April 2019 – Molten Aether FFRP

Pushing the Investigation

We are looking for 2-4 players to participate in a 2-3 hour long session that will be scheduled in about 2-3 weeks from now, to allow me time to finish with the semester. We will be playing off of non-combat areas of mental illness, classic horror concepts, and a much darker universe than we’ve been going with before.

So the introductory thread for the Angelic Sins setting was supposed to have been over and done with years ago. However, we have been having trouble getting players to consistently want to participate. We’ve tried to do it on the forum and such since times don’t like to add up so people can do things. However, this is a plot that I’d like to finish. At this time, I’ve put out a call for players to volunteer for an as-yet-unscheduled event in Angelic Sins.

If all participants are able, we can arrange for the session to last longer, but right now I’m looking at doing several short sessions that deal specifically with this in an episodic kind of way. Rather than trying pack an TV style episode of content into the game, these will focus on one or maybe two concepts important to the whole plot, closer to a small MMORPG Quest style of episode.

If anyone knows any players who may which to participate who may not be on the server, please invite them and see if we can build a following.

Attack on Mars Devastates Federation

Some are saying the last safe haven for synthetics could be the Serenity Concord. The Concord has issued a statement saying that they are not considering any legislation against synthetic lives at this time, certainly will not act without more information about the causes for and details of the attack on Mars. The ALFRE act of 2384 is now the only legislation in known space to protect the rights of artificial life forms.

Yesterday during celebrations of First Contact Day, an apparent terrorist attack against the Federation colony on Mars occurred. Few details are as yet known, but what is known is that synthetic workers played and instrumental part in the attack. Any reasons for why this might have occurred are unclear at this time. Synthetic workers deactivated the planetary deflector shields and turned the defensive satellites against the surface in orbital bombardment. Casualty reports are still coming in but early reports estimate over 90,000 dead in the attack.

A rescue armada being constructed by Starfleet to assist in the evacuation of Romulus before the Romulan sun is predicted to go super nova was also attacked and destroyed along with the entire shipyards. The surface of the planet has been devastated and early reports suggest it could take decades to properly rebuild. It is unclear if the Federation will choose to rebuild its rescue fleet, though Admiral Jean Luc Picard has stated the devastating attack has nothing to do with the mission to save the Romulan people from destruction.

The Federation Council held an emergency meeting this morning and have issued a preliminary ban on synthetic research and development. Admiral Picard could not be reached for comment. Such an act could have unimaginable consequences for any synthetic life forms currently living or working in Federation space. It is known that since the android known as Data was discovered on Omicron Theta that many have been fighting for synthetic rights. The events of the past 24 hours are sure to have a lasting impact on the lives of any artificial beings currently in Federation territory.

Changes Made

While there were some reservations about the changes to be made, I still believe we can increase our total player count and activity across the 3 settings by splitting them across different servers. Over the last week or so, that is what we’ve done. All 3 servers are now operational and set up. All content on the original Molten Aether server has been configured to be archived and read-only until such time as we feel comfortable deleting it.

The server Molten Aether will remain online and be a centralized hub for all the settings / servers. All the OOC channels are intact and while the roles have been heavily simplified, it maintains the same idea of who can get where. The “Founders” role will also now contain those who run additional servers as well as those who have contributed a lot to the setting, since those are also mostly the same thing.

Those who run other servers will be granted access to the #staff channel on Molten Aether. I have also simplified our bot experience, we have 3 core bots on most of the servers, and a few more on Molten Aether itself. The main addition is the bot called Alyssa, which is an instance of Nadeko Bot that I host myself. If anyone is interested, it is open source and pretty easy to configure. The primary reason for this bot is that it provides some “global” options for when running a self-hosted version on multiple servers, as such we have use of the following global commands:

.start
.end
.pause
.resume
.links
.servers

These commands replace the Dyno commands which were similar. In addition, on Blazing Umbra there is the command .welcomekit which gives links and a description of a welcome kit for new arrivals to the station. More commands will be forthcoming as they are needed.

The server invites can be displayed with the .servers command for all of the Molten Aether servers. Soon, I will begin posting advertisement links to the Portal and we’re already listed on Dynobot’s site for all the servers. The hope is that we will attract people for each setting who may or may not want to do other settings and each server gain increased membership that way.