives, focused on collections of reports related to the division/project's work.
- Tag System: overview of how to tag your reports.
Some other plot-specific resources:
- The Gates page, a collection of all the information discovered to date about the Seven Gates, including where they are, what they look like, what's been learned about them so far, the ritual from the Arlathan plot, and some related adversaries. There's also a "Gates" tag for related reports. The Gates are and will continue to be central to the mod plot (spoilers) so we highly recommend familiarizing yourself with the basics.
- Adversaries and Sources & Supporters lists, works in progress identifying NPC friends and enemies that have been used in plots and/or can be in the future.
If you spot anything missing from any of these, or have an idea for something it'd be useful for us to add, let us know!
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