cyclops

Souls Templar Regroups

There is talk that the cataclysm is a result of the Mistress’s liaison with a demonic creature, which has rendered her unholy.

The Souls Templar have begun to regroup after the insanity brought forth from the simultaneous eruptions of four peeks bordering the valley where the Rose Palace was located. What is clear is that they have suffered an incredible number of losses. What is unclear yet, however, is why there were not more losses. The palace was entirely covered in the molten rock from the bowels of Elder Soteria. There is much talk throughout the 10 Kingdoms that such an events indicates the Old Gods are upset with the Templar in some way. The Grand Mistress of the Templar has not indicated how so many did survive, tales from within the palace when the eruptions happened tell that most were unable to get out fast enough, those outside were killed instantly. The only thing to protect the inside were powerful wards of protection put on the palace long ago. The vast majority of those from the palace suffocated as the air ran too thin.

The Grand Mistress still has not identified the creature which rescued so many of them;While we are of course grateful to the gracious help provided us, if they wished to be known to the public, surely it is clear they would have made themselves known. I myself did speak to them in person, however, I feel that after being done such an honor it would be the height of treachery to speak of them with such familiarity without knowing why they wished to not be known. Rest assured we give this brave soul thanks for the efforts which has saved so many, even in the light of such loss, the Gods provide hope.
Grand Mistress Lisa Thompson

Those close to the Mistress report that she may have even known this person for some time, described as part demon and part woman. There is talk that the cataclysm is a result of the Mistress’s liaison with a demonic creature, which has rendered her unholy. Growing unrest among the monarchs at such an idea has driven some to wonder if a woman is really the best choice to lead the group during such troubling times.

Salvage Begins in Los Angeles

In Los Angels, while the US Government has repeatedly stated that it believes a natural gas pocket was breeched during routine construction of an underground bunker facility, there are serious questions that have yet to be answered. Government officials have been unresponsive to further inquiries, however, first responders were finally allowed on scene to the site of the desert explosions which took place recently just outside the city. So far, no survivors have been found, the bodies recovered have been burned beyond recognition.

On site details are sketchy and the first responders have only been allowed to investigate the areas of the first basement level with other levels closed, supposedly for decontamination. It is unclear at this point how deep the facility goes, military personnel have been bringing out bodies in various states of being burned, though all of them are burned so bad that dental records will have to be used for identification.

Anomalous Effects

The anomalous effects in Los Angeles County that accompanied the explosion in the desert also appear to have abated, though it is estimated over 100 supernaturals or those with supernatural abilities were injured or killed during the unexplained event. Investigators from the local government who deal with supernatural events have begun to look into possible explanations, but so far have found nothing.

Unexplained Deaths

Within hours of the explosion that ripped through desert tonight, supernatural entities have reported deaths as they fleet the city, unable to call upon their abilities. It seems the explosion has caused a swath of some 50 miles around the site to become some kind of area of exclusion to supernatural abilities, including magic and psionics. Creatures who rely on their supernatural abilities have scant time to leave as the effects begin to worsen over time. Undead creatures are the most susceptible as their supernatural nature keeps them alive.

Older and more powerful supernaturals seem to have more time, however, the exodus of the Los Angeles area continues, without access to their abilities many are scrambling to find conventional means of transportation.

Cataclysmic Eruption at Rose Palace

The Rose Palace were the keepers of the Peace of Ages and without them it is feared the great war which tore apart the world may begin anew, and restore Elder Soteria to the smoldering ruins from before the Ageless Ones came.

While the exact reasons for this are unknown, the Rose Palace has been engulfed in fire and molten rock as the mountains surrounding it has erupted, casting fire into the skies and burning rock down the slopes of the mountain. At the end of this last evening, the palace itself has been entirely enveloped in brimstone and molten lava. It is unknown if anyone escaped, but wizards have been trying to contact the Palace via the Airgid Drochaid though they fear that the palace has been destroyed or the stone shattered as no connection has been possible. Knights from the 10 Kingdoms have been dispatched to the Rose Palace in accordance with the Peace of Ages, they should arrive in a matter of days.

In the nearby towns on the night of the eruptions, many townsfolk described the heavens opening up and the Gods shooting blue lightening down from clear skies into the mountains. Though no one closer than 200 miles away has come forward, though many advisors and monarchs have dispatched people to gather information and see how bad the damage is. The Rose Palace were the keepers of the Peace of Ages and without them it is feared the great war which tore apart the world may begin anew, and restore Elder Soteria to the smoldering ruins from before the Ageless Ones came.

Members of the Souls Templar who were on assignment have been released from their charges by the monarchs they reside in, and are set to gather in the mountains at the Ruins of Wulfre Keep, not far from the Rose Palace itself, though given the old ruins location in the mountains, it may not be possible to meet there. If this is the case, it has been said that they will meet at the town of Rawold.

If the Souls Templar and the Rose Palace have been gutted, all the realms may be in dire trouble and the Peace of Ages is likely to be broken. After that, all out war is likely to follow.

Explosion in the Desert

A massive underground explosion took place in the desert outside of Los Angeles at exactly 8:00 pm on Tuesday January 1st, 2019. Rescue teams were dispatched from Los Angeles immediately, however military units arrived on site shortly after and have declared an the area to be a restricted zone, rescue workers were not permitted entry, claiming national security.

The mayor of Los Angeles has filed an official protest with the United States Navy, who reportedly is somehow involved with how the land is used. However, the land itself is owned by a company RTL Holdings LLC, the CEO is named as one Edward Brass and has not responded to any contact attempts.

First responders initial reports have been classified as top secret, and restricted from the public. Two recordings of the initial back-and-forth between 1st responders arriving on site and dispatch have leaked, though their authenticity has yet to be verified. Both recordings are from different divisions, one from the California Department of Forestry and the other from the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. Both recordings have officers and firemen talking about a blue-green flame and waves of some unknown form of energy coming off of a massive glowing blue ball before the recordings are cut. If these recordings are true, experts remain unsure as to what kind of event could have caused such combustion and suggest that perhaps toxic fumes caused hallucinations.

Latest Founder – Minty Jade

In recognition of the sheer amount of improvement and further focus on character development over the last year or so; I have added the newest member to our list of founders. The title of Founder is given to anyone who has significantly contributed to the setting itself; such a title has been previously given out to Yuu-Desi, for his contributions to the definition and nature of magic and how it works as well as to T0l for his significant contributions to the military structure of Solas Tempus and weaponry used by the site. Beyond simply contributing information to the Wiki or participating in role playing, Jade has made a distinct effort to swing through creative and well crafted arcs of character development which added significantly to the setting. The additions to the setting include the way death, the dead, the damned, and the saved are handled in the setting and defining an entire plane of existence while still maintaining an idea of balance within the playable characters she plays.

So, for that, we thank you @jade, congrats.

Writing Prompt: Frozen Gate

We’re going to try to get back into writing prompts again; I do hope everyone likes it. There is no contest with this one, but I would like everyone to participate.

The usual applies; there are no limits on what can be written. This can be cute, funny, vulgar, dark, angry, or anything in between any of it. Whatever floats your boat to write and of any length everyone feels comfortable. This should be consider a rough-rough-rough draft as well so don’t try to make it perfect, just get some ideas out there.

This image comes from Deviant Art, see the image page itself for citation.

A Most Unusual Distress Call

We’ve got a ship in trouble, doesn’t matter if we’ve never heard of it. All the questions can get asked later, for now we mean to find them and rescue them – whoever they are. Once the crew is safe, then I have some questions for them. Until then, it’s about making sure that we answer the voice from the darkness asking for help. No one gets left behind on my watch.

At 2300 hours on December 26th, 2385 reporters from the Soteria News Service received an unusual signal via the lower spectrum of the subspace local communications band. The signal is a repeating sequence spelling out coordinates and asking for assistance. The ship’s identification is encoded in the signal but the ship is not found in any database.

The ship identifies itself as the STV Arden Trinity, it identifies itself as registry number TOV-199257-D. The distress call itself has only a simple repeating digital message; repeatedly declaring the vessel to have suffered a catastrophic failure and requesting immediate assistance. There is no voice component to the message and reporters, upon receiving the signal, immediately attempted to raise the vessel on the same and tertiary subspace channels to no avail. The incident was reported to Solas Tempus and the Concord. Solas Tempus reported that no vessel has that designated under that name nor with that registry number, yet they have reported that they are attempting to pinpoint the location the signal has originated from so that they can dispatch rescue vessels. Apparently the coordinates given the message are for an area of deep space and there is too much space to cover, long range probes detect no vessel at those coordinates. Probes have been launched to search nearby areas of space, trying to locate the origin of the signal.

When asked for her comments on this unknown signal and if Solas Tempus had any issues responding to such an unusual signal; Vice Admiral Vermilion of the Search and Rescue division of Solas Tempus responded:

“We’ve got a ship in trouble, doesn’t matter if we’ve never heard of it. All the questions can get asked later, for now we mean to find them and rescue them – whoever they are. Once the crew is safe, then I have some questions for them. Until then, it’s about making sure that we answer the voice from the darkness asking for help. No one gets left behind on my watch.”
Vice Admiral Minute Vermilion, Rescue Services

Further investigation has revealed that the type and method of distress call are also not in use by any known race. Our investigation is ongoing to discover as much as possible and it has been requested that a reported be allowed to travel with the rescue team once dispatched.

Update: As of 0500 hours this morning, December 27th 2385, it is confirmed that the subspace signal originated in a different area of space, STR feels that they are close to pinpointing a location to send rescue vessels to.

This is the start of an extended story line that will become an event at some point. All players who with to participate are requested to respond in the forum thread. All characters approved for Blazing Umbra are welcome to participate in any capacity they wish.

Change to the Wiki

Over the last few days I have been making a lot of changes to the wiki, most everyone who has a character probably got an email. I went through every single character bio that we have there and reorganized them. All players that had 4 or more characters now have their own category, this helps keep the People category easier to read through. We also have categories for some of the races, organizations, and settings. There is also a new setting category of Cross Setting which is for characters in which the same version of the character crosses between settings; such has to be approved by staff of course.

The changes include the requirement of a setting field in the Character Box template, but more than that, we make more use of the player field, which we’ve always had but hasn’t been widely used. Now, the system will attempt to automatically categorize a character by the person who plays it. This does mean that we’re going to have to make sure the field is consistent, an excellent example is Neeko (going by many names, usually revolving around being on Spotify a lot). Now, his character pages are all listed under that name, Neeko. Thus all characters he plays have to be listed under that name. If the player name has a user page on the wiki, it will automatically be linked as well. This also means that if the player has a Wiki account, we should use that name for the name of the player. This will help keep it consistent and link into the user information on the wiki.

The other thing this means is there should no longer be a need to add categories to the character pages manually. Simply fill out the setting information in the template along with status and player, the wiki should do the rest.

We are also now going to be making better use of our category for NPCs. I was also inspired by something that Chaos Spartan said and from here on out, if someone would like to claim an NPC for themselves to play as a proper character, contact the staff; we should be able to arrange that. Character bios for NPCs will be filled in as needed during game play, it is important to keep track of details, so try to record traits that you want an NPC to have during play and slap them into the wiki, even informally, after.

Thank you to everyone. Happy gaming.

Awards & Prizes

Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others participated in our NaNoWriMo contest; for which I am very grateful. Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon. A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

For a while now I’ve been doing participation awards, those people who contribute the most, I believe, deserve to be recognized. However, recently those participating have all been staff members, and I believe that we should focus on non-staff members for such awards. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate our staff, I truly do, however the idea is to draw people to participate and contribute which staff members usually do anyway.

Whether it is due to multiple languishing storylines or due to everyone being busy with school, work, and/or life the server has seen a drastic dive in the amount of activity. I am not very concerned with this, activity comes and goes and while I hope things don’t die off, if they do they do. I wouldn’t be the first time I had to rework things and start again.

That all being said, my contribution / participation recognition has not gone as well as I’d hoped and I am actively looking for other options to accomplish that goal! Please feel free to contact me with any ideas on how to increase participation, and such awards are on hold until I figure out a different way to do things.

NaNoWriMo Contest Results

This year I did something I’ve thought about doing for a while and opened up a new thread and a challenge. That is, I wanted the server to write a novel! There have been other crowd-sourced projects like this, my favorite (and perhaps the most funny) was put on by a guy named Brian Brushwood and was to troll the novel 50 Shades of Gray. It’s a hilarious idea, while I didn’t want to troll anyone, I’ve seen first hand how creative everyone is. To give some incentive, I said I would pay money to the top two contributors to the thread (excluding myself of course). The thread can be read here. While I do plan on continuing the thread with anyone who wants to participate, I was disappointed in the number of people who took me up on the offer.

Of course, Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others did participate; for which I am very grateful. Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon. A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

Moving Forward

I talk a lot about moving forward, I want to find out what everyone thinks we should do to increase our activity. We’ve had some new players join, which I hope that they submit characters, and I know it is pretty standard on Discord to join a server and forget about it. I’d like to try and refocus our strategy, we’ve got a lot of members, and it’s clear that our core people (staff mostly) play really well together. I ask that everyone try to do a story with someone they don’t play with often, time permitting of course. The more people we have playing the richer and more developed the setting and its history will become.

Thank you to everyone; happy gaming.