Late afternoon sun streamed through the window of Arrens’ study, deceptively hiding the intense fall chill in the air. He took a deep breath, enjoying a moment’s reprieve from the stack of term papers on his desk before picking up his pen again to make notes- only to be interrupted again by an odd noise.

Sounds like someone is wheeling in a cart full of rocks?

The sound stopped, and he could still hear Aely walking around, so he went back to the paper again.

A few moments later, and he could swear he heard someone taking a hatchet to something… in his kitchen. Alarmed, he scampered around his desk and out into the hallway.

“Aely? Aely! Is everything ok?”

The offending paladin popped out of the kitchen, hatchet in hand. “Yeh, ‘m fine. Why?”

“I… you… hatchet? What are you doing?”

“Makin’ pies.” The expression on her face was deadpan, as though this should be the obvious answer to why she was wielding a hatchet to the kitchen.

“With a hatchet?”

Aely flicked a bit of orange goo off her shirt. “Yeh, gotta cut up th’ punkins somehow…”

“Pun… oh. Oh! Where’d you get the pumpkins?”

“Th’ last ay th’ garden ones. Found a few that’re no’ squishy yet. Figured I’d make pies t’ bring th’ wee ones feast t’morrow, yeh?”

Arrens grinned. “Good idea too, love. I’m sure they’ll be devoured. Do you need help?”

“Nah.” Aely brandished her hatchet ferociously. “Just gonna roast ‘em up an’ make pies. An’ I’m mostly through th’ punkins. Hope I dinna bother ye too much?”

Arrens shook his head. “Of course not, but I think I might come join you in the kitchen, especially if you’re going to be smashing pumpkins with a hatchet. It sounds like it might be more entertaining than these term papers. The last few have been just dreadful.”

She made a face at him, and went back to her pumpkins, chopping them into manageable pieces for the oven. It wasn’t hard work, but there were quite a few hunks of orange squash gore spattered around the kitchen when she finished. She did not TRY to fling bits of goo at Arrens, but it wasn’t her fault he was within flinging range.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Ficlet Friday: Pilgrim’s Bounty

I’m wondering if other servers have similar forum stickies, and also a little disheartened at the lack of attention that it’s gotten outside of the group of people I already know.

I KNOW that there is other roleplay on the server, so I’m guessing it’s just not found its audience yet (the Feathermoon Forum is no longer a conglomeration of lots of server activity, it’s kind of died).

I’ve been involved in a discussion on Google Plus where people are talking about major changes in the game affecting any kind of server continuity/community, and I’ve definitely seen that over the last two expansions. Between the changes to the battlegrounds and LFD and the changes to raiding (especially in Cataclysm) that favor smaller groups, plus the upcoming “Looking for Raid” feature, there’s not the same kind of ties to other players that used to exist.

Problem is at this point, that network is long gone. Enough people that acted like the connective fiber of the community have moved on to other games, much like I did. The result is the server has no cohesive community anymore. The dungeon finder eroded the fabric of our server for years, and now that those people that actually cared at trying to keep the once cohesive community alive left, there just doesn’t seem to be one. Everyone exists in their own insular guild community and rarely pokes their head out into the larger one. - Mark T from Aggronaut.com

And that affliction has taken root in the Roleplay community for sure – call it Roleplay Turtling, if you will. The changes to the game may be good things – and I’m hard pressed to argue that the battlegrounds change or LFD were bad ideas – but they HAVE changed the community.

Thing is, I firmly believe that community (and gaming) are what you make of it, and that I’m not the only one feeling that change. So! In light of the recent post on the Feathermoon forum, a Friday Five about RP and Community:

Where are your RP hotspots, where people gather when they’re looking for RP but don’t have anything scheduled?

Do any events still happen weekly/monthly/whateverly on your server?

What kind of events get your attention and draw you in, versus being “ho-hum” and not something you’d schedule yourself to show up for?

Is there acceptance of pick up RP or little RP on your server? Is there public RP?

How would you increase the visibility of RP and help to draw in new folks?

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Friday Five: Increasing Roleplay Visibility

Except… for all extents and purposes, Azeroth is a world without electricity. Which means it’s probably a world without universally available air conditioning. (Of course, gnomes are a likely exception) Fortunately, Azeroth is also a world with “climate controlled zones”… but that doesn’t mean we can’t add a little seasonal flair to our Midsummer celebration.

As such I propose a Friday Five-hundred! If you choose to take the challenge, write a 500 word (or fewer) ficlet that addresses the following prompt in some way:

A record-breaking heat wave hits Azeroth just in time for Midsummer.

When you’re done, post the fic (on a forum, on your blog) and leave a comment so I can go read them!

Questions to get started: How does your character deal with the heat? Do they try to “stick it out” in the city? Take a trip to the beach? Maybe go visit Winterspring or go hang out in the Library in the Storm Peaks? Is your character an engineer, attempting to find a way to cool buildings or rooms or people? How is your character doing health wise, and will this affect them? What about plate armor wearers? Does your elemental shaman cut a deal with Air? Maybe your frost mage keeps himself cool with a small, portable blizzard?

I’ll admit, this was prompted by both my own reality (which has been sauna-like for the last few weeks), and by a wonderful image, suggested by the Panzercow, of Aely sitting in front of a running Gnomish fan with her hair draped over the back of a chair, eating frozen grapes. We’ll see if the fic ends up being publishable

Happy Summer!

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Friday Five-Hundred: Midsummer Sun

He writes:

I was playing Fulthruttle and one of the guild leaders called out for defenders to Stormwind. I answered the call and popped my teleporter to Toshley’s Station with the plan of hitting Shattrath and then taking the portal to Stormwind.

And when I came out of the teleporter, only my Evil Side made it. Yes, I’d been hit with Soul Split: Evil!

So what happens when a gnomish engineer goes evil? Why, they go Mad Scientist, of course. I think her finest moment was explaining to her guild master that she could easily deal with the Horde as long as she was allowed to kill everyone else in the city at the same time; she could think of five ways to do it, although her Puppy-Blood Fuelled Murder Engine(tm) wasn’t one of them. Yet.

Hence, this idea for a Friday Five.

1. How would your character react to a Soul Split: Evil?
2. How would your character react to a Soul Split: Good?

I thought it was a fun prompt, and the idea of Aely getting Soul Split: Evil was kind of a strange one – it took me some figuring to come up with much of anything. An experiment in extremes, I suppose!

Have fun and happy Friday!

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Friday A-Muse-Ment

This is one of those amorphous blog post ideas that I’ve had rattling in my head this week. It may or may not make a successful post – I’ll leave that up to you guys to decide. (Or rather, I’ll wait to see if I get a bunch of confused comments. )

Character strength can be a really hard concept to define. Sure you can pick up on a few things that make characters “strong” – defined, consistent personalities, depth of personality and story, the ability to be an agent of change and to change and grow themselves. But those are all pretty “fluid” topics, and we could go into huge lists of ways to make a character stronger, or ways to increase their depth, or whatever.

A lot of times, though, people suggest giving your character a weakness to make them stronger.

Which seems, quite honestly, counterintuitive.

It’s not.

Giving a character a weakness doesn’t mean necessarily that they become weak. It’s almost more applicable to say “give the character balance”, but since people usually have no trouble giving their character awesome-traits, the discussion usually boils back down to giving your character some not-so-awesome traits. While you can always throw an unrelated weakness into the mix, it’s possible to have weaknesses grow from strengths (and not in that really kitschy way that people talk about for job interviews).

One way to do this is to take an event or situation and answer a few questions about the character, to see how it works out.

As an example, since this sort of thing came up in RP this week, let’s poke around in Aely’s brain a little (if you don’t mind my presuming that Aely is a strong character).

Aely’s backstory contains some pretty dark times. That’s not unusual, since most of Azeroth has been involved in wars for all of recent human memory (the Elves get a bigger perspective on this one). Within those dark times she experienced some pretty heavy trauma that left her both physically and emotionally scarred.

That event left her stronger – she rebuilt herself physically and mentally, is a much more solid, stable person, and has very concrete beliefs because of it. She also has strong motivation for being a better healer, particularly of certain types of wounds, and is extremely protective of the people she cares about. But that event also left her weaker – heavy trauma like that has far-reaching mental implications, and if she is surprised by someone else suffering from something like what she went through, it makes her extremely upset. If that person is someone she cares about, it’s worse, because then she feels guilty for not being able to get past her own physical and emotional reactions to be able to help them. She wants to be able to protect the people she loves, and when she fails to, compounded with her own mental issues getting in the way of her being able to care for people, it makes her pretty upset.

Looking at the description of Aely, there’s kind of a formula that can go towards helping other characters:

1. What is the event? (Obviously this should be something significant for the character – either good or bad)
2. How does the character react before, during, and after the event?
3. How does that event make the character stronger?
4. How does that event make the character weaker?
5. How does the character think about and relate to what happened? How does that affect future events (if it affects them at all)?

From that formula we can take an Orc that spent time in the internment camps (a horrible event). He suffered from the lethargic lack of energy and mental fog due to lack of demon blood. During the internment, he became almost mindless, afterwards he hated himself for not fighting more strongly and developed an ingrained hatred of Humans, and a distrust of all Demonic and Shadow magic. He also took to training himself in the shamanic arts, and is extremely loyal to Thrall and to his comrades in battle.

This, in the end, makes him a stronger character – he is thinking about what happened and reacting to it, being introspective about his own reactions, and acting on what he finds. He is stronger physically and mentally, and will be very hard to dupe into any sort of subservient position in the future. But it also makes him weaker – hatred and irrational fear can blindside even the most stable of characters, and while that might not come up in every single story or situation, if he is written and played consistently with those traits, then that one event is responsible for character growth, character depth, character strength, and character weakness.

When people talk about how to build good RP characters, they often suggest creating “balance”. Hopefully this will help spark some creativity towards dealing with character creation.

Life-defining moments don’t all have to be good, bad, happy, or sad – but every life has a few defining moments and experiences. (Obviously not every event will be life-defining or life-changing – that will depend entirely on the character.) Sometimes those happen over a period of time (like both Aely and our Unnamed Orc), sometimes they happen in a sudden moment. Either way they can affect a character from that point forward.

Thinking about a character’s defining moments (and how they react afterward) is a good start toward creating depth and believability.

Since it’s Friday, feel free to take the formula and use it like a “Friday Five”, either for a character you already have developed and active or for a new one you imagine up in your head.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Strength and Weakness