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.
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.