June/July/August plot digest and September/October/November setting interactions

[ourearth]

PLOT DIGEST AND SETTING INTERACTIONS POST

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Plotting posts are here to

• serve as digests, to get everyone back up to speed with what is going on in the game by providing up-to-date information on plot and setting
  
  
• provide a space to ask questions about interactions with the setting and plot
  
  
• offer a venue where players can plot with the mods so that together we can make Save Our Earth as interactive as possible. Plot that has not yet happened is malleable; if player characters interact with it, it may just steer in a different direction from what the mods expected.

Please direct all questions, suggestions and anything else addressed to the mods to toplevel titled "Talk to a Mod" and not to the post in general.

The post is also open for players to plot and coordinate between one another.

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General/OOC notes:

• If you want to engage with something happening in game in any way that you feel needs mod input (maybe you wanted to cuddle a shark or catch a Capsmon), please always feel free to either come back to the current plot digest/setting interactions post or prod Kira-mod on plurk! The more you interact, the more likely it is that you punch the plot by chance. (It's not always going to cause natural catastrophes, promise!)
  
• As most of you are probably aware, the country that our game is located in is currently going through a rather tumultuous political situation. So far, we have simply not addressed it from a setting-perspective, but with October 31st creeping up on us and Mossgate being a harbour town with many ferries, it seems like at this point we have to make a decision regarding if we want to continue to use real-world history for this game or if we want to branch off and pretend that this is a world in which Brexit does not exist. We ask everyone who wishes to chime in with their opinion on this matter by Friday 27th. Please tell us what you think in this thread, so we can take your opinions into consideration when we make the decision.
  

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Events that occurred recently:

• Sadie and Ben had a conversation while being on different sides of the boundary.
  
• A second meeting of the Numbered took place, organised by Nel, though it was for social and not information swapping reasons this time around.
  
• Mr Helpful called a meeting at which he requested the help of all Numbered to deal with Mr Evil, dropping a good deal of information on himself, Mr Neutral and Mr Evil.
  
• Sam, Benjiro, Walter and Sadie scouted Mr Evil's base on the sea fort with a boat for plot research that Ben and Jimmy had built, and discovered some oddities.
  
• A dig at the side of the river revealed a stone age hillfort that, as Russell and Walter discovered and Jimmy and others helped them explore, extended under the current path of the river, suggesting that the river had not been flowing in this specific location while the hillfort was in use. The dig seemed to be of special interest to all three aliens.
  
• The Pride Week brought literal glitter bombs that were placed around town with no discernible pattern to it. Russell and Walter learned that there are caving tunnels below Moss Manor village and Folkton and once more mouse devotionalia were sold by a little old lady.
  
• At an anime con, the fictional Capsmons could be encountered around the con's area.
  
• During a music event by the sea, strange sharks showed up.
  

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Events that will (potentially, pending player actions) occur in the future:

• A curious finding in the hill fort dig will occur just before the dig stops due to the time of the year. We'll do a random draw to determine who finds it, please sign up here if you're interested.
  
• [Mingle] The graveyard in Mossgate has to be closed due to having gotten unsafe. There even is a sinkhole.
  
• We assume there will be more prodding of Mr Evil's super secret evil base, but this is entirely up to player action. Please get in touch with us about whatever is being planned!
  
• [Mingle] Those Numbered whom the mice like will have the mice try to lead them somewhere. Where? That's to be discovered...
  
• [Mingle] The Numbered are being watched. By sharks. Very tiny sharks. That pop in every water surface around their house or work that has a connection to a larger water network (in other words, they will primarily pop up in people's loos, but the tiniest ones of them will also flush out of faucets when they're turn on, or even out of showerheads...).
  
• [Mingle] Leading up to Bonfire Night, Mr Helpful will have an ominous task for the Numbered.
  
• [Mingle] Halloween sees a return of the cobwebs. And it sees every Numbered wake up with a carved pumpkin around their head, like a mask. They seem to be unable to take them off for the duration of the day.
  
• [Mingle] Bonfire Night will happen, one way or the other.
  

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Potential Plot Echo Opportunities

• Speaking to a dormouse for the first time. [Please speak to Kira if you want to play this out with an NPC.]
  
• Having a shark encounter.
  
• As always, sometimes plot echoes happen in surprising places when the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) things get prodded.
  

Comments

Talk to a mod

[ourearth]

Questions, suggestions, and everything else goes here! Don't hesitate to come back to this toplevel until the next plot digest goes up if a new question/anything else "plot" related crops up.

Re: Talk to a mod

[iamnotgod]

I would be up for having Walter first encounter a dormouse and/or tiny shark! (I'd be making a log for this, of course, whether or not it actually needs to be tagged out.)

I would also be interested in the dig site find, but I'm okay not having Walter be the one who finds it if others are interested.

[ourearth]

Here's the signup link! I totally forgot that one.

And would you like him to have an interaction with the dormouse? If so, do you have a preference for how the encounter happens?

[iamnotgod]

Having one show up on his bike before he goes out for a ride might be particularly funny~

Other than that, no especial preference.

talkin to a mod

[spaghettimonster]

The signup link for hill fort findings leads back to this post - I'd like Russell to have a chance of it, is this where I should say so?

I'm also interested in him getting startled by unexpected shark encounters - it's not the same as Undyne surprising him with her toothy grin and a piledriver into snowbank or river, but unexpected sharks are always an adventure.


and not a signup or question, but:
"[Mingle] Bonfire Night will happen, one way or the other" comes across as delightfully ominous

Re: talkin to a mod

[ourearth]

Here's the signup! Sorry about forgetting it.

There will be a mingle for the sharks, so I hope Russell will have all the fun with them /mod hat off maybe he will have to save a yippy dog from one I mean that's his life now, isn't it

[spaghettimonster]

It's all good!

I was gonna say, as long as the sharks take to him better than the dormice initially did, he may have fun - but then I remembered surprise shower sharks. Upsetting for sure. One skeleton, two lives - always besieged by dog

[mockeryofthedivine]

I will definitely want Lucas to encounter some tiny sharks. And possibly attempt to make one or two of them into pets. Because that's what you do with a shark you find in your sink, right?

Will there be room for backtagging this later, though? Since I saw a mention on plurk of the sharks turning up early October, and I'm going to be on hiatus that month. Would I be able to still get in on this when I get back?

[ourearth]

There will be room for backtagging later!

But I could also see about moving the sharkening up to an earlier date. When are you going to go on hiatus, and when will you return?

[mockeryofthedivine]

Awesome! And I'll be leaving on the 3rd of October, and coming back on the 26th (or possibly a couple of days later, depending on how much jet lag hits me).

Re: Talk to a mod

[bravelyplucked]

Torin is still new and lost and basically what I am trying to say here is he really needs the weirdness that is a talking dormouse in his life. In his office, maybe?

Re: Talk to a mod

[ourearth]

Please respond to this toplevel with a description of the place that he's in and what he's currently doing, and an encounter will happen :3

Re: Talk to a mod

[iamnotgod]

Thinking of making a log (either today or just this week in general) for having Walter bring up the dormouse woman at Pride, set the day Jimmy makes his find. Is there anyone on the dig site that might be popping in while people chat, or is it safe to assume they'll have the space/time there to talk about what's going on?

Should we branch off from real world history and pretend that all things Brexit never happened?

[ourearth]

Please chime in here with your thoughts!

[catted]

I think there's two pros and one con. They are:

Pro:
- Roleplay is pretendy funtimes. It is escapism from a shitty reality. Why bring that shitty reality in to rain on people's fun?
- To a degree, SoE's world history is AU anyway - Mossgate exists, confused aliens are a bother, and depending on player action the divergences may get larger than that.

Con:
- Sticking as closely as possible with real world history means that everyone has the same frame of reference for what's happening outside of the echo boundaries at any point.

[ineffablytartan]

I've made my opinions clear at home, but to restate them where everyone can see for accountability:

I am very much against it. I'd like one space to be free of it and I really really don't want to have to deal with it in my pretendy fun times space. I'd have to seriously reconsider my involvement in the game completely (I realise I'm not a particularly active player but this is including setting mod/person-in-the-house-to-bounce-things-off things).

[deathrae]

I don't particularly go here, since I'm Aussie, but I think it'd be a better idea all round to not include immediate and particularly harmful shit like Brexit in the game. This is supposed to be fun and I feel like the idea of Brexit is just a big fuckin' pile of stress, and we don't really want our OOC stress fucking up our IC angst any more than life normally does.

[iamnotgod]

I'd only be for including Brexit if there was a chance the Numbered could be involved in fixing it.

Outside of that, I am also game for a no-Brexit AU!

Re: Should we branch off from real world history and pretend that all things Brexit never happened?

[dragoonrouge]

I'd like Brexit to not exist in this. It's incredibly stressful and it really would take away from the escapism the SoE presents

[warped_replica]

Brexit has been mentioned previously IC around the time of the flood, but I am entirely in favor of a no Brexit AU.

[spaghettimonster]

I know enough about Brexit to know that it sucks. In-game, I imagine the stress of it would be enough to distract characters from some of the shenanigans coming from numbers, and reduce their availability / willingness to investigate things. Out-of-game, I can't imagine reminders of it are much fun for the players. As long as it's not a frustrating extra task for the modly folks to figure out a rough thing of what's going on in the world instead, I think it's for the best to exclude it. Maybe this is a world where some butterfly ripple from Mossgate changed just the right things to shift things away from it early on, or maybe it just never came up in the first place.

[mockeryofthedivine]

I think pretending it didn't happen in this verse would be best. Even putting aside the contentiousness of it, the fact that it's a super complex political issue and a major real-world event makes it unsuitable for rp.

Also, 'so what are my characters thoughts on Brexit?' doesn't seem like something that would be much fun to explore.

[bravelyplucked]

This is the sort of thing that stresses people out and interferes with pretendy funtimes, I'm 100% on board with it being a thing that never happened. We're here for a good time, not a historically accurate time.

[singlefaith]

I doubt I have a complete understanding of everything involved with Brexit, but everything I have heard indicates that it's extremely knotty, very delicate, and a highly debated and divisive topic. I don't think it's necessarily something that we need to wrestle with in rp, as others have said, and looking at the feedback from the people living in the middle of it, I'm definitely in favor of branching off from reality and giving them a break from it.

Signups!

[ourearth]

Just comment here to enter into the draw for finding a thing at the dig!

[spaghettimonster]

Strange things in the river seem connected to the echo boundary, what with the thing Sadie found at the river's mouth

/adds Walter here for completeness' sake

[iamnotgod]

Also linking to the relevant thread, since it's still going.

Re: Signups!

[bravelyplucked]

Mr. Paleontology over here is all about the digging let's do this

Re: Signups!

[lovedramamoron]

Tossing in Jimmy there,since he's there.

Re: Signups!

[ourearth]

While digging in a low spot, Jimmy will find what appears to be a small figure of a mouse made of tin. It appears to be curled up like the sleeping position of a dormouse.

Further emergency excavation in the area will reveal three other such figures, though they are in worse shape than the first one. After no more figurines can be found nearby, the weather will not permit any further excavation before the next spring.

Please make a network post in which Jimmy announces his find.

[dragoonrouge]

When poking at the tin dormouse that Jimmy found, would it trigger any ffEchos of the past?

[ourearth]

The ffecho shows it being smelted into the form its in by people and with techniques that she should be able to identify as prehistoric Brits (possibly Bronze age).

It also shows the tin figurine while it is placed in what seems to be an elevated spot of a dwelling (the people look different, but they still look like some form of prehistoric, possible Bronze age Brits).

Thirdly, there is an echo of water and mud having mostly covered it.