A few CDB characters have had their betrothals moved into marriages:
Ser Bradwyn Hunter and Mysanna Egen wed on 12-2-159, and had a daughter, Bronwyn, born to them at the start of 160.
Ser Morland Celtigar and Syrella Darry married on 24-2-160.
Ser Bryce Caron and Sherion Darklyn married 22-5-159.
Retroactive story points have been handed out to several current players who’ve made particularly significant RP contributions to the game over the past two years. From here on out, story point awards will not depend to any degree on mailed-in nominations (which were solicited last time around). We’ve created a small system for nominating players, which you can read more about via +HELP SP. For information about how to use story points, see SYSTEM ADVANCEMENT.
Players can nominate up to three players for story points per month, with a text explaining why they think that player deserves a story point. Staff will take all nominations into account when judging who gets a story point. If there are very few nominations, we will defer awarding points to the next month. Regardless of that, however, nominations should always be made for activities within the previous month rather than for general activity in past months. Finally, to make sure the story points do not start to saturate the game, only one or two will be given out each month, and staff will make the effort to spread the points around among deserving players.
Two changes have been put in place to try and make the CDB easier to use.
First, following a suggestion from a guest, a +CDB/CAMEOS command has been created as a shortcut to +CDB/SEARCH TYPE/CAMEO|CG/YES|STATE/NPC.
Second, code has been tweaked so that one can now use the full name of a character to view their entries; before now, it would not be able to find them. So, for example, +CDB Jarwen Hollard will now show the appropriate page. As an added bonus, partial full names can be used, so +CDB Jonn L will turn up Jonn Lannister’s information, where previously +CDB Jonn (and similar other searches) would point out all possible candidates who most closely fit that name.
The family tree for House Dayne has been expanded, increasing the CDB by about 34 characters (including additional characters in House Blackmont and House Santagar). If you’re interested in helping us out with proofing, please feel free to examine CDB records starting with Gerold Dayne and see if you spot any oddities such as strange birth or death dates, birth dates that are impossible in relation to other births or deaths, typos, etc.
The family tree for House Dalt has been expanded, increasing the CDB by about 35 characters. If you’re interested in helping us out with proofing, please feel free to examine CDB records starting with Digory Dalt and see if you spot any oddities such as strange birth or death dates, birth dates that are impossible in relation to other births or deaths, typos, etc.
As we discussed on the forum some time ago (in a topic recently revived), we will be trying out the idea of having a weekly roleplay session at a set day and time to give more players the chance to meet up and form connections. We will also do our best to ICly be present for these ourselves, which is why the first day and time that we will be trying out will be Sundays at 14:00 Game Time (see +time). There will be no set end time, but we would expect that such sessions might run 2-3 hours.
Initially, there will be no specific events arranged for these sessions, that is not the main point of them. However, if players want to suggest little mini-events for these sessions, we’d be more than happy to entertain such suggestions. Just keep in mind that they should be interactive events as opposed to, for example, court sessions. We do need to run some of these too, but they’re not great for getting players to interact with each other.
We will put up notes on the Events board (and the Calendar) for the first four sessions, then we will evaluate how it has been working and consider whether any changes should be made.
The family tree for House Gargalen has been greatly expanded, increasing the CDB by over 60 characters characters. If you’re interested in helping us out with proofing, please feel free to examine CDB records starting with Lady Lilianne Gargalen and see if you spot any oddities such as strange birth or death dates, birth dates that are impossible in relation to other births or deaths, typos, etc.
Thanks to Talvo (of talvo.com, and the creator behind our mail & board system and various other useful little systems), the CDB search has been greatly improved and searching an age range (or rather, a range of birth years) now works once more.
In order to deal with some of the code changes when we open Dorne, and to make it plain which area a character is currently in, we have added a Location attribute. We will add this ourselves to all CGed characters, but we will need players to chime in with Location for any non-CGed characters that have been established as being in a particular Region. We are hoping this will make it a little easier for prospective players to avoid characters that have been established as being somewhere other than in one of the open areas.
We are not quite ready yet to start accepting actual requests for Dornish characters, but in order to simplify one of the problems, we have decided to see if we can find out how much interest there is in Dornish characters and what sort of family trees players are interested in seeing expanded.
The situation with the family trees is such that we will not be able to make complete family trees for all the Dornish houses. With just 16 known houses, everyone would be far too interconnected for it to be realistic. It would also lead to an awkward situation if GRRM provides more Dornish house names later on, as these would end up too separated from the others. Given this, we have decided to only complete family trees for a selection of the Dornish houses. Character choices will largely be limited to these houses, as it is too awkward to have players play characters from incomplete houses where you may not have the names of your parents or know if you have any siblings or not.
Keeping this in mind, we would like to ask everyone (current players as well as prospective players) the following questions:
1) Are you planning to apply for a Dorne-based character? If so, is it likely to be a Dornish character or a character from elsewhere in Westeros that is there as part of Daeron’s forces? In both cases, it has to be a character that can be based in Sunspear.
2) Is there a character in the family trees already that you are interested in? If so, feel free to name the character, but this is not necessary, and does not constitute a reservation of that character. We may allow for reservations once we’ve seen what sort of interest there is, however.
3) Which Dornish houses would you like to see fleshed out?
4) Do you have any suggestions for specific characters/concepts to add to the houses?
Answer on the forum, via +mail or email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). The current family trees can be found at http://www.westeros.org/BoD/Houses/ and if you could help with descing Dorne (which would greatly speed up when we can open), please see http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showtopic=31570.
The first of the advancement commmands, +xp/practice, has been added to the game. A brief helpfile can be accessed via +HELP XP, and more information can also be found on the help wiki.
For the moment, use this command carefully. It has been tested, but at this stage we cannot be certain that everything works as it should. Make sure to take note of what your XP is before and after you use the command and also what your skills were at before and after. Report any oddities to us.
One area that needs fleshing out in the +help as well as the help wiki is guidelines for how this command (and the ones that will follow it) should be used. The basic idea is that it should be used ICly. If your character has not been doing something to advance a certain skill, then you should not be using the command to practice that skill. You don’t have to actually roleplay training a skill, but training (or at least learning more through using said skill) should be part of what your character does ICly.
If there are any questions at all, let us know.
Another map has been added to the website, this one featuring the grid layout for Sunspear.
Sunspear? Yes, we have decided to move away from our original plan, which was to open Dorne—or Sunspear and the Shadow City, rather—after the end of the Conquest. Instead, it will be opening as soon as we can get everything needed sorted out. We think that offering people a chance to play in an occupied territory, not the least during the upcoming rebellion, might provide some great roleplay opportunities.
When is “as soon as we can”, you might wonder? Well, we have the grid built now, that was the easy part. Next up is descing the grid, and there’s also some code that will need to be tweaked to take into account two areas (most notably, +rumors and Influence). The most difficult part may be fleshing out the Dornish family trees, and right now Balerion has some other things to work on so he will not be able to get to that for a while, most likely.
If there are any questions at all about this, let us know.
Long overdue, maps have finally been added to the website. We had more ambitious plans for the maps, but those proved too difficult to execute, so in order to get something up there we started from scratched and produced new, simpler maps. Some tweaking is still needed on these (the large version is very large, and the smaller a little hard to read), but its something at least. Find them here.
The two primary RP logs from the Dornish Bread Riot have now been posted! You can find them here.
The consent helpfile has been significantly reworked, partially as a result of our decision to remove the Consent, Death, Mature and Plot options from +Prefs. Consent between players is now always more or less full consent, whereas consent between staff and players is more limited. Updated +helpfiles for +prefs will be installed shortly, and the new consent helpfile can be found here.
Make sure to read through and please let us know if there are any questions.