OOC DISCUSSION MEME;

[theearth]

Save the Earth requires a good deal of thought to apply into. Because of this, it can't hurt to get some input into your ideas or to get some idea of how other players will feel about them.

This post is exactly for that. Think of it as a creativity workshop where there are no stupid questions, bad ideas can get weeded out and good ones can get fed properly. However, this space is for constructive criticism only. Please remain mindful of that.

How it Works:

Put forward your idea for a character you wish to apply. Point out the parts you like most, the holes you want help with, the parts where you can't seem to make up your mind either way. Consider what sort of goals you'd like to achieve in the game, why you think the character is a good fit and what sort of roles they'll be able to fulfil. Don't be afraid to let it all If you have an app in progress, you might want to link to it. Similarly, linking to a resource to let others know the preincarnated character better might be a good idea.

Then, discuss with others! Hopefully you'll be able to make your vision more complete and understand the game better. Potentially you could formulate future CR or even pre-game CR.

Comments

/too lazy to switch accounts again, but this is a Dassa

[strokeofgenius]

I've never heard of those books :|c what are they about?

[professorwolf]

XD I tried to get into the other books, but at the time I didn't really enjoy them when they weren't about cats ^^' I keep thinking I should pick them up again and try again, now that I'm older :: chinscratches ::

(Ahaha, oh well, it was a thought XD )

[professorwolf]

The Book of Night with Moon and To Visit the Queen are the books Arhu is in. The universe they're in are the books from the "So You Want to Be a Wizard" series, by Diane Duane. They include books like Young Wizards, Deep Wizardry, and the series-title book, So You Want to Be a Wizard. They're modern fantasy, with the "magic" being solidly based in physics, which I find cool, and with the goal of wizardry in general to slow down entropy, the heat-death of the universe, and to protect life.

I REALLY enjoy the two books Arhu is in, because they take place from the point of view of the cat wizards, who have a whole different culture, which is really made of awesome worldbuilding and fun stuff. I couldn't get into the others, but that may've been cuz at the time I was really into animals? XD

/also too lazy to switch; is seriallylucky-mun, not Gail

[kd7sov]

The basic premise is that some people are wizards.

A slightly more useful version of the premise is as follows: Entropy happens. Back when the Powers That Be were making the universe, the Lone Power invented entropy and tied it into everything else, so He/She/It (Powers being essentially genderless, and also capitalized) got kind of kicked out of the club. But entropy was still a thing. So the other Powers invest some of their power into certain mortals, who then are wizards with the responsibility to slow down entropy as much as they can (because even the Powers don't know whether a new universe will come from the destruction of this one). The main series focuses mostly on human wizards, and a fairly small set of those, but the Feline Wizardry side-series focuses on a bunch of cat wizards who control the "worldgates" (teleport portals, basically) at Grand Central Station.

[seriallylucky]

Mia's pretty awesome, even if she doesn't get a whole lot of lines. (He says, having a silent protagonist as his main.) I don't know how much Dark Dawn you've played, but I subscribe to the headcanon that she pretty much single-handedly protected Imil when it needed it. And yeah, same boat - I didn't buy a GBA until I could get Golden Sun along with it.

[eyesofstrength]

Both pretty much are antagonists, but really not. Tia is just one of those oh crap you totally didn't expect it unless you're familiar with the developer's tendency to have the nice characters turn out to be the final boss. But you are right that her mindset was very different and in the end you also almost wonder if you really did the right thing in ending the cycle and also her existence.

Her echoes would be quite freaky considering that she only existed to end the world over and over again.

But yeah, would totally love help with a PB. Overall, both characters are actually similar enough in appearance that what would work for one would work for the other. Here is official art for Tia.

doop still a dassa

[lil_rebbitzen]

I didn't know about it when I got mine for my birthday, since the internet wasn't as big a thing back then. I just happened to come across it, and thought it looked cool. Same with Fire Emblem |D

Mia is like my second fave, tied with Piers.
I was a dork and always named Piers James cause I thought he looked like James from Pokemon /bricked

[elfstoned]

True. Maybe there would be a better time to bring Loki in? A different season, maybe?

[wordsgate]

lol, same here, since I just reserved another character. I'll let you know if it seems like I'll have time for her! But it might be a while, I'd at least need a canon review.

[professorwolf]

Hmmm. I can probably work with that to find ya a few options! Do you want brown hair, or black hair (since blue isn't likely to happen, ahaha), and by "in her 20s" do you mean early or late 20s? And are you looking for ethnic of any kind (is the game set in Japan, for example)?

[formermagicalgirl]

I admit, it is kind of fun to do a complete 180 in their personality or a what if their life had been normal.

So to start, maybe we'd want to consider do you want her to be from a farm, or even just a very rural town? The area works out well for it, some of the eastern states are very well suited for farmers and often kids will go to college to learn more about agriculture.

[seriallylucky]

Ah, you should. Fair warning: the first three are a bit tricky to get into (though the New Millennium Editions are supposed to fix that; I haven't investigated those, and as far as I can tell they're ebook-only at the moment), so you might want to start with number 4: A Wizard Abroad. Which, probably by coincidence, has a (non-wizardly) kitten as a moderately prominent character.

Just, ah... try not to get too attached to any one-shot character, especially if they have a nickname; Duane has a tendency to kill them off, especially in the earlier books. Though I think there's only one character (or two, for sufficiently broad definitions of death) who's died in a book after the one that introduces them.

[formermagicalgirl]

Probably more early 20s, I estimated her age at about 18-20 in game. And it's not set in Japan or anything. It's a fictional world with places based off ancient civilizations of ours. The one Tia is from is called Altago and based off Carthage. It's a far from modern world where the most advanced technology is ships that use wind.

And yeah, blue is so not happening. Black or brown is fine, I'm not picky.

[professorwolf]

All righty, now that I'm done pretending the internet doesn't exist for the weekend... XD Have a list of potential PBs?

Cat Power: a little older-looking, but there's a good range of ages, and her hair is darker. has a very serious face.

Olivia Thirlby: I will suggest her to anybody who wants dark hair. mostly cuz I find her freaking adorable, but she can do serious really well (see: Dredd).

Nina Dobrev: for a slightly more ethnic look, she's eastern European descent, which might fit better with being based off Carthage, but still fitting the art. she's def in the right age group and her hair works well.

Darla Baker: right color hair, kind of a spooky look in some of the pics that come up on google, which goes well with the background powers at least!

If you like parts of some of those but don't think they fit exactly, let me know and I can find more with similar look. I play in a number of PB games and can grab a lot of faces from past experience and PB comms.

mild spoilers for Toward the Terra!

[child_soldier]

So...I've never really done this AU thing before, but I was thinking Tony here from Toward the Terra might be really interesting in a setting like this!

In a nutshell, his canon is focused around a society that exists in colonized worlds and space stations after having to abandon Earth due to pollution and war making it unlivable. They've installed a computer-run system that keeps them firmly in check so they can't do more damage while they wait for Earth (Terra) to be terraformed so they can return. A group of people called the Mu with genetic mutations that cause them to be varying levels of telepathic/telekinetic/etc. but with weaker yet long-lived bodies start to be born and are hunted down and systematically destroyed by the people controlled by the computer system. The series plot involves the struggle of the Mu to survive and find their way home to Terra, which they desperately long for.

Tony is one of the few naturally-born children in existence, and an extremely powerful Mu, and is essentially a child who went through self-imposed accelerated growth/maturation by necessity. He's a soldier who does terrible things for the good of the Mu despite being considered a monster for it, and while he has no personal concern regarding Terra either way, he wants to find it because his people, who he loves, all want to find it. Throughout his life, he's lost multiple people he loves, including both parents, and is extremely attached to Jomy, leader of the Mu and whom he calls "grandpa" due to his powerful bond with Tony's mother when she was a child.

I was thinking of making his AU history be that of a child orphaned when he was quite young, raised by a grandfather on a sort of hippie co-op commune just outside the city. It would be a relatively peaceful place that is full of well-meaning but emotionally high-strung people convinced they're being oppressed by the outside world for their simple, peaceful way of life. They'd do farming and stuff, and I imagine Tony would be the slightly rebellious angry kid who gets sent into town for supplies a lot and doesn't know if he wants to leave the commune or stay, because he dislikes outsiders and loves his grandfather, but at the same time is having a nasty generational clash with the older people in the commune.

I'm mostly just torn on whether this is plausible, or if I should change it around to something more different from his canon upbringing...he'll have a lot of powers and other memories of a completely different world to have for Echoes, but I'm not sure if the lack of major personality changes (besides his bloodlust) would be boring to people I'm playing with or not!

Any feedback is much appreciated, I kind of came up with this over the course of today and am not sure whether it's preposterous or not!

[shiromadoushi]

Possibly if the commune idea doesn't quite work (since putting on in a city can be hard) is have it that his mother is a major hippy who truly believes that she was an indigo child and is trying to raise her child to be as psychic as he can be, only she has it all wrong, so when Tony does get his abilities back, finding out that his mother is a fake can trigger all sorts of anger/canon parallels. (Bonus points if his dad looks like Keith ;) )

And for contrast, his grandfather can be the only sane man in his life who lives in reality so there can still be that very strong attachment.

[shiromadoushi]

ALWAYS PRINCESS TUTU.

*played Mytho for YEARS and also has an on again off again Dross muse*

Could have so much fun with that whole mess.

[psionichax0r]

haha. i actually already wrote the app, but im waffling on sending it in because. i kind of just want to play her as herself. an au version doesn't seem as interesting for some reason

[shiromadoushi]

Maybe try her in the test drive and see how it goes?

[minkhollow]

Hi! I'm an outlander (followed a link in from Felix's mun) and still weighing whether I want to join in/if I can remember a second game well enough to actually play it, so I'm sticking to my own journal for now. But the concept's actually caught my eye for the first time in ages, so I thought I'd at least bounce this around.

If I were to join in, it'd be with Rebecca St. Clair from Warehouse 13. It's the show of my heart, I essentially want to be Rebecca when I grow up, and I'm relatively sure she won't be getting any more canon at this point. I also really, really want to play me an awesome '50s!Warehouse agent somewhere.

Pros: I hear y'all need some more ladies about the place. I already have a few reincarnation-AU ideas (not least because childhood in the 1980s would be rather different than childhood in the '30s). Once she remembered it, she could be quite the badass; it's canon that she's a damn good shot, and she has many many points in investigating things (and keeping her head in a crisis).

Cons: She may be a badass, but she's still a baseline human. (A baseline human who would eventually have a Tesla, yes, but... baseline human.) She's also making a lot of faces indeed at the prospect of ending up in any game without Jack to go with her; I don't suppose I could tempt anyone into apping him? I can bribe with icons!

Neutral points: Minor character means a fair amount of headcanon, but I've thought a lot of that up already (I just have these feels okay). While I do already have a journal for her, I would probably make another one for this game, and I have no idea what I would call it. I've also gathered there are a lot of teachers already, and I'd probably carry over that aspect of Rebecca's character; on the other hand, she's definitely more early-childhood than college-level.
Also I can't for the life of me figure out what the first Echo would be. Tesla? (Probably not.) Knowing how to shoot a gun pretty damn effectively, despite never having done in this life? Jack's ring, minus the engraving for a while?

[wordsgate]

Ooh, Warehouse 13! A friend of mine loves this series so I've seen part of the first season (which reminds me that I need to get back on it, this show is cool). I looked up Rebecca and I remember her from Burnout!

Unfortunately with the new character I'm working on I don't think I could app with you (plus I don't know the show well enough to app from it). I can see how not having a character that's important to her could be tricky. Do you think she could develop a similar relationship with some CR in the game?

I don't think the baseline human part is a problem as long as she has some useful skills, which she obviously has! And I think it'd be cool if she's an early-childhood teacher, IIRC we don't have any of those yet (just a few high school teachers and some folks that work at the University).

[minkhollow]

:D It's still going (though whether there'll be a season 5 is still up in the air, grr - it's REALLY DAMN GOOD, deciders-of-these-things! And we've made it trend on Twitter three weeks running, can Defiance say that? Aaaanyway). But as for Rebecca, she's only in two episodes you haven't seen, and the way things are going I don't think they'll have time to throw her in again. That's the main reason I'm not going for Claudia; she's still open-ended, and also it's harder to picture her plopped into another setting.

(I don't usually tend to 'lolz you're NEVER GOING HOME AGAIN' games, but the reincarnation aspect of this one makes that easier to think around. XD)

It is... possible, at least at first, she might develop a new relationship. But as she started remembering things I'm not sure what would happen. Jack was a liiiiittle important to her.

Knowing that baseline-human likely wouldn't be a problem, though, that's a relief! Rebecca definitely has useful skills (I mean, when you're watching the horrible thing that happened to your partner/boyfriend play out all over again and you're the one who sets up the generator cables... I salute you, madam).

Another thing that occurred to me: There would be occasional entirely-headcanon things that would almost certainly come up as Echoes. The one that hit me this morning has pretty much nothing to do with canon, but there is no way Rebecca doesn't know where she was when JFK was assassinated; it's very possible that the news clip coming up or talking about it in a classroom setting would trigger an Echo. (Mostly the headcanon things are related to her canon experiences, but some things... yeah.) I suspect from looking at the request list that wouldn't be too bad if I didn't overdo it, but it would definitely be a consideration every now and then.

[wordsgate]

Oh yeah, I've wondered about if echoes could be headcanon'd memories before...I've been meaning to ask about that, actually. Maybe I'll go do that now...

[minkhollow]

Some things would be headcanoned memories by default; Rebecca just doesn't have that much canon to begin with. (And while the showrunner joked on a commentary track about a '50s!Warehouse spinoff, the Warehouse 12 one would be more likely to take off, really.) It's just that most of them would have some bearing on her canon experiences.

But some of them, other than perhaps a passing thought of 'I feel sorry for whoever ends up having to collect Artifacts from that,' would just be old memories. And something like 'where were you when [thing happened]' could be powerful enough to break through.

same person, brand spankin' new journal

[entertainaplanb]

I put in a reserve; I think I may be doomed. XD At the very least, if I can get the girl into a game without Jack, it'll be through this kind of setup.