exploration

[inthenightmods]

EXPLORATION

ACTIVE EXPLORATION SLOTS: 0/8

Explorations are currently OPEN. They will close again when we run out of active exploration slots.

Building a structure may be done at any time and does not affect the active exploration slots.

•••
The forest engulfing Beacon is dense and uncharted, but that just means there's never a shortage of cool stuff to discover lurking off the beaten path. There's always new locations, plot clues, or extra resources to be found, so although venturing into the woods is always dangerous, the rewards may just outweigh the risks.

Once you come up with a plan, please fill out and submit the form below. We'll respond in one of two ways, depending on the nature of your exploration:

• In most cases, we'll respond with a single write-up detailing the outcome of your exploration. For example, characters venturing out into a particular part of the woods may discover a new location! In that case, you'll receive a full description of that new location, along with any other details worth noting, such as forest spirit encounters or difficulties along the way. If your group would then like to react to any of this or explore that location after its discovery, you can then respond with your own write-up of everything your group would investigate, and we'll let you know what happens as a result. And that's it! Then the exploration is wrapped, the location becomes available to the game at large, and you're welcome to thread out any details of the exploration if you like.


• In limited cases, an exploration request will open a dialogue between the players and mods to determine the outcome of your exploration. For example, characters attempting to interact with forest spirits may get the chance to play out that encounter, whether it be a pleasant conversation or, uh, the forest spirit trying to kill you, since that happens sometimes. Explorations of this nature will not always result in a response like this, as it'll depend on our availability as mods. If you're interested in doing an exploration like this and don't want to leave it up to chance, PM us! We'll work with you to schedule an encounter.

Regardless of which type of exploration you end up with, what you do during an exploration is entirely up to you, so feel free to get creative! We always try to reward creativity in some way, even if it's not a success in the way that you hoped for.

•••
Before you embark on your quest, here's everything you need to know about explorations:

• Exploring uncharted territory is intended to be dangerous, and there is always a risk of failure, injury, and other setbacks. If you're not on board with these risks, exploration may not be in the cards for you.


• That said, the exploration form includes an opt-in for serious injury and death. If you aren't interested in having your character(s) at risk for that stuff at this time, you can let us know upfront. Please keep in mind that opting out of serious injury/death does not mean you're opting out of the above risks of failure, injury, and other setbacks. Those risks are always in play during explorations. In addition, while opting out of serious risks doesn't mean you'll get a watered down exploration, some discoveries lurking out in the forest are reserved for risk-taking characters. For example, opting out of serious risks eliminates the chance of running into the hostile green-eyed spirits, so characters interested in pursuing green-eyed spirit plot threads will have to put themselves on the line to do so.


• If you choose to opt into the risks of serious injury and death, your character's safety is forfeit and you give the mods the right to maim accordingly (though, of course, we'll check permissions posts in doing so). This does not mean that groups opting into these risks will always be tormented and killed! It's just helpful for us to know your preferences and expectations upfront. Please keep in mind that opting into the risk of serious injury or death applies to the whole group, not just individual characters.


• Explorations into the area of Beacon currently occupied by the Parade will always be extra dangerous. Characters will run the risk of encountering the Parade itself, but besides that, the Parade's presence gets all the forest spirits in the area extra revved up, increasing their hostility. We'll give you the "danger zone warning" at the top of the exploration if you're about to head into Parade-infested territory, as characters may be seriously injured or killed at any point during an exploration within the parade route. You can check the Parade's schedule on the calendar page.


• Chance of success will be left up to a mix of mod discretion and RNG. We'll typically use a RNG to determine what you find, if anything, but we'll also take player/character ingenuity into account. In short: If you have a solid, creative plan, you're more likely to be rewarded for that. Aimlessly wandering won't always get you nothing, but it's less likely to earn you something neat for your trouble. (However, please do be encouraged to follow the dumb idea that's in your character's heart. We will reward for IC idiocy, too.)


• Having torches from the bonfire with you will also increase your chance of success, though be careful: If you lose the torches while exploring, someone will have to recover them or they're lost forever. Additionally, you must request torches through the item request page in order to take them on explorations. Torches not logged through the item requests page are not considered game canon.


• Once you receive a mod response to your exploration, you will have one week to tag us back. If that week timer runs out, we'll consider that exploration closed, and mod responses will stop. You're welcome to handwave your own IC conclusion to the exploration at that point. To be extra clear: the time it takes for us mods to respond to your exploration is not included in that time limit. The timer starts fresh each time we tag you back.


• Explorations over two weeks old will be wrapped in the next mod response. This is to prevent explorations from dragging on for too long, which will slow up our system, but more importantly, it'll make for awkward timing issues in the game! We don't want to leave players waiting on exploration outcomes to be able to engage with the rest of the game.


• Characters may only embark on one exploration at a time, no matter how small. Pretty self explanatory! One at a time, please. If you play more than one character, you may send them on concurrent explorations, but keep in mind that we might deny exploration requests like this to give other players a chance to hop in.


• We will only accept a maximum of 8 active explorations at a time. If those 8 slots fill up, we'll close the queue to new submissions until we're able to wrap some of the active adventures. This number is based on mod availability.


• Explorations will always be closed during events except under rare special circumstances. Similarly, explorations can't be forward- or back-dated to happen during an event. Go do event things instead!


• You can also submit an "exploration" to build a new structure on this page! Just use the appropriate form below.

To EMBARK ON AN EXPLORATION, please fill out the form below:

<b>player name(s):</b> (please list ALL PLAYERS involved with the exploration!) <b>character(s):</b> (please list ALL CHARACTERS involved with the exploration!) <b>area of exploration:</b> (please be as specific as possible! we need to know where your character is/is trying to go.) <b>date(s) of exploration:</b> (you may forward or back date by up to two weeks from the current date.) <b>plan:</b> (what, specifically, are you doing? this is the place to detail the plan in full, so be sure to include all of the relevant details so that we can factor it all into our response. consider questions like: what's the goal? are you bringing supplies or torches? does anyone have experience or training that could assist with your plan? is anyone already injured or impaired? tell us what your plan is! AS A REMINDER, EXPLORATIONS WILL TYPICALLY ONLY RECEIVE ONE RESPONSE TO DETAIL THE RESULT, so it's important to be clear about your intentions and plans!) <b>is your group willing to accept risk of serious injury/death?</b> (a simple yes/no is all we need, and please only give ONE ANSWER for the whole group. a "yes" here doesn't automatically mean you'll all die horribly, and a "no" doesn't mean you won't get anything cool. we'll check permissions posts before injuring/killing characters.)

To BUILD A STRUCTURE or ALTER THE SETTING, please fill out the form below:

<b>player name(s):</b> (please only list the names of the players ORGANIZING construction/alteration.) <b>character(s):</b> (please list ALL CHARACTERS involved with construction/alteration.) <b>location:</b> (please be as specific as possible so that we can add it to the map!) <b>start date:</b> (when does this project BEGIN? based on the details you provide in this submission, we'll let you know how long it will take the characters to complete the project.) <b>plan:</b> (this is the place to tell us how the construction/alteration is going to happen! hit us up with as many details as you have, as we'll be using this plan to determine the length of the project.) <b>description:</b> (what does the finished product look like? this is the description as it will appear VERBATIM on the setting page.)

Please note that with the recent discovery of the medical center, each player may only explore the medical center ONCE for the time being in order to give everyone a chance to get involved. If exploration requests die down and there are still areas to be uncovered, we may lift that rule. We'll make an announcement in the OOC comm should that happen.

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Comments

[arsarcanum]

player name(s): Mawi
character(s): Sora (arsarcanum)
area of exploration: Library
date(s) of exploration: 02/06
plan: After tearfully saying good bye on the 17th and thank you for everything last month, sweet Librarian, Sora's been coming back every Monday he can for a couple of hours to sweep, do some basic cleaning and tidying, and to make sure the Librarian doesn't get lonely. (Fistbump lessons have been consistent. They're getting to the Baymax "balalala" exploding fistbumps at some point. That's the goal!) Today, he's coming in with a fistbump and some of the prototype Valentines chocolates he's been making in a larger paper packet! He would like to procure the following, if the Librarian may be so kind.

- Any information from Earth from New York City (as close to Brooklyn as possible) from 1920-1940, in a universe as close to Bucky's as possible
- Sci-fi novels from before 1940, again from an Earth as close to Bucky's as possible (Sora's going to request the War of the Worlds if they have it! It's the oldest sci-fi book he can think of.)
- Long shot here - Sora is going to request any information about a world he only knows as Scala Ad Caelum. The only thing he knows is that it's supposedly the core from whence the Kingdom Hearts multiverse sprung - he doesn't even know what it looks like. (He doesn't and wouldn't really know that Scala Ad Caelum began life as another world called Daybreak Town. Maybe the Librarian would know something about that?) If there are any new books that are related to his last Kingdom Hearts related request, he'd love to know about that, but he figures that if there's nothing, he should just wait until things in the library shuffle around a little more.
- Finally... He's very curious if there are any books about any of the spirits in town? Sora's closest with the Librarian and the gacha machine (if... they're a spirit... hey, Sora's got an open mind here), so he'd like books or information on them. He wants to know about his friends! But any info on any spirit like the Postmaster, the Ice-Cream Spirit, the Concierge or even the spirit who runs the school would be nice. This is definitely asked from a getting to know you angle, not a "who were you guys and how does this help us save Beacon" angle.

is your group willing to accept risk of serious injury/death? Sora would let the Librarian kill him at this point. It's fine.

[inthenightmods]

The Librarian is getting real good at fistbumping! It takes a little bit of thought and effort, and it's not really a fistbump so much as hopefully a fist beneath those sheets bump, but the thought is there. They eat their chocolates as they scurry around, grabbing a few books.

• There's an encyclopedia about Brooklyn in the late 1920's! It includes such things as local points of interest, population densities, and little blurbs of information on ehtnic subsets within neighborhoods.
  
• The Librarian finds Sora the same book as last time-- but oh, weirdly enough, it's changed a bit. The two closest pieces of CR Sora has made in his time here are now among the illustrations, gathering around a Sora-like figure as they split the Paopu fruit.
  
• Alas, there isn't much on Scala Ad Caelum: the most they can find is a picture of it in an atlas-like book, glossy and high-def. The other pictures are varying locations from worlds both familiar and not.
  
• Oh!! At that last question, the Librarian puffs up a little. There's no hesitation to where they go for this: behind their desk, there's what might generously be called a diary. It's really more a sheaf of looseleaf paper bound with string, and contains as many strange doodles and symbols as it does words.
  
  But Sora learns, in the Librarian's questionable handwriting, that the way to the Postmaster General's, hm, heart, is through either colorful pebbles or new stamps (or at least, that's what the Librarian has found). Actually, there's a lot about the Postmaster General, including little doodles and faces drawn near them. Hm!

[arsarcanum]

Excellent! Sora will have the picture book returned in about five days and the encyclopedia returned in within two weeks! He does take a photo of the picture of the atlas, then a picture of Scala Ad Caelum itself (after getting a brief echo from it, of course - thanks, Librarian), before squinting at the updated picture book... is that... the soldier and Jason? What are they doing there?

Hm indeed. He thanks the Librarian for letting him see such an important document! He'll probably come back to gossip about it at a later time, but for now, he's happy to know it exists. (Really, he will be back to gossip about it, if only because he is perfectly aware that there is a thing going on between these two.)

Thanks again, Librarian! You'll be getting some properly wrapped chocolate on Valentine's Day!