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riverviewooc2017-04-20 11:42 am
riverview: april test drive meme
riverview test drive memeWelcome to Riverview's test drive meme! Feel free to dip your toes in on the test drive meme to try out your character in the setting, play out a mission, and get samples for your application at the same time!
● Reserves are currently OPEN.
● Applications open on May 1st.
● Providing all parties are amenable, threads on the test drive meme can count as game canon, as the plot in the prompts presented is game canon.
● TDM threads do not count for Activity Check, but they do count for Activity Bonus Points, so long as all characters involved are accepted into the game.
● Threading on the TDM is intended for prospective new characters, so top-levels should only be posted by players of these characters. Since the events in the TDM are considered game canon, characters currently in the game are free to use the TDM prompts logs and posts on the regular communities.
Feel free to use the prompts below or create your own scenario. The setting is built to be flexible, so feel free to make things up as you go.
information resources
premise ● arrival ● setting ● ask a question ● calendar ● navigation
Recently, a team of skilled explorers went out into the jungle to the Northwest of the city to follow up on several sightings of a giant lizardlike behemoth that's been skulking around outside the walls, a creature whose level of aggression (and therefore how dangerous it might be) was unknown. The team, while not exactly as stealthy as they were supposed to be, did manage to find the creature, which they found to have about the intelligence and temperament of a very, very, very large dog. And whom they named Liam.
Having established that the behemoth (which is around the size of a blue whale, snakelike in shape, but with four legs, brown striated scales, large claws and teeth, bad breath, and an affinity for face-licking) is not an intentional danger to the city, the authorities could not rule out the idea that it might cause accidental damage to the city, walls, or crops around the city. As a result, research has been done and a new mission has been drafted and recruited for - baiting the behemoth. The objective of this large-scale mission is for many small, quick-moving teams to take behemoth bait deep into the jungle for the purpose of luring the massive but mostly-harmless creature away from the city and hopefully to a new, less-inhabited feeding area. There is room for many different teams, and all of them should be heading deep into the jungle heading directly away from the city, going Northwest. The authorities in question have come up with a wide variety of food and pheromone scented lures that range from mild to truly stinky, so which type your team gets is up to you.
Each lure is small enough to fit in a cage-shaped canister that can be carried like a backpack by one person with average strength, and each lure-carrier will need to be accompanied by at least one or two fighters. Why, when the behemoth is peaceful? Well....
The behemoth might not be aggressive, but unfortunately it's picked up some unwelcome companions. After last month's near-disaster where a colony of lizardlike monsters had taken up residence in tunnels under the city, wreaking havoc in the power grid, and were subsequently either killed or flushed out of the underground, some of the local fauna has been bumped down the food chain.
The fauna in question is a very large pack of mammalian six-limbed creatures that usually live in the trees and hunt oversized insects in the underbrush. When the lizards escaped the underground into the surrounding jungle, and drastically reduced the population of the insects the mammals usually feed on, the predators became parasites, attacking the only thing left that is more docile than the insects they usually feed on - the behemoth. These creatures are quick-moving, well-camouflaged in the jungle with mottled brown-and-green fur, and sport massive teeth and long tongues that allow them to stick to whatever surface they land on.
Hungry as they are, they will make no distinction between the behemoth's juicy hide and the lure-carrying teams that are trying to help it. Hopefully, their ranks can be thinned enough that the behemoth survives the trip to its new home.
Not everyone is cut out for missions into the jungle or cleaning up angry predatory parasite monsters, but that doesn't mean that staying home means being safe from the weird things that come out of the portal. In the early morning of April 20th, drawn by the warmth of the rising sun, a massive swarm of rainbow-colored fireflies emerges from the portal into the quarantine. Unlike regular fireflies, though, they are bright enough to glow even during the day, and these bugs have bite! While generally harmless aside from stinging a little, the bite of the rainbow fireflies causes certain kinds of emotional response to become heightened, depending on the color of the firefly in question. While scientists have never run into these bugs before and have no idea how it works, they can cause this effect in any kind of sentient creature that is capable of emotion, including androids and characters that are usually unaffected by substances. The effects on emotions are as follows:
| ● RED: Lust/Anger ● ORANGE: Honesty/Openness ● YELLOW: Fear/Anxiety |
● GREEN: Jealousy/Envy ● BLUE: Sadness/Grief ● VIOLET: Love/Affection |
When a character is bitten, the effects on their emotions can last anywhere from an hour to a week, depending on the character's psychology and resistance to certain emotions - for example, if a character has a hard time dealing with their grief, the effect of a blue firefly may last longer than other colors. How the characters manifest the heightened emotional response or sensitivity is up to the individual player, as different body chemistry or other circumstances might change how characters are affected. Red firefly bites have a 50/50 chance of affecting a character with lust or anger, though characters who have not reached sexual maturity (underage characters) won't get get the lust effect.
Firefly effects can be easily avoided simply by avoiding the fireflies. It won't take long for some of the geniuses in the Quarantine to start making and distributing firefly repellent, and characters can expect sales of mosquito tents to skyrocket.
These alien fireflies have a lifespan of around a month, and they are unable to procreate outside their native environment, which means the last of them will be dying off around May 20th.
CLARIFICATION: In response to a player question, the effects of the fireflies CAN layer, so they can be affected by more than one at the same time. Red fireflies with the lust effect don't make characters incapable of controlling themselves, just heighten feelings of arousal/desire.
Whether your character is posting up a silly word game to distract people from the dangerous mission going on, trying to get hold of a friend, or putting out feelers for people to go out into the fray with, the network is going strong.
Alternately, an offer for a free app is popping up on new arrivals' devices - Friendr is a friend-finder and/or dating app. If characters choose to install it, they will fill out a short bio and parameters for what they're looking for, upload a snap of themselves, and then proceed to browse for matches. This is a typical swipe-left-or-right type app.
Many thanks to
mistojen for coding this especially for Riverview!Choose your own adventure and do something else in the setting!
(network) you said the magic words!
Your turn: What's your definition of magic? How does it manifest in your world? How is it accessed? What are the schools of magic? Are there hard limits, things that are clearly established to be impossible, or soft limits, things that simply have not yet been accomplished?
magic words indeed!!
Let me see if I can answer in an equally satisfactory way. By my definition, magic is a source of power accessible by people who are born with the innate ability to harness it or the capacity to learn, though the latter is much more limited in comparison to the former.
It's very generalized compared to some others I've seen and heard spoken about. We don't have schools in any sense of the word. No one teaches magic and anyone who has or can use magic can learn to use it in any number of ways.
I'm sure our hard and soft limits - as you put it - are similar to those in a lot of worlds with magic. Truly raising someone from the dead is impossible and it's extremely ill-advised to attempt doing so. What's perceived as success usually comes with some very nasty consequences. We can't alter the course of time or grant immortality to anyone who doesn't already have it. Those who are born with it achieve it genetically, by virtue of having a parent who can pass it along.
I honestly couldn't tell you how people are born with the ability to learn. It seems to be random.
I believe that covers all your questions!
no subject
So no one teaches magic at all? A child that manifests magic is just supposed to figure it out on their own? There's no danger to that?
... Who already has immortality? Besides spirits, I suppose, though even spirits can be killed.
no subject
Your two queries are pretty closely tied together, actually. Warlocks, those who are born with magic, are all immortal. As long as we can control our magic enough that we aren't hurting people left and right, we have plenty of time to fine-tune it. Some warlocks will take in others and help them hone their magic, but it's not a certainty. There's no organization behind it, or at least there hasn't been so long as I've been alive.
lmao sorry she's grilling u pal
What happens if someone can't control it? Or if someone is hurting people? I don't like how my world handles those things, it would be nice to hear better options.
It sounds like warlocks are how the elves say they all used to be before humans came, that they were all immortal and used magic. But no one who isn't born with it where I come from can just learn how to do it like mathematics or writing, that's certainly new. How does someone learn it that way?
grill away!! he may do some of that of his own though!!!
There are parties whose responsibility it is to keep peace between humans and non-humans. I wouldn't recommend our system as one of the healthier ones. It's definitely not one that gives equal autonomy to all, not currently.
You have a different view of elves in your world than some I've already spoken to. But yes, it sounds at least a little bit similar! Let me see if I can explain succinctly. Those who are born with magic have it because of their blood. Those who aren't have a certain affinity for things that aren't of the human world. They can see through glamours and sense magic, things like that. We call this the Sight. Humans who possess it can sometimes, very rarely, use magic. As I alluded above though, it's much, much more limited than the kind of magic my kind use.
no subject
Probably the king or queen is most valued normally, except when everything is on fire and someone else is more useful. Like me.
Officially recorded history is only about nine hundred years old, and everything before that is scattered, difficult to source, or simply myth. Unofficially, the Tevinter Imperium and the Dalish have their own records, though they're hard to access for their own reasons.
Ugh. Well, I'm willing to look at any system with less kidnapping and mass slaughter, but I suppose they can't all work.
What are your elves like? What's the limitation in learning magic compared to inheriting it? Is your blood magical as a property?
no subject
The following are familiar to me: dogs, cats, horses, chickens, rams, sheep, and harts. I have to say, the others are nothing I've heard of, much less heard of someone domesticating! We do have buffalo in my world, which sounds like it could be similar, if only in name.
What might your job title be then?
Nine hundred would make your world's history significantly younger than ours, at least officially. We have roughly fifty-five hundred years of recorded history.
Ours functions by a certain definition of the word, and does so without kidnapping and mass slaughter. I would very much hesitate to call it truly functional though.
Our elves are fictional. The best comparison I can make to something that exists in our world would be the fair folk or fae. Lastly, our blood doesn't have any inherent magical properties. It wouldn't be useful to someone else if they had it. And the limits have to do with the amount of effort a person has to expend. For a significantly experienced warlock, using certain magic is as simple as breathing. For a human using magic, anything they attempt will take a significant amount of energy.
no subject
What's wrong with your system? Who's keeping it around in spite of the problems?
Do your humans use mana as the energy that powers their magic? Are there any ways, good or ill, to boost power? Is there a specific way to replenish that energy when it's depleted? We use lyrium potions for both of those things, though some of us can use blood.
no subject
Those are very complicated questions. I'm certain several volumes have been written about either. I'd have to say the simplest way of explaining it would be that after all this time, a status quo has been established and it's hard for anyone to disrupt it.
There aren't many ways for humans to increase their magical capacity without immense amounts of practice, no. Warlocks can augment their magic by summoning demons and negotiating with them to use their power. I can't say I'm an expert on Seelie magic, but it's very much connected to nature.
no subject
The Grey Wardens are an order dedicated to protecting the world from darkspawn. When they come to the surface in hordes with an Archdemon leading them, it's called a Blight, and only Wardens are equipped to stop them.
What kind of demons do you have? Where did they come from? What risks do they pose to someone trying to deal with them? Why do they not offer the same power to magical humans? Can only Seelie use magic that involves nature? The Dalish tend to use nature magic more, but it's not a exclusive to them. I can if I want to, but I'm not really a fan of vines.
no subject
I see. I guess I can understand how it would be a very vital position then! On top of being very dangerous.
There are whole volumes about the different types of demons we have. Some of them defy classification entirely, though there are a few notable ones. According to the generally accepted version of events, some were originally angels who fell from heaven. As for risks, that would depend on the type of demon. Some are interested in generalized mischief, others specifically want to hurt humans. Humans have two human parents, Downworlders (which includes warlocks, the fair folk, and vampires and werewolves) do not. In that respect, it's down to blood. If a Seelie were inclined, I'm sure they could teach me some of their magic, though I'm not sure that would work both ways. The Dalish are elves?
no subject
The Dalish are elves that refuse to live among humans and live in wandering clans instead. They claim their magic is closer to their old ways, and I guess they'd know. I can't help but wonder if it has more to do with them simply having closer access to nature compared to us in the Circle, since the most nature we'd ever see was when a Templar tracked mud through the Great Doors.
What aspects of healing magic apply? Is it restricted to physical injury? Does it require sacrifice or is simply expending magical energy enough?
no subject
The Circles you spoke of and the Dalish elves, do they represent the two extremes as far as learning and using magic? I suppose I'm really asking if there's something in the middle. [ Meaning, maybe, what's between an approach that sounds more theory and knowledge-based and one that sounds like it's more natural (literally). ] That's not to say I think your approach sounds overly academic. But with the different scenarios you're talking about, I have to wonder.
Healing magic can be used in many ways. It does require a large expenditure of the healer's energy. If more is needed, you can borrow from another living source without harming them, but you have to be cautious.