Thanks to the very hard work of Balerion, Dorne is now fully desced. In order to build up a population of characters before we begin running any events in Sunspear, Dorne will immediately be pre-opened. This will also help us iron out any code issues that may be remaining in terms of adapting the various systems to handle two areas.
This means that players can now request and CG characters based in Sunspear (for tier IIs and IIIs, we will give it a week from this announcement before we start looking at the applications competing for the available slots). Once approved, they can also start role-playing. However, players should be aware that Admin-support beyond handling regular requests, questions, etc will be limited to start with. With several plots currently running and upcoming in the King’s Landing area, we will need to focus on these for the moment. We will also continue to work on a few remaining tasks related to Dorne, such as fleshing out the recent IC history and the current court structure.
Players are very welcome to give input on the court structure (and to work with the Admin to work their characters into it), and we would also love to see more players CGing Cameos for the area.
Based on nominations for January, story points (SP) have been awarded to Cadan and Sarmion for their contributions to the game in the last month.
For more information concerning the system, see +HELP SP. For information about how to use story points you’ve earned, see the Advancement helpfiles.
It is now possible to reserve a Dornish character for when the area opens. This is done by e-mailing the Admin at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and stating which character you would like to play. Please include the character’s full name and DBNUM, as listed in +CDB
.
The characters that can be reserved are primarily those who have their REGION and LOCATION set to DORNE (add REGION/DORNE and LOCATION/DORNE to a +CDB/SEARCH to find them). They are currently all set CLOSED, to prevent them to be requested using the regular system, but unless they are younger than 15 or deceased they will be available for play when the area opens.
We are also open to reservations of non-Dornish characters to be played in Dorne as part of King Daeron’s occupation forces, but in these cases we would like the reservation to be accompanied by a brief write-up regarding what position the player envisions the character as holding in Dorne.
Please note that a reservation is not a guarantee, although very close to one in the case of Open characters. If you have any questions at all, direct them to Nymeria or Balerion.
The family tree for House Santagar has been organized and expanded, increasing the CDB by about 14 characters. If you’re interested in helping us out with proofing, please feel free to examine CDB records starting with 2201 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.
This should be the last of the significant expansions of Dornish houses at this time, although we may add in a few people here and there in the near future. But we’re presently satisfied, so “expanding Dornish houses” is now checkmarked off the to-do list for opening Dorne, meaning we’re one step closer.
The family tree for House Blackmont has been organized and expanded, increasing the CDB by about 18 characters (including additional characters in House Jordayne). If you’re interested in helping us out with proofing, please feel free to examine CDB records starting with Perros Blackmont 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 part of our preparations to open Dorne, we have added 10 Cameos based in Dorne to the CDB. With all the other things that need to be worked on to get Dorne ready, we could really use some help getting these Cameos CGed. They have been added to +Jobs, and can be seen by players by typing +jobs. There are also a few other player-level jobs on there already, including some more Cameos for King’s Landing and a few court officials. If anyone wants to work on any of these jobs, let us know and you will be assigned to the job in question. CGing a character fully is worth 3 XP, and partial setups are worth 1 XP.
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.