Andromeda

So a couple things exist in lore to help explain the mechanics of the game. All tolled, XIV does more to root gameplay in lore than most other games. In particular, as it relates to dungeons and trials this comes in this forms: While there is only one protagonist "The Warrior of Light", the main power that is used by WoL in instances is the Echo, and that's actually way, way more common than a lot of people think. The Path of the Twelve was a... let's be honest, a cult that later merged with the Circle of Knowing and became the Scions. The Path had thousands of linkpearls in circulation and a vast majority of these were in the hands of people with the Echo. Factor in that not everyone with the Echo would join a cult and you get a small but not insubstantial population with the Echo. This means that in dungeons the WoL is joined by other people with the Echo. The ego is different for everyone who has it, but some core gameplay mechanics are tied to it. The various indicators like AOE circles and stack markers are a product of the Echo's ability to grant limited prescience and wiping and restarting is honestly explained as Hydaelyn granting the party a vision of a possible future where the heroes failed, warning them of wrong choices. Eventually after screwing up enough this foreknowledge even takes the form of a buff granted by the Echo. So while some people do shun characters who have the Echo, its not as unfriendly to lore as might be thought and in fact a lot of gameplay mechanics are rooted in the Echo being abundant enough to call on. As for repeating a dungeon farming it, I suppose those could be Echo projections as well, showing potential successful futures.

Due respect, but "this is impossible don't do it" is literally the opposite of the OP's intent here. The thread began as being about what could be possible to explain travel. I don't think the thread is or ought to be limited to just their intent, but you're rather mischaracterizing the initial purpose. Which is funny, given that trying to reconcile the original purpose of something with a broader more accessible idea is literally the subject we're discussing

There are a couple points I want to make as we seem to be drifting to a "this is wrong/bad/don't do this" stance on allowing Travel. First, the RP community ignores lore all the damn time. From the murky nature of Hingan/Doman being district languages from Hyuran which we as a community have said is unequivocally true to the inconsistent progression of time which we tend to totally ignore, we have dismissed complications in the past in favor of what is more beneficial to RP. Even in small ways like ignoring the in-universe calendar with it's eight-day weeks and 32-day months and it's odd day names. Lore purism is a relative notion and ultimately not always the most beneficial position to RP from. I can say Lightningsday all I want, but if you don't know that's Friday me saying Lightningsday is hurting RP by being inflexible in lore. Second is that lore in this setting is itself remarkably flexible. The lorebooks themselves aren't even perfectly reliable, going so far as to disagree with themselves in text on certain points. There's very, very little in the way of lore not filtered through unreliable narrators. This seems to me to encourage an attitude of "lore plausable" in place of "strictly lore adherent" as what you strictly adhere to is usually a perception of the reality of the story and not an objective reality. The game itself, the strictest adherence possible to lore, is presenting a subjective reality, not an objective one. This is hammered heavily on quite a few different fronts but clearest on the subjective classification of beastmen which are not objectively district from Spoken. And what we're told is true is weird. From Palemoon Parazuzu and werewolves to the fact that all the crossover events have been canon to dragons being aliens, this is a genuinely weird setting. That's glorious, that allows for a lot of player freedom. This is all a very long way of saying that denying the validity of people traveling to and from the First does not make a person better, nor is someone embracing that potential wrong. Purity of lore adherence is not necessarily better for RP nor is it necessarily that much more accurate given how wholly unreliable the setting we have is. I don't think I know a single person who has never bent lore and I'd be nearly as confident saying almost everyone has ignored something for the conveniences of RP. You don't have to engage with anything, but be very wary of thinking that the ways others enjoy this setting are bad. We are firmly in "judge not lest ye be judged" territory here.

From my understanding no. It's something the Exarch (a Time Mage pretty sure) kinda copied. That's why it acts as a bridge, it's entangled with the original Crystal Tower. Though I'm not done with the MSQ, there might be more to it.

I know it stretches love (no more than some suggestions), but my Mateus endeavor, Sunset Destinations Travel Agency, has built a room dedicated to sending people to the First. The idea is we use the connection provided by the Crystal Tower to piggyback of the Exarch and Warrior of Light bridge and send others along it. The more we send, the firmer that route would become. The Embarkation Room acts in part as an artificial aetheryte see those Garlean gates), transmitting to only one destination, thus skipping the destination attunement requirement (based on The Navel and 1.0 mechanics kinda). Sunset then sends Travelers to the Crysterium aetheryte. The intended limitation of this method, though users are free to ignore it, is that travel between worlds can only be done between these two points because the technology to piggyback off the Tower is only present at this location, but that's mostly for balance issues and totally fine to ignore. If you're curious about the design, it's Goblet 2-4 Room 2 on Mateus.

Following the massive success of last year's Battle of the Bands featuring groups like Fourte, Lights, Lucky Sparrow and Love Materia, the Bandee Pakshee has put out a call for the best performers on the Star to come together for another exciting event! Will Fourte return? Will Love Materia? Or will we be wowed by a new challenger like the excited folks at Mateus' Whispered Wish? Or, perhaps, the band to take home the title this year will be you? Competitors will have ten minutes to perform a set of their choosing on the Pakshee’s main stage. A ‘band’ can be a group of any size, but must be more than a single performer. We would request that performances be accessible for all audiences (don’t get naked), but beyond that we’re happy to have any type of performance! We'd like to make this a T-rated event on the new RP Calendar policy if possible but we're happy being M-rated. We're hosting the Battle on Saturday, August 16 at the Bandee Pakshee on Balmung, Goblet 10-19. You can sign up to participate here and check out the event page on our website where we'll keep an updated list o participating bands!.

He should know. He's like 80% of it. Including the moogle. In my experience there a are a few patterns that power interest and energy, all of which are in full swing. The first is summer duldrums. I don't know why exactly, but every summer activity and engagement drops, particularly in "routine" RP that repeats weekly or every other week like Grindstone. That said, more unusual RP events like the monthly Sultana's Breath Shopping Arcade seem to still pull good numbers. Second is patch lull. This is an easy pattern to spot and most event planners know to take it into a account when evaluating their success. People are less hype about the game in general so less motivated to log in. Third is the lock. From the little we saw as a pattern over the last year, after taking few months with no new blood things stagnate. And each time someone tries recruiting they pull from a diminishing pool, making growing a group a zero-sum proposition. This is stressful for some community organizers and it, in my view, tracks with a rise in drama and anxiety. If we assume Balmung will open for a month every few patches this will be another cycle we'll settle into. If not it's a challenging reality we'll need to adapt to. Either way, it's one of the current factors. So are we dying out? No, not even a little. Changing? Only in the worst case scenario. I think everything else is just a matter of a few cycles lining up to kick is particularly hard these past few months. I didn't realize this was a thread from May when I posted, but I think it's been a rough summer so it's worth revisiting now on the other side of a couple tough months.

It was done mostly thorough GDocs, but basically yeah. It was certainly a major cultural shift from most RP communities and I think the only thing that kept the elitism of it in check was the idea of being graded kept so many people out that otherwise would've been treated like lesser parts of the community. The point being that in that environment, people were expecting peer editing. In this one they aren't.

I was, once upon a time, part e an RP community that graded your writing. At the end of each week one of the GMs would review your work (minimum one thousand words) and give you notes before giving your writing a grade. Your accumulated grade was your character's overall strength. This was a hell of a community, albeit a demanding one, and I was very happy with the years I spent there. But in XIV, no one has asked you to be their editor. No one is getting graded. You're not there to improve someone's writing. You're just telling a story with them. You have to remember that odds are the person you're RPing with isn't looking to be graded. They aren't looking for an experience like my old community. To that end, I don't act as anyone's editor unless they request it or I know them well enough to know they won't take it as an offense.

Along those same convention, Glifix Knowthings (Glifix from hieroglyphics) or for a mercenary Endwix Clashysticks.

We of course encourage people to check out our website for a motherload of event photos, our upcoming events, our regular menu (soon adding the menus for Lavender Moon Creamery and Hothouse Catering) and our own forums. This is a wonderful platform in addition to here and our tumblr to get in touch with us, and one we've put no small amount of effort into.

As for speed and reliability, I usually play it off as most healing magic is the "get you back on you feet and fighting" stuff and actual repair takes a while and often several sessions. I also will put limits on how much can be healed in a short time if I think people are leaning too heavily on my magic to stay on their feet. As for what magical healing can do, I'm on mobile so I don't have the link but there is a great video on Fallout lore about the science of sci fi healing that applies pretty well here too. Let me see if I can... Aha! Though content warning for language there.

I think it's very dependant on the people you run with. I've been the useless muggle next to a few pop-up healing emergencies and seen a bit of scene stealing and shoehorning, but most of the ones I've been actually involved in have been very well done. Even when people pressured my character to fix her magical disabilities, they were respectful of the pacing I wanted to take it at. As for healers wanting to join in a scene, I think you can certainly offer, especially if your character has specialties, but remember you're a supporting player, you can only offer.

From a political theory perspective, by the Allagan Empire's fall a flag no longer served a purpose, really. Flags are used to represent an identity and identity is a relative thing. That Canadians exist gives meaning to being Italian. But by the end of their era, Allagan was the state of being for everyone that wasn't Meracydian. Flags also are used to boost morale, but by the fall of Allag there were almost no organic soldiers and few organic laborers. These classes that often rally around the morale boost of their trials being for the good of all just didn't exist anymore. I would say that Meracydia might've had a flag, because they needed symbols of an identity distinct from Allag, but Allag had no need to differentiate itself from anything. People were Allagan. Allagans were people. Things outside this weren't really worth considering. In this way, Allag isn't comparable to an ancient power, but a future one. Allag was very nearly a Type One Civilization, which has never existed in our world so is mostly speculative. We just have political philosophy and theory to project what one might be like and, in this case, why it might not bother with flags.

Working on the Crystal Chronicle has been something immensely satisfying and moving for me. It's no secret that I have a lot of projects I juggle on Balmung, but the Chronicle will always have a special place in my heart as one of the ones that I feel most proud of. My journocatte Maxe Sahashin will be sticking around and be contributing to the continued excellence of fictional journalism at the Garnet Gazette, and I hope that those who have come to love the chronicle follow it's at-first humble successor. I'm not going to say that the Gazette will ever really fill the void left by the Crystal Chronicle, because I'm not sure anything can, but I do promise I'll do everything I can to make sure it's a worthy successor. As our Senior Windmills Correspondent and Trashy Novelist in Residence, I hope that the kind of thing you're used to seeing from my wacky mixed-berry Miqo'te continues to shine lights on your events and make the community feel more interconnected. With my other hat, as an FC leader and event host, I'm going to miss the Chronicle. Whenever I was doing anything, whenever one of my projects took a step forward, whenever my characters were involved in something cool, I immediately turned to the Chronicle to offer them a story, and in turn they provided another avenue for me to promote my events. The relationship I built between the Bandee Pakshee and the Chronicle is one of the things I credit my company's success to, and losing that honestly broke my heart. When we found out about it in the Chronicle staff, I had to leave the meeting and cry, honestly. Because both as a member of the writing team and as a community member who loved and benefited from their coverage, I felt a great loss. It may not ever be quite the same, and it may take time to become as grand, but I hope the Gazette will be that pillar of the community that the chronicle was. And I hope members of the community will continue to support it as they have the Chronicle, by reaching out to us about your events, by helping us promote ourselves by sharing the link and talking about the articles, and even by writing or editing. An institution like the Chronicle isn't born overnight, so I beg your patience with the new paper, but I hope the love people have shown in this thread continues with our new team and new brand.

Update! In Game Theme(s): General Contract Work, Ishgardian, Resource Procurement, Politics/Government/Diplomacy, Doma/Kugane FC/LS Name: Republic of Ishgard : Website url: http://www.rprepository.com/g/ishgard Contacts: Iris Blanchimont, Wu'rexa Norh Housing Ishgardian Consulate, Shirogane Ward 4 Plot 59

There aren't many more contentious issues in lore interpretation and the lack of any real consistency form SE is horrible. By even saying that it's dubiously canon the Tumblr community lights the flames of war. Acting as though there is not a separate language is a good way to be ostracized regardless of canon. This is not an issue you want to wade into, in my opinion. The RP community has by and large decided that whatever canon shakes out being, Doman will be treated as the language of Othard and so that's where I recommend going.

I am a woman and a vast majority of my characters are as well. I'm not exactly bad at writing men, but I'm not as good at it. Not that my characters' genders are all that important to who they are as people, only a few would be fundamentally different if they were a different gender, but there's an intangible thing that I don't seem to get right with my couple of male characters. I don't know what it is that I don't get right, but Lhusi'ir hadn't ever felt quite real.

In Game Theme(s): General Contract Work, Ishgardian, Resource Procurement, and if you'd consider adding Politics/Government/Diplomacy that as well. FC/LS Name: Republic of Ishgard : Website url: http://www.rprepository.com/g/ishgard Contacts: Iris Blanchimont, Lamia Vuinuet, Wu'rexa Norh Housing Not presently available

[align=center][/align] [align=center]The Fury has called on her Sons and Daughters![/align] On this, the Eighth Sun of the Fourth Astral Moon, in the year of the Fury Four of this Seventh Astral Era, the children of Ishgard are invited to draw near and answer her plea for service once more. With the end of the Dragonsong War, the time has come to again take our rightful place among the great nations of this world. As a new iteration on an ancient nation, it is important that our fledgling democracy take her Rightful Place as a member of the global community. To that end, Parliament does Ordain and Establish this Office for the Advancement of Our Most Holy Cause upon foreign soil. We call upon both our own sons and daughters and those foreign nationals with a dedication to Ishgard in their bones to answer the call and build diplomatic relationships realm-over. The world has changed ere we closed our gates, it has become in some ways a harsher place, but in others a more interconnected one. Our place in this new world relies on you. The first project of this Office of Foreign Affairs will be the Establishment of a facility in Hingashi for the purpose of cultural, spiritual and political exchange. This Embassy or Consulate, or whatever form should be deemed Appropriate and Just by the Office, is a sign to the world that Ishgard is no longer content to watch from afar, but to be the Moral and Righteous Partner in world affairs that the Fury would will us to be. From this important symbol of our Faith and Determination, we shall follow the path the Fury bids, to remain an ever-present part of diplomatic and political affairs across Hydaelyn and to welcome those of diplomatic standing to the Holy City with warmth and friendship. Be it So Ordered. [align=left]Iris Lilith Blanchimont Minister of Parliament Office of Foreign Affairs Administrator[/align] [align=center][/align] [align=center]Out of Character Information [/align] The purpose of this Free Company isn't so much to make little Ishgard enclaves so that Ish RPers never need to leave Ishgard, but instead to give a good solid reason why people are, and to provide support networks to Ishgardians abroad. Already a lot of the community of Ishgard that grew around Heavensward has either disbanded to find a place in Stormblood or found their own reasons to travel, and <> would happily be there to support these characters. Some ideas we have on how to do this include hosting cultural exchange events, operating a Temple Levedesk out of a plot in Shirogane and providing an avenue to continue the high-quality political and diplomatic RP that we were known for through Heavensward to the rest of the world. There are some challenges, of course. Whenever you take an action as an 'official' thing in the RP community you run the risk of running afoul of canon or alienating some people who fear canon forcing retroactive continuity. We do have a few responses planned out if the game takes a particular direction with something we're working on, typically that takes the form of saying our efforts are 'pilot programs' for future efforts by Ishgard proper. However, confident that the story of Ishgard has been broadly told, we do not anticipate this being a problem. We don't want to contravene canon or challenge it, we want to enrich it and expand it. That is what RP does best, after all. What we're looking for from you are the kinds of people that make an embassy feel real and alive. We've got our officers - Iris Blanchimont, Lamia Vuinuet and Wu'rexa Norh - but we need a diplomatic corps, missionaries of Halonic doctrine, healers, scholars, cultural icons of Ishgard, High Houses, merchants, security forces and Temple Knights, everything that makes a consulate a part of a community. And for characters without a background in Ishgard, we want people who believe in this kind of diplomacy. We want your Ul'dahni tradesmen, your Lominsian privateers and your Gridanian spiritualists to work with us to help establish deep ties to the rest of the world that Ishgard in canon is sorely lacking right now. We've got a website set up with RP Repository here, a tumblr to follow here, and a Google Forms application here. We were also the front-page story in Issue 27 of The Crystal Chronicle. We've saved up enough for a Small in Shirogane, but are aiming for a Medium and are seeking donations and running maps like crazy to bring that kind of money together. Look forward to a ribbon-cutting event this fall!

I'm a ancillary member of Lamia's RP community, and while it's small, its a pleasant one. Certainly a very different feel from Balmung's community, which can be good if you're looking for a truly new experience.

My main, Andromeda Dulaque (Rommie) is the proprietor of a pillowhouse in Goblet and self-styled as a mentor figure for sex workers. Drop me a line, or drop by Bandee Pakshee (Goblet 10-19) and Rommie would connect your character with all the resources he needs! \o/