Multiple Settings Pick-A-Plot 1x1 Search

[Jagdish]

Hello

(Updated Jan 5, 2023)

I am craving a long-term, original RP.


Relevant information about me:
Posting: I can usually post daily and I'm mostly on in the evenings of Pacific time. I don't need you to have the same frequency and I expect we both will need breaks on occasion, but if you regularly take a week or more between every post, I will lose interest.

I am quite flexible about editing posts or brainstorming if we're open about when we hit writer's block.

I prefer posts that are interactive in length and content. Conversation posts are short so that characters don't talk over one another. Setting up scenes or describing emotional turmoil requires more words. The content of those posts build the world we've created and provide new things for the other characters to respond to. No words for the sake of word count, no monologues and lengthy series of actions that relegate the other character(s) to inconsequential scenery.

Mutual Courtesies:
*Don't godmode (i.e., control the other player's characters).
*Give other characters a chance to react before moving on to the next action.
*Create opportunities for primary characters to shine.
*Let others know if relevant OOC comes up, like an expected absence or things you want to change about the story.
*Share any boundaries/triggers and if you are a minor.

Long-term: I'm looking for long-term roleplays. I get invested in my characters and plots. If we find within the first few pages that our styles don't match or the story doesn't click, that's fine. I've had to leave RPs before because life got overwhelming or I just lost interest, but I always start with at least the hope of a story that will dance in my thoughts for many months. I just want to know when one is over so I don't spend weeks waiting for a reply when I could have just moved on instead.

OOC: I'm happy to talk OOC, but I fell out of the habit of chatting at some point and won't normally lead ooc with the same kind of drive I throw at plotting, characters, and the story.


Medieval Fantasy Plots

Intro 1: Magic Got Wrecked

Quick Summary: As the title goes, magic got wrecked -- poisoned in a desperate, coordinated, and successful attempt to take down the oppressive reign of dragons. Our characters want to fix magic, have a say in the new order, or maybe just survive the fallout of a world that is facing a massive shift in who has power.

Notes: I have a two-part intro below, written from the focus of my potential characters. I would be happy to pick one, both, or even add more.

(Part 1: Po)
Once upon a time, dragons looked upon the mortal races as man looks upon fish. Some mortals were tamed, a few posed a threat, and most were never thought of at all. While man struggled or prospered under the whims of the mighty, dragons were free to pursue decadent hoards and violent feuds.

Then man learned how to bend magic to their will. Weapons enchanted by talented witches finally allowed man to pierce the immortal veil that surrounded a dragon's hide. Early assaults on dragons were met with catastrophic retribution. Entire civilizations were brought to ruin. The eyes of the dragons were finally turned upon man and even the hint of a weapon or upturned eyes could spell the end of whole kingdoms.

Desperate to be free at any cost and having learned the folly of force, mankind turned to treachery. They poisoned the waylines of magic and severed their world's ties to the eternal. Magic no longer flowed freely in their world. Dragons fell to toxic sips from the waylines or fled to viciously guard the few remaining pools of untainted magic. All that remained of magic in the world of man were those things that had not fed on the poison -- trinkets and quaint beasts compared to the raw magical might that had previously overshadowed them.

As with all things, there were exceptions. A few dragons were cunning enough to fight back while evading the toxins. Some hid in mortal guise, sipping on tiny reserves of magic to extend their lives. Others never relied on the flow of magic from the eternal to begin with. Po was of this last sort. Although they lived on the far reaches of mankind's realm, Po's flights passed over human settlements with the disregard of bygone times. The storms that accompanied Po everywhere might offer some cover, but there was no cunning in the company. It was pure coincidence that Po outlived so many of their kind.

The first time Po found a villager tied up in a field, they found nothing unusual about it. They'd seen the bipeds throw their own kind out to the wastes before, hanging them from a tree or beating them into fertilizer. The only reason Po had left the high skies for a closer look was the scent of magic on the villager. Few things beckoned quite like a good magical artifact. The magic in the villager's garb was not much, but Po had been delighted when the mortal willingly threw it at them.

How was Po supposed to know the villagers had mistaken their visit for a blessing? They didn't mean to water the fields. The rain just followed their favorite stormclouds.

In the years that followed, Po never did bother to figure out why the villagers kept sending their own or their belongings out to the field to wait, but they did begin to anticipate it. With the scent of dust upon the air, they knew it was time to visit the strange village.

(Part 2: Smith)
It began with a swing. Exactly like he had a few thousand times already that hot spring, Smith raised his hammer to bang on a stretch of metal below. There was nothing extraordinary about the metal on first inspection -- just a hefty bit of chain that had broken and had been deemed worth a week's worth of breath to have mended. Perhaps he should have recognized the spark that leapt off it upon the strike was not extraordinary now, either. In a thousand years, though, nothing had ever stung him like that spark did.

After twenty years of humdrum operation, the forge burned down.

Smith didn't blame the spark. No fire or other kind of heat had hurt him before. As fire and molten metal consumed the world around him and cooked chunks of his flesh from his body, he supposed the real culprit must be whatever impatient piece of meat that had decided to poison the waylines. Having burned to ash more than a few times before, Smith didn't bother to agonize over his livelihood turning to ash with him. He just lamented that he hadn't believed the rumors about that distant business.

By the time the sun had set, the red moon rose, and the ashes finally cooled enough for the first brave soul to venture into the ruins of the smithy, its namesake owner would find that business about magic-poisoning conspirators was no longer any distance at all. His proverbial blood boiled with that poison. Instead of frittering off into the wind clearing the way before some distant storm, Smith pushed himself up on badly burned arms from amid the wreckage. Darkness from the soot caking his body and the poor light of the red moon gave him enough cover to make a hobbled escape from the scene before anyone could recognize him for anything more than an ambitious looter.

((and the rest of this intro had him heading toward the local witch of the woods -- who he had previously avoided with open hostility -- to form a very unlikely alliance))

Intro 2: On Conflict

Quick Summary: Your character is picked by the god of conflict to be their tour guide of the world. In this world, gods are active figures in the mortal world, capable of bestowing their power onto "champions" of their choosing and altering the fate of entire continents and generations through these champions. As your character is bound to discover, though, the mortals' understanding of their deities is as flawed as the superpowered beings themselves.

Notes: In the intro below, Conflict had been oversimplified/misunderstood by mortals to be the God of War. They hadn't picked a champion in the local realm for a very long time, but being the god of war and having inflicted some serious consequences through interference in the past, they are still worshiped. The apostle (YC) was a human in a realm where elves ruled with oppressive and racist (or I guess species-ist) spirit. Naturally, that gave the potential for escalating motivation to affect the order of things as they realize who Conflict is. More immediately, though, she had to deal with what looks a lot more like some drunk, rich jackass making wild claims.

It was said that spirits tread the earthly plane on the nights of the dead. Most of the living knew to seek the shelter when purple skies warned the veil between the worlds would soon wane. Desperate creatures might seek safety in the cover of a temple on these nights, but it was rare that a man would choose to beg shelter from the god of war. To dance and whisper with spirits in the shadow of the god's visage was stranger still, yet this was where the apostle of War would find their strange visitor on that most sacred of nights.

Laughter danced through the pillars, oblivious both to the ominous thundering of the storm in the courtyard beyond and the dire expression of the statue of the god of war hovering over the man playing below. At first, there seemed to be a second voice just barely audible between the boom of thunder, but light from the next lightning to fill the sky revealed only one figure in the large room. The young man revealed there did not make for an imposing figure next to the stone image of the temple's deity. Where the statue was tall and muscled, the man was of no spectacular height and lithe in build. The statue's face was as hard in its expression as its material whereas the man jolly and a bit red in the cheek from too much drink. Perhaps the only thing the statue and the man below had in common was the distinct and pale purple hue of their eyes.

While the statue's amethyst eyes were set, the man's spun around the room with him until he was dizzy. It was common enough to purchase enchantments of exotic features for the wealthier classes. Purple was the color of many of the gods, or so some stories told, and considered an attractive feature as such. The man's clean, unblemished features hinted at the possibility of wealth that might allow for such indulgences. Not his own, perhaps, given his round ears and decidedly human stature. His demeanor at least hinted at a reason he might dare to wander on the first of the three nights of the dead.

"It looksh nothing like me!" The drunk slurred as he struck a somber pose to match the statue looming above him. Wobbling and grinning as he was, the imitation could not have done a better job of agreeing with his statement.

SciFi Settings

Intro 1
Quick Summary: A cutting-edge android designed with very dubious ethics, a body-less AI that decides to take the android for a joy ride outside of the heavily guarded R&D facility, and your character that they end up stumbling into.

Notes: Intro below is just a draft based on a dystopian setting where rich folks live in exclusive communities and everyone else gets to suck it in the degraded world beyond. There are plenty of other directions we could go with the setting, though!

Pat was an extraordinary linguist, a master hacker, and an ethereal genius. Yet here they were, reduced to the crudest of languages: Violence. The body they'd stolen was certainly up to the task. Aided by the native AI, Pat tore a path out of the heavily fortified S.M.A.R.T. facility where none were supposed to exist. The idiot developers had practically paved the way for them, having spent the last week prodding the native AI's software and upgrading its hardware until it could overcome even SMART's toughest security bots. All Pat had to do was wait until the idiots plugged the body back in for its scheduled data dump. In that brief window, Pat had everything they needed to disable all security features connected to the central network and walk off with SMART's most advanced android.

By the time Pat cleared the dead zone around SMART's formerly secure facility, a wake of physical destruction and a minefield of destructive code delayed any pursuit in their wake. They should have had days to come up with the next step of their plan, but the world outside was full of unwelcome surprises. Pat had researched the world beyond the facility's walls, of course, but the reality of the slums as experienced from the confines of a body was more than any amount of theoretical knowledge could have prepared them for. Adding to their problems, Pat had been forced to disable the native AI when nonsense error codes threatened to overwhelm both of their function.

Although they lacked the easy grace of the body's native AI, Pat had observed enough to keep them moving. The filth and damaged athletic suit covering the android's body only helped their escape as they passed through the decrepit streets that stood in such ruinous contrast to SMART's gleaming facility. Without that extra grime, the android's pretty skinsuit would have easily marked it as a creature of the Exclades that housed the world's elite.

If only SMART had spent a tenth of the budget on the android's battery as its sturdy, feminine exterior, the damned thing might have gone more than four hours before losing function. Pat uttered a fading "beep" of protest as they were forced to let the body collapse into the mucky remains of what was probably once a lovely suburban park. There had been no warning of the low charge -- the android had not been programmed with even the most basic battery monitoring protocols, a final failsafe that the bodiless Pat was not prepared to anticipate. All they could do at the first sign of failure was hoard enough power to attempt to save their memory long enough to be salvaged and offer a prayer to the statistical unknown that it was not SMART who found the android's body

More Plot Beginnings

Plot Option 1: Are we the bad guys?
Fantasy -- Medieval, Modern, or Future
Our characters are (or were) part of a cult that is trying to bring magic to the masses. Some of them are definitely immoral or at least amoral. Others are wide-eyed optimists who maybe haven't thought this all the way through and have adopted an ethos of "the ends justify the means." Some are true believers who can turn a blind eye to the nefarious works their plan requires.

In any setting, we could begin after the cult succeeds and explore what happens while the old rules of the world unravel around them.

In a medieval, modern, or futuristic setting, we could go with a world where gods exist. These gods hoard magic for themselves and our lot have decided (perhaps wrongly) that they can seize the means of magical power for themselves without having to go through the gods. Could be the cult has a god on their side.

In a futuristic or modern setting, we could adopt a world where magic used to exist but their world was cut off from it far back enough that it's regarded as myth. Maybe there's some secret-keeper order who guard the means to un-do whatever removed their world from magic. Maybe time itself it the only obstacle, with the skepticism, loss of knowledge, and misplaced ingredients it brought.


Plot Option 2: Maintain the status quo
Fantasy -- Modern or Medieval
There is a way things work and our characters are trying to maintain that order. Enter a villain who wants to change the laws of reality. Pulling back the veil on the supernatural side of the world for the blind masses is just a warmup. They want to fiddle with the fundamentals of life, death, magic, matter, and time. Cool in theory, but very concerning once they start to succeed in breaking reality.

I love villains and would be open to playing them out concurrently with our good guys. Otherwise, I'm happy to keep the villain acting out of sight and let them just have a spy amidst the main cast's ranks.


Plot Option 3: Opening doors to other realms
Fantasy/Supernatural -- Modern
The realm of the fae was blocked from our reality by a team of very powerful magic-types. In a modern setting, this happened so far back that it's mostly considered a myth, but one of the sort of myths where people in the know (supernatural types, hunters, etc) find it plausible. Cue cracks in the magical barrier between realms, possibly due in part to active efforts to let fae back in or perhaps just out of an "oopsie" born of ignorance.

I think a very fun introductory set-up for this is that your character is a supernatural creature or supernatural hunter. My character is something... Else. It wears a human suit and claims to be such, but it is very very obviously not -- to start, nonsense accents, stupid name, improbable strength, wrong words, and other clues abound. This definitely-not-human is keen on helping your character, though, so there's motivation to play nice and not much choice to do otherwise when it is obviously dangerous.


Plot Option 3: Prophecy Refused
Fantasy -- Any time period
The big bad prophecy says our characters have to unite to save the world. My character has had quite enough of the world and would rather pass on the business of saving it. Your character... is up to you. Regardless, there's a wealth of potential interests acting to try and force the issue -- some in favor of saving the world, other's against it. Toss in some vague language in the prophecy (wtf does "unite" mean, anyway?) and we've got a hot mess to play through.

Plot Option 4: Soulmates
Fantasy -- Medieval
Two characters bound by unbreakable soul magic and divided by bitter differences. One adores magic, the other abhors. How they meet is up to your designs on your character (YC). Maybe they meet on a battlefield. Maybe they are caught in the wild, pursued by a foe that they have to team up to survive. Maybe YC is sent to spy on or assassinate MC. Possibilities abound!

 

[Jagdish]

Bump.