Site News Feed – Page 4 – Molten Aether FFRP

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.

Proposal for Server Changes

I have considered server changes for a while now. Everyone knows that the server has gone through many iterations. For a good while now I have seriously considered doing something we did previously… That is to go back to having a server for each setting. Not only that, I would like to allow those people who have starships to have their own servers for their ships and thus allowing people to play around more with time-fudge (as is kind of becoming a term in my brain) so that people could more easily break away from the constraints of being all on the same server at the same time.

At this time, the changes outlined here are a proposal awaiting commentary from the group. If no commentary is given, we will proceed with making the necessary changes, otherwise consider this post an engraved invitation to comment and / or complain about these ideas. I am especially interested in peoples concerns both with how we do things now (which feels excessively complicated at times to manage) and how I am proposing to do things in the future (which might also feel excessively complicated to manage to some). I would like any and all constructive commentary.

Setting Czars

I have decided that each setting is going to get its own “Czar” who will be in charge of said setting in its entirety, except for accepting some co-input from myself when and if it became necessary to do so. Though the intention is for whoever is in charge of that setting to have a server dedicated to that setting where they are in charge of character approvals, story line choices, and even setting / background choices.

Reality Czars

Along those same lines, since we have Janus Gate in operation, I would like to give people the opportunity to (again on different servers) run a linked-reality with even more control unto themselves. This is the framework I imagine for servers to partner with ours. A prime example is a pure Star Wars, Halo, or Troy Rising universe along with other customs (including Cyber Star’s custom setting if he wishes, or Winter’s setting if she wants). Within each of our 3 settings we have methods of traversing realities and such partnerships would come with a “full faith and credit” kind of clause. This would allow approved characters, ships, and technologies / concepts from one reality to traverse to another reality unchecked so long as it has been previously approved in one of our servers.

Reference Material / Game Mechanics

I have always found participation points to be an important part of any setup. Thus, servers joined together in this way would need a bot (similar to Tatsumaki in this feature) to accumulate points and displayer server-only points and network-wide (as I think we could reasonably call a set of servers a network) points. We would still all share the same Wiki (though reality-specific servers would get the choice to reference their own Wiki should one exist).

The in-game mechanic of the Janus gate or even a singular Stargate works for me for transit between realities within Blazing Umbra, and magical solutions in the other 3 settings, the Umbral Passages / Drochaid stones in Embers of Soteria along with generalized magical spells and such in a more advanced world such as is in Angelic Sins.

Since Discourse (our Forum solution) and WordPress (thus, duh) have an extensive capacity to be customized and provide a unified front for all things, those people who are running external servers could use the forum and/or word press to unify announcements and the like. Some adjustments would need to be made, in all likelihood, in dealing with cross-posting and such but that all can be dealt with on the technical side at a later date.

What and Why?

My life is quickly getting more complicated and my personal life is blooming out into something I am really enjoying. I don’t want to give up Molten Aether nor any of its sub-settings but I am becoming too busy to properly manage it (and I didn’t really have time before to do all 3). Also a lot of other people have a lot of other ideas that are far better than mine when dealing with things like Fantasy and Modern Horror and even SciFi that isn’t Star Trek and Stargate (which I know an obscene amount about). Doing it this way allows people to be creative and benefit from our combined creative talent which is, well I think it is an impressive amount of creativity we have here.

Taking Applications

So what is going to follow is going to be the draft application for doing a partner server to ours:

Server Name:
Link:
Admin:
Description:
This should be a paragraph or 2 at least.
Base Universe:
If the reality / universe is based on an existing one (such as Babylon 5, Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Halo, Troy Rising) or anything that we can look up specifically as the base for the setting, it would go here include existing resources for if an original setting is being used here as well.
Special Information:
Anything we need to know about the in-universe game play and rules, be as detailed as possible if there is anything unusual outside the rules outlined on the Molten Aether Wiki that needs to be considered.
Additional Notes:
Anything else we need to know.

Application Terms and Conditions

These terms and conditions apply to every partnered server, of any type, which is added to Molten Aether. All partner servers should aspire to the same overall feel, our goal is to create a network of servers to cater to the creative desires of everyone who may wish to join and support those people in becoming better role players, writers, and such.

Full Faith and Credit

Any and all characters approved on any individual server are valid for every server within Molten Aether and its subsidiary servers and our character creation guidelines must be met as outlined here. All servers must follow the rules of conduct as outlined here, at a bare minimum, this does not mean that individual servers cannot have more strict rules of play so long as they do not violate the rules specified. Interpretation of rules should be as uniform as possible, but server admins do retain the ability to interpret the rules as they see fit while minimizing conflicts with other servers.

Moderators vs. Administrators

Moderators are defined as those who work within a server to assist in role play, producing plots and stories, going over applications, and enforcing the rules of an individual server. Administrators are defined as those who administer the server’s framework, channels, bots, roles, and other such things. Administrators also, under this plan, will assist in unifying all the servers in the network should some kind of conflict arise.

Admin Sharing

While each server will have its own administrators moderation privileges will be extended to administrators from the other servers. This does not have to include moderators getting similar privileges on all servers. However, anyone who is an Admin on one of our core servers (currently defined as SysOp we currently have on Molten Aether) will be expected to be administrators on subsequent servers unless there is sufficient reason not to. Moderators can also be shared, but it is not required and individual server owners have the final say on if a moderator of a partnered server is allowed to be moderator on their server.

Comments

In addition to our normal comments being on the forum, there is a Google form for extended comments and voting for these changes.

Time and Time Again

I’ve always told everyone that real life comes first but I never had much of a real life to contend with before. I can’t say that I’m familiar with balancing my time the way I have had to recently. Along that vein I’m not able to keep up with my obligations as the head of the various story lines that we have going on. As such, I am officially handing the reigns for all ongoing / upcoming story lines to our SysOps, @jumpingscript and @ks0908 who will coordinate with our Moderators and Founders in order to get our role play back into swing. I will likely give advise and ideas, the primary approval and focus for RP will be our collective Staff.

First off I’d like to apologize to everyone for my limited time over the last few months. School this semester has been brutal and especially demanding on my time, I’m spending roughly 70 or so hours a week on classes, class requirements (in class room experience), homework, and actual work (paychecks are nice). Even before my personal life got more complicated, the demands on my time were significant. As most of you know I have also become involved with someone, this person has quickly become very special to me and thus most of my free time (what little we can line up together) goes to her.

What to do about unfinished stories…

We have many unfinished and ongoing story lines, what I have documented is all contained in the following OneNote Notebook, this link is a view-only link and shows everything I have gathered that has yet to be posted for the game. I know a lot of people don’t care for Microsoft products but OneNote is entirely free, has apps for Android, Windows Phone, iOS, Windows, Mac, and web. The server staff has been given an editable link to allow them to make changes to all notes and read all content.

For those players who are in RP-Lock with my characters and given storylines. Overall, we can put those RPs on hold and continue them later (likely after my semester ends) when I have more time. The time-frame on that is mid-May, since finals week is the end of April / start of May. For anyone with specific concerns on how to deal with ongoing storyline issues due to my absence, I encourage you to contact me directly and we can work out specifics of how to deal with it. A few people I am going to contact privately myself.

For those wondering some of the details for things; I have compiled a rough list of who is where of the important figures…

Blazing Umbra

Sal D’Amico has been recalled to Markab Prime to oversee Solas Tempus operations from HQ.
Asher / Rosary have been ordered to stay on ready-alert during the Zone exploration from the Continuum in orbit and monitoring the situations / providing intel.
Lance Thomas is still listed as deceased, overall the general population does not know anything different and his passing has been mourned slowly and operations have really gotten back to normal. There are rumors throughout the station and abroad that he is still alive, most of these focus on some urgent mission that is revealed would do some horrible thing, the horrible things varies of course. Of course the core of our playable characters within Blue Team of Solas Tempus know the truth, that he is alive and being searched for.
Drem Confuscho has been assigned to assist with the Solerian people at the bottom of the Soterian ocean to rebuild their society. The USS Drakon has been largely left to Emily Damion to command.
The STV Galatine is commanded commanded by Siv Quinn who has been promoted to Admiral and made the head of Blue Team / Temporal Operations. The Galatine has been placed on a classified mission and has not been seen in the Schatten System in some time, neither has Siv.
Amber Cross herself is still in the system and active, she can be played as an NPC if necessary by staff but please read up on her character before playing her.

Command Structure in Schatten System

Nimbus Station remains the command outpost for the system and oversees all operations within the system under its current command structure.
The Civilian Government still maintains its primary offices on Nimbus Station for the time being, Andrea Maddox is a Human (female) and is Governor of the system while a Romulan (female) is the Senator of the system. These are both NPC’s so they can be played by anyone.
Sal D’Amico is largely unable to be reached at any given time, but if his orders are needed they probably take a few days to a week (real time) to get as the players in question will have to drop me a line and I can write up orders or some such. He does have a secretary and aids who can be NPC’d if necessary — I’ll leave any names up to everyone playing.

Angelic Sins

This is much easier to untangle. Lance Thomas himself has been heavily reprimanded for his behavior and for the moment is mostly working out of the Ad Undas base near Los Angeles and is investigating the supernatural occurrences that happened recently, he is essentially unreachable. My other characters there are just not present right going on other jobs, in the case of Trevor Arnell he is most likely unavailable because of having just gotten married and now has to learn the history and culture of Erica Larsson who is not human and has a significant amount of stuff that Trevor has to learn.

I will leave it up to the staff and players about the murder mystery that has been going on for a really long time, notes on that should be in the notebook linked above.

Embers of Soteria

The main story here should hold but can be used. Notes on the story are in the above mentioned notebook. Lisa Thomson herself has been leading the Souls Templar across the countryside seeking to defend the kingdoms against the horrors that are starting to come through the veil as the Peace of Ages dissolves. This plot element will remain static for the time being and can also be used by players as needed to conflicts, storylines and anything else.

Good People, Good Writers

We have a lot of good people here and good writers. I hope that everyone can continue to role play and have fun even when I’m not around. Please, create new stories, have fun, alter things, nothing would please me more than having to learn new lore and new things that happened. Don’t be afraid to break things, don’t be afraid that I’m not going to approve, run it past the staff and so long as they give the OK, then you have my blessing.

I’ll be around to chat and such periodically and I might RP now and again.

Until then. Happy plotting.

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.

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.

Mysterious deaths aboard Nimbus station

Today morning body was found near engineering section by Security Ensign Jonas Sanders, officer told us that it did not have any markings that wold indicate that it was crime. Medical team took body and after examining it, they determined natural cause of death, Heart Attack.

Later this day Petty Officer Gonzales found another body this time near victims living quarters, and while cause of death was also heart attack few people started to question if those were actually accidents. Speculations aroused that bot victims were given poisons but they were proven wrong after preliminary report from toxycology showed no trace of unussual substances.
For some context, both victims were areound early 30s man, with clean bill of health

We were able to recive short statement from witness of second body discovery

He looked like he fallen asleep, calm, with closed eyes. Only weird thing was that he was naked. He looked like he just woke up to fall asleep again. I noticed Petty officer Gonzales was checking him, but she soon declared <redacted> was dead and called coroner team
Anonymous source, not Affiliated to Solas Tempus staff

Is it really just a coincidence? Or maybe it’s targeted attack? Or maybe something else?

Stay tuned for more information on Soteria News Service!

//ooc: any character able to detect dark magic/energy would be able to sense presence of succubus on station, however they won’t be able to tell exactly what it is, nor track it unless they get really close

School’s Out Soon and Stories Will Be In

So as most of everyone knows, winter break is coming up soon, very soon. We’ve got a number of story lines that have been on a long-pause due to time restrictions from school and I’ve got a partial list going here of the stories which need completion. I’m looking for people who want to help run and / or participate in these plots so we can move them forward. In the near-term I’d like to hear any ideas associated with where to take these plots next and beyond that when we can actually do these plots.

Angelic Sins

Our primary plot line in Angelic Sins is, of course, the Serial Killer / Murder Mystery plot. I’ve posted several summaries and still, this hasn’t really gotten off the ground. I am, however, looking to push forward with it. Anyone wishing ti participate; I’m looking to perhaps have a few investigation events — these will not be combat oriented but instead will be fact-finding. I’m going to try to have them take place in the near future, probably before Christmas.

Blazing Umbra

Where to start with Blazing Umbra? There are a lot of plots that have fallen by the wayside during the school year and even before.

Akron Mystery
Death / Disappearance of Lance Thomas
Vex Conflict (@buckethead)
The Zone in Blazing Umbra (Chaos)
Zone of Corruption (Cyber)
Stellar Horizon
Foothold Scenario (@ks0908)
Political Pressure / Onyx / Imperial Forces
Grtul Gate War (@buckethead)

I’m sure that I’m missing some here, and I’d like to push forward with some of these. It seems that the forum has not done well for such role play, so I’ll be looking to when we can hold events for some of these. Again, I’d like people to contact me with what plots they might want to play in or help with.

Embers of Soteria

All of our primary plots here have to do with the Thinning of the Viel plot line, except for some of the personal story lines (PSLs) which are more specific. We’ve had the recent Daemoni Attack which is related to that, the business with magic and evil things coming forth, and a plot with Cyber about his injured dwarf that are all related to this same thing.

Telegram Notifications

So after some searching I have finally found a completely free option to have forum notifications for users. Within the next few hours we will be discontinuing support for Pushover in favor of using Telegram for our notifications. The chat client is free and links to its download for Android and iOS will be at the end of this post.

To configure, get Telegram and open a new message to @MoltenAetherBot, the bot will then give you a chat ID number. Paste that number into your user settings page under “Profile”. The text box should be at the end of that page and titled Telegram Notifications.

Download links for most every platform can be found here. Again, it is entirely free.

New WordPress URL

So, since WordPress is so much easier to update than raw HTML code, even with an application as awesome as Adobe Dreamweaver, I have moved all of the information that used to be on out home site (https://home.blazingumbra.com/) here to the WordPress. This includes our TOS and Privacy Policy (yes, we have those) as well as information about the game, links to the wiki, forum, etc.

The new URL is simply: https://home.blazingumbra.com

All previous URL’s should redirect back here, that is if I’ve configured Apache correctly. If anyone has any problems, please let me know.