sidereal rp ooc

sidereal_rp is a small, setting-heavy, commentspam, jamjar sandbox-game. Please note that this game is invite-only: you must either know the mod, or be referred by somebody currently in the game in order to play. If you're referring someone, please just email the mods with a heads up.

premise

Your characters find themselves in a long-abandoned city built up around an oasis in the middle of a vast desert—impassable and impossible to leave, due to an endlessly raging sandstorm and a strange sense of disorientation that always turns you back around into the city. At night, the sky is clear and vast, with two enormous moons and endless, glittering, unfamiliar stars.

Sidereal, aka The City of the Fixed Stars, is a beautiful, solarpunk setting: lush with water and plant life, full of mysterious technology... and strangely empty, overgrown and long-abandoned. Characters can begin to reclaim the city: make a home for themselves, reopen an old café or store, discover how to get electricity running again, uncover art and instruments, learn about the legends of strange dead gods, tune out the constant unearthly wailing from a bottomless mine shaft, puzzle out the secrets of societal collapse, ignore the howling on the nights with no stars... fun things like that.

Life in the city is pleasant, with good weather and enough food, amenities, and room to discover and explore. Your characters are encouraged to make a home for themselves.

It’s just, you know. A bit strange around here sometimes.

mechanics

This is a brief overview of the game mechanics so you can stop reading here if this isn't your jam. The points below will be elaborated on elsewhere, particularly on the Gameplay page.

Time & Speed
Approximately 3:1 OOC:IC days, sometimes a little slower.

Tone
A CR-focused game where you can play at your own pace (no events or set times you need to be around or Miss Things), but where there are regular world changes to engage with and settings to explore within your threads. It's roughly conceptualized at 90% comfy make-your-own-fun slice of life, 9% strange environment, 1% soft eldritch-apocalyptic horrorshow.

Apps
Most types of characters (including OCs, CRAU, etc) are permitted. Apping is basically as easy as I could figure out how to make it.

Activity Check
Nah. If someone’s sitting on a character that’s not being played and you want to app them, please ask them, or email the mods. We put up an "are you still here?" check-in every couple months on Plurk to keep things clean.

HMD
None. If you have feedback for a castmate or another player, please chat it out with them directly.

NPCs & Mod-Run Events
None. The mods will make setting-driven posts that will give you some options for things to explore, but it's up to the players to have their characters do things. You won't have mods replying in-thread to say "oh you found x" in an exploration fashion—but you'll have posts that say "if your characters go around x, here's what you can have them do or find..." Mostly this is a sandbox with some flavortext, so it's very make-your-own-fun.

Player-Driven World Changes
Go ahead and suggest changes to the world, add or build things, etc. Changes are logged using the Housekeeping & Worldbuilding page. If you're not sure about something, just ask the mods.

Objectives & Status Effects
Yes, there is an IC system for causing things to 'randomly' affect characters (like changing age, forced truth, etc). If there's an effect you wanna do, just ping the mods.

Powercap
Common sense powercap. No ‘game breaking’ powers, and godly beings are slightly nerfed. Otherwise, just play nice.

Murder/Death
Minimal/none. Voluntary PVP is allowed and you can sustain injuries from doing dangerous stuff, but the worldbuilding supports no permadeath. It’s OK if you want to app a villainous or disagreeable character, but please keep in mind that this is primarily a get-along game.

Locked Comm
The community is locked, so only members can view posts. If you're thinking about apping and/or want to be able to read the posts but aren't a current player, you can request to be added here.

NSFW/18+
All players must be 18 years of age or older. NSFW material is totally OK, but please move it off-comm to journals.

arrival

Characters arrive in Sidereal quite suddenly, as though the world around them has just shifted. They blink, and they're suddenly here. There may be a little bit of nausea and disorientation—probably more of it, the more sensitive you are to magic, time, and the flow of the universe, you know? They appear in the Courtyard, near the Fountain.

They are, somehow, intrinsically aware of a few things: one, that time here does not flow quite the same as where they came from, so time spent here does not mean that time is passing in their world. And two: that, at least right now, they cannot leave. If they try to fight too hard against the idea of staying, it just seems . . . difficult. Surely they'll be able to leave one day, but why make a fuss about it? It seems nice here. Wherever here is.

housing

Characters currently have the following options for housing:

• Simple, one- or two-bedroom 'condos' that look out into the Courtyard. These are tidy and lightly-stocked, ready to live in. They are accessed by a fingerprint-scanner on the door; once you access a condo for the first time, it becomes registered to you.
• Slightly larger homes located a short walk away from the Courtyard, overlooking a narrow canal. Some work is required to make these liveable—clearing out vines, relocating bees, some small repairs.

Characters are not locked in to the first housing that they select—as things develop, they can move around (or, stay in one place while they're working on and renovating another). It's totally up to you.

posting & playing

World Posts
The mods will usually post once or twice a week, usually on Tuesday & Friday. With each new World Post, the IC time will typically advance by 1 day, or move from morning to evening, etc. These are all 'mingle' posts in the sense that they will not be run by the mods, but are designed to give you hooks and things to play with with each other.

Player Posts
You can make new posts at any time, and we strongly encourage you to do so! We anticipate that since there will be regular World Posts, there may be fewer player posts than in most other games, but seriously, post as much as you want. Feel free to advance time and do your own thing. If you want to make a status effect post or something and aren't sure what's viable with the setting, just ping the mods.

Tagging
Tag posts you jump with your character's name. If playing a duplicate or a previously-played character, modify your tag. There are no other tags used.

setting & exploration

Cores
Throughout the city, there are large crystals called Cores. There are ways to re-activate these Cores, causing them to glow brightly and pulse with power and energy. They seem to have a strange magnetic field that causes anomalies (see: status effects) at times, and do other things like power the world's electricity.

Exploration
The game will start off with a set of available locations (outlined in Setting). Outside of that, if the characters try to explore further, they get disoriented and turned around (like Legend of Zelda Lost Woods style—you try to exit, and are suddenly either facing back the other way, or even worse, just randomly trotting into the Courtyard, no matter how far away you were before).

Each World Post will layer more and more onto the setting. Characters can explore and discover new areas as outlined in the World Post. For example: The World Post may say, "Today you find that if you walk North, the previously blocked path through the trees no longer disorients you. It's blocked with fallen trees, so characters will have to spend at least a day making their way through there. Once they make it, they'll find a Fountain." It's a bit spoilers from the OOC standpoint, but lets your characters ICly have the joy of their actions causing discovery.

Characters can also Do Things Independently with the world that has already been unlocked—for example, if a bunch of characters decide to clean up and repair a run-down section of the city, or start a restaurant, or fix up a boat and leave it at the canal, you can then comment to Housekeeping & Worldbuilding and that will become a permanent part of the setting.

If there's anything you want to find, create, or do, and aren't sure if you can, please just ask in the H&W post.

World Mysteries
Sometimes there are sounds. Sometimes there are dreams. Sometimes the stars go out. But you don't know about any of that, yet. So don't even worry about it.

world info

Powercap
Powers are capped to a reasonable level—nothing that can 'break' the game, blow up the whole city, or make things too easy from an OOC standpoint. If you're not sure where to draw the line, ask us! But there should be some struggle involved.

Destruction of Property
You can use powers to clear things out like, you know, demolishing a wall, or a piece of furniture, or a lamppost. Anything 'essential' (or anything that would get its own bullet point on the settings page) can't be majorly damaged—it's like, you try, and your powers or abilities sort of fizzle out and leave it only minorly scorched.

Death/Injury
Death is not permanent: characters can get hurt and die, absolutely. The Fountain in the Courtyard is a healing spring that will resurrect people or heal any injuries sustained in Sidereal (though it doesn't retroactively fix anything that happened before you arrived). If nobody is able to bring you to the Fountain and you die elsewhere, eventually you'll just wake up in the Courtyard again, maybe just a little more disoriented than usual.

Food & Amenities
There are Storerooms accessible quite near the Courtyard that have enough food, water, and basic clothes and supplies that you don't need to worry about money, or even foraging. Still, it's basic stuff, so people will definitely benefit from creating shops or bartering, crafting, discovering, and maybe setting up a market in the long-term. (More info about what exact stuff you can find in the Storerooms will be included in Settings).

Special Dietary Needs
The Storerooms supply. The weirder your needs, the weirder the supply, though—if you feed off human blood or Pure Energy, you might just find a bunch of individually wrapped protein cakes that are just labelled Pure Energy? It's weird, but you won't die.

Items & Belongings
Characters arrive with the clothes on their back, and some basic weapons and items they'd usually be carrying with them. They can mysteriously find a couple keepsakes or things they might Like To Have with them on their person as well.

Technology / Electronics
You can have things like computers, phones, etc, as your personal items, but they behave slightly erratically. After a Core was placed in the basement of the Storeroom, though, all electronic devices seem to always be at a full charge. Appliances light up and are available to turn on, fridges are cold, street lamps flicker with bright light. They don't need to be plugged into anything!

Internet / Network
There is an internal network. Mobile phones are widely available if your character wants to pick one up and text and use apps.

Animals/Bugs
There are bugs—moths, bees, butterflies, you name it. Not, like, an excess of bugs. But not an absence of them. There are, however, no animals.

Pets
Canon pets like familiars, etc, are reasonably allowed to come along with their person. If you're not sure if your circumstance toes some kind of worldbuilding line, just ask.

Accessibility
For the most part, you should be able to reach most places pretty easily (unless you're planning to scale cliffs, in which case, that would be challenging for pretty much everyone). The city itself doesn't rely on an excess of stairs, and if you're an oversized dragon, for example, the Cores seem to shrink you down so you can fit places nicely, if you'd like to.

Language
There seems to be a universal translation effect in place, so you can understand everyone magically. However, this might be the kind of thing that goes off sometimes if a Core malfunctions, or if the sky goes dark . . .