The Digest collects entries from Westeros: Updates, All Sorts of Weird Stuff: News and Blood of Dragons: Announcements.
We have added a new little system to the game, called Tips. Tips is essentially a database of notices about commands, resources and other useful things on or related to the game. Each hour, a random notice is broadcast to anyone who hasn’t turned off the system. The idea is that it will help players (especially new players) learn of these commands and resources since digging through all the helpfiles is perhaps less than fun.
See +HELP +TIPS for the helpfile, which explains how to turn tips on and off, and if you’d like to suggest any tips to be added, use ‘ex #2936/TIPS*’ to see what the existing tips are.
The latest Green Ronin podcast discusses both the A Song of Ice and Fire Role Playing Game and the Wild Cards Campaign Sourcebook, starting at the 22 minute mark. Among other things mentioned are the forthcoming Quick Start Rules for the Ice and Fire game, which will be made available for Free RPG Day, the great interest the game drew from retailers at the GAMA Trade Show, and George’s involvement in approving art that fits his vision of the series.
Players who create personal, named NPCs for regular or semi-regular usage need to submit these to the CDB. See +HELP CDB SUBMIT for how to do this. Note that tier for such characters will default to V unless the player asks for something else and provides a reason for why it should be higher. More than IV is very unlikely to be approved.
Via Subterranean Press, we learn that they will be producing a limited edition of George R. R. Martin’s first novel, Dying of the Light, with illustrations by Tom Kidd. Also mentioned is the fact that Kidd will be illustrating Subterranean’s edition of Songs of the Dying Earth, co-edited by GRRM and Gardner Dozois.
A small tidbit of news concerning the proposed HBO series adapting A Song of Ice and Fire comes from this interview with David Benioff at Words to Mouth. At the very end, Benioff is asked by the interviewer what’s coming up next for him. He notes a script of his being filmed, the forthcoming Wolverine, and then mentions that he’s, “the showrunner for an HBO series adapting George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels.” While this doesn’t mean anything new, as such, it certainly shows that the proposed series is alive and well, in line with GRRM’s most recent remarks and contrary to some pernicious rumors coming from certain corners.
The search code has been tweaked to allow tier as one of the fields that can be searched. However, tier search will only return NPCs, not PCs. This is in line with our policy of not displaying the tier of a PC in the +cdb output. If any unexpected results are produced, let us know.
As previously reported, the George R. R. Martin Masterworks series of miniatures sculpted by Tom Meier and distributed by Dark Sword Miniatures were semi-finalists for the Origins Award in the “Best Miniature or Miniature Line” category. I has now been announced that the masterworks series is a finalist. The winners will be announced in late June. Congratluations to the good people at Dark Sword Miniatures, Tom Meier, and GRRM!
GRRM’s official site has been updated with new cover art in the Cover Art gallery and a new post to “Not a Blog” noting that he has come down with bronchitis and will not have much energy for blogging until he gets over it; what energy he has will be focused on continuing his work.
There is currently (at the time that this message is posted; for up-to-date information, see +cdb/quota) 1 slot for tier III characters available. As this is a slot that has just opened up, there will be a 5 day request period from the date of this announcement. Please see the quota helpfile for further information about how this works.
There are two types of characters that we would like suggestions for: Cameos and Extras.
Cameo characters are intended to be fully precreated and made available specifically for MUSH newbies. They are not generally intended as permanent roles, more as a way of trying out the game. ICly they are supposed to be more minor characters, suitable for getting your feet wet with. Ideally, they should be roles that have an easy time interacting with a lot of different people, rather than relying on for example the members of a single house.
Extras are basically named NPCs specifically intended as characters that can be emitted or referenced in roleplay when you need someone fairly generic but you’d like to have a name and some details to work with. They are not intended to ever become PCs, and that way they can be used more freely. For some more information, and some suggestions that we will be adding soon, see this forum topic.
If you have any suggestions for these types of characters, feel free to submit them via +help cdb submit. When it comes to the Cameo characters, we would also love some help with CGing the ones we decide to create, so do indicate in your submissions whether you are willing to do so as well.
Having a few logs added now and then to the logs page is a good way of showing that there’s roleplay going on and it is also a handy way of showcasing the kind of roleplay that goes on. We’re looking at implementing some sort of web form where log drafts can be submitted into a queue and then approved by us, but so far I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that in the CMS we use for the log storage.
This means that currently logs will have to be submitted via email and Balerion and I will have to add them. Given this, there’s a limit to the volume of logs we can handle, and delays will happen. However, now that we have caught up with the backlog of logs, we’ll try to stay as current as possible.
So, if you are sitting on any logs that you want to show off on the site for whatever reason, please consider preparing them according to the instructions on the log page and sending them in to us. If you log a lot and have hundreds of logs to select from, pick some favourites now and then.
Fans interested in the spectacular artwork for the Japanese editions of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (examples of which may be found in George R. R. Martin’s cover art gallery) may be interested to know that The Art Book of Yasushi Suzuki will include at least some of his covers, as well as nearly a hundred other pieces of art he has created in his career.
Word is that the semifinalist ballot for the Origin Awards has been leaked. Each category will be narrowed down to five finalists. In the “Miniatures or Miniature Line” category, Dark Sword Miniatures and the George R. R. Martin Masterworks series sculpted by Tom Meier are on the list. The finalists should be announced soon.
A new type of characters will be added: Cameo characters. These will be fully CGed characters, primarily of tier V, that prospective players (inexperienced and experienced alike) can use to sample the game with. We hope that this will provide a way of testing the game for players who don’t want to invest the time and effort in CGing a character before they know if they’ll like it.
In order to build up a small selection of Cameo characters, we will need some help, both with concept suggestions and CGing. If you are interested, let us know. Keep in mind that these concepts should be for characters that can interact with the majority of the playerbase (that is, with noble characters) and they should ideally be characters that are in King’s Landing more or less permanently so that players can easily slip in and out of these roles. The idea is that players should stay in these roles for a very limited time period, perhaps a month or two at most.
A few more posts from the Center Stage event, as GRRM has snuck in a few last responses before officially closing out his participation. Of particular interest are his remarks on future books he might write in the setting, and a number of questions concerning Targaryen historical matters.
For those using Firefox, we’ve now introduced OpenSearch plugins to all areas of Westeros.org. There are three primary ones: the main search plugin searches sites such as The Citadel, while the forum and the wiki have dedicated plugins. Just check your search bar and you should see the option of adding our search plugins to your collection. What this will allow you to do is quickly and easily search the site, forum, and wiki from anywhere on the Internet.
A new set of commands have been added, to allow players to vote for the NPCs they most want to see in play. Please make sure to make use of this and to point the command out to players looking for suggestions. For more details, see +HELP CDB WANTED.
A massive update to the So Spake Martin collection today, including GRRM’s posts to the Barnes & Noble Bookclub event. The event appears to have been the most popular of the B&N Center Stage events, drawing nearly 300 total posts across four topics, with GRRM posting answers more than fifty times (and often providing answers to multiple questions in those posts); the next largest, by Anne Rice, appears to have drawn slightly fewer than 200.
For those fans of The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword, the Dabel Brothers will be putting in an appearance at the New York ComicCon. More details of their panel, including some of the topics it’ll cover and an opportunity to get a free preview of their forthcoming Dresden Files comic can be found here.
GRRM’s official site has been updated with several new posts in “Not a Blog”, discussing among other things his big push to try and finish A Dance with Dragons by the end of June, the new Wild Cards comic, and his participation in Barnes & Noble’s Center Stage forum.
Barnes & Noble has invited GRRM to take part in their “Center Stage” on-line forum, where users can pose questions to the author and talk among themselves at the same time. He will answer select questions each day, over the course of the five day event. More information can be found here. The event will have a special emphasis on Wild Cards: Inside Straight, but his other works can be discussed, as well as his work in television. The forum goes live on Monday, April 14th and continues through to the 18th, but users may already start to discuss and pose questions here. Registration is required.
Though due to hit comic shop shelves on the 9th of April, there’s a new preview available of Wild Cards: The Hard Call #1 from Dabel Brothers Productions. It’s an all-original Wild Cards comic story, something which has never been done before, featuring the talents of Hugo-nominated author Daniel Abraham and artist Eric Battle.
We have completed one of our periodic checks of the links in the So Spake Martin collection, generally found in the “Chats, Interviews, Etc.” section. Dead links have been replaced with active ones (often thanks to the Internet Archive). There’s some great material in there, for those who’ve never perused them before. Of particular note are chats such as those hosted by Opus Press and Dromen and Demonen. One interview is currently dead, a 1996 interview with Amazon.com. We will be contacting them requesting permission to host it ourselves.
We have decided to go ahead and allow alts with certain restrictions. Specifically, alts will be available to current players of Dornish hostages or to players of other characters who wish to play a Dornish hostage. Players will only be allowed one character with a tier higher than IV (to see if any such slots are currently available, see +cdb/quota) and to qualify for a Dornish hostage you need to either have 1 year of prior MU*ing experience or 3 months of regular activity here on Blood of Dragons. You also need to have read all the published books.
Players may start requesting these characters right off, though actually processing the requests may take us a little while since we need add in some more alt-checks in various place. Finally, we will note that the policy we have decided on is that alt information will be publicly available via +finger.
The undisputed master of “A Song of Ice and Fire” portraiture, Amok (aka Roman Papsuev), has a new official site, including his whole gallery of “A Song of Ice and Fire” images created both as a fan and professionally, as well as a great amount of other art from other projects he is involved in. Sharp-eyed fans may notice that he’s touched up some of the portraits while in the process of getting the new site up. Expect to see some more fantastic art there in the future!
Subterranean Press has announced that they will be publishing a book in the tradition of the old Ace Doubles, namely putting together two stories in one volume. In this case, they’ve announced the double-volume will feature reprints of two novellas by George R. R. Martin. The book will be titled after the two novellas it contains, Starlady and Fast-Friend.
The stories date from the mid-70’s and seem to fall within the scope of GRRM’s “Thousand Worlds” setting. The book, which will be published both as a limited edition of 200 and as a regular trade, will feature a cover by Martina Pilcerova.
Since we have found that the unset tier (represented by the ?) is a source of complications and confusion, from now on all characters that we do not have a preconceived notion about will be set as IVs or Vs (primarily in the case of some personal NPCs and some others that we have intended as Vs). The relevant files have been updated to reflect this. If we have managed to miss any, please let us know.
The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with two reports from Technicon 25. In it, George R. R. Martin’s progress on A Dance with Dragons and the third “Dunk & Egg” story are discussed.
Also, a spoiler-filled report concerning a chapter from Dance that GRRM read, and ensuing discussion and elaborations, can be found at the “A Song of Ice and Forum”, here.
For no reason currently known to us, the forum is unavailable. Some other services are also down—the IRC chan and nickservs, FTP—which suggest that the server itself may be knocked offline (possibly due to an upstream router issue). More news when we have it.
While it is of course ideal if roleplay can run smoothly without the need for Staff intervention, at times it is better to consult Staff than to press ahead and perhaps cause lingering OOC resentment over a disagreement that was not properly resolved. We would like to encourage players to get in touch with Staff when disagreements of any kind arise. We do not want such actions to be seen as disruptive but rather as a way of maintaining good relations OOCly even when things get heated ICly.
In addition to the typical conflicts that can arise, some specific issues that have come up lately and which definitely should go through Staff (specifically, through Nymeria and/or Balerion) are questions and/or disagreements about thematic issues and questions and/or disagreements about general NPC opinions. What is and isn’t canon theme and what the NPCs at large feel about something can only be dictated by the Admin.
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