ChamomileHasWords
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Premise
This premise section is copy/pasted unaltered from the interest check. I want to keep the explanation of the basic ideas in the OOC post to keep things more consolidated and easier to keep track of. If you read the interest check, the new stuff is under the Character Sheets header.
Epistles
Here's something slightly different from the standard idea: Everyone is a wizard submitting letters to a wizard magazine of some kind, produced by a wizard academy with a printing press for its members. I say "magazine" and you think of a glossy softback in a grocery store dating back no further than 1920, but the printing press was invented in 1436, so a small-run academic periodical is not outside the standard fantasy tech level at all. So all the wizards run off and have wizard adventures in the Elemental Plane of Magma or conduct alchemical experiments to combine spiders and cats in the academy cellars or go on an expedition to verify the accuracy of the Compleat Atlas of Hell after some errors were noticed, and then they write up what they're doing and submit it to the magazine. The magazine printer gathers up every letter written in by a wizard this month and compiles it into that month's magazine, prints out enough copies for all the wizards in the academy, and everyone can pick up a copy whenever is convenient. Some wizards submit a letter and collect a magazine on a monthly basis, others return after three years in the howling wilderness of Yug'tholep to drop off a 50-page travelogue/bestiary and pick up forty issues of the magazine printed for them and left in a giant pile in their office while they were gone.
Drop-In, Drop-Out
The epistolary format means you don't have to commit to seeing the RP through to the end. If you stop writing posts, that means your wizard stopped writing letters to the magazine, that's all. That suggests they aren't doing anything interesting enough to be worth writing about, but they don't suddenly become catatonic before quietly fading out of the story the way an abandoned character in a standard prose RP will stop responding and then everyone has to figure out how to move the story past that. If you go inactive and come back after a long absence, it might be because your wizard was doing fairly boring and straightforward academy administration the whole time, it might be that they spent several months on dangerous arcane research or distant explorations and have only just now returned to report on several months of activity (not necessarily at-length - just because they spent three months doing something doesn't mean they want to spend ten pages writing about it), or it might be that they were silently involved in events that unfolded in other letters, just not in a way that ever merited being named by the authors of those other letters.
What Epistles Can Be Submitted?
The magazine is a way for wizards to communicate asynchronously with their community since many of them are only sporadically in the academy's physical grounds. As such, submissions to the magazine can be anything that the author wants to let their fellow wizards know about. It might include an update on arcane research or exploration, a call to arms to do something about some approaching doom, a diatribe about how much a wizard hates a rival academy, or anything else. Two wizards might get into a drawn out screaming match through the medium of magazine articles and counter-articles. The magazine does have an editor who can reject articles, but their role is more similar to that of a forum mod than a modern magazine editor. They might impose a ban on specific hot-button topics or refuse to accept any more articles furthering an ongoing feud between two wizards or otherwise try to keep the peace, but they won't reject anything based on subject matter or quality of submission except in the most extreme of circumstances.
There are, however, two special OOC categories for epistles: Arcane studies and travelogues. Arcane studies introduce new spells and travelogues introduce new locations. The IC wizard academy doesn't necessarily recognize these as official categories, but they're important to keeping the collaborative worldbuilding straight. An epistle doesn't have to be an arcane study or a travelogue, but if it is, it needs to follow the rules below, which are designed to prevent one player from running away with too much of the setting.
Arcane Study
An arcane study introduces a new spell to the setting. If it's a powerful and complex spell, the epistle might literally be an arcane study recounting how the spell was discovered. If it's a weaker spell, the epistle might be a study guide for younger wizards or be a completely unrelated letter that happens to bring up the casting of a basic spell. What's important is that, as an OOC rule, an arcane study can only add one spell at a time, to prevent someone from walking away with half the spell library in their first epistle.
Every spell must have a unique combination of mana, and there are six quiddities of mana: Red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple. So there is only one spell cast with two red and one yellow mana, written as 2R/1Y. Spells with a higher total amount of mana are more powerful and harder to learn, and the total amount of mana used to cast a spell is the spell level. So, that 2R/1Y spell would be third level. Generally, apprentices can cast level 1 or 2 spells, most trained wizards can cast level 3-5 spells, and level 6-9 spells are the domains of exceptionally powerful wizards. A spell cannot contain mana from two opposed quiddities on the color wheel, so no green and red, no blue and orange, and no purple and yellow. This also means each spell can have a maximum of three quiddities, since once you have three, it's impossible to add another without adding one that's opposite to the quiddities already present.
A wizard has a quiddity themselves, and every spell the wizard uses must have at least one point of mana matching their quiddity. You can only write an arcane study for a spell your wizard can use. This means that single-quiddity spells can only be used by wizards of that quiddity, so if you're the only wizard with that quiddity (i.e. if no more than six people join this RP), you get to define all nine of the spells for your quiddity. For that reason, the usual rule about only defining one spell per arcane study is lifted for spells that use only your own quiddity. You can make as many of those as you like all in one go, since you're not taking away slots from other wizards when you do.
Mana is not consumed when cast and comes from magical creatures, locations, and objects. A wizard is themselves a magical creature and has one point of mana from their own quiddity. Additional mana comes from magic creatures and items they carry with them, usually familiars and wands or staves. Some wizards might source their mana from magic rings, magic swords, magic mounts, or any other number of magic things. The only thing they probably don't source mana from is magic locations, because it's hard to pack up a dolmen with you.
Exactly what quiddities mean will be defined in play. Some amount of reasonableness will be enforced. Blue quiddity cannot be the source of all fire magic, because if the quiddities are going to have elemental associations, then clearly fire magic should be red. However, quiddities don't have to have elemental associations. As quiddities get more defined, overlap between them will start to get more rigidly enforced. If the first healing spell uses green quiddity and you want to make a blue quiddity healing spell, that's fine - blue just has to heal in some noticeably different way from green. Maybe green is direct healing while blue is a life-steal, for example. However, if there are eight healing spells and they all use green mana and no healing spells that do not use green mana, then healing magic is green and if you want a blue healing spell, it needs to include some green as well.
Travelogue
Behold, the glorious map of the local realm:
View attachment 1131399
This is a 13x13 hex map with the academy located at 7,7. When you write a travelogue, you define one of the hexes on this map, or else you define a distant realm.
Each hex is 24 miles across, which is about the range that cavalry manning a castle can patrol. This means each hex either has a castle or else has something else instead of a castle. Maybe it's troll country and no one can build a castle there. Maybe the castle is surrounded by a market town or a bustling trading port. Maybe there's a city there instead of a castle, by some ancient agreement at the kingdom's founding. Maybe the castle sits as a lonely outpost on a border march. Maybe there's no castle because the hex is an underwater holding of the merpeople. Regardless of the details, a 24 mile hex is big enough to be its own fiefdom with its own problems, and a 13x13 hex map with each hex being 24 miles across is about the same size as Great Britain in total. When you define a hex, you can decide who rules it, who lives there, what's going on, etc. etc. If you define a hex adjacent to the academy, they probably have some kind of relationship with the academy. If you define a hex adjacent to a bunch of previously defined hexes, then what's going on in that hex probably has something to do with what's going on over in those hexes, but 24 miles is far enough away that they aren't necessarily directly impacted. If you define a hex in the middle of the grey, then who knows what's going on over there.
The more of the local realm gets defined, the more other hexes need to fit in with what's already been defined. At the beginning, however, the only thing defined about the local realm is that there's a wizard academy in the middle of it. Does the wizard academy rule some or all of the local realm? Are we a hidden enclave in a land where magic is outlawed? Is the local realm split between many small kingdoms or united into one larger one?
A distant realm is in a different region of the world. It might be the neighboring kingdom, another continent, the South Pole, or another dimension. There are 168 blank hexes on the standard map, so we definitely shouldn't have to create distant realms due to running out of space, but if someone wants to write an epistle about venturing to the South Pole or a Japan expy or whatever, I'm going to make a new map instead of adding 400 hexes to the east/south edge of this one.
When you are defining a distant realm, you can define as many locations in it as you want. You don't have to limit yourself to one hex. Once a distant realm is defined, however, it must be added to one hex at a time just like the local realm.
Character Sheet
Name:
Gender:
Age:
Quiddity:
Position:
Personality:
Backstory:
Abilities:
Appearance:
3 spells/hexes:
How To Character Sheets
Name, gender, age, personality, backstory, and appearance are self-explanatory, quiddity is explained in the magic system above.
Your position is your position in the academy. These are usually going to be professor or dean. That's not an exhaustive list, but those two are the most common. A professor is in charge of some combination of conducting research and teaching students, while a dean is in charge of one of the component colleges of the academy overseeing a broader area of study, probably an entire quiddity of magic. Students can't submit to the magazine themselves, but one or more students might be brought along on a research expedition by a professor, and a research assistant might be given the job of writing down what happens so the professor can submit it to the magazine. Plagiarism is not generally looked upon favorably in academic circles, so it would be a scandal for a professor to claim their student's writing was their own, but it's completely normal for a professor to send in a student's writing with a note attached saying "I vouch for the accuracy of this report." Other positions can exist, but don't need to.
Abilities is mostly self-explanatory as well, although it's worth noting that if you create a character who is an orc or a dragon or something and no one else has made one of those before, you are creating a precedent for what those creatures are like in this setting. It is also worth noting that the level of power allowed is both wider than you might be useful and has a higher cap. Wider, meaning it is okay if some characters are much more powerful than others, because they are not usually traveling together, so the weaker character faces smaller problems far away from the stronger character. And a higher cap because all characters are expected to be wizards of at least 3rd level, often 6th or higher, which means they can cast a lot of spells, some of which are very powerful. These are the foremost experts on magic for hundreds of miles and because they undertake most of their adventures alone, they do not need major weaknesses that allow other characters to shine. Other characters shine because they are doing other things in other places.
With that being said, it is still important to keep character power below the level where they can solve problems trivially or at great distance. Like, if you want to play some kind of dragon, that might work, but you can't be the kind of hyper-powerful ancient wyrm demi-god dragon whose aura of power alone solves all problems within a 100-mile radius. The premise allows for more power than you might be used to, but don't go completely insane here, wizards aren't gods. Also, your character's natural abilities shouldn't eclipse or replace the magic system. Open-ended things like "psychic powers" or "genie conjuration" or "natural fire magic" aren't allowed because they make it too easy for a character to completely ignore the magic system, which is one of the main ways that characters interact with each other. Your abilities can be individually strong, but there should be a short and specific list of them, so that the bulk of any given character's problem-solving toolkit will still be spells.
The spells/hexes should define some part of the spellbook or hex map which isn't already defined. This is for three things: First, it doublechecks that applicants understand how the collaborative worldbuilding works, since that part is new and I'm not sure how well I explained it, second, it lets people signal how much they plan to focus on spells vs. hexes, and third, people are pretty eager to get rolling and I don't want to shut them down completely but I also don't want half the spellbook and map to be filled in before our first in-character post.
This premise section is copy/pasted unaltered from the interest check. I want to keep the explanation of the basic ideas in the OOC post to keep things more consolidated and easier to keep track of. If you read the interest check, the new stuff is under the Character Sheets header.
Epistles
Here's something slightly different from the standard idea: Everyone is a wizard submitting letters to a wizard magazine of some kind, produced by a wizard academy with a printing press for its members. I say "magazine" and you think of a glossy softback in a grocery store dating back no further than 1920, but the printing press was invented in 1436, so a small-run academic periodical is not outside the standard fantasy tech level at all. So all the wizards run off and have wizard adventures in the Elemental Plane of Magma or conduct alchemical experiments to combine spiders and cats in the academy cellars or go on an expedition to verify the accuracy of the Compleat Atlas of Hell after some errors were noticed, and then they write up what they're doing and submit it to the magazine. The magazine printer gathers up every letter written in by a wizard this month and compiles it into that month's magazine, prints out enough copies for all the wizards in the academy, and everyone can pick up a copy whenever is convenient. Some wizards submit a letter and collect a magazine on a monthly basis, others return after three years in the howling wilderness of Yug'tholep to drop off a 50-page travelogue/bestiary and pick up forty issues of the magazine printed for them and left in a giant pile in their office while they were gone.
Drop-In, Drop-Out
The epistolary format means you don't have to commit to seeing the RP through to the end. If you stop writing posts, that means your wizard stopped writing letters to the magazine, that's all. That suggests they aren't doing anything interesting enough to be worth writing about, but they don't suddenly become catatonic before quietly fading out of the story the way an abandoned character in a standard prose RP will stop responding and then everyone has to figure out how to move the story past that. If you go inactive and come back after a long absence, it might be because your wizard was doing fairly boring and straightforward academy administration the whole time, it might be that they spent several months on dangerous arcane research or distant explorations and have only just now returned to report on several months of activity (not necessarily at-length - just because they spent three months doing something doesn't mean they want to spend ten pages writing about it), or it might be that they were silently involved in events that unfolded in other letters, just not in a way that ever merited being named by the authors of those other letters.
What Epistles Can Be Submitted?
The magazine is a way for wizards to communicate asynchronously with their community since many of them are only sporadically in the academy's physical grounds. As such, submissions to the magazine can be anything that the author wants to let their fellow wizards know about. It might include an update on arcane research or exploration, a call to arms to do something about some approaching doom, a diatribe about how much a wizard hates a rival academy, or anything else. Two wizards might get into a drawn out screaming match through the medium of magazine articles and counter-articles. The magazine does have an editor who can reject articles, but their role is more similar to that of a forum mod than a modern magazine editor. They might impose a ban on specific hot-button topics or refuse to accept any more articles furthering an ongoing feud between two wizards or otherwise try to keep the peace, but they won't reject anything based on subject matter or quality of submission except in the most extreme of circumstances.
There are, however, two special OOC categories for epistles: Arcane studies and travelogues. Arcane studies introduce new spells and travelogues introduce new locations. The IC wizard academy doesn't necessarily recognize these as official categories, but they're important to keeping the collaborative worldbuilding straight. An epistle doesn't have to be an arcane study or a travelogue, but if it is, it needs to follow the rules below, which are designed to prevent one player from running away with too much of the setting.
Arcane Study
An arcane study introduces a new spell to the setting. If it's a powerful and complex spell, the epistle might literally be an arcane study recounting how the spell was discovered. If it's a weaker spell, the epistle might be a study guide for younger wizards or be a completely unrelated letter that happens to bring up the casting of a basic spell. What's important is that, as an OOC rule, an arcane study can only add one spell at a time, to prevent someone from walking away with half the spell library in their first epistle.
Every spell must have a unique combination of mana, and there are six quiddities of mana: Red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple. So there is only one spell cast with two red and one yellow mana, written as 2R/1Y. Spells with a higher total amount of mana are more powerful and harder to learn, and the total amount of mana used to cast a spell is the spell level. So, that 2R/1Y spell would be third level. Generally, apprentices can cast level 1 or 2 spells, most trained wizards can cast level 3-5 spells, and level 6-9 spells are the domains of exceptionally powerful wizards. A spell cannot contain mana from two opposed quiddities on the color wheel, so no green and red, no blue and orange, and no purple and yellow. This also means each spell can have a maximum of three quiddities, since once you have three, it's impossible to add another without adding one that's opposite to the quiddities already present.
A wizard has a quiddity themselves, and every spell the wizard uses must have at least one point of mana matching their quiddity. You can only write an arcane study for a spell your wizard can use. This means that single-quiddity spells can only be used by wizards of that quiddity, so if you're the only wizard with that quiddity (i.e. if no more than six people join this RP), you get to define all nine of the spells for your quiddity. For that reason, the usual rule about only defining one spell per arcane study is lifted for spells that use only your own quiddity. You can make as many of those as you like all in one go, since you're not taking away slots from other wizards when you do.
Mana is not consumed when cast and comes from magical creatures, locations, and objects. A wizard is themselves a magical creature and has one point of mana from their own quiddity. Additional mana comes from magic creatures and items they carry with them, usually familiars and wands or staves. Some wizards might source their mana from magic rings, magic swords, magic mounts, or any other number of magic things. The only thing they probably don't source mana from is magic locations, because it's hard to pack up a dolmen with you.
Exactly what quiddities mean will be defined in play. Some amount of reasonableness will be enforced. Blue quiddity cannot be the source of all fire magic, because if the quiddities are going to have elemental associations, then clearly fire magic should be red. However, quiddities don't have to have elemental associations. As quiddities get more defined, overlap between them will start to get more rigidly enforced. If the first healing spell uses green quiddity and you want to make a blue quiddity healing spell, that's fine - blue just has to heal in some noticeably different way from green. Maybe green is direct healing while blue is a life-steal, for example. However, if there are eight healing spells and they all use green mana and no healing spells that do not use green mana, then healing magic is green and if you want a blue healing spell, it needs to include some green as well.
Travelogue
Behold, the glorious map of the local realm:
View attachment 1131399
This is a 13x13 hex map with the academy located at 7,7. When you write a travelogue, you define one of the hexes on this map, or else you define a distant realm.
Each hex is 24 miles across, which is about the range that cavalry manning a castle can patrol. This means each hex either has a castle or else has something else instead of a castle. Maybe it's troll country and no one can build a castle there. Maybe the castle is surrounded by a market town or a bustling trading port. Maybe there's a city there instead of a castle, by some ancient agreement at the kingdom's founding. Maybe the castle sits as a lonely outpost on a border march. Maybe there's no castle because the hex is an underwater holding of the merpeople. Regardless of the details, a 24 mile hex is big enough to be its own fiefdom with its own problems, and a 13x13 hex map with each hex being 24 miles across is about the same size as Great Britain in total. When you define a hex, you can decide who rules it, who lives there, what's going on, etc. etc. If you define a hex adjacent to the academy, they probably have some kind of relationship with the academy. If you define a hex adjacent to a bunch of previously defined hexes, then what's going on in that hex probably has something to do with what's going on over in those hexes, but 24 miles is far enough away that they aren't necessarily directly impacted. If you define a hex in the middle of the grey, then who knows what's going on over there.
The more of the local realm gets defined, the more other hexes need to fit in with what's already been defined. At the beginning, however, the only thing defined about the local realm is that there's a wizard academy in the middle of it. Does the wizard academy rule some or all of the local realm? Are we a hidden enclave in a land where magic is outlawed? Is the local realm split between many small kingdoms or united into one larger one?
A distant realm is in a different region of the world. It might be the neighboring kingdom, another continent, the South Pole, or another dimension. There are 168 blank hexes on the standard map, so we definitely shouldn't have to create distant realms due to running out of space, but if someone wants to write an epistle about venturing to the South Pole or a Japan expy or whatever, I'm going to make a new map instead of adding 400 hexes to the east/south edge of this one.
When you are defining a distant realm, you can define as many locations in it as you want. You don't have to limit yourself to one hex. Once a distant realm is defined, however, it must be added to one hex at a time just like the local realm.
Character Sheet
Name:
Gender:
Age:
Quiddity:
Position:
Personality:
Backstory:
Abilities:
Appearance:
3 spells/hexes:
How To Character Sheets
Name, gender, age, personality, backstory, and appearance are self-explanatory, quiddity is explained in the magic system above.
Your position is your position in the academy. These are usually going to be professor or dean. That's not an exhaustive list, but those two are the most common. A professor is in charge of some combination of conducting research and teaching students, while a dean is in charge of one of the component colleges of the academy overseeing a broader area of study, probably an entire quiddity of magic. Students can't submit to the magazine themselves, but one or more students might be brought along on a research expedition by a professor, and a research assistant might be given the job of writing down what happens so the professor can submit it to the magazine. Plagiarism is not generally looked upon favorably in academic circles, so it would be a scandal for a professor to claim their student's writing was their own, but it's completely normal for a professor to send in a student's writing with a note attached saying "I vouch for the accuracy of this report." Other positions can exist, but don't need to.
Abilities is mostly self-explanatory as well, although it's worth noting that if you create a character who is an orc or a dragon or something and no one else has made one of those before, you are creating a precedent for what those creatures are like in this setting. It is also worth noting that the level of power allowed is both wider than you might be useful and has a higher cap. Wider, meaning it is okay if some characters are much more powerful than others, because they are not usually traveling together, so the weaker character faces smaller problems far away from the stronger character. And a higher cap because all characters are expected to be wizards of at least 3rd level, often 6th or higher, which means they can cast a lot of spells, some of which are very powerful. These are the foremost experts on magic for hundreds of miles and because they undertake most of their adventures alone, they do not need major weaknesses that allow other characters to shine. Other characters shine because they are doing other things in other places.
With that being said, it is still important to keep character power below the level where they can solve problems trivially or at great distance. Like, if you want to play some kind of dragon, that might work, but you can't be the kind of hyper-powerful ancient wyrm demi-god dragon whose aura of power alone solves all problems within a 100-mile radius. The premise allows for more power than you might be used to, but don't go completely insane here, wizards aren't gods. Also, your character's natural abilities shouldn't eclipse or replace the magic system. Open-ended things like "psychic powers" or "genie conjuration" or "natural fire magic" aren't allowed because they make it too easy for a character to completely ignore the magic system, which is one of the main ways that characters interact with each other. Your abilities can be individually strong, but there should be a short and specific list of them, so that the bulk of any given character's problem-solving toolkit will still be spells.
The spells/hexes should define some part of the spellbook or hex map which isn't already defined. This is for three things: First, it doublechecks that applicants understand how the collaborative worldbuilding works, since that part is new and I'm not sure how well I explained it, second, it lets people signal how much they plan to focus on spells vs. hexes, and third, people are pretty eager to get rolling and I don't want to shut them down completely but I also don't want half the spellbook and map to be filled in before our first in-character post.
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