GAME UPDATES ↠ March 2023

MOD ANNOUNCEMENTS: FEBMARCHUARY

OOC & ADMIN UPDATES

Notable Dates

Applications: Open indefinitely
Leadership Applications: Due March 31
Test Drive Meme: Here! Tracking the post for new top-level comments strongly encouraged.

Haha what a short month!!! Here are a few reminders we meant to give you 2 days ago when February began, plus some new updates.

AC-Related Changes

As a reminder, we're switching to a quarterly summary-based AC. The first new check post will go up on April 1, 2023, and cover the period of January 1-March 31. We'll ask players to check in with a few sentences about what their characters have been up to for the last three months and a minimum of three links per character to relevant threads from that time period.
Side characters as a separate category of character are going away, so if you currently have a side character you intend to keep, you have until the end of March to submit a full app. Any we haven't received apps for on April 1 will be removed from the comms and considered dropped. You'll of course still be welcome to app them after that point if you choose to do so.
Remember that you will still be able to skip providing AC links for up to two (but not all) of your characters every 3-month AC cycle—so you can, in effect, keep your side characters on the side if you prefer or choose a character or two to send out on field work every AC period to lessen your AC burdens. This change is not meant to increase anyone's AC requirements! It's primarily to make sure we have a full app on the record for every long-term character, since the majority of side characters in recent years have been odd enough ducks that we required them anyway.
Instead of permanent side characters we're now allowing voice-testing applications, which look very similar to side characters except that they're only permitted to hang around for three months of voice testing. After that point they must be apped as full characters or dropped.
Submit your remaining AC reward points for loot by the end of the month, or convert them to Gallows Upgrades! Beginning this month, you'll instead be able to claim rewards for your character (including most of the rewards currently available, like specializations and rift items) in exchange for participation in each mod plot, rather than by counting up points long-term. After March 31, we'll be removing all rewards except Gallows Upgrades from the rewards page, so use them up by then if you want to do so.
Gallows upgrades will remain as they are—keep submitting your plot reports for those! (Please fix this place up. We're also taking suggestions for additions to the list!)

Plot Goals & Resources

GOALS

Division and Project pages on the wiki have been updated with some new goals. Please take a look! These will be driving most Riftwatch work in the near future, and will be an IC focus, so you should feel free to talk 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

A reminder that reports are very important! This game has been around for 49 dog years and a lot of long-running plot threads and themes have been investigated and developed over that time. 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 is broken and the google replacement sucks (we won't bore you with the technical reasons it sucks; suffice to say we can't do anything about it). To help make it easier to find reports on various topics so you can see what's happened in the past, we've gone through all the reports and events on the wiki and 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 llets 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 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.
Adversaries and Sources & Supporters lists, works in progress identifying NPC friends and enemies that can be used in plots.

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!

Project Changes

At the end of March, we're going to be dissolving the Felandaris and Jeshavis projects, which we think have run their course for the moment and can be absorbed back into mod plot/division work going forward. If anyone is heartbroken by this decision because they were just dying to throw in an app to run one of those, you have until March 31 to put in that app and sell us your vision for the project.

Otherwise, our plan going forward is to keep only Sashamiri and Haven as permanent projects but to permit the creation of smaller, ad-hoc projects focused on specific goals, which we may rename if we can come up with a more Dragon-Age-y sounding term for "task forces."

Whatever they're called, these will be a lot like projects, but inherently temporary, with finite short-term goals. For example, if you and your character are very interested in establishing a working relationship with the Qun, you might have a project with an end goal of creating an information exchange with the Ben-Hassrath. We'll help you map a plan to get there via a few intermediary steps that you can turn into player plots, and your character will be in charge of the effort IC. Once they've achieved their goal (or they've critically failed, which can be fun, or you've just lost interest) the project will dissolve.

How is this different from running a player plot, you ask? The main differences are scale and IC authority. The ad-hoc projects/task forces (ugh) will have goals that will take more than a one-off plot to complete, along with some associated day-to-day/off-screen work, making them bigger and longer-term than the typical player plot. They'll also be IC roles, granting your character(s) some decision-making authority over how to approach their goal and manage the people/resources at their disposal. (They'll still answer to one or more Division Heads, though, of course. Don't get too excited about going rogue.) OOC, it will mean you can come to us with an end point you're interested in and we'll help you work backwards to make a plan to achieve it within a reasonable number of months, rather than having to hack at toward your goal one step at a time with the vague hope we will eventually allow it to pay off.

We hope that it will give more people an opportunity to put their characters in impactful leadership roles—without necessarily committing for an eternity—and to run plots they care about with meaningful results at the end. An application (similar to our plot request form, nothing scary) and more details will be available starting next month.

IC & PLOT UPDATES

Starkhaven Aftermath

Things! They happened! Check out this separate post for IC news about the aftermath of the Starkhaven plot, because there's quite a bit of it!

Upcoming Events

Next up will be a mod plot at the end of this month addressing the on-going nightmares that have been plaguing Kirkwall, building on the investigations some characters have done. If you want to ramp up your character's bad dream experience for the grand finale, now's the time! But it's also fine for people to be affected to different degrees, without it being commentary on their strength of will or anything like that, so it's equally fine for some characters to be less affected, or for the degree of effect to vary day to day.

IC Leader Updates

Sorry, we missed the notifs on our post last month but we do now have some new temp postings (which we'll let you keep an extra month if you'd like to make up for it). The following temp appointments are effective immediately or however far back into February you're still backtagging:

Jude will be Acting Personnel Officer
Ellie will be Acting Griffon Master
Vanya will be Acting Seneschal

And, effective immediately and, we're thrilled to announce, not temporary, Wysteria de Foncè will now be Mediation Officer.