All writing should be in first- or third-person, in present tense.

Colorizing spoken text is optional. I'll notice anyway. However, if you choose to do so, please don't use yellow; I find it very hard to see.

This is a mature game for mature adults. Please act like a mature adult. I'm not labeling it "Adult" and I don't expect to see any serious adult content, but there will be mentions here and there.

Don't god-mode other characters, especially other PCs. If it's something super trivial just for dramatic color, fine, but don't take actions for them.

Please check in at least once per day, or let us know if you're not going to be able to. I'll be checking a lot more often than this. Action scenes tend to drag pretty hard anyway in the forum format, and this is a long adventure. If every round takes a week to get through, we might not make it to forming a kingdom before we all die of old age! If you check in and it isn't your turn yet, you're welcome to post your intended actions ahead of time. I'll be generous with stopping and waiting for you to confirm if I think your intended actions might no longer make sense or you might want to do something different, but having pre-loaded actions will help move the game along.

You will not die because of sheer bad luck. If you make what should have been a good plan, and you execute it reasonably, and it all goes horribly wrong simply because no one could figure out how to roll a number higher than 4 while all of the bad guys roll critical successes all over the room, you might end up set back a bit but it won't be the end of the campaign. If it seems like this is about to happen, I will start cheating in your favor to make sure you at least get out safely. In related news, I will try not to kill you with random encounters, unless you ignored a LOT of warning signs that the place you were going is really much too dangerous right now.

You might die if you completely fail to plan, or charge in blindly where angels should fear to tread. Scouting and alternative solutions will be important. This adventure contains quite a lot of dangerous situations and enemies! If you just march in and try to power through, maybe it will work, but more likely it won't.

Workdays are longer than 15 minutes. There will be plenty of downtime in this adventure (sometimes months at a time!) but when you're actually doing something, you should try to push on to make a decent amount of progress each day. Safe places to rest in the wilderness might not be in plentiful supply. Also, most of your enemies are intelligent, and if you back out in the middle of a dungeon, they might be more ready for you when you come back, or have reversed some of the progress you previously made. That said, if you really feel you're spent and need to take a break, sometimes that's the right thing to do, even if the bad guys will know you're coming later. In general, if the next step would move you onto a different map (the next layer of a cave system, for example), that's a pretty safe time to retreat for a night, although not necessarily much longer. There will be exceptions but common sense should make things clear.

There are not a lot of rails in this adventure, but I'd appreciate it if you get on them when they do show up. I will try to give a lot of signposts if there's a really important next bit of adventure that you should head to. Please don't gratuitously ignore these signs. But mostly this will be an open-world sandbox adventure; you can build your kingdom however you choose, and there will be many threats that you can deal with in any order or even not at all, while you're waiting for the next piece of Major Plotline to show up. Similarly, if you're just exploring somewhere and I give you a lot of signs that something extremely dangerous will appear if you continue in this direction, consider going elsewhere until you're ready for it.

Social encounters will be handled narratively. Instead of saying "I want to use Diplomacy to convince this guard to let me in," you should describe the argument or conversational tactic you would like to employ: "I commiserate with the guard about working for uncaring bosses, who make you stand out here all night in the rain for no very good reason, while slipping him 5 silver." You won't be judged on quality of writing or forcefulness of argument; this is just to make sure that you actually have a plausible idea in mind. However, almost every social encounter includes particular topics that certain NPCs are sympathetic or hostile towards, and this will affect the results. I will decide which skill it seems like you're trying to use, and roll it for you. I'll generally assume you're trying to use skills you actually know how to do, with a bias toward things that you know will work better for the particular situation even if it's not your best.
This message was last edited by the GM at 06:22, Fri 21 Oct 2022.