January Monthly Post - Summer breeze makes me feel fine...

[wearethecrystalmods]

AC Results

The following characters have been swept from the game for failure to respond sufficiently to last month's activity check. Steven Quartz Universe (Steven Universe - Strike) If any of these characters would like to return to play they will have to use the reapp form. If any mistake has been made please don't hesitate to contact one of the mods. Thank you!

WHOA WHAT THE HECK IS THIS

Welcome to Cosmographia's first monthly post! Remember that chatter about Excursions? This is what that turned into, after your mods mulled over what they were meant to accomplish and how best to make that happen. Monthly posts roll together AC results, event previews (if it's an event month), world updates, explorations, and results of the last month's explorations. The first one is nothing new. Event previews are something we've done in the past to give you some time to plan and prepare, usually by having something happen earlier in the month to foreshadow it. We're going to start putting those out at the beginning of the month, complete with summaries of any foreshadowing that will happen. Mingles will still be posted when appropriate. World updates are things like notable weather events, holidays and town events, monster attacks, and other mod-provided things that will happen during the month. Instead of posting frequent mingles to populate Cosmo's world with NPC activity, we'll give a list of dates and world updates on the first day of the month, which players can use as prompts for their own mingles and/or to spice up their characters' lives beyond the bi-monthly events. Explorations are a way less complicated version of the core idea behind excursions. Each month, there'll be a comment header on the monthly post for explorations. That header will take comments like these: While Tiger's Eye is in town, "Alice" is going to ask her if Hawk can whistle the Chocobo theme. "Cooper" thinks the pattern on that mysterious door in the heart room is tacky so he's going to hit it really, really hard with his gem weapon. (Play this out in a thread that's at least 10 comments long, link it here, and something else will happen...) "Bob" knows a little bit about astronomy. If they look at the star charts in the Observatory, will anything weird show up? And those comments will get replies like this: Tiger doesn't know what that is, but she'll complain fondly to "Alice" about a time when Hawk had a song stuck in her head for six months straight and Tiger had to shapeshift her own ears away. It won't break, but the Heart will light up like a disco ball and a bunch of confetti will fall on "Cooper's" head. To a trained eye, a pattern emerges..."Bob" will notice some constellations that spell out "U R STINKYHEAD". ...Paraphrased, of course. Explorations won't replace events where characters thread with NPCs or against the mod account to interact with the setting, but they'll open up NPCs and the setting to players outside of events. In the past, we've gotten questions in private about hidden setting details when characters have explored locations outside of events. We hope that making explorations a feature of the monthly posts will encourage players to use them, as well as make the information turned up in them public for other players to notice and use. To that end, each monthly post will have a summary of the results of the last month's explorations. This will include both information that was uncovered by characters (and whether or not it's likely to have traveled through the Temple grapevine), and changes to NPC behavior, locations, or other aspects of the setting that have come about because of player actions. Players are encouraged to use the rest of the comment space on monthly posts to pitch ideas for threads, player events, mingles, etc to their fellow players. Since not all of our players use Plurk, and keeping an entire game's playerbase on your Plurk friends list just for plotting isn't always feasible, plotting on monthly posts should help you reach more players and stay in touch with what characters will be doing in Cosmo. So, without further ado, here's the scoop on January 2017!

January World Updates

WEATHER All month - The hottest days of summer are upon WB, bringing with them popsicles, ice cream trucks, and a handful of out-of-town beachgoers. NPC ACTIVITY 1st through 7th - The New Year's Festival ends on the 1st, but Bricktown and Waverly Bay are still lively in the days following. Now is the time for last-minute holiday discounts, parties, and griping about all the Valentine's candy that's already on sale. A stall in Waverly Bay will be selling heavily marked-down consumer fireworks. Do not blow up the Temple. 1st through 7th - When the sun shines just the right way through a notch in the hill and into Griffon Village, the griffons know it's time to celebrate another year's passing! A happy griffon new year mostly involves spoiling all the grifflings born in the last year completely rotten. Anyone who visits the island in the week after New Year's Day might find themselves dragged along to fish and gather fruit. But if the griffons suspect you're young enough to be pampered, you might be offered a regurgitated feast instead! 6th - A certain GIANT BIRD reappears!...but it's cool, she's friendly this time. She's wearing a pet-shaming-style sign in Tiger's handwriting that explains she's tame and friendly and please don't attack her. With her gem healed and some quality time spent with her sister, Hawk's Eye has settled down enough to pick up her duties as a defender of Waverly Bay. Hawk can mostly be found flying over the town, roosting on top of the statue, or playing with Griffon outside of town. From the 6th onward, she'll be available for interaction via explorations on this post. 17th through 22th - For a little under a week, the Temple Gems will feel a mysterious presence that comes and goes. It's faint, but resembles the feeling of recognition you get after someone behind you calls your name, and becomes stronger when it's noticed and focused on. In addition, Gems who sleep during this period may have peculiar lucid dreams involving floating in darkness while being surrounded by many voices. The presence can be responded to, and may react to attempts to communicate with it via explorations on this post.

January Event...?

...actually, there won't be one. December was a pretty busy month, between the not-technically-an-event Fourth Wall and the holidays in general; to let everyone unwind and keep an eye on how this monthly-post-and-explorations thing plays out, we're bumping the event schedule a month ahead. There'll be an event as usual in February.

Comments

QUESTIONS

[wearethecrystalmods]

OOC questions and clarifications etc.

[nailed_it]

A few quick questions (and I hope I'm asking them under the right header, my apologies if not).

So for Explorations we should watch this post to see when those top-level comments go up for NPC threads? Or will there be a post on the IC comm and that's where the hand-waved interactions happen?

Or, since I just realized I might be completely mis-reading how it works, is this where we link instances of our characters intending to interact with the NPCs in order to get hand-waved IC reactions? As an example, say Yang notices something weird about a gem monster she fought and bubbled and wants to ask Tiger Eye about it. I comment in the Explorations header with a link to the thread and an explanation of what her question would entail and then a mod comments back with an NPC answer.

My apologies if I'm way off base here on how this works. Either way I'm super excited at the prospect of explorations! :D

you didn't see that.

[wearethecrystalmods]

You're good!

The second example is one of the various things explorations can be used for. Other options are things like:

- A character wants to explore an established setting more thoroughly than the locations page has detail for. They comment here describing what methods the character uses to do so, and we reply with any new details they turn up.
- A character does something in a populated location that will get major attention from NPCs. They comment here with it, and we not only confirm the NPC response but make a note of the event in our plotdoc to possibly reference later.
- Something is happening in a world update. A character interacts with it in a way that might get results we didn't mention in the update itself (like Alice did on this post). We provide further deets as needed instead of outlining every possible result in advance (and thus restricting the ways characters can react).

It's a combination of regular old contact-a-mod-to-pitch-a-player-plot detail requests, and NPC interaction that doesn't depend on waiting for mods to actually thread every one of those interactions out (or on players to take on extra threads just for a chance to play with the metaplot).

No specific thread is required to put in an exploration, but we hope the results of explorations give players extra material to start threads or posts with.

The intent here is to have the game's setting be interactive all the time, in a way that mods can handle, in a way that's friendly to those who are shy about FAQs and mod contact or who don't have much of an OOC presence in our community, and in a way that encourages players to ask questions and try things even outside of events. Explorations are pretty heavily based on systems we've seen used in other games, which seem to strike a nice midpoint between "lots of things happen in the setting for players to react to, but with little opportunity to affect the setting themselves" and "highly interactive via threads with NPCs, but mods have to tag constantly with few breaks to achieve this and players who don't have time for NPC threads are left out".

[nailed_it]

Oh wow! That opens up so many more options! :O

I really like this a lot! It's definitely a nice happy medium between the two extremes you outlined and now I'm even more excited! This is super awesome! Thank you so much, Mods! :D

EXPLORATIONS

[wearethecrystalmods]

Requests for detail on or IC interaction with the setting.

[domeinion]

Alice is more than familiar with voids and voices. How will the presence respond to her slipping into command-speak (e.g. "If you'll B DOWN here for a while, something is going to START, RIGHT?") or trying to test what it responds to?

[wearethecrystalmods]

Trying to talk to the presence will make it go "quiet", as though listening.

Command-speak will seem to confuse it, causing it to stay quiet for a while after it's responded to. Eventually it'll (weakly) transmit the feeling of being in the telescope room at the Observatory.

[domeinion]

FIELD TRIP

she's gonna go poke around at random objects and look into the telescope!

Griffon Village

[nailed_it]

Okay, I have to ask...is Fandango one of the grifflings born last year and therefore available for spoiling rotten?

[wearethecrystalmods]

She is.

She's especially eager to get treats from Gems.

[nailed_it]

Oh no, Yang's absolutely going to have to go and shower her with treats then.

She's no good at fishing the way griffons likely do but she grew up on an island so maybe she can catch something. ...If nothing else, she can just punch a couple of trees to get the fruit to come down.

Are the griffons bothered by adorable and super friendly corgis at all? She'd probably take Zwei along with her on the trip to help out and get him some exercise unless the griffons seemed really threatened by him.

Strawberry Fields

[modelcivilian]

Since everyone's kinda... well, enjoying themselves early in the month, Adrien's going to take the week to kind of disappear in the day and try exploring the fields again. Like, yeah, the satellite crashed there, and there are all these gem weapons, but he's curious about the Floating Islands and Tanzanite's Pond.

Though, let's start with Tanzanite's Pond earlier in the week, before too many monsters gather. Unless it's already become their watering hole or something... yeesh...

[wearethecrystalmods]

Is he just wandering around, or is he looking for something specific?

The bridges connecting the floating islands appear to be pretty stinking old and may be fragile; watch your step.

Tanzanite's Pond is slowly developing an ecosystem. Thar be algae....

[modelcivilian]

A little of both. Some half-hearted searching and more 'getting away from it all'. He'd definitely would remember anything that seemed to stand out from the corrosion, the strawberries, and the weapons though...

The bridges are old, but his feline abilities should help him get across. Or do they?

Oh yay, algae. If he really looked in the water, would he see anything else?

[perfectlynormalcthulhu]

On January 3rd Anri will suddenly realize that the chopsticks she's been eating with for the past few days are still entirely normal. Deciding to experiment, she'll go into town and start asking around about abandoned Gem buildings (i.e., player-run locations that have been moved to the Abandoned section); which one is she most likely to get directions to?

[wearethecrystalmods]

The one she'll hear most about is the warehouse out by the docks; some teens lament the disappearance of its owner, and others say they still have parties there.

While asking around, one teen will let Anri know she's a big fan, and press a sketchbook into her hands before leaving. It's full of graphic design sketches that seem to be heavily inspired by the aesthetic of Anri's "creations".

[perfectlynormalcthulhu]

Anri, unsure how to respond, will reflexively thank her politely as she's leaving before carefully storing the sketchbook in her shadow.

Once she's actually in the warehouse, she will carefully experiment with not transforming things she touches until she's got the hang of it, using the sketchbook as base materials.

She will put half of the resulting posters up in the warehouse, and take the rest home.

[espigeonage]

Does Julien's bird-befriending power work on griffins? ...Or with Hawk?

[wearethecrystalmods]

It works on exactly half of the griffins. Specifically, the front half! The griffins are chatty and sociable, but might refuse requests involving physical effort due to severe indifference of the hindpaws. They have a sophisticated sense of the island's ecology and of how the position of the sun and stars indicates the time of year, and are eager to teach Julien these things.

It sort of works on Hawk. The capacity for understanding is seriously cut down, between Hawk's corruption giving her problems expressing herself to begin with and also her not actually being a real bird, but Hawk takes to him pretty much immediately and can easily be coaxed into shenanigans.

Be careful - she's physically exuberant and plays kind of rough.

Re: EXPLORATIONS

[letsplayer]

Okay I remember that we can play Head It with the baby grifflings, kinda, but we can totally have some sort of griffon amie/refresh with the babs, right

Also, assuming that Pokemon world berries grow on Aventurine's tree, can Griffons eat them without ill effects and/or can they be grown on the island?

[wearethecrystalmods]

Absolutely. The adults will welcome any and all help in pampering babies.

Berries can be grown on the island, and do fairly well there, though the griffons will cut them back if they start growing too prolifically. As far as edibility goes, griffons are biologically regular old animals, so if the Pokemon cast has been running with berries being edible by animals and/or humans, so it shall be for the griffons too.

[chatwithdeath]

Voices... now we're getting into something Naomi is familiar with. Of course, she might originally attempt to ignore them. However, hearing your name on repeat so many times, eventually she'll have to ask what does it want. So, voices, what do you want?

oh crap I'm sorry I never hit post on this

[wearethecrystalmods]

Thinking "what do you want?" at the voices - in those words - will result in the word "want" being echoed back intermittently over a period of about three minutes.

Then, it'll transmit a strong feeling of curiosity, and echo the entire question at once: "what do you want?"

[nailed_it]

Will the voices the Gems hear in their dreams sound familiar to them at all? For example, are they recognizable as people they know or just completely strange voices?

[wearethecrystalmods]

If they focus on the voices, they may hear them resolve into the voices of people they know! However, all of those people will be fellow Temple Gems, current or former.