Or selling vast tons of poppie to your neighbors!

Edit and Disclaimer: These jokes, in no way, condone real life distribution, manufacture or ingestion of illegal recreative substances. We as comedians are not responsible for extensive illegal practices of any sorts ...

Hahaha

Going to have more posts on the way so stay tuned and remember that Altaea will reappear in the most unexpected ways ;)

Hey all! Happy holidays to you all because it's 6 days before Christmas!

Just wanted to let you all know that we've fully caught up with all our collaborations and will be moving the story either Sunday or at the latest, Monday. There's a lot of ground to wrap up and as you've all noticed, there's quite a bit of content to chew through. Episode 1 is close to reaching a conclusion and aside from the delays and decidedly slow pacing, this scene's conclusion has been long overdue. I've made a decision to shorten posting length so that the content is digestible, doesn't strike everyone with the case of tldr and delivers openings that allow other characters to intervene, interact with each other as well as with other independent or minor characters.

As you all well know, the past half dozen – dozen posts have all accumulated over the past 5 – 6 months and … though there's been stretches between collaborations and post cycles, we've made amazing progress in that we are nearing the conclusion of Episode 1: In Fine Principium and Absolutum Dominium! Episode 2 will begin soon after we wrap up Episode 1 and there will be interesting developments and opportunities to explore the city as well as certain areas of interest within the story.

Overtime, I will also be gradually updating the character tab so that we can a) All repost our character sheets, b) Gain access to valuable character references, and c) Access information about independent and minor characters. New characters will be introduced as the story expands into later episodes and chapters where several important independent individuals of interest will be marked for reference if anyone wishes for their character to interact and drastically impact the story.

If any of you have any questions, thoughts, concerns, and/or simply want to initiate a collaboration, you know where to reach me via PM or Skype!

Hiya

Hiya is right, Konica!

There is no honor in war ...

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Note: So ... I know it's been a stretch since the OOC's seen activity and given that we are communicating via Titanboard and Skype. I figured I'd take the time to make good use of communicating outside of PMs and I can say for certain that I already feel that there's going to be progress in many areas!

How is everyone holding up these days and what plans do y'all have for the 2016?!

Aye, it has been slow-I am genuinely extremely surprised that it has even survived given the drag and time delays. It has, though, and I am still here.

The story is intriguing and going along well. I have admittedly done a lot of tl;dr-however, this has more to do with the time-jumps than the post lengths themselves as many of the names' meanings were lost to me over the periods of inactivity so I understood very little of what I was reading.

I think a concise, bullet-point dictionary of major terms, people, places and a summation of what all has transpired thus far will be enough to clear that up at least on my end. Quite a lot of the posts, I just did not understand because I did not know which group, person, faction or incident they were referring to and nor did I know where to look to find out the answer.

Otherwise, I am up and ready to continue!

Apart from the year it took us to do it, Episode 1 was pretty good. A bit confusing so yeah Nevis' suggestion is a good one!

On an entirely personal level I'd like a chance to play Ash and Cori a bit more in episode 2 (Neither got much attention, though Ash is mostly my fault aha) ;) That's of course purely me haha not a general thing.

What I'd like to see more is... I guess not even necessarily IC. Just all of us collaborating? So far a lot of it has been of site with titanpad, skype ect and I feel like the last few months I've had minimal contact with everyone else in this roleplay (partly due to titanpad not working on my phone, I'll admit). But yeah it'd be nice if we can all do things I guess! More player interaction! Yay!

Edit: Also that blue text is not good on grey :P :P

Needs less draggy stuff, more action. Less confusing stories. Clearer writing.

Give me a place to go and people to kill in this next episode and we're golden.

That's very combat orientated :P

@FernStone What did you expect. My main home these days is the Arena, not the advanced RP subforum. My expertise is in the fine art of bloodshed, not negotiations and politics.

@DJAtomika I don't know what to expect haha - certainly didn't know that. That's cool I guess. Bloodshed is certainly a very very fine art... If a bit messy

I'm pretty shit at writing combat myself, take the current chapter in my novel as an example.

I agree with the pacing problems and I'm also similarly surprised that this actually survived. I think the most important thing in a RP is cooperation and, well, interaction. While I appreciate collaboration, I couldn't help but feel somewhat isolated from other players, be it because of the quiet OOC and because of our reliance on mixing things together in a pad which could be hard because of the time-zones or other things.

I agree with @FernStone that more interaction between the players would be golden, and better pacing would definitely be a help, which can be easily reached through shorter posts (not one-liners or like three-sentences and we're done sort of shit, just more contained posts, as the way we've done it so far can sometimes be hard to digest).

Yes please. Perhaps more discussion of story here instead of on a pad. If we wanna work on posts, have everyone on one single pad and not several different pads. That way we can read who's writing what and how it'll affect our posts as a result.

All things in one pad might be confusing, but at least a link to all pads?

But yeah I also feel like I don't know what's going on with some things, which doesn't help when i have characters spread about the place xD And there was so little discussion here. Maybe partly our fault. We should start talking in here more

A link to all pads in use feels like the best way to proceed to me. This way one post proceeding with two players will not contradict two other players' posts.

I'd agree there

I myself have a link to three titanpads xD The one with Dae, Lucius, Ona ect + the one with Korkud + another one

And it can help a lot

@ Fern - What sort of colors other than white work better on grey? I feel like light gold or a lighter color like light blue might be the sweet spot, hehe.

Also, I'll admit that I've been working on including a bigger role for both Ash and Cori. We know that Cori is an armorer and shifting towards a genius inventor role. She's the one that crafted Uriel's armor, hence why he's called the armored man in the Iron Mask!

As for Ash, I did have a post written

@ DJ - Going to be lots of room for killing and if you want blood, in the next episode you'll have all the blood you can spill. I can say for certainty that in this coming episode, we'll need a thousand Balthazars and ... currently we only have one ;P.

@ Peik - I agree with you in that the collaborations were good via PMing, but that since all the Titanpad boards were rather isolated and confined to multiple arcs, that left for limited interactions between all the writers. I'll admit that it was my fault for letting this come around and that I do apologize for miscommunications or the delayed posting activities. We've all written phenomenal pieces and more activity and frequent posting will let us ... gasp ... give the story justice to where we will actually finish it!

@ Everyone - Time zones really do make a bit of difference especially since we're all awake at different times of the day. I'm really humbled by all your participation and am in favor of including more of our story discussions here and not on the Titanpad. I'll encourage and make it an utmost priority to use the OOC as a means of communication and not the Titanpad because I feel like this is a much more robust area for communication.

Many stories don't actually get a chance to flesh out and if you've seen RoleplayerGuild's large story graveyard, it's depressing. We'll never reach that point, thankfully and I think that we've got a phenomenal corps of writers and characters.

It was been my intention to really make Altaea feel like it's in the Late Middle Ages, but I've realized that it's got a Middle Renaissance - Early Modern period vibe. I've also realize that there must be room for more interaction and so far, I don't intend for the story-direction to be linear or one-dimensional. I wanted to keep the story confined to certain section within Voltas, the former Valanian capital so as to keep all the characters together and allow for more interaction and growth, but I'd like to know all your two cents about all this. This next episode will allow for huge opportunities and several major plot developments that may possibly change the future for centuries to come.

I'll have some updates on the First OOC post since it seems overdue for an update. You guys and gal are great and so far, it's been a blast writing with all you in Altaea.

This is what I have in the bullet points for improvements if you feel a case of tldr:

- You're all awesome and phenomenal writers
- Titanpad links for all the collaborative pads
- References to all the Factions, Important Characters, Incidents, and Historical Events
- More discussions about Characters and Collaborations here in the OOC
- More Frequent Posts while retaining Quality without massive 10 paragraph pieces
- Additional Combat Opportunities
- Clearer Narratives