Introduction to the tonal rules and conventions of the Nephele setting

Hangin' with your Buds
Nephele is the name of the world in this setting, which collectively is called "Prince of Locusts."

"Prince of Locusts" was made solely for the fun of it, and to have somewhere slightly better than World of Warcraft to roleplay characters from. As it evolved, people added in more miscellaneous things they were interested in - creepy clowns, extradimensional elves, nudibrances, horrors from outside of space and time, slav squatting, murder mysteries, snakes, etc - without any real rhyme or reason to what got added besides what sounded neat. We tried to make it all work together as seamlessly as possible. We encourage you to come along and do the same thing and just keep rolling this thing.

Yes

 * Be a good collaborator by making your check-ins with everyone else proportional to what it is you want to add. Are you adding something HUGE that every character in the setting would know about, like another species? See if people are okay with retconning that! Are you adding something small, like a magical hair salon? Hell yeah. You probably don't need to check too much (but you should still tell me about it, because that rules.)


 * Be a good collaborator by accepting that not everything everyone adds will be something you like. That's okay!


 * Go ham, be cringe, pop off, be extra, etc. Rule of Cool.


 * If all else fails, fall back on Tolkien fantasy or World War 1 fiction tropes


 * Be chill. This doesn't matter. Real people and their emotions and being fair and kind to them matters.


 * Make your own fun, without waiting to be told exactly what to do - it's a sandbox!

Don't

 * Add in something that's going to be very very hard to work around if you leave! We don't want to change anything you made, or delete it, but we also don't want to force you to stay somewhere you're not interested in being.


 * If you're RPing, worry about matching all of your RP perfectly with everyone else's RP. RP is loose canon. We operate on a branched AU method: if you get a detail wrong, just think of yourself as off in your own little AU branch and don't worry about it. Touch base, but don't stress.


 * Push yourself to add things if you're not really interested or having fun. Ideas are infinite. If this one fades out, there will be more and more. :)

Presidenting
"Prince of Locusts," in the OOC realm, runs on a system I've been calling "presidenting." This is supposed to sound dumb, it's intentionally silly, but people usually figure out what I mean when I say it. Every character, species, and country has a "president," a real person who is emotionally invested in them and knows everything about them that's currently canon. Everyone has a broad idea of the general setting, but presidents will have deep and thorough knowledge of their own area of interest. Lark is the president of Shrikes, and all of their associated storyline characters and Princes. Echo is the president of Dwarves and all of their associated characters and magics. This is to give you examples of how it works, not to forbid you from adding to either of those topics!

Anything you personally add to this story and are invested in, you will be president of. Congratulations, hail to the chief. This can be a country, a character, a Prince, a battle, anything! Unless you specifically put it up for adoption, people should come to you to ask what you'd like to be done with it, and where the things you made touch the things other people made, you and the president for that topic should negotiate to make sure you're both cool. Here are some guidelines for how this shakes out, in practical terms.

Yes

 * Add in your current research topic you're obsessed with. Do not wait for someone to ask you, just go. That's what this is for. Do you have an unreasonable amount of knowledge about arctic exploration, or railroads? Please add your own wild take on how cool this thing could be. Go as detailed as you want. The world canvas is largely blank, so that people can get unreasonably excited about things all over it


 * AU in your current canon character you're obsessed with. You want to make a whole faction on this planet that's really obviously just every character from "Teen Titans" but as weird sorcerers? Yes. Do that. You want to rescue your favorite who got done dirty by their canon by giving them a way cooler backstory and severing them from all the dumb stuff? Baby, that is our sole purpose, baby. Go, you're beautiful.


 * Make up a new character for no reason just because you want to have a cool guy that does something cool. Fuck it. Fuck it dude, just go.


 * Make up a new country or battle or anything for no reason just because that also sounds cool. Fuck it, dude! Just go!

Don't

 * Retcon, change, or murder something another person came up with without their permission. That's not cool.

Tonal guidelines
Through trial and error, we've landed on some specific things that this setting is and is not. Almost every guideline here has been hammered out by way of an argument. This part of the guide is to keep you from having to have the same argument again - there are some things we have more or less decided we 'prefer.' None of these are actual rules, they're just goalposts so you understand the flavor that's going on in this setting.

Yes

 * Familiarize yourself with what other people are doing before you contribute. You don't need an encyclopedic knowledge or anything, but before you toss things into the pond, check out the general status of the fish.


 * Try to be creative with one or two powers and the interesting ways they can be used. One of the founding principles of this magic system is that a character with one normal or overlooked superpower can, through creative use of it, be an insanely difficult opponent.


 * If you really want your character to know something that's an Earth culture reference - Immanuel Kant, Macbeth, Pomp and Circumstance, etc - just drop it in wholesale and assume that whatever it is that's translating all of their dialogue into English also translated that reference into something that Earth people would understand. This is called the translation rule. It's meant to be used in cases where you don't actually want to make up an entire history of alternate world theater culture and then teach everyone else about it in order to just convey in a throwaway line that your character offhandedly mentioned a famous play where a king murders some people.


 * Ask yourself: If this new thing (combat skill, weapon, technique for creating Princes, etc, etc) is so much better, why aren't all the fictional citizens of Nephele already doing it? Maybe they should be!

Don't

 * Add in new kinds of magic or new ways that magic can be learned. This can also encompass things like superpowers that are not magical - characters that can just naturally read minds, fly, or speak to animals. This is a big one. The magic system - Effort-gifts and Princes - are the keystone of this setting. They're meant to be able to encompass all kinds of superpowers, as well as have rules that fairly simple and easy to remember. Things break very quickly when you try to get around them, in ways you probably didn't intend.


 * Give any country or species a monoculture. There should be a ton going on within every group of people - factions, alternate interpretations, rebels, splinter factions, disagreements, a wide variety of experiences. You don't necessarily need to describe all of it, but there's no such thing as a country, species, town, or even army where every single member thinks and feels the same things.


 * Add back in transphobia, antisemitism, sexism, major human-on-human racism, historically oppressed women, or any of these things that we've tried to more or less just leave out. We're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. Don't stress out, just don't purposefully add any, that's all we ask.


 * Try to build a character like you would a video game or OSR tabletop character, where you pick the most powerful/optimal abilities because your end goal is to win fights. That's not the win condition here! Whether or not your guy can win a fight shouldn't be the most interesting thing about them.


 * Try to build a character that's always, in your actual opinion, right. You will legit drive everyone around you nuts, because instead of being able to be in conflict with your character, they'll have to fight you, a real person. Feels shitty.


 * Make any money off of any of this, or try to.


 * Pay anyone any money for this, because you're helping them make money off of this, which they shouldn't be doing.


 * Take someone else's writing for another project

Conclusion
Please add your stuff to our stuff. I love you. Thanks.