faderiftooc | MOD UPDATES ↠ September 2023

MOD ANNOUNCEMENTS: SEPTEMBER

OOC & ADMIN UPDATES

Notable Dates

Applications: Open indefinitely
Leadership Applications: Due September 30**
Test Drive Meme: Here! Tracking the post for new top-level comments strongly encouraged.
Activity Check: October 1 - 15

Calendar Changes

We have decided to have two Septembers this year.

No actually what we have done is add IC news snippets to the game calendar from this month through the end of the year. Right now this news is focused entirely on the Free Marches invasion, because our number one priority was helping create/bolster the sense that the war is an ongoing threat that is continuing between our plots, not something that stops and only starts again when we pay attention to it, and right now that's all the news we had the bandwidth to invent. But we'll start adding other kinds of news going forward as well.

The news tidbits on the calendar are meant primarily as flavor for your background knowledge and IC conversation purposes to help the world feel more alive. We don't expect people to turn every item into a mission, and while we may embed some hints regarding upcoming plots or mysteries people could solve into the news in the future, we'll make sure we make it clear if/when it's something we think people should definitely be doing something about.

But even though you aren't required or expected to plot about all of these items, you can—that's why we're sketching them out months into the future. If you want your character to get intel about an attack in advance and mount a defense or to schedule an unrelated road trip through the Free Marches so your characters accidentally wind up in the middle of a surprise attack, those are possibilities you are welcome to take advantage of!

If you only want to use these events as settings for your RP without significantly affecting them, you don't need permission or a plot request for that. You can say your characters were passing through a particular village and had to run when it was attacked or that they were sent to survey the damage afterwards without checking in with us at all. If you want to do something that alters the outcome or expands the scope of the event—preventing it via spywork, putting up a defense that would change the outcome, discovering something notable while visiting, making it part of a plotline you're creating, etc.—then please submit a plot or info request first.

If anyone has suggestions or news they'd like added to the calendar themselves at any point, let us know via mod contact. You can also continue to add your player plots/war table assignments as normal.

New Rewards System

As we announced mumble number of months ago, our activity rewards are now going to be based on participation in mod plots rather than points you have to count up every AC period. With the exception of new specializations, rewards are tied to participation in a single mod plot and cannot be carried over for the future, so you’ll have to get them while they’re hot. We’ll post a reward claim form whenever a new mod plot goes up and leave it open for about a month.

Rewards are earned by writing tags. Generally, unless we specify otherwise due to some particular plot mechanic, five log tags (from you, not total) per thread will earn a reward. Rewards are organized into tiers. You unlock a tier by completing the requisite number of threads within a single modplot. So if you do one thread that has at least five log tags from you, you unlock Tier 1. If you have two, you unlock Tier 2, etc. There are three tiers.

Everyone is limited to three rewards total. You can downgrade your rewards from the second or third tiers to lower tiers if the higher tier items don’t appeal to you (i.e. you've unlocked Tier 3 but you'd rather have two things from Tier 2 instead), but you can only ever have three rewards total per mod plot.

We'll create unique themed rewards for each mod plot, including some that can only be claimed by one person. But the following standard rewards will always be available after every plot:

TIER 1

Runes. You can acquire any one canonical runestone to add to your character's weapon or armor so their sword has fire or their armor is imbued with some magical protection.
Rift items, gag/simple variety. Your character can find an item that came through a rift from another world, their own or not. Snack foods, posters of pop idols, underpants with elastic, etc. Things that are fun or sentimental but don't have much in the way of moving parts and won't generally be useful on missions.
Weird pets. Bring home a monkey or a wolf. The pet must be something that can at least semi-realistically be either permanently contained (sharks in tanks, small rodents, etc.) and trained/tamed out of being dangerous to the general populace. No dragons.
First anchor ability. If your character currently has a vanilla anchor, the anchor can develop either an offensive (shooting rift-energy projectiles) or defensive (generating a small rift-energy protective barrier) capability.

TIER 2

Fade-touched materials. Your character can acquire materials that have been touched by the Fade and have them made into a weapon, armor, or other item that has special abilities. There's a list here.
Half of a specialization. To reflect the time and effort it requires to actually learn a new specialization, acquiring a new one requires two rewards spread across two mod plots. You can use one of the canon specializations or create your own. If you create your own, put it in mod contact for us to review and approve.
Mabari. A mabari can imprint on your character. How your character acquires the mabari—getting unwillingly adopted by an old one without a master, intentionally buying a puppy, etc.—is up to you.
Weird mounts. A hart (or equivalent), dracolisk, or nuggalope.
Second anchor ability. If your character has a first anchor ability (see Tier 1), you can now have the second one too.

TIER 3

Enchanted or legendary items. You can use named items from canon, invent your own named item from made-up Thedasosian history, or have an enchanted item of your own invention or discovery that doesn't have a name and/or former owner. These can be items that are useful in combat, like weapons and armor, but they don't have to be. E.g., a self-filling tea pot.
Rift items (magical/useful/complex). Your character can come across an item from another world. This tier is for things more serious and useful than snacks and underwear. As a rule, advanced technology (if it is allowed at all) will be converted into something enchanted.
Griffon tamer. Now that the griffons are breeding freely in the mountains around Kirkwall (and the existing griffons are reaching middle age), your character can befriend, tame, and ride a wild griffon that you invent and name yourself.
Anchor upgrade. This reward is only available to characters who have had their anchors for more than nine months. With this upgrade anchor can grow to the size of the Herald’s anchor, allowing them to close rifts alone and exhibiting more powerful versions of the anchor abilities (if they have them).

The following items are not rewards under this system, but they have separate prerequisites. Once we clean up the current reward page (which will continue to be where you submit plot reports for Gallows upgrades), you'll be able to request these items there at any time during the year.

Non-Gallows housing. You still have to let us know where your character will live and how they will pay for it before getting a sign off for this, just so we can enforce some realism and not have anyone buying a Hightown mansion on a Riftwatch salary. New rifters also have to have finished their quarantine period before moving out of the Gallows.
Tier 4 armor (dragon scale or rift quartz). You have to participate in closing a rift or slaying a dragon and link us to a related thread.
Anchors. Same as Tier 4 armor. Your character can wind up with one at any time as long as you actually RP about them being around a rift to acquire it.

The following items no longer require purchase or permission of any kind. If you purchased one of these items after we announced we were ending the old AC system and would like to cancel that purchase and use the points for something else, you can do that–just go back to your comment and let us know.

Tier 1 and 2 armor and weapons.
Becoming a griffon rider.
Horses.

The following rewards will be bestowed upon the worthy by the gods for mysterious reasons at a time of their appointing:

Trebearchet.

You'll also be able to earn rewards from some player plots. Players who run war table missions or open-to-anyone player plots can also request to use this reward system to reward players for participating. If you offer rewards to participants in your player plots, you can also propose your own unique, plot-specific rewards to add to the tiers.

IC & PLOT UPDATES

Upcoming Events

The next mod plot will take place in mid-October and will see RIftwatch traveling up to the edge of the Silent Plains where the Exalted March has been bogged down for some months since its previous sudden advance north and surprise strike on Trevis in vengeance for Starkhaven. Riftwatch will be drawn there by some particular developments that the Inquisition believes they could help investigate, and there will be a variety of missions and desert adventures that present themselves once they arrive. More on this as the information becomes available IC.

IC Leader Updates

Effective immediately (or sooner!), Stephen Strange will hold the role of Head Healer.

Effective Firstfall 1 (that's November), Byerly Rutyer will be stepping down from the post of Head of the Diplomacy Division after four years of service. This information isn't public yet IC, and characters will only become aware when it's announced and/or told to them privately. There will ICly be a transition period planned to allow a more seamless hand-off.

OOC, we'll consider applications for the role after October 31, but you can begin submitting them now. (We're not considering applications for this role at the end of September because we don't want to rush anyone who wants to mull the idea over a bit.) If we don't receive any applications, it will remain open on the same monthly review schedule as all other leadership positions.

It's been quite a while since we had a Division Head opening, so as a reminder: like all leadership slots, these appointments are determined purely by the mods. Division Heads don't ICly or OOCly appoint their successors, and the remaining Division Heads don't OOCly choose who joins them, even though ICly they would be voting on the matter. Instead, we choose someone as mods and then ask the Div Heads to figure out a way to justify having voted at least 2-1 for the character we appoint. It's part of the deal.

So once it's announced that Byerly is retiring, everyone is welcome to RP about their ideas/suggestions/preferences or about attempting to angle for this person or that one to fill the slot. But in order to avoid creating conflicts between players, the actual decision is only ours, and we won’t take any IC campaigning into account.

The things we take into account when choosing any IC leader (as laid out on the app page), in no particular order, are:

Recent & historical activity levels
IC suitability, including leadership ability and relevant expertise/experience
OOC suitability, such as plot proactivity and a history of playing well with others
OOC application responses/agreement to the requirements

Item 3 is particularly important. Players of Division Heads have to communicate and collaborate with everyone in the game to help create and drive plot and RP for others. This involves things like (i) communicating IC and OOC with everyone regarding division business and war table missions, (ii) working with the other DH players to plan and run joint missions, (iii) working with us and other players to determine the division's (and Riftwatch's) IC goals and responses to plot developments, and (iv) working with us to facilitate player RP, like figuring out how to make it possible for a player to run a mission they've proposed as a player plot that might be on (or over) the line of what the DHs would normally ICly approve, or discussing how to finesse IC consequences to keep everyone's characterization as plausible as possible but not render someone's character unplayable, even if your Div Head character really would want to just execute them or something.

Tons of experience running plots is not required, nor is an encyclopedic knowledge of everything going on in Fade Rift's Thedas. We'll always be available to talk over details. What we do need is an interest in driving plot and willingness to dig in and work with us and the other DHs to brainstorm and develop overarching organizational goals and war table missions that feed into them.

IC suitability is also important, but keep in mind that this is relative. No member of Riftwatch leadership has ever really been "suitable" according to most of the world, let alone perfect. They all have some variety of legal or personality problems or limited experience (or only unverifiable rifter experience) if not all of the above. So for IC suitability, we basically ask "is this on its face a choice that would make the other Division Head characters look stupid?" Looking desperate is OK, but stupid—by which we mean a choice that is clearly completely unsuited and impossible to justify giving the position over just leaving it empty—is not. For instance, a rebel mage war criminal from a family known for involvement in treason who is constitutionally incapable of being polite would be a stupid choice for Diplomacy Division Head, so we'd probably leave the post open rather than force the Div Heads' players to try to ICly justify giving the job to Kostos Averesch.

If you're potentially interested and have questions, feel free to toss them at the Mod Contact. Applications should be submitted here.