Hylozoist

Interplanetary Space Friends - A Game About Space Adventures, Friendship and Fast Food

Thanks @DepressedSoviet, I look forward to reading it!

Interplanetary Space Friends - A Game About Space Adventures, Friendship and Fast Food

Do you feel the need to do something heroic?
Do you crave helping other sentient beings?
Do you hunger to be a paragon of goodness in a galaxy gone wrong?
What about the chance to eat your own weight in barbecued ribs?
If you (or your parents / legal guardian) answered yes to any of these questions, let me be the first to invite you to the ISF!

THE INTERPLANETARY SPACE FRIENDS

BROUGHT TO YOU BY HENDERSON'S RIBS
A (Most Likely) Casual Roleplay About Space Adventures, Friendship and Fast Food

The ISF started off as a much smaller, humbler institution. It began life as the Henderson's Kid Club - a way to encourage children to associate the fledgling Henderson's Ribs fast-food empire with fun and games, ensuring a lifetime of brand loyalty. When the planet of Henderson's Ribs (as it came to be known) joined the galactic community, the Kid Club became the Interplanetary Space Friends, and helped turn the company into the galaxy's largest provider of barbecue ribs. In any given inhabited system, you'll find the familiar brown and red flag flapping gently over a domed building emblazoned with those wonderful words - HENDERSON'S RIBS.

New members of the ISF receive a membership pack, containing the following things:

A badge. It's made of plastic, and painted gold. It features a smiling, oversized bovine and the letters ISF. It comes with a little badge holder, made of an even flimsier plastic. A membership number is printed on the reverse side, along with some text explaining that this badge remains the property of Henderson's Ribs.

The latest copy of the Space Friends Monthly, a newsletter about all the great and wonderful things members have done. It's also filled with adverts for Henderson's Ribs, crosswords, word-searches and other puzzles. The back of the newsletter contains an editorial written by Henderson himself on whatever topic the company feels is particularly important.

The Handbook. It basically promotes the three core values of the ISF - Be Good, Help Others, Eat Ribs. There are all sorts of rules and regulations within the handbook, many of them contradictory. Most members have a passing familiarity with at least some of the rules, and it's rumoured that there are different editions of the ISF Handbook.

The Notebook. This is the most treasured of belongings for most ISF members. Each page has the ISF logo embossed upon it, and the pages are perforated down one side, so that they can be torn out easily. A sticker applied to the inside of the notebook explains the purpose of the notebook - write in the good deeds you have done, get it signed by the person you helped, and exchange it at any Henderson's Ribs franchise for fantastic prizes.

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Question #1: What?
The premise is fairly simple; you are members of the ISF, aboard a space ship. You travel the galaxy, doing good deeds, or at least trying to do good deeds, before reaping the sweet, sticky barbecue-y rewards. As you can probably gather, this isn't a particularly serious roleplay - think Space Dandy rather than, say, Star Trek. Ideal players will have a sense of humour, and treat this as the lighthearted escapist silliness it is.

In terms of how the game is going to play out, people to help, planets to visit and the like will be made fairly obvious, mostly via issues of Space Friends Monthly. I will leave it to the player characters to basically come up with an agreement on what options they want to pursue, and then I'll try and keep up with whatever "help" you end up offering. If none of the prompted ideas tickle your collective fancies, I'm more than happy to run with whatever you end up wanting to do - the galaxy is a big place, after all, and can easily accommodate all of our ideas. Want to help a girl rescue her genetically engineered pet from a tree? I'll run with that.

Basically, if you want direction, I'll gladly provide it for you, because that's what the GM is for, right? If you want to be the masters of your own destiny entirely, I'm good with that too. As long as things are happening, the story is moving forwards and I'm getting a good giggle or two out of it all, I'm happy.

Question #2: Who?
I'm looking for a small group of people, four or five at most. I am dangerously flexible regarding the sort of character you want to play, except for two things - they must be a member of the Interplanetary Space Friends (Brought To You By Henderson's Ribs), and they are on board the Quest For Flavour, a cheerful looking spaceship that serves as a base of operations for the crew. Aliens, robots, zombies, intelligent slime, polka-dot humans, elves in spaaaace, toasters, weird creatures made of cheese, unintelligent slime, creatures fashioned out of clay and abandoned by their creator... as long as they're on the ship, and part of the ISF, it's all good.

Question #2b: The Quest For What Now? Who's In Charge Of That?
It's a spaceship. Do keep up. As for who is in charge; I have two thoughts on this. If somebody wants to play a character with the not-entirely-prestigious title of "Captain of the Quest For Flavour", then I'm happy to let them have it. It'll probably be on a first come, first served basis (much like the fine eating establishments of Henderson's Ribs), so if you desperately want to lead a bunch of space misfits but never had the opportunity to do so because of legal reasons, here's your chance.

If nobody wants the title of Captain, the Captain shall be an NPC to begin with. But I'll probably try and pass off the role - with hilarious consequences - to some character or other at some point, because it'd be funnier. Not wanting to be the Captain will not guarantee that the hat of leadership will be thrust into your hands!

Question #3: When?
I'd like to start fairly soon, as my head is bristling with ideas and my resolution for this year was to try my hand at inflicting running a game here. I'm hoping that a small group of people can manage a reasonable posting schedule, where nobody gets left behind, and we all carry one another into a galaxy of bizarre happenings. I usually check the website in the evening and in the mornings (GMT), and will aim to make sure that nobody's waiting on me for more than a day.

Question #4: How? I Mean, How Do I Join?
Fill out a character sheet, post it here, and I'll get back to you as quickly as I can.

Question #5: Are There Any Other Rules Or Things I Should Know About?
I operate under the general rule of "please don't be a jerk". Be good to one another, be willing to work with one another, be willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, and make sure you drink plenty of water. If other rules need to be established, we can work on them together, as a team. Yay, teamwork!

Character Sheet!

ISF Membership Form c-98bV2

Name: This could be the name inflicted upon you at birth, a stupid nickname given to you by your so-called friends or a super awesome nickname that you demand everyone else calls you, like "Ace McCool".

Appearance: This could be text, this could be an image, this could be a bit of both.

Species Name & Description: Feel free to go pretty hog-wild here. Obviously this'll sort of fold in with "appearance", but it's just so I know what people would call your species. Also, if you could include how common the species is in terms of the galactic community, that'd be good - I'm happy if you want to be the last of your species, or just one amongst countless trillions, but it saves me having to guess and helps a lot with working out how NPCs will react to you.

Favourite Side Dish: This is just one of those things that Henderson's Ribs needs to know about their customers, sorry.

Useful Skills & Abilities: What can your character do? Fix things? Telepathically communicate with fish? Fight with their fists? Negotiate their way through a hostage situation? Taste great with mayonnaise?

Membership Number: Your ISF membership number. These tend to be long and sometimes include letters, weird arcane symbols and guttural sounds.

An Inspirational Quote That Sums Up The Character's Personality: "Glory and adventure awaits!" is good and implies a certain amount of action. "I don't wanna get out of bed today!" might very well be honest, but that's not what we're looking for.

History: Don't fill this in, but have a think about it now. Because everyone is going to be a crew member aboard the same ship, I figured that it's probably best for everyone to come together once characters are made to agree on how they came to be on the ship.

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Brought to you by your friends at Henderson's Ribs. Out Of This World Flavour!^TM

Convergence: The Restoration

Peacock

In today's thrilling installment, introductions are made, the call to action is heard and there's also a cat! Starring @Nerevarine as the mysterious Heilong Yu and featuring equally mysterious figures in black played by @CorpusMundus! Action!

Peacock listened to Heilong Yu, or, rather, felt her thoughts press down on her own brain, and decided that the whole experience of hearing what somebody was thinking was neat enough to not worry about for the time being. Telepathy was undeniably awesome, just like the sort of thing you'd see in a cartoon, and it sounded like she didn't like slavers either. Like two peas in a pod, except the pod is an unknown land, the two peas aren't particularly alike and the food metaphor was beginning to make Peacock's stomach rumble.

"Hear... hear what?"

The young girl followed along behind Heilong Yu, joining her at the hole in the wall that passed for a window. Raising an arm up so that the string of eyes attached to them could see, Peacock made a thoughtful, if rather exaggerated, hmmmmm sound. The strangers, dressed in black, stood out just as much as Heilong Yu did, except their style of dress was more authoritarian-chic compared to Heilong's. The words were considerably more interesting and, as Heilong Yu went to spruce up her outfit, Peacock just stood three, straining to listen to the words of the Grand Confessor outside. It didn't really sound so bad.

"Some really weird folks out there, I think they're a cult or something, and- yeah!" Peacock pulled the emergency brake on her own train of thought as Yu suggested getting out of the slum and going somewhere. At this point, anywhere would be better than here, and somewhere might at least have some popcorn and a comfortable place to sit. Without any warning, save for a slight narrowing of the eyebrows above her empty eye sockets, Peacock vaulted through the hole in the wall with a joyous, and possibly bloodcurdling, shout. A passing cat jumped, hissed, and scurried away.

Sheepishly, Peacock turned around and peered back into the building, through the window, at Heilong Yu. The cloud of dust kicked up by her acrobactics and subsequent landing began to settle behind her. If there was anything else in the street that noticed her, or heard her, Peacock was merrily oblivious to it for the time being. As for the other senses, well, Peacock was almost certainly offensive to those too.

"Peacock. Name's Peacock! Good to meetcha, Yu."

Sci-fi Sandbox

Well, in the interests of getting the ball rolling again (and making it easier to get people interacting...), is there some sort of central GFUN station, or planet? I had wanted to run with a story of the Greater Orpil Flock trying to establish an embassy and apply for membership with GFUN, and such bring my narrator character into a position where she can interact with others, and a sort-of-capital-ish-thing for the GFUN would be the logical place to set that.

I'm a-okay with making up such a place if needs be, and dragging other diplomats, kicking and screaming if needs be, into it, but I want to make sure that this would be an acceptable thing to do. It's my first time trying out an NRP, so I'm not sure what exactly the protocol is when it comes to "world building" (for lack of a better term) outside your own nation's borders, but I imagine that some folks won't mind, and others would see it as a bit of a breach of protocol.

Project Crossover [Video Game Crossover RP]

I've got a suggestion for you. Saxton Hale. both serious AND silly!

@Archmage MC

I'm not sure I'm Australian enough to do his shirtless majesty justice. I'm not sure any of us are. I'm not the GM, but I'd veto anyone playing him unless their CS submission includes a photograph, signed by a lawyer or medical professional, of the person wanting to play Hale wrestling an alligator. At the very least.

Project Crossover [Video Game Crossover RP]

I wasn't a fan of a fighty character due to the EXP system, but a support or comedy character kinda doesn't really care too much about that as they're not there to fight the baddies, but to support the people who are.

@Archmage MC

I normally love playing support and/or comedy characters, so I'm thinking that whatever I settle on for my secondary character should be something a little more serious than Quina.

Which will be hard.

Like, really hard.

Convergence: The Restoration

Peacock

In which our fantastic heroine struggles with words and provides Heilong Yu (as played by @Nerevarine) shelter, all the while bombarding her with questions, completely unaware of the language barrier between them. Action!

The sensation of having somebody dump words directly into your mind, avoiding all those weird little tubes and bones that make up the various bits of the ear, was something of a novelty for Peacock. The assorted rat wranglers, mud harvesters, swindlers and flim-flammers that made up what remained of the crowd didn't seem to react to the words. Peacock concluded that either this message was for her mind only, or everyone else was just way too busy doing whatever it was they were doing to respond.

"Then we're two peas in a pod, two rats in a trap, two..." Peacock paused to try and think of another way of explaining just how similar their situations were, then dismissed the thought (or lack thereof) with a shrug. While the girl displayed an almost comical lack of concern for the almost comical lack of knowledge either of them had regarding how they ended up here, the rows of red eyes attached to Peacock's slender mechanical arms glanced around, trying to keep an eye, or eyes, on everything.

"...pickles in, yeah, that doesn't work. Out of the sun, gotcha. Can fix you up with that, at least!"

And so Peacock turned around with a dramatic flourish of her arms and marched, with a rather exaggerated gait, back down the street and over to the building she'd woken up in. It hadn't changed much since she left it a moment ago. The door still lay on the ground, hoping it could grow some legs and begin life anew as a table. The interior was dark, save for the flickering embers of the fire in the middle of the room, though a rudimentary ventilation system allowed the smoke to leave by creeping up through the cracks in the ceiling to slowly suffocate whoever happened to live just above ground level. The pair of corpses slumped in the room adjacent to the front room were beginning to make themselves known, as not even the stench of rot and sweat impregnated into the walls could mask that sort of corpse-stink. It was the sort of place that not even vermin would be seen dead in.

"One dank, sun-free hovel, just what the doctor ordered," Peacock stepped over the door, took a few careful steps to navigate her way around the broken bits of furniture that were scattered about the place, and finally crouched down next to the fire. It produced a token amount of light and heat, but it was cosy enough.

"Erebus, Shams, don't know either of 'em. It's not New Meridian either. I woke up in there," one mechanical arm extended out, and a comically oversized gloved hand pointed at the entrance to the other room, "and I know I fell asleep on my own bed last night. So what's with you and the sun? Not a morning person, huh? And what's with bypassing my ears? That's some weird trick! And the axe, carrying a chopper like that around, like you're looking for trouble, or trouble's looking for you..."

Peacock's arm snaked back to it's previous position. The row of eyes on it just stared. Clearly, Peacock was quite oblivious of how weird her own tricks were.

"...and, uh, hey, you probably don't want to go in that room. It was like that when I got there."

Convergence: The Restoration

Starting off in the slums because waking up in a rat-infested hovel feels like the best way to start any game.

Edit: Had to go and fix two things in my first post already. The moral of this story is - have a cup of tea before you post stuff in the morning.

Project Crossover [Video Game Crossover RP]

Before I post this GM post, I want to say that I didn't start the XP event with this post because I don't expect us to head right away into the missions just yet. (...) I will also write a P.O. list for each team that everyone can use to regulate who supposed to post next.

@Holy Soldier

Works well for me, as the last of my relatives leave tonight, and I can post a bit more regularly from tomorrow onward!

Convergence: The Restoration

Peacock

In which our plucky heroine wakes up in the slums, causes a stir, and meets a fellow stranger - Heilong Yu, as played by @Nerevarine. Action!

Peacock woke with a start in a room that had seen better days, and it was only the complete lack of artificial lighting that let it avoid seeing better nights too. The air was so thick with the stench of human habitation that other odours had to form an orderly queue in the room next door to wait their turn to get in. A handful of other guests were were seeking shelter here, and it looked like there'd been some kind of fight for the a pile of hay the previous night. Whoever won, the pile of hay was the loser, judging by the blood and hay scattered throughout the room. Sunlight illuminated, mercifully, a small patch of the floor, but it was only a matter of time before the whole scene would be bathed in the warm glow of morning proper, and no doubt somebody would be sick at seeing such a sight.

Still, Peacock considered, I've woke up in worse places.

With all the grace of a car crash at fifty miles per hour, Peacock went to the door and burst through into something approximating a communal kitchen. A pair of men huddled around a small fire, a curious choice for indoor decoration, and the pot of something bubbling away on top of it could have been today's breakfast, the regurgitated mess of yesterday's dinner or, most alarmingly, a bit of both. There was no hint of generosity in their eyes, and they didn't seem keen to share any food with the young girl that they'd pulled in from the streets last night. Especially as the scrawnier looking of the two had assumed that the girl was a corpse.

"Good morning," Peacock grinned, "what's cooking?"

The pair abandoned their meagre possessions and bolted towards the safety of the outside world, leaving a trail of hay, dust and an upturned pot of stew in their wake. The wooden door swung gently backwards and forwards in the rotting frame before deciding to give up the vertical lifestyle entirely and fell off it's hinges. More light penetrated the building now, and it wasn't a pretty sight, as generations of people had lived here over the years, and not one of them ever thought to bring in a comfy looking chair, grab a potted plant or do much of anything except watch the building collapse slowly around them. The token bit of greenery came in the form of something growing on the wall; the mouldy patch was probably the healthiest resident the building had ever known.

Stepping over the door, Peacock peered down the street. Buildings leaned on one another for support here, creaking and aching in their old age. To her left, the pair of corpse-gatherers were busy screaming and running away, shouting something about the dead coming back to life and bemoaning the lack of opportunities for the lower classes to get much of anything done. To the right, further down the street, it looked like a small crowd had gathered to watch a pale, axe-wielding lady look for something. Of the two options, the latter seemed like the most amusing, so the two men who put her up for the night got to live another day of crushing, depressing poverty.

The plan was to barge through the crowd to get a better look at the lady, but Peacock's odd appearance did a remarkably good job at easing her passage through the group of slum-dwellers. A few of them muttered about the end of days, and foreigners, and monsters, and Peacock briefly wondered which of the categories the axe-carrying lady came under. Compared to everyone else around here, Heilong Yu was rather differently dressed, and looked just about as lost as Peacock was. The red eyes arrayed down Peacock's arms stared at Heilong Yu, as if trying to work out where this incongruous figure came from and how it fit into the grand scheme of things.

"I betcha you're lost too, huh," Peacock began, keeping a respectful distance from the lady, just as the onlookers were keeping a respectful distance from the pair of them, "and good luck getting any answers out of these clams, their mouths are shut tight when they're not shrugging or sleeping or screaming for help. Who are ya, then?"