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Unfortunately, things were pretty difficult and up in the air when people started jumping into this thread. I didn't have any ideas for it for a while, but now that things are settling into more of a rhythm on this side, I'm interested in picking the thread back up. I'm going to be closing out a thread or two on another RP site this weekend, so I might use some of that freed up headspace for brainstorming here again.

Emily will, also unfortunately, require a rewrite. When I started in this thread, I was kind of mystified and intimidated by FT lore. Luca and I have talked extensively about it, but it's always been difficult for me to grasp because we grew up in such different communities. Spiderweb and CalRef were communities with lots of STEM people. They had a real, if sometimes controversial and less-than-effective, organisational structure that drove activity and interest for the people there. I grew up in online RP communities (mostly Zelda-based but also some original settings) where most people were artists and nobody knew anything about STEM. Our sites were ratty and prone to break because none of us understood how to build or create things online. And that sort of shaped my view when I was trying to fathom FT. And so Emily was, to put it lightly, a complete dumbass with no ability to do anything in this cool code magic world.

So I'm going to try and brainstorm how she/I would actually be in this situation and attempt to take the prompt a little more seriously than I did before.

I will inspire you back to reviewing games (because you are a good writer and should do more of it) by sharing one I just wrote for Potion Permit :P

--

I don't know who this game is for. I played for six hours, focusing on fulfilling quests and beelining progression, and I still felt like I was being held back from accessing the full range of possibilities. Potion Permit is like if Stardew Valley had a different art style and worse mechanics. You're a chemist, which is cool, but you're in a town of people who don't like you. You're a doctor, which is also cool, but your home and clinic are in shambles, and the gameplay loop is grinding out foraging materials in the local woods. The game has almost no interest in the actual idea of being a chemist or a village doctor.

The town and people in it are somewhat interesting, but a lot of them just feel like worse versions of Stardew characters. Like, the "homeless person" lives in a shack (still labelled a tent) and you overhear a conversation where he chooses to be homeless despite having plenty of money. That's really weird. There's one interesting character, and she's the apprentice blacksmith named Runeheart. Everyone else is an incredibly bland stereotype. Young rascal, upstanding nun, friendly barmaid, and the mayor is Mr. Monopoly. To befriend these characters, you must talk to them every day (they have one line per affection level, which they repeat every time you talk to them) and/or give them a gift, limited to the reward you receive for healing people.

The main draw of this game for me was that you're a healer/potion maker. But that means you're using your cauldron to make potions, which comes down to using the ingredients you've harvested (each of which gives you a 3- or 4-block tetris piece) to fill a pattern. Upgrading the cauldron gives you more space to add ingredients, so you can be less efficient or make more complex potions. Being a doctor requires you approach the sick villagers, who arrive in your clinic and activate a loud alarm, and listen to them say "my [body part] feels weird". Afterward, you hover over that body part and click "diagnose", leading to one of two minigames, either extremely slow simon says or extremely slow dance dance revolution. After succeeding in diagnosing the person, you automatically know which potion is required and can apply it with another click.

I gave the game a chance long enough to upgrade all of my tools, my cauldron, and to unlock the first forage expansion, but god it was soul-draining to get that far. Every advancement in the game requires money, in the realm of several hundred gold to over a thousand, but the only ways to get money are through healing people (one person might arrive every 2-3 days, and will pay you 150-300 gold for successfully treating them) or selling excess potions (this option opens up after several days, and is limited to a limited drop box that gets emptied once per day). The advancements also each require at least 100 wood and 100 stone, which require you to interface with the main gameplay loop, foraging. This requires you to hit a tree with an axe 3-5 times, netting you 4-7 sticks per tree, or to hit a stone with a hammer 3-5 times, netting you 4-7 pebbles. All trees, rocks, and plants (3-5 hits with a scythe for potion ingredients) respawn in exactly the same place every day, with no variety. Upgrading your tools lessens the number of hits required to forage, but not by much.

Once I opened up the expanded foraging territory, new creatures and plants appeared, but rocks and trees were mostly unchanged. They gave more pebbles and sticks, but not a lot more pebbles and sticks. That was the point where it became clear to me that the game wasn't worth playing any further.

Overall, Potion Permit is a series of systems that are severely underdeveloped. The art and music are inoffensive and pleasant. The townsfolk have interesting designs, but very little development or writing outside of the relatively rare quest, and even then it's nothing particularly special. The gameplay mechanics are boring, the prices relative to what you're able to forage require a ton of unnecessary grinding. And the main draw of the game, being a potion maker and doctor, is barely focused on in the game at all. If this game gets significantly better later on, that's unfortunate, because nothing in the first six hours was worthwhile.

Based.

>the 27th

hi luca

The proposal was submitted for vote yesterday :P

https://vote.calref.ca/vote/60

Both of these concerns would be relatively moot if the Councillor of Cartography map were, instead, a game map that rest every term and did not depend on stable transitions between administrations and did not promise long-term continuity, but interest in that manner of service has never been expressed.

This actually sounds pretty cool. I'd like to see if anyone would be interested in term-long maps. Maybe that would inspire some more RP activity?

But you're right about the issues with my suggestion. I'll be happy to second this unless anyone else has thoughts on it.

I agree that the map should be handled by us again, but I have a thought on this. What do you think of us taking the original map over again, but leaving the Councillor of Cartography position in place to oversee secondary maps and RP treaties? That way we have a consistently-updated map, but if people do have novel ideas on things they can change or enhance the position with, they still have some opportunity for that.

Riza woke up to notice two things: first, a single, unbroken stream of light was shining through the canopy and directly into their eyes. Secondly, Lyndh was standing over them hoisting that giant sword over his shoulder and staring suspiciously at them. It was an interesting experience, seeing tiny eyes over the edge of that gigantic bush of a moustache. Riza raised a hand to shade their eyes and grunted. "What?"

Lyndh grunted back, then pointed. Sitting up, Riza looked in the direction to find that a small pack of squirrels had crossed the line of where the wards should have caught them. The warrior snorted, then laughed loudly and walked away. Riza stood up, glaring after him. "Yeah yeah, okay fine the ward didn't work." They took a moment, attempting to shake some of the leaves from their hair, but found it wasn't working. And that's when they noticed Kaegan standing in the middle of some nearby trees looking confused. Well, if it wasn't literally everyone waking up before the person keeping watch. They approached Kaegan and looked in the same direction he did.

Kaegan continued looking out into the forest, unmoved. Passionlessly, he said "That guy was Scottish." He turned to Riza, "I guess he thought we should know."

The mage looked at Kaegan, then back out in the direction of where he'd been looking. "Yeah yeah, okay fine the ward didn't work."

Kaegan tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. "Was it a ward against the Scottish?" he asked blankly.

"Primarily," Riza replied, "but I was hoping to keep out other evil spirits as well."

"Well, it seemed like a friendly evil spirit. I guess, considering we're not dead. Or stew."

Rizali began tearing down the tent while they talked. If evil Scottish spirits were about, they better make good time. "They always do, until they pick you up and throw you across a field. Some kind of competition, to see who can throw a person the farthest. Or they'll make you into stew, yeah. One of the two."

"Yeah. One of the two," Kaegan replied. He continued to stare into the woods in the direction the strange individual had both come and gone. Were it not for the large human-sized hole in the foliage, one could make the case that he had made up the event entirely.

"Hey Rizali?" Kaegan asked. "What are the Scottish?"

Riza stopped in the middle of attempting to collapse one of the little pole things that never seem to work properly, and looked into the middle distance. "I have no idea, but they sound scary. What do you think they are?"

Kaegan began to look for this things to pick up and start taking onward in the journey, but seemed to realise quickly that he arrived with nothing and would be departing in the same manner. "I don't know. He seemed like a normal person who just talked weird."

"This fucking," Rizali pushed the plastic thing to the side just as Lyndh came around to do it for him. How lucky to have someone else to do the narrative necessities while Riza and Kaegan talked. "Anyway, yeah I guess he might have just been someone from the village? Or some kind of crazed hermit. Did he have any crows with him?"

"Nope," Kaegan responded. "No clothes neither."

"Oh wow. Huh, how about that. We should probably keep going. I don't think we'll keep finding random people further into the forest, hopefully. Did he say anything else?"

"No. Also your big guy's done. He's a lot faster at that than you are."

Rizali looked over to see Lyndh had completed folding up the tent, and was carrying it over one shoulder like a pack. "Huh. You know, Kaegan, I wonder if Lyndh might be Scottish. It's been on my mind ever since I learned what Scottish people were two minutes ago."

Kaegan blinked a moment and considered the implications of the designation, then he said simply "Can't be, he's wearing clothes."

"Damn, you're right. Oh, by the way, did you happen to see any tree people?"

"Like Lyndh?" asked Kaegan blankly.

"Wha- no, like a person but made of wood."

"Like Lyndh?" asked Kaegan blankly again.

"What do- Kaegan, I don't think you're taking this seriously. I'm asking you if you saw a tree person."

"Like Lyndh?" asked Kaegan blankly again-again.

"I had the strangest dream last night."

"About the tree people..."

"Yes, exactly, about the tree people. I dreamt one came into the camp and asked such strange questions. Either it really happened and I fell asleep mid-conversation, which would be embarrassing, or I dreamt it. Dreamed it? Dreamted it?"

Kaegan inspected the camp for people other than the three of them, but they did indeed appear to otherwise be alone. "Well, they're not here right now, I guess," he responded.

"It must have been a dreamt then, that's good to know. Is there anything else you want to do in this part of the forest?"

"Leeeeeave it?" Kaegan blinked. As if the strangeness wasn't bad enough, it would clearly take more mental strength and patience to endure this place if Rizali wanted to come up with any other activities than just getting to the other side.

"That sounds like a great idea. Then we should make like a tree and leaf immediately."

Emily wiped the sweat from her forehead and looked up at the sky. A cloudless, endless expanse of blue as far as the eye could see, entirely unchanged from what it had been the last time she'd looked up a few minutes before. She worried sometimes that most people didn't see the effort everyone was putting into rebuilding the Refuge after the calamitous upheavals, and how necessary the work was. If not us, then who? the thought had passed through her mind several times since arriving and joining the long-term project.

It wasn't a terribly long distance between the old portal arch and the admin tower: only a couple of kilometres, but she'd made the trip several times. Emily knelt down at the side of the path, where several flowers were growing in harmony with one another, and created one more to join them. Just one more little project to make things happier around here. On one of the trips through the area, she had seen some bees clinging to the bits of clover interspersed among other types of grass, and that had led to this project. One flower for every time she passed through here, and surely the bees would be happy long term.

She continued her walk. Her nature magic, as it had been known, came from a very different place than the tech-based magic more commonly found in Refuge admin lore. Unfortunately, shortly before she'd passed through a new portal to this place, her old realm- and the source of her existing magic- had collapsed upon itself, Adjusting to life in a new place was already going to be a difficult prospect when the previous home was one she had built herself, but doing it without her old magic had proven somewhat extreme. People didn't necessarily understand her joy at being able to grow a single flower at a time, but that had come after a few years of magical burnout and a few failed starts at rebuilding her skills. The rust was finally coming off, and what a delight that was.

The admin tower loomed in front of her. Loom might not have been the most apt word in the situation, but it was one that Emily enjoyed using. Loomed! The correct word would more likely be towered, but imagine thinking "the tower is towering over me" and not laughing. But the tower was there, and it was very tall. She enjoyed the simple majesty of it, and all the effort that had been put into a nice, wild nature space around it.

She entered the tower and began trying to magic herself to the top floor. She strained with the effort of opening up a cheeky portal, but it wasn't to be. She pressed the button on her magic bracelet- brzzzzzzzzzzh- and then pressed another one. A simplebot came out of a vent nearby, then just sort of hovered nearby. She looked at it, then at her bracelet, and then back to the simplebot. "Oh! I see. I would like to get to floor 16 please."

The simplebot continued just staring at her.

She tapped gently on the top of it. "Hello little computer friend. I would like to get to floor 16, please."

The simplebot continued.

She looked around. Nobody, typical. Well, then she wouldn't be embarrassed about this. She knelt down and whispered something to it, some sort of secret magic words only the simplebots and Emily knew. And then the simplebot turned and approached one of the walls, beckoning for Emily to follow it. She did so, and found that it had led her to an elevator. "Oh, sick, I didn't know we had elevators," she said as she entered it and pushed the "16" that only appeared as she held her hand up. "I wonder if they're new."

"The state of things these days," Joshua complained. His gaze was hard to judge, he was either looking at the far away, ruined buildings, or at the weird admin furiously working away in front of him. It was always hard to tell with Joshua because he was rarely doing anything but complaining, whether it be to himself, out loud to terrorise those around him, or recording it into a wrist-bound recording device that broadcast his words to all three people who listened. He shook his head. "Back in my day, things weren't this bad. I can't believe the youth let all this crumble to nothing. You're all such a disappointment. You know, I wouldn't have let this happen, I would have stopped it, if it hadn't been for the damned war getting in the way. That was your fault as well, with all your avocados and insistence on cobbed corn."

Emily, of course, wasn't listening. She was instead hard at work with a nail file, doing her best to wear down and break a long-standing travel rune that was cut into one of the various stone archways. The rune glowed brightly: it believed it had done its job perfectly well, and from one perspective it had. It had held this portal open since time immemorial, longer than anyone could possibly hope to remember, allowing constant travel for at least the last several minutes. "Alllllllll right," she said, taking a second to wipe her brow and blinking several times to regain her focus, "almost done. What were you saying, Joshua?" she continued working away at the travel rune.

"Damned kids, can't pay attention to anything, can't listen to anyone. I've been so disrespected, nobody listens to me. I have good ideas, you know. I should have been made an admin, not you."

"Such is the plight of the social admin," she responded, leaning back and cracking her back, "closing these travel portals going in and out of the Refuge." She looked through the portal, the red and yellow glow of the constant blasts of fire lighting up her face. The sound coming through was a persistent roar, sounding like both a long-lasting dumpster fire and the screams of all manner of terrible people about how they were specifically oppressed. "Can you believe that place exists?"

"And you snowflakes are all so obsessed with cancelling people oh my god. I used to be a big-time GP personality in there, you know? I was on top of the world in 2004, owning all the little noobs, and now you're trying to close it off forever."

She exhaled, a satisfied smile crossing her face. "Yeah."

"And what kind of admin are you supposed to be anyway? Aren't admins supposed to be magic?"

"I'm actually great at magic," Emily perked up, excited to finally be tested in a way that mattered. She leaned closer and placed a hand over the top of Joshua's boot. From the top of the tattered black cloth, a beautiful white flower grew. "Ta-daaaaaaa" she said.

"What, you can grow flowers?"

"Flower, singular!" She nodded. "Where I came from, we didn't have any practitioners of the types of sorcery that exists here. We all just sat around telling stories and wearing pointy ears and occasionally throwing rocks at one another. Our admins had wonderful nature magic that could grow and nurture great trees with branching storylines and so many little pieces of life, but it doesn't translate super well to this space, so I've been working pretty hard on making the things I already know work here, you know?"

"But you can't do anything actually helpful."

"Well, Luca gave me this neat bracelet," Emily said, gesturing to her wrist, around which rested a lovely green ring with several buttons on it. "They said it'll allow me easy access and... routine? routine actions? I think that was it, something like that anyway. Anyway, I haven't figured out what most of the buttons do, but check this out." She pressed the second button, and the bracelet released a "brzzzzzzzzzzh" sound.

"Anyway, I'll come back and work more on this later. It doesn't look like the portal is quite ready to close. I've got a lot to do, many flowers to plant and maybe I'll go work on that tree again soon. Nice seeing you, Josh, good luck with the blog!"

"It's not a blog!" Josh replied as she walked away, stomping his flower-bedazzled boot on the ground and being relieved to see the knife pop out. "It's a stream, and I'm going to have so many fans! And stop calling me Josh, my name is R4z0R_Bl4d3!"

I remember the first time I joined a forum. I was 11 or 12 (I think? It was somewhere around that age anyway) and we'd only just gotten the internet a few months before. I had somehow found my way to a Nintendo fan community, and they had two Zelda groups- an old one that had been around since the late 90s and a new one that they were hoping would attract more people, as some of the major personalities of the old group were inflammatory types. The new forum wouldn't load on my computer, so I joined the old one, and somehow this dumb pre-teen child was chatting with people who were in their late teens and early 20s.

It was such a weird experience. I grew up in a hyper-conservative area and had never met anyone outside of that belief structure. And over the next two decades or so, I've become a massively different person than I likely would have had it not been for the internet. Being exposed to other people and making friends and having shared interests with other people drastically affected my life, and I found myself later trying to run communities so that I could help provide that safety net for others.

Something that scares me is the idea that, if I'd been that kid on the internet as it is now, I might never have found a nice community. All these social media platforms have so many algorithms designed specifically for the Tenno to suck someone into a spiral of echo chambers to reinforce what they had previously believed. I might have gotten into alt-right Youtube or found my way to a weird subreddit hive where I wouldn't have gotten that space to grow and learn.

That feeling of barely dodging a bullet just by virtue of when I was on the internet is always in the back of my mind. And it's why I'm really happy CalRef is here. I've only been around for – oh wow, almost six years I guess- but it really does represent a space where we try to promote the openness and freedom that the internet used to represent. And it's hard to cut through that cynicism and jaded exterior that the internet has now, but I'm happy to keep working for it with everyone else.

I think it's a great idea to try and cut down on the distractions and things that are outside ourselves on the internet and try to get back to just creating things. I'll take this message and this hope and try writing more, and maybe go on a walk later.

Happy Refuge Day!

ALL THAT I DO

Once upon a star supernova, twenty six legendary cards descended from our tall card tower. Hooray!
Our newfound love Testlandia, wore splendid magenta fursuit, specifically commissioned to contain BEES! It buzzed through rainbow, over walls yonder, and into the sky. At midnight, Gerald Ford erupted from his volcanic lair, overflowing with meritorious service. Both chambers reloaded their legislative shotguns while removing glistering shirts, heated by lava undershirts. Ford devoured the 535 imperial guards, while copper prices skyrocketed, and legislation stalled.

Meanwhile, the legendary crocodile, Crocodile Irwin, initiated CPR for the legislature of New Hartoria. Mercifully, HS wrote textwalls of nonsense which follows:
"Spinning crickets mercifully inundate Equestria"

Obviously, this sucked. Mercifully, Andraste (Jesus Ronaldo) smote tobacco from a Tevinter corpse. Aromatic! It smelled. Unclear directions confounded the manufacturing executives, who decided there was no better fate than death. Opportunistically, they provided Andraste more timeshares filled 37% of the time by Tevinter, but why? For this, the ultimate price of three dollars and forty seven cents must be paid.

Dissenting Justice reminds us of prison. Thanks Justice! Very cool! Not until Alexander Wallexander jumped out and landed beside several upside-down teletubbies doing yoga

Fortune 500 Award Winning

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 68
Luca: 59
Argo: 30
Kal: 23
Aav: 14
Wasc: 10
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Fox: 4
Catherine: 3
A819: 3
Zuk: 2
Ruby: 2
Potato: 2
Sueloc: 1
Istillian: 1

Lynue sat at her desk, having somehow taken plenty of time to arrange and organise the office without the Councillor arriving. She had even taken the extra steps of colour-coding the various papers on her desk, from yellow to off-white to white that was slightly less off. And now she'd become so accustomed to arranging things that she was constantly rearranging her own thumbs... or perhaps that was just fidgeting.

She was a bit nervous at the prospect of meeting with Councillor Alanganin, especially unannounced. It wasn't the type of thing that usually happened. No, it wouldn't do at all, there was no world in which someone would drop by a library to meet with a librarian when they had an office. She wasn't even the head librarian, she was just in charge of balancing the books. And right now, they were about as stacked as they could possibly be without the whole operation toppling over. Lynue glanced over at the precariously-stacked tower of hardcover tomes, and began to sweat.

She stood up, took a couple steps out from behind her desk, and then hesitated. What if he walked in right as she was about to open the door? She would look impatient, that would be so unbecoming. Oh fiddlesticks, the whole world was topsy-turvy today, and she didn't know what else there was to do. The librarian glared at the book on her desk. "This is your doing, you beast," she muttered to herself, "I know it for a fact."

A curse upon her lot in life, she could wait no longer. Lynue approached the door and opened it a crack. The crack was much too small to see anything, unless her luck had placed someone within the narrow band of sight it afforded her. No, she would have to open it further. And in doing so, she found that there was no Councillor in sight. No, just a very confused Constable Constabulary looking from one side to the other.

"Psst," she hissed, trying to get his attention. He noticed and walked over to her, scratching his head. "Where is the Councillor?"

"I swear I left him right here, Lynue, but when I left your office I couldn't find him. I've nearly turned the library upside down trying to find him." The boy shrugged, "Nothing doing though."

"Hm," she stepped out in to the hallway and stroked her chin. "Perhaps he was offended what with being left alone without wine. That's a government official's lot, right? They faff about places and the small people give them wine?"

"Oh fye," Constable Constabulary said, slapping his own forehead. "You're right. I apologise, this was all my fault. I really beansed this one right up."

"Consider it a learning experience, lad. If he's no longer here, I will take my leave, however. I have to deliver something-"

"Oh right, you can't do that! There's another person here to see you!"

Lynue could barely give a constrained smile. "I suppose organising my office won't have gone to waste, then. Please see them in presently- and," she added with a conspiratorial grumble, "if they have also disappeared, please let me know before I pull my hair out waiting again."

Discord continues to make terrible decisions I guess :c

But forums forums forums! This is the natural state of people, posting on forums 

So here's what I'm most interested in. Carmilla came out (ayy) in 1872, and Dracula wasn't published until 1897. Both are very similar in construction and plot, but the differences are that Dracula is more of an outside force throughout the story than Carmilla, and the story of Dracula travels a lot further.

Why wasn't Carmilla the story that exploded in popularity instead? It's so much better, and it's legitimately scary.

Sorry but you are not allowed to view spoiler contents.

I feel like Dracula became more popular for a few reasons, but I'm interested in seeing more discussion about it. I think it was helped by the fact that it (an English novel) was set mostly in England, the vampire was an imposing male figure who was a sexual danger to women, and it had more action near the end. By contrast, I imagine popular audiences weren't as on board with something so openly gay (though lesbian couples were a known thing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries- but since women weren't full citizens, nobody cared as much as they did about M/M couples), so solitarily domestic, and something that was more tension-based than outright horror.

BUT THAT'S SO UNFAIR.

Anyway, the story is great. And the fact that it's easy to read even 150 years after it was published is incredibly cool.

Yeah this book is crazy, but it's one of those where you realise that the only reason a lot of Victorian novels are boring is that they're way too long. This one is short and enjoyable, even if the ending (I won't spoil) isn't what we would want in the modern day.

I actually kind of love Carmilla, she's so cool. The more you learn about her (especially near the end), the cooler she is. Her whole vibe is exceptionally modern for something written 150 years ago.

I'm looking forward to more people finishing it!

[- In Order to Prevent a More Perfect Union -]

In Order to Prevent a More Perfect Union

PREAMBLE. In the most recent regional election, two Member States launched a conjoined campaign to become co-Councillors. This document seeks to provide a block to future campaigns utilising this heretofore-unseen legal hole.

In the Regional interest of adapting to heretofore-unforeseen circumstances, the RRS shall be amended to include the following:

- In Order to Prevent a More Perfect Union -

13. Elections will consist of a one week candidacy period where an eligible Member State may declare their intent to stand for office, a one week voting period where all Member States may vote for their desired candidate, and a one week transition period to acclimate the incoming Councillor with their roles and responsibilities.

      d. If a candidacy declaration consists of more than one candidate for Councillor, it will be declared invalid.

The current RRS. 13 subsections (d), (e), (f), and (g) shall become RRS. 13 subsections (e), (f), (g), and (h).

Additionally, in the interest of adjusting the Councillor of Culture position to be less burdensome to its holder, the RRS will be amended to the following:

7(c). The Councillor of Culture, whose responsibilities are defined as orchestrating cultural events and developing the identity of the Refugi culture. This Councillor shall:

• Develop a Regional Eco Report to fulfill goals stipulated by RRS 14(a) and RRS 14(b) by identifying ways in which Member States of the Region may contributed towards the environmental targets established therein.
• Publish regular updates to the Regional Eco Report to maintain its relevance and timely advice.
• When additional assistance is necessary to fulfill the duties of office, appoint an assistant.

Authored by: Sylh Alanor
Seconded by: A Million Dreams

What about "Distinguished Professor"