Recent Posts

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.

Other Side of the Grtul Gate

In the last month, Solas Tempus has stepped up the shipment of supplies across the gate, including a portion of the fleet has been stationed within the star system occupied by the humans native to that reality.  While there has been no official statement on the increase of military activity on the other side of the gate, it is known from several public statements that Solas Tempus and the Serenity Concord have signed a treaty with the Terran Space Alliance on the other side of the gate.

So far Solas Tempus has signed a number of treaties with parties in other realities.  However, the recent activation of the Janus Gate prompted Solas Tempus to send through a good portion of the battle group assigned to this system.  These forces later returned with little damage but rumors began to surface that a large scale engagement had occurred on the other side of the Grtul Gate.

While most everyone has seen the recent influx of tourism to the Schatten Star System and beyond, the gate which has provided that has been largely ignored since it showed up along with the massive space-station-ship called a Fabber, named Vulcan.  The gate itself has faded into the background, simply providing a path for ships to come and go from the other side of the Grtul Gate.

It is important to note that the other side of the gate is an entirely different reality.  A reality with its own political situation, races, and vastly different technology to our own.  While the humans on the other side and similar species that have come to our side of the gate has been largely positive, the recent rumors of a large scale engagement have been troubling to many.  Solas Tempus has released a statement in response to recent inquiries regarding the build up of military forces on the other side of the gate.

As per our recent treaty with the TSA, we have began to deploy military assets to their space in order to help secure our interests.  This is a standard military move, we have military assets stationed at other locations both in conventional space and in other realities for the same purpose.  Due to the high population of friendly and technologically advanced people on other side of the Grtul Gate we are pursuing a stronger agenda with its people, much the same way we signed an expansive trade, peace, and assistance treaty with the Avali.  The treaty with the Avali has been a benefit to everyone on multiple occasions.  This treaty is no different.

While it is true that their political situation is more complicated than many on our side of the Gate, this is not cause for concern.  There is no need to read into the situation more than is actually there.  The people on the other side of the Gate has been friendly and generous and we are endeavoring to respond in kind.

Acting Fleet Admiral Sal D’Amico

Background

Some time back the Pegasus realized that no new communication had occurred from the Gate in some time and left to investigate.  Since then the ship has been stationed on the other side of the Gate.  Previous to that, three Solas Tempus vessels were also stationed there, with the stated purpose of pursuing productive trade and peace agreements as well as exploration.  The three ships the Sparrow, Star Opal, and Gladius have also continued to be stationed on the other side of the gate.

After the activation of the Janus Gate it was not more than a few days before the Zealot Star returned with the bulk of Solas Tempus forces.  Shortly after traffic through the Gate returned to normal.

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.

Scouts Requested

The recent loss of contact on the other side of the Grtul Gate and the recent loss of contact with the Severed Grace into a large anomaly has prompted the need to investigate further.  At this time Vice Admiral Timol of SPECCOM is requested contractors to volunteer to investigate these two occurrences.  Please send a message to the Vice Admiral for deployment information and compensation information.

OOC:  Players interested in this should comment on this post via the forum IC.

Loss Shakes Foundations of Solas Tempus

“Yesterday one of our greatest leaders has been taken from us by the hands of fate. Fleet Admiral Lance Thomas was pronounced dead on arrival after a tragic shuttle crash took his life.” – Prime Minister Ethir Th’chaaveq

The loss of Fleet Admiral Lance Thomas has shaken the organization Solas Tempus to it’s very core foundations.  The original founding member of the group had become something of a living legend throughout known space.  Known for his tenacity and steel backbone as well as his lavishly foul temper he was a force to be reckoned with.  Still, to this day, the true origins of the man remain a mystery.  Questions have often been asked about where the man came from and how he came to power; those questions may now never be answered.

On October 27th Admiral Thomas’s personal ship, the Sleipnir, was forcibly dropped out of warp by the barrier which surrounds the Schatten Star System.  The vessel was still going at nearly light-speed and headed for Soteria when a distress call was received and ships were dispatched.  The Admiral had lost control of the vessel and it entered a flat spin after on of the impulse engines exploded.  A further rescue attempt by the Irvyn failed to bring the ship under control but did divert it away from Soteria and instead toward Schatten II.  The attempt further sent the ship spinning on all axis, further research indicates that by that point in time, the ships inertial dampening field had become inoperative.  The vessel crashed into Schatten II shortly after, though it is likely the extreme G forces acting upon the vessel prior to the crash caused the death of the Admiral before the ship crashed.

The body itself has been transported back to Trocara where an autopsy was performed and burial preparations are being made.  While the body is still secured and not available for viewing, the autopsy report had been released to the public, at least in part, and specifies the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and the manner of death has been ruled accidental.  Investigators are still combing over the evidence to piece together the exact chain of events, however the DPI and Solas Tempus have both remained close lipped about the investigation.  Neither the DPI nor Solas Tempus have responded to requests for comments.

Official Statements

A brief official statement by the Prime Minister of the Serenity Concord was released the following day on the 28th.

Yesterday one of our greatest leaders has been taken from us by the hands of fate.  Fleet Admiral Lance Thomas was pronounced dead on arrival after a tragic shuttle crash took his life.  Efforts are underway to piece together the exact nature and sequence of events that have resulted in his death, everyone deserves answers.  We will work methodically through the evidence at hand to determine exactly what occurred, Admiral Thomas deserves no less of us.  Our hearts go out to his family and those closest to him at their loss and his wife, Drem, should know that the entire Concord mourns with her.  We ask that everyone respect her privacy and the privacy of Admiral Thomas, this will be a difficult time for everyone but we will get through it, together.

Prime Minister Ethir Th’chaaveq

The Prime Minister has been unavailable for direct comment, however, sources close to him have expressed that he is deeply saddened by the loss.

While no official statements have come from Admiral Thomas’s widow, Drem Thomas, multiple sources within the organization have reported that she has left Nimbus Station and that no one has seen her since.  The official word from within Solas Tempus is that she has been placed on administrative leave, details on of Ms. Thomas requested that leave or not are not available.  Her ship, the USS Drakon, was placed on lock-down for a brief period of time and rumors say that the USS Lilith was ordered to pursue the Drakon that same day, though the Executive Officer of the Drakon (Emily Damion) and the Commanding Officer of the Lilith (Neo Akazuli) could not be reached for comment.  The assistant to Captain Akazuli did respond to our requests for information stating that many vessels undergo readiness exercises as part of routine training and that no further information should be read into such events.  However, the assistant was unwilling to confirm or deny that the Lilith and Drakon were involved in any such exercises.

Memorial Services

Memorial services for Admiral Thomas have been scheduled for late in November on Trocara, the Prime Minister and his cabinet have confirmed they will be in attendance and several prominent members of other governments and agencies throughout known space have also communicated they will be in attendance as well.  Sources within the United Federation of Planets have reported that there is some discussion over presenting the Ms. Thomas with a posthumously awarded Medal of Valor for her late-husband, commemorating his achievements.  The Chancellor of the High Council of the Klingon Empire as well as the Praetor of the Romulan Star Empire as well as several members of the Romulan Senate have also confirmed they will both be in attendance; if that is the case it will be the first time the leaders of both worlds have been at such a ceremony together in decades and could be an historic meeting should the two choose to speak to each other.  The Federation President is confirmed to be in attendance and rumors have surfaced that even Admiral Jean Luc Picard will be attending as well as Admiral Katherine Janeway though aids for both officers have said that such decisions have yet to be made and that both have many duties to attend to which could prevent them from attending.  The aid to Admiral Picard did add that “Admiral Picard sends his most sincerest condolences to Ms. Thomas for her loss and that he hopes she knows how many in the universe respected and honored her husband.”

NaNoWriMo 2018

I know that a lot of the players here have made some real efforts that have paid off and the quality of the writing on the server has greatly increased over time and I am honestly proud of how far everyone has come in the quality and caliber of not only their writing but the quality of thought that goes into their ideas. So, lets write a novel together.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have really wanted to expand on our collective efforts of creative writing.  One of the most key parts of any role playing server is doing just that!  I know that a lot of the players here have made some real efforts that have paid off and the quality of the writing on the server has greatly increased over time and I am honestly proud of how far everyone has come in the quality and caliber of not only their writing but the quality of thought that goes into their ideas.  So, lets write a novel together.

The Plan

So, this year I’m going to put into motion something I really thought about doing before and we’re going to hand out prizes for contributions to this project over the next month.  The time frame goes from today, November 4th, until the end of the  month (November 30th).  First place will get $25 in the form of an Amazon Gift Card (since it does not need to be mailed) and 2nd place will get a $10 Amazon Gift Card.  Equivalent monetary value can be put on alternatives for those who cannot access Amazon or are unable to claim said prizes (for our International players).

The money will come out of the server’s Patreon fund, which I encourage people to donate to so that we can make a contest like this a more regular occurrence!

The Rules

So any contest must have rules, posts which do not add value to the story (such as posts made up of the same word repeated over and over again or some such) will be removed.  Predatory or malicious posts will also be removed — these are defined as posts which discourage others from posting or posts that are designed to upset or otherwise maliciously poke and prod another author.  Also, do not edit another users posts and while one may edit their own posts, pleas refrain from making edits to your own posts after they have been the basis for someone else’s posts.

The contest will be judged on the # of words contributed to the story which have a letter length of greater than 3 characters.  This is to avoid words like a, an, the, I, if…  We are going for actual content here and need a way to measure that.  Word length (beyond being at last 4 characters long) does not matter, so there is no need to use the longest words possible.

All server members are eligible to participate and win (other than myself, I will be participating but I am not eligible to win).  Characters and ideas need not be approved before posting them, this is not role play and doesn’t even necessarily take place in one of our settings (though it might).

Where?

The actual writing will be taking place on the forum on this thread.  Discord simply isn’t suited to this kind of writing, I would prefer to use Microsoft Word but since it is very expensive one cannot promise that people have access to it, that is out and Google Docs does not have sufficient tracking to keep track of everyone’s contributions.

Each post will be an addition to the story as if it is one long document.

What about after?

After the story is complete, we will be judging whether or not it should be further put into a document and edited / polished into a final draft.  I would personally like this and then for it to go onto here or be stored elsewhere so that we can go back to it.  I think this server has a lot of great talent in it and I look forward to seeing it moving forward.

Contribution Awards

Once again, it has come time for our contribution awards.  I have been largely absent from the server recently, for a number of reasons.  I am pleased to pass out recognition to our players for their contributions this month.

Server Contributions

Our top 3 contributors to the server this month are:

  • Dr. Winterdawn
  • Minty.__.Jade
  • Cyber ★

Thank you to each of you for keeping things alive!

Forum Contributions

The top 3 forum contributors are:

Thank you to all of you who keep the forum going!

Wiki Contributions

This month we only have 2 non-staff contributors to the Wiki, so here they are:

Thank you to both of you for enriching our collective role playing world.

Storyline Awards

The following people are getting recognition for running plot lines this month:

  • Cyber ★
  • Archer Red the 15th
  • ks
  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889
  • Buckethead

The above people have been running plots through the month of October, in particularly, Chaos has turned a character introduction into several successful threads on the forum, something which I heartily congratulate.

Final Awards

So our final award tallies are as follows:

  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889 gets 2000 points
  • Cyber ★ gets 1500 points
  • Dr. Winterdawn gets 1500 points
  • Minty.__.Jade gets 1250 points
  • Archer Red the 15th gets 1000 points
  • Buckethead gets 1000 points
  • ks gets 1000 points
  • AscendingCanadian gets 750 points

New Score Board

darktrooper501374964
Archer Red the 15th318872
Uther Tibbs261116
ks174654
The Chubby Gamer161909
Buckethead148479
Dr. Winterdawn119531
Minty.__.Jade109540
JumpingScript89322
Cyber ★64592

Thank you, again, to everyone for all of your contributions to the game, keep it up.

Weekly Creative Discussions

As I mentioned to some of the staff not too long ago, I’d like to start having discussions on where we’d like the plot to go and the status of what’s going on within the game.  I know I myself (and many others) have not been around a lot, during the school year like this it is incredibly important to keep everyone on the same page and continue to move plots forward.  I’ve taken a number of steps to ensure that we can do this but one thing that is lacking is in communication.

The idea is to have a discussion among Staff and Founders about where we would like the game to go and how we can push it forward.  There are three parts to this of course.

Pushing Plot Forward

We have got far more dead or dropped plots that I would ever like to have in a game, especially in our less-used settings of Angelic Sins and Embers of Soteria.  So the first thing we will be trying to move for is more staff involvement in soliciting RP to move plots forward with a focus on pulling in new players who have just arrived and seasoned players who have fallen off the map and may not know where to get back into things.

New Plots & Direction

That being said, there is never a time to rest on existing plot lines and direction of the game.  The other half of the coin is I would like to have a discussion of where we want to go with the setting, new plots, new ideas, and keep the game fresh.  Sometimes plots fail, even if they are good ideas life gets in the way and a lot of things can happen.  As such, I’d like to really dig into what we can push for in the direction of the settings and a discussion of how we get there.

Issues & Resolutions

An important part of these meetings will be trying to figure out how to resolve the issues with the game as it is.  This can include issues with players, plots, how plots are being run, but with a focus in how do we resolve issues.  It is very important to me that everyone  makes an effort to keep problems, solutions, and commentary constructive so we can move forward and continue to build all of our settings.  The best and most robust creativity comes with we all get together.

Attending & Participation

I don’t want to make this sound like a job; if someone cannot be here for the meeting then they cannot be here for the meeting but I would like everyone to not only show up but to really try to be an active participant.  We’ve got a lot of really good creative minds on this server, this is a chance to bring everything to the table and see what we can make of it as a group!

Since not everyone can be around for this, I do plan on putting together a post about what is talked about and decided and make that available for public viewing here on the WordPress site.  This gives our players a chance to talk about things and then bring any concerns, ideas, questions, or just general commentary to our attention.  It goes without saying that resolutions or issues regarding particular players will not be made public.

What’s going on here? – A Writing Prompt

I have really liked some of the text which has come as a result of our writing prompts!  This is a little different, this scene is (of course) from the 2nd episode of Star Trek the Original Series ever to be recorded, the so-called 2nd pilot.  I chose a scene that is intentionally ambiguous where many of the characters present are not present in the show as it was known or not formed into the mold which they later became.

For this writing prompt, I’d like people to answer the question:  “What is going on here?”

What do I mean?  I mean, I’d like people to consider what could be going on in the scene, who these people are, what are they thinking, saying, what are they about to do?  Is it a normal day?  How about the start of an adventure that will change them?  Perhaps it is the end after they’ve saved the day!  Maybe they haven’t made it out yet.

We’ve got some new players and I encourage them to submit something.  No approvals required here, for those that aren’t familiar with this — you may use any character from anywhere just be creative and have fun.  There are no wrong answers.

Contribution Awards for September, 2018

The server runs on stories and without them it dies, the fact that we’re still around into our 3rd year is proof of the creativity of everyone here.

We’ve seen a lot of increased activity in the last half of September, something for which I’m very happy.  We just had our elections for staff members, in case anyone missed it.  Before I announce the winners of each contribution awards, I’d like to point out that some of our highest contributors are of course the Staff members, particularly our Moderators.  Even with the new activity from Staff, we should all be striving to involve anyone and everyone who wants to play.  I would like Staff members of all kinds to consider seeking out and checking in with players who have not posted in a while to see if they’d like to join in.  We have a lot of very creative people out there who sometimes don’t know what to contribute or don’t really know that something is going on.

Players who have been fixtures of our server for a long time such as Haladur, Left4Cake, Chanree, and Rain Lily are exceedingly good role players (as is most everyone who is on the server) and it wouldn’t hurt anyone to just drop a DM or a ping at one of them to see if they’d like to join in.  Our new faces such as Chaos Spartan and Ascending Canadian are prolific on the Forum and collaboration with them on that medium is certainly encouraged.  Our new player katteé is also quite good and I’d love to see more of what they have to offer.

Without further ado…

Contributions for the Discord Server

Our top contributors on the Discord Server (excluding Staff) are:

  • Dr. Winterdawn#8966 (Awarded 1000 Points)
  • 🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃#8682 (Awarded 750 Points)
  • Cyber ★#2063 (Awarded 500 Points)

Congratulations, and thank you for all that you do.

Contributions for the Wiki Site

Our top contributors for the Wiki Site (excluding Staff) are:

  • Spartan889 (Awarded 1000 Points)
  • Carl C. (Awarded 750 Points)
  • Dr. Winterdawn (Awarded 500 Points)

The Wiki contributions are something that I especially appreciate, these are how we store a good chunk of our site’s past, through the character bios and technology descriptions that get entered and never go away.  This is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t delete old characters and the like.

Contributions for the Forum

Our top contributors of replies on the Forum (excluding Staff) are:

The forum has always been a special place to me, forums contain so much more of the role play and story that goes on than a chat site, even one as awesome and amazing as Discord.

Contributions to Plot Lines

The server runs on stories and without them it dies, the fact that we’re still around into our 3rd year is proof of the creativity of everyone here.  Sadly my school schedule (and that of others) has restricted some of our major plot lines from moving forward as fast (or at all) as I’d like them to.  As such we do a special thank-you to those who have continued to run significant plots or assisted in keeping plots going, for those our Staff is included in the awards.

  • Cyber ★#2063 (Awarded 1000 Points for Ongoing Plot)
  • AscendingCanadian#4800 (Awarded 500 Points for Plot Assist)

Final Tallies

So, finally, we come to how much everyone gets in total:

  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889#7660 (2000 Total Points Awarded)
  • AscendingCanadian#4800 (2000 Total Points Awarded)
  • Dr. Winterdawn#8966 (1500 Total Points Awarded)
  • Cyber ★#2063 (1500 Total Points Awarded)
  • 🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃#8682 (750 Total Points Awarded)
  • Left4Cake#6713 (500 Total Points Awarded)

So, the new scoreboard looks like this:

Imperatoris Lacerta343398
Red the 15th281639
Uther Tibbs255097
ks171187
The Chubby Gamer158592
Buckethead129726
Dr. Winterdawn113945
🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃103790
JumpingScript88471
Cyber ★56955

As usual, thank you to everyone for continuing to play in my game.  I enjoy reading your stories and writing with you all.

Play on!