faderiftooc | MOD POST ↠ Arlathan Forest Sign-Ups & Information

SIGN UPS & INFO: ARLATHAN FOREST

For our mod plot this month, Riftwatch will be going to Arlathan Forest! They'll specifically be going to prevent the Venatori from seizing control of another Gate, but there will be opportunity and cause for individuals from every division to participate, regardless of how competent they are with traversing the wilderness or investigating Gates.

This adventure will involve a few parts:

↠ An OPEN LOG with choose-your-own-forest adventures, including camping miserably, combating Venatori and forest monsters, and delving into ruins to search for clues. This will be enough of an emergency that even people who aren't great with the outdoors will be needed. Riftwatch will be maintaining an underground base camp in a sunken part of the ruins of Arlathan, accessible by eluvian, so anyone who can't justify being away from the Gallows for weeks of camping at a time can still visit to check in on things or help out for a shorter period of time and wind up pulled into adventures.

↠ Two closed, capped ELF PLOTS to deal with two different kinds of elves: Dalish and Ancient. Each of these plots will be limited to four characters each.

Dealing with the DALISH CLAN will require doing them a favor. Specifically, they'll need to stop some nearby humans from hunting halla, by a method of the group's choosing, without implicating the elves in whatever they do. This will have a minimum tag count for success, so please don't sign up if you won't be around in the first few weeks of September.

Dealing with the ANCIENT ELVES will be a more traditional diplomatic endeavor, to talk to them and try to get information out of them. This will be NPC'd to a limited extent; we'll have a non-linear thread where each participant can ask one question (or make a statement, if they'd prefer) and one follow-up to their own or another person's question/statement. (We may allow more if it seems necessary to get the relevant information, but two is all we can promise in advance.) Participants can also mingle or talk to non-mod-controlled NPCs. Preference will be given to Diplomacy Division characters for two of the four slots.

↠ One closed but uncapped PUZZLES PLOT where characters will be divided into groups that must make their way through some obstacles and trials to reach their goal. (The puzzles will be IC only, not things players have to OOCly solve.) Participating in this plot will result in some degree of permanent alteration to your character, on the scale of losing a particular subset of memories or a skill or a few fingers. You'll have OOC control over what those alterations are, within given parameters. But if the general prospect bothers you, you can opt out by not signing up.

HOW TO SIGN UP

Sign ups for the two elf plots and puzzles plot are in the comments below.

The puzzle plot will be done in teams of up to six characters. When you sign up, you can do so individually or with preselected groups of two to six characters. We'll combine any individual sign-ups and groups with fewer than six characters into larger groups.

Sign up by the end of the day US Eastern time on August 30, 2022 so we can get the posts up on August 31 and still call this an August plot. :)

MORE PUZZLE INFO

Some additional info on the puzzle plot to aid brainstorming, team decisions, hopefully motivate sign-ups, and so forth. Without spoiling precisely what's going to happen in the plot, we can tell you that:

IC, the final stage of their journey will involve characters being required to collectively offer up a sacrifice. How each group approaches this collective sacrifice will be up to them, and their decision will impact the individual sacrifices demanded of them.
We hope it will be fun regardless, given the continuing close quarters ties between all of Riftwatch, but we chose not to totally randomize sign-ups because we think people may benefit from having characters with prior relationships (of any kind) present during the plot when they have to discuss the sacrifice aspects. Not that you couldn't use it to get entirely new CR! You just may get more mileage out of it with pre-existing relationships.
ICly, characters will be given very narrow options to choose between when determining a sacrifice, or may have one forced on them with no choice at all, so when thinking up options don't worry too much about whether your character would ever personally choose to give up X Y or Z. Players will decide the specific sacrifice(s) offered to or taken from their characters, so you can rig it to ensure the sacrifice you want them to make is the most palatable option they're given. Example: if it would be most appealing for you OOC for your character to lose the ability to speak Tevinter, but they'd never volunteer to do that, you could make their second choice be losing an eye so suddenly having to relearn their native tongue doesn't sound so bad after all.
Like we said above, even at their most severe we're not going to require everyone to have their character sacrifice a limb or have total amnesia or anything like that, and not all sacrifices will necessarily be permanent. The severity of the sacrifices required will also scale a bit depending on how characters handle the collective sacrifice. But in general, and to expand on the vague examples we provided above, some potential sacrifices include:
- Loss of a sense (or partial loss, for sight/hearing)
- Loss of a skill (e.g. picking locks, playing an instrument, a type of magic)
- Loss of some category of knowledge (e.g., a language, the history of Orlais)
- Loss of the ability to enjoy a favorite food or song or hobby
- Loss of the ability to lie about or to talk about certain topics at all
- Loss of a specific memory or category of memories (e.g., all memories of their mother, the memory of their wedding day, the memory on which their trust in a particular person is based)
- The loss of a secret via the sharing of a specific memory with everyone else in the group (e.g., the memory of a terrible crime they secretly committed)
- Loss of fingers, toes, ears, the ability to grow hair or facial hair, etc.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list! Other types of sacrifices may be accepted if they're on roughly the same level of impact. These are just examples of the style and degree of sacrifice we're going to be looking for and some ideas to start from.
The OOC goal is to give people a way to shake up their characters/CR or provide longer-term challenges to RP about, so sacrifices will be required to be things that your character would actually consider a personal sacrifice. For instance, they will not be able to game the system by giving up a memory that they consider trivial or that they hate and would love to have wiped from their head. And while some of the sacrifices may be recoverable (for instance, skills or knowledge could be re-learned), they should be things that it would take significant time and effort to regain and that it would be a hassle for your character to no longer be able to do in the meantime. (We may make it possible to recover things like lost memories in the future, but we make no guarantees. Any lost body parts will be permanent.)
Unlike the Dalish plot, the Puzzle plot will not be a time-sensitive one. The sacrifices will be the conditions for plot success and if we tack on any "10 tags per team by X date" type goals they'll be purely of the "Riftwatch gets some bonus loot" stretch goal variety.

PUZZLE ROLLS & REWARDS

As an optional flavor-adding mechanic, we've rolled dice for each team member for each puzzle. This idea is to give people a general sense of how things went as they progressed through the temple trying to solve the various puzzles, so that you can have a sense of what the mood and dynamics might be by the time they arrive at the end without having to RP out everything that came before. This isn't to suggest that you can't RP out anything that comes first! But the key bit is at the end and we thought it might be easier to leap ahead to that if we gave you a way to handwave what came earlier with a bit more detail.

The numbers aren't intended to indicate a character's skill at solving any particular type of puzzle, that's why we haven't asked you for any sort of stats or modifiers. They're just meant to suggest a level of helpful contribution, which may be intentional or accidental or, most likely, a combination of the two. A high score could mean a brilliant deduction or literally stumbling over a clue, and a low one could be caused by getting distracted by a wild animal attack, or misinterpreting a mosaic, or anywhere in between.

A score of 3 or less, we'd suggest, indicates that your character has been injured in some way or has caused someone else on the team to be injured. Again, how this happens and how much of it is your character's own fault is up to you, as is the kind or severity of their injury. (We haven't used these as modifiers on later rolls, but if you want to say an injury is why they were no help at all on a puzzle they'd normally be good at, you're welcome to. You could also just as easily say that sitting down nursing a broken arm they were at an angle to spot some key clue later on.)

The idea is to provide a framework to either montage through some earlier stuff or OOCly hash out what the team dynamics were through the rest of the trials in order to inform the RP about the sacrifices, since if somebody has had a day of terrible luck or great success it might influence how they approach those issues. If this isn't fun or helpful in that way, you can feel free to ignore any or all of it.

If, in addition to RPing about the sacrifices, any characters on your team also have a log of 10+ tags about one of the preceding puzzles, then everyone involved in that thread will get to pick a magical artifact to have found along their way through the temple. Options include:
- Magic boots that allow the wearer to jump 20 feet high in a single bound.
- Enchanted ring that will turn any weapon they use into a fire or ice or lightning weapon
- A pendant that causes wild animals of a particular family (canines, felines, etc.) to decide not to attack them. (But not necessarily be friends with them, definitely not understand or listen to them. Just not attack.)
... or propose your own artifact with a similar (or lesser) power level and single-purpose utility. It's a free Enchanted Item with no AC reward point requirement. You can claim yours here.

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