User:Rainier

Current Projects

• Wiki Framework - Sidebar. Navigational Skeleton. Organizational Structure. Mostly done. Needs polishing!
• The Shadow - Developing the Shadow-layer of the grid and defining the major spirits and broods which inhabit it.
• The Underworld - Developing the Underworld-layer of the grid and the ghosts which haunt local, uh, haunts.
• Other Ephemera - Places of power, weak points in the Gauntlet, spirits, ghosts, all the spookiness.
• Extraspherical NPCs - Mages, werewolves, vampires and hunters.
• Goblin Market - Existing Market Rules and NPCs. Guidelines for market scenes and new marketeers.
• Kith Rebalancing - Because we all need impossible dreams now and then.
• Court Titles - Initial structure, so that every court has an easy means of getting involved.
• Influence - Rules for Open Player-Guided Groups (Families, Courts, Freeholds). Rules just need polishing and posting.
• Connection Factions - Groups in which players might RP and have Allies, Contacts or Status dots. +factions created. Need to add info to the wiki.

Perspective

On Extraspherical Activities

Though this game and its stories are focused on Changelings and Mortals (of varying degrees of strangeness), it is still set within the World of Darkness. There are other creepy things out there... and people hunting them. Our world includes mages, vampires, werewolves, hunters, spirits and ghosts. There may be other oddities to be revealed in Stories, but, as a general rule of thumb, there aren't Sin-Eaters (Geist), Possessed, Immortals, Prometheans or Changing Breeds running around.

We've spent some time developing those layers of the setting so that characters may, where appropriate, interact with them. They're woven into the theme. While spirits and ghosts are something we encourage players to use in their stories, abiding all rules and theme guidelines, entities from other spheres (MtA, WtF, VtR) are the domain of staff and should not be parts of your story without staff approval; staff STs have guidelines for how to use them!

On Influence

We wanted a consistent set of rules for all Open Player-Guided Groups across the boards to make supporting them easier for us and keep the expectations for players simple. We consider Families, Courts and Freeholds to be Open Player-Guided Groups. Open in that darn near anyone can join; as long as base requirements are met for any of these groups, PCs can join them without requiring approval from other PCs. Player-Guided in that it's our hope that players will feel comfortable telling stories, handling the administration and determining the direction of these groups (within theme!) without a lot of staff oversight. As the game opens, we'll have our hands in these groups, but it's our goal to step back and let you guys run the show in a very short time frame. We'll still be there to help and keep an eye on theme, but we mostly want you to be able to govern yourselves. It's our hope that the Influence system will make that easier for both players and staff.

On Court Titles

By the books, only the Winter Court really has a clearly defined internal court structure and a manageable list of court positions within a freehold while the other courts are left to kind of figure things out as they go. While this may work well in a pen-and-paper game where PCs are generally on-screen, so to speak, only for adventure and mystery and other conflicts and oddities, it's far less practical for a MUSH where PCs are on-screen for much of their day-to-day lives and players get the opportunity to explore their characters' involvement in the courts or freehold in a lot more depth.

We wanted to give players in every court the same opportunities by providing a balanced structure at game launch. These titles and positions are not set in stone. As players take over the management of the courts and freehold, they may wish to make changes based on what people actually want to do with their characters. We are totally okay with this!

As for the ranks and titles going in, I used the seasonal court content in Lords of Summer as a starting point. The Winter Court provided an easy starting template. I then fit some of the titles and positions provided for the other seasonal courts into the same structure, which then necessitated the addition of another position for Winter to balance those four courts out. The titles and roles for Autumn and Spring were heavily trimmed in an attempt to reduce redundancy--as many of the roles were represented in entitlements or the freehold subgroups--and keep the special positions limited.

From there, I just made shit up for the remaining four courts, trying to maintain parallels to the seasonal structure where possible. For instance, the first Influence rank is usually populated by those who aren't deeply engaged in the court or who might not stick around, whereas the third Influence rank is where people really start arming up to fight for the court when necessary. Most of the courts have someone appointed to the freehold to enact and organize rites, rituals and social events of relevance to their court. Most have a freehold position for someone to act as their diplomat, reaching out to other courts or freehold subgroups as necessary. I also tried to make sure that each court has at least one role or responsibility completely unique to them, such as Dawn's Catalyst whose job it is to keep the rest of the freehold from stagnation, prodding others to do their jobs when they've gone quiet for too long.

Though I created this content, I am not attached to it. I won't be hurt if the players want to change things as stories demand. My primary intention was providing equal opportunities across the courts so that anyone can get involved, no matter which court best suits their PC. I also wanted to create a structure for, as Annapurna puts it, players to RP against; a system with a tiered leadership structure and a limited number of special positions available provides opportunity for conflict, which is the basis of a great many stories. We don't want to bar involvement, but we do want involvement to provide stories, whether those stories are proving yourself to leadership, taking out the competition or finding a new way to work together is entirely up to you! As long as players keep those two things in mind, that these titles should provide the potential for both opportunity and conflict, they're free to change things as their groups evolve.

On Kith Rebalancing

The existing CtL 1.0 kiths are so imbalanced it hurts. We've all seen how the imbalance is reflected in a game's +census. We would really, really love to see a broad variety of characters doing lots of strange and interesting things, but we understand how hard it is to get excited about being a Steepscrambler with a +3 to Climbing when you could, instead, be a Flowering with 9-again on three separate skills. The existing mechanical imbalances create a barrier for creativity as players are drawn to the better blessings. We don't blame you. It's easier to bend your story around good mechanics than to try to make crumby mechanics work for your story.

So, we're redoing, uh, everything.

My goals in rebalancing the kiths are:

• Add new kiths to all seemings besides Fairest to provide equal numbers across all seemings and offer a few new options to players.
• Maintain the original spirit of the kith and, where possible, keep the blessings as similar as possible to the original.
• Provide a passive ability (always on or, at least, no cost) and an active ability (requiring glamour to activate) to each kith. This idea is stolen right from the CtL 2.0 drafts which have been released by Onyx Path.
• Balance anything I take away (/9 in three skills without any qualifiers!?) with something new that hopefully adds depth to the kith in question.
• Give everyone High Wyrd bonuses.
• Help Beasts get something nice that's not just Yet Another Animal Ken Specialization. (Seriously, three of them? C'mon.)

There's a chance that we'll get into play and find that something I've made is completely imbalanced, necessitating some tweaking after the game goes live. We will try very hard to prevent that from happening by doing our best to balance and test before launch, but we can't promise there won't be some changes as we go.

On Connection Factions

I find it helpful for both players and staff if there are defined options for Allies, Contacts and Status. It'll be easier for us to know what any given merit will get you in our setting, and we hope it'll be easier for you to make use of these merits and interact with other people invested in the same factions. If you feel something's missing from whatever we've made, put in a +req/pitch.