faderiftooc | MOD UPDATES ↠ June 2022

MOD ANNOUNCEMENTS: JUNE

OOC & ADMIN UPDATES

Notable Dates

Applications: Open indefinitely

Leadership Applications: Due June 30

Test Drive Meme: Here! Tracking the post for new top-level comments strongly encouraged.

IC Leaders Schedule Update

Since everything else is behind schedule, we're extending the deadline for AC leadership proofs to the end of July, rather than June. As a reminder:

Division heads and project leaders need to provide a war table assignment for their respective divisions/projects every three months and link to it in their AC comment.
Other leaders need to actively use their position in some way—a war table assignment, a log focused significantly on the work, an announcement, etc.—and link that in their AC comment.

Please don't wait till the end of July to submit plots, or we'll bottleneck! And to prevent overloading people with choices, we strongly recommend collaborating. As a reminder, a single war table operation that involves two divisions/projects (or one division and one project) will meet the requirement for both, provided that both leaders participate in creating and running it.

What's Next

Our next mod plot will occur in late July or early August and will entail visiting Arlathan Forest, for reasons. We may also do a small, local event in the interim, but for the most part the schedule will stay clear for player plots and war table events.

As mentioned above, players of division heads and project leaders are required to do a war table assignment by the end of July.

Everyone else: remember that you can propose player plots about all sorts of things! Stuff we allow includes:

Plots that are personal for your character: their personal nemesis tries to infiltrate the Gallows to assassinate them, their hometown (as long as it's small enough not to be on the canon map) is decimated by darkspawn, they're abducted by enemy assailants from a tavern and need to be rescued, and such.
Plots that use Riftwatch work as a surface justification to get a few characters into unrelated and unexpected trouble. For example, Riftwatch might not send people off solely to fight a dragon, but if you want to do a dragon fight, you can say a group of characters is waylaid by a dragon on their way to assist with some official part of the war effort in the Free Marches and then handwave the work and focus RP 100% on the dragon fight.
Plots that affect the Gallows or large groups of characters. If there's a status event type plot you'd like to see in the world, you don't have to wait and hope for us to do it as a mod event. Where native magic/spirits won't suffice, we also often allow "a rifter artifact did it" as a justification for weird hijinks.
Plots that are prompted by external political events. While we won't, for example, allow a player to control major decision-makers like national rulers or the Divine, you can scratch an itch to RP about the Chantry or elves by creating and control NPCs on a smaller scale, such as proposing a plot where a faction of scholars begins arguing about whether to include rifters as a category of demon in academic works or a lord decides to expel his elven population for some localized reason.
Plots that follow up on plot threads and/or advance the larger plot. There are some major plot threads we need to keep untied for game reasons–e.g., no one is allowed to go kill Corypheus or Solas right now–but we leave a lot of smaller threads dangling on purpose and try to reward players who take initiative with them. There is also far more stuff to be done than we can ever cover in mod plots alone. A few examples of things we'll probably approve plot requests about as long as they're reasonable:
- Persuading individual lords, Merchant Princes, Crow houses, or Free Marcher city-states, and similar to do more for the war effort.
- Collecting more information about unsolved mysteries, including the source of the current nightmares, the locations of Gates, things the Venatori are up to, where Solas has gone, etc.
- Identifying and handling enemy agents in various places.
- Building up networks of contacts, agents, and friendly local resistance groups in enemy areas.
- Scoping out the situation in locations that interest you but we haven't gotten around to exploring via mod plots yet, such as checking in on the Qunari in Kont-arr or the Rivaini court.

As a note, we'll generally allow larger leaps of progress for plots that involve multiple characters and more IC effort. This doesn't mean the plot itself needs to be complicated and have five parts. But for example, we're not going to allow a character to discover the exact location of a Gate in a single step taken alone and/or off-screen. If you submit an info request saying your character is checking every book stall in the Free Marches in search of relevant materials, we might give you a hint that points toward a next step they could take, but not the actual location of a Gate. On the other hand, if you propose a player plot for multiple characters to work together to locate a buried library with ancient elven documents and maps, we're much more likely to let them skip over the bread crumb stage and go straight to a full loaf. Player plots that have sign-ups or other openings for more people to get involved, as opposed to being closed to a few preselected characters, also get bonus points when we decide how much progress they can make.

If you're interested in running something but don't feel you have enough information to propose a plot, feel free to start with an information request! We need these to be fairly specific–e.g., don't ask "what plot can I run" or "what can my character learn about the Gates." But if you meet us partway and tell us you'd like to run a plot that involves Forces-type work and narrows down the location of an additional Gate, or that you'd like to write a plot that sways Ostwick to join the war effort but could use clarification on what's holding them back, we will happily help you out.

A List of Brief Reminders About Other Things

Turn in your plot reports (whether war table or player plot) for points toward purchasing Riftwatch Improvements on the AC Rewards page, so that we can ICly upgrade the Gallows!
Sign up for a project! Just add your character to the personnel list on the relevant wiki page.
The revamped, expanded Riftwatch overview on the wiki, with lots of info about how the organization works, what characters do all day, and what's expected of them. (Also lots of reports and stuff if you're wondering whether anybody's ever done anything about X, Y, or Z.)

IC & PLOT UPDATES

Antiva Updates

All three of the plot logs met the threshold for success, so Antiva has agreed to stop trading with Tevinter. This is a pretty huge success, and given Antiva's famous neutrality it's also pretty controversial, within Antiva and beyond. Just before and after the decision was made and announced, there were scuffles at Antivan ports as some merchants tried to rush shipments in or out the door before they became illegal. In Antiva City, one merchant ship partially sunk in the harbor when it attempted to set sail just under the wire and heavily overladen, and in Rialto a ship full of goods from Tevinter was attacked while unloading and bales of expensive silk were thrown into the harbor and strewn about the docks.

It will take some time before the impact of this ban on Tevinter becomes clear, and in the meantime work in Antiva is far from finished. They remain unwilling to actively assist the war effort by mustering an army, but individual Merchant Princes and Crow houses could potentially be persuaded to put their manpower into the war. Trade bans also naturally come with a rise in smuggling, and Riftwatch may need to pitch in to ensure the rules are being enforced.

Additionally, Ramondo Caliara was unmasked as a member of the Venatori, and the Antiva Crows who accepted the contract on Riftwatch's collective lives, House Kortez, have been largely thwarted and turned upon by the other Crows due to their involvement in larger Tevinter plans to jeopardize Antiva's security. Scattered survivors might still pose a threat to Riftwatch, if you ever want to use Antivan Crows as antagonists in a plot, but there's no need for characters to fear routine assassination attempts will follow everyone around Thedas forever.

We have small IC rewards for the characters in the Antivan Crow plot, which passed 20 tags. But we're going to wait a couple of weeks to take a final count! If anyone wants to get the other two past the 20-tag mark, or propel the Crow one further for more rewards, you have until the 25th of June.

Reminder: Nightmares

Characters in the Free Marches are continuing to experience nightmares more often than usual, now with increasing frequency. Characters traveling outside the region–including everyone who went to Antiva, for example–will find their sleep returns to normal while they're away. By now, it make also be obvious via gossip and grumbling that this phenomenon is not exclusive to Riftwatch members. Kirkwall locals and people elsewhere in the Marches are tired and on edge, and if asked they will confirm their dreams have been strange and bad of late.

IC Leader Updates

Effective immediately, the man publicly known as Richard Dickerson will take over as head healer. Gird your nugs.

You can see a list of all the available positions, including the new ones we added last month, on the wiki. Applications for leadership roles will next be due on June 30.