JohnSolaris

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

@JohnSolaris

My Hider

<Snipped quote by JohnSolaris>

Read the character you typed out, it feels very "writer's self fulfIlment" in style and an exact Mary sue. That can never be good in most roleplays. I'm leaving.

@71342

This makes me wonder if you know what a Mary Sue actually is, and if you just throw that phrase out to describe any character you don't like. My character obviously has very significant flaws, he does not automatically succeed at everything he tries to do, other characters don't automatically like him for no apparent reason, and he certainly isn't going to warp the whole plot to fit him. Yes, he's wish fulfillment, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing if the character is also well-written and has interesting, meaningful conflicts. If you just don't like any kind of wish fulfillment, period, then that's just you.

If you're leaving just because of this, without even seeing the character in action, go ahead. I can't force you to change your views if they don't agree with mine.

Edit: I just did a pretty well-known Mary Sue test for my character, and ended up getting 20 points, which says that he has a low chance of being a Mary Sue. No, of course the test isn't foolproof. But it should be somewhat helpful, at least. I do think I know what I'm doing, so if you think my character is a Mary Sue just because of the wish fulfillment, well, it's just your opinion.

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

Have you enough players or will I be able to get a character in?

@Satsuki

More players are always welcome.

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

BC's faction is accepted.

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

My only very, very, very minor nitpick with Ana is that her Flash Step Speed Burst ability shouldn't use any "unique" form of mana. The more technical explanation should be that the specific magic circuit that the ability is made of can temporarily regain a small amount of mana very quickly, but it still takes the usual time for the temporarily regained mana to be absorbed into her true, deeper mana reservoir. So if Ana tries to use the ability without stopping, it'll rapidly eat into her real mana reservoir, and tire her out. This applies to all abilities that can only be used in short bursts, so you don't need to put in any justifications.

Other than that, your character is accepted. Welcome to the game! :)

---

I made a minor edit to the description of the Evocation style of magic. I added that in most cases, no one else can use the abilities of your Evoked magic items, even if you want them to. And I clarified that if you put in a fragment of your soul to allow your Evoked item to detach from you, then it basically becomes a semi-sentient, independent magical artifact.

I also posted the profile of my first character, in the Characters section. Warning: Over 9000 4000 words! Yeah, I make long profiles all the time. Very long profiles.

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

This post will contain my own characters.

I should mention that while normal player characters cannot start with more than city-destroying levels of power unless discussed extensively with me beforehand, my characters don't have that limitation. Yes, each of my two main GMPCs will be more powerful than any other individual player character. However, since my goal is to make a good story, I will make sure that my GMPCs will not ruin any conflict in the plot, or effortlessly solve other characters' problems. The personalities of my characters should make it clear why they aren't too willing to interfere with other people's issues, in addition to the self-imposed power limiters they wear that normally restrict them to the level of other player characters. I will also make sure that my characters have interesting, consistent, and well-rounded personalities, and are not Mary Sues. Lastly, rest assured that my characters are not invincible; I will make sure they lose for one reason or another if I deem that it's required by the plot.

There exist at least several other characters, on both the Magi and Tech sides, whose power levels are comparable to the full power levels of my two GMPCs, though their details haven't been decided yet. If you want to create one of these "epic-tier" characters, you need to discuss your idea extensively with me before you're allowed to do so, and convince me that your epic-tier character will not disrupt the conflicts of other player characters.

Also, since I know my own magic system better than anyone else, I will omit some of the limitations of my characters' abilities. The limitations are obviously still there; I just won't include them in the profiles. Otherwise the profiles might get way too long, like what happened to character profiles in my previous RPs. If you want to know the limitations of any specific ability belonging to any of my characters, you can just ask.

My characters:

The Evanescent One

Name: The Evanescent One; Evan.

Side: Magi.

Sex: Male.

Age: 1724 (see his biography for why he's this old).

Race: Cosmic elemental (spirit); formerly half human, half purple dragon (spawn).

Appearance:
Evan's true form is an orb of swirling colors, roughly the size of a human heart. It contains every color in the rainbow, but is somewhat predominantly purple and golden yellow. The orb is made of a glowing, translucent and insubstantial energy, but myriads of complex crystalline structures and arcane runes appear to shift in and out of existence within the orb's depths every second. Though the orb is small, gazing into it is likely to give one a sense of nigh-unfathomable gravitas and depth.
Evan typically covers his true orb form with a humanoid male body, with the orb located where the body's brain should be. The body is a moderate 175 cm in height, with a decent amount of muscle, but a wiry build that makes it look somewhat skinny nevertheless. Its skin tone is Caucasian and slightly paler than average, and appears almost paradoxical in being perfectly even and unblemished except for a number of thin scars littered across the body. It has messy, slightly curled, pale blond hair that falls a bit below its neck, and yellow, reptile-like eyes (normal human-like scleras, reptilian irises, i.e. yellow irises with slitted pupils). Its ears are somewhat pointed, like an elf's, and its canines are a bit sharper and more pronounced than those of a normal human. Its face can be described as quite handsome, but often makes people uncomfortable rather than attracts them due to frequently having a dour, serious expression and an excessively piercing, intense gaze.
Over the humanoid body, Evan mostly opts for exceedingly simple, plain clothes, usually an undecorated light gray hooded cloak. Underneath the cloak, he wears an equally simple tunic, trousers, and traveling shoes, undecorated and in shades of gray and brown.

Personality:
Evan is a complicated person, to say the least. On the outside, he appears to be a highly reclusive, withdrawn, introverted individual, shunning all social contact whenever possible and staying alone. If forced to interact with others, he tends to come across as detached, apathetic, even callous and amoral, not willing to right any wrongs he sees even though it should be perfectly within his power.
Beneath the surface, Evan is highly conflicted. He vehemently detests all forms of unnecessarily violence, killing, or anything that causes suffering. He also strongly believe that there is no absolute good or evil, that might makes right, that the strong has every right to use its power in whatever way it sees fit, until it's trumped by an even stronger being. It was because of these traits that Evan became the infamous sorcerer-king who conquered the world 1500 years ago and ruled it through absolute terror for three centuries, for he believed that it was necessary to minimize warfare and death on a global scale. Since his previous attempt at making the world a better place came crashing down in the most catastrophic way possible, Evan now believes that he no longer has any right to try to improve the wellbeing of the world or even any individual, that he'll just make things worse again if he tries; he's terrified of his own power and the harm it can do if he lets it run free again. This is the main reason for his apparent introversion and detachment, in addition to simple social ineptitude.
Even deeper down, at his core, Evan is a scientist and a researcher. He is incredibly intelligent, and possesses an insatiable curiosity and an endless thirst for knowledge, seeking to unravel the mysteries of magic and the universe for their own sake. It was this curiosity that drove Evan to perform the experiments that made him as powerful as he was. Back in the first age of magic, he felt that he was obligated to try to improve the world, because no one else had enough power to do so. Now that he no longer feels bound by such an obligation, Evan is content in returning to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. He feels no hostility toward the Tech side, and is in fact fascinated by their technologies that he hasn't seen before. Lastly, having lived his entire life in emotional solitude, Evan does feel lonely, and wishes for the existence of at least one partner who can understand his thoughts, interests, and plights.
As far as instinctual sexual attraction goes, Evan is heterosexual. But because of his life of emotional solitude, concepts like love, affection, and romance are rather alien to him, likely to elicit only confusion and doubt.

Faction: N/A.

Biography: Evan is the sorcerer-king who merged with the Dweomerheart and conquered Earth during the first age of magic. He did not really die as people believed, and returned to the world at the end of the modern age along with magic itself. He currently paints himself as a nameless wanderer and recluse, one of the many people of little importance on planet Earth. His full biography may get a bit long, so I'm putting it in a hider.

Detailed biography

Evan was born in the year 503 A.D., roughly five centuries after the Dweomerheart was first built. His father, Antonius, was a brilliant, incredibly powerful mage, but also an utterly amoral psychopath and sadist who loved nothing more than dominating those weaker than him with his power. Evan's mother, Lythill, was a purple dragon with crystalline scales, one of the rarest and most beautiful subrace of dragonkind. When Lythill had the misfortune of losing to Antonius in battle, her personality was completely wiped clean by his powerful magic, replaced by a constructed slave personality who mindlessly obeyed Antonius's every command. Antonius taught the enslaved Lythill some Shapeshifting magic, and forced her to take on a human form; he then proceeded to use her as both a sexual plaything and a guinea pig in his mad magical experiments. When Lythill became pregnant some time later, Antonius was interested in the physiology of a half-human, half-dragon hybrid, and had her keep the child. His twisted curiosity also wanted to see what would happen if a mother shapeshifted to a different species when pregnant. When Lythill's body instinctively refused to shapeshift, to protect her unborn child, Antonius manually took control of her autonomic nervous system and forced her to shift to dragon form, when her baby was still inside her human womb. The terrible trauma that ensued resulted in Lythill's painful death, but the baby survived. Annoyed that he lost a good test subject, Antonius decided to keep his newborn son and use him as a new guinea pig.
Evan grew up under constant horrific abuse from his father. He was allowed to keep his free will, for Antonius found it more satisfying to torment someone who could actually suffer, as opposed to a mindless slave like Lythill. Evan could not understand why his father always hurt him for seemingly no reason, and grew to strongly detest any sort of needless suffering. As Evan grew, he found that his father's abuse began hurting less and less, and it did not take long for him to realize that he was growing more powerful. He hid his increasing powers from his father, easily done thanks to Antonius's arrogance and overconfidence, and plotted revenge. One day, when Evan was sure he's become stronger than his father, he attacked Antonius when the latter was asleep. One ferocious battle later, their house lay in ruins, and Evan stood victorious in the form of a humanoid dragon, having devoured his father whole.
Having no other purpose in life, Evan continued his father's magical research, to sate his own curiosity. He did not want to harm innocents, so he conducted the experiments on himself, which slowly made him even more powerful, until he was sure he had enough power to obliterate entire mountains. A forbidden ritual that Antonius half-completed, a ritual that allegedly allowed one to merge with the Dweomerheart itself and gain incalculable powers, promised to make Evan even more powerful, but he never dared to touch such a thing.
Evan was content with living the rest of his life alone, conducting research, before his lab was raided by soldiers from an unknown army. And so he became caught up in the politics and warfare of the outside world. At first, he lent his strength to the side whose cause he believed to be just, but he soon learned that the world did not exist in moral black and white, but rather in shades of gray. Every side thought their cause was just, and it was simply not possible to make any compromises that made everyone happy. Evan wandered the world for two centuries like this, occasionally helping whichever faction who sought to better the world, but always failing miserably each time, until he reached a state of utter despair. He concluded that since he was more powerful than anyone else, he was the only one who could truly protect the world from itself.
And so Evan completed his father's forbidden ritual, entered the Sea of Chaos, and became one with the nexus of all magic. Such was the birth of Deus Magicus, the one true god to ever walk the Earth, and the most brutal tyrant the world had ever seen. The immense power warped Evan's mind and soul, and he found himself resorting to more and more drastic measures, to quell all forms of dissent at their roots. All for the sake of peace, he reasoned.
The world endured Evan's tyranny for three centuries, but not forever. The rebellions eventually became harder and harder to contain. With him as the common enemy, the world was finally united, with all of its most powerful mages gathered together one day in a massive siege on his throne. When even that wasn't enough, the rebels unleashed their trump card, tearing a rift into some plane of eldritch terror beyond even the Sea of Chaos. From the rift came a being whom words failed to describe, whose mere presence shattered the sanity of all but the strongest of minds. It and Evan did battle, bringing ruin to the world and, ultimately, to each other.
Evan thought himself perished then. His soul was shattered, along with the Dweomerheart itself, its remains pulled into the Sea of Chaos. But after what seemed like an eternity, he found himself slowly coming back to consciousness. He was but a fragment of his former self, a formless orb of magic, still possessing enough power to destroy cities with ease but nowhere near strong enough to claim the world once more. And only when his mind was no longer clouded by all that continent-shattering power did the atrocity of his past deeds finally dawn upon him.
When Evan opened a portal back to Earth, he found that a thousand years had passed as he drifted mindlessly in the Sea of Chaos. It tore his heart apart to see the world in ruins a second time, once again brought by humanity's nature to wage war with itself. But he could not bring himself to attempt to right the world's wrongs again. Instead, donning the disguise of a nameless hooded figure, Evan sought out the survivors of the second global calamity, and taught them the basics of magic, giving them the opportunity to survive and rebuild. Evan then swore to never interfere in the world's affairs again, and watched in passivity for two hundred years as the second age of magic took its hold. Unsurprisingly, the humans and their creations began fighting with each other again, after they'd sufficiently rebuilt and grown. At that, Evan could only bitterly laugh. Feeling that his previous identity was as meaningless as his attempts to change the world, Evan threw away his old name, and began calling himself "the Evanescent One", grimly acknowledging all the fleeting differences, or the lack thereof, that he'd managed to make.
The world finally became interesting to Evan again when one day, another group of humans and affiliated creatures suddenly came, seemingly from the stars themselves, bringing with them fascinating powers and technologies Evan had never seen before. As they made contact with the magic-wielding inhabitants of Earth, war loomed on the horizon, but that was of little surprise to him. As a nameless, solitary wanderer, he cared little for how the two sides would wage even more war. All that interested him was the Tech side's powers, and the new possibilities they could bring.

Skills: Thanks to his over seven hundred years of experience (not considering the one thousand years he spent unconsciously floating in the Sea of Chaos), and immense intellect, Evan has amassed a large number of skills, each mastered to a degree that is virtually impossible for anyone who didn't have as much time as he did.

Full list of skills

Hyper-Intelligence: Calling Evan a “genius” would be a gross understatement. He is one of the brightest minds to ever exist in the history of mankind. His intellect is so great that he can not only rapidly grasp any complex abstract concepts incredibly quickly, but also to improve upon them and make them his own. Genius-level intellect is practically required to understand any of his ideas.

Extensive Arcane Knowledge: Having spent centuries researching magic, Evan is vastly knowledgeable in every field of magic and magical sciences, including but not limited to alchemy, smithing, enchanting, engineering, and the construction of magical artifacts. He is also exceedingly adept at magic in general, fully aware of most of its possibilities and limitations. It is not an understatement to say that Evan is the most knowledgeable scholar of magic on Earth.

Daunting Mind: Because of Evan's incredible intellect, willpower, and many lifetimes of experiences, affecting his mind with mental magic is an extremely difficult task. The sheer depth, weight, and complexity of his mind will overwhelm the vast majority of people who dares to make mental contact with him, unless Evan consciously helps the other party in deciphering his thought processes.

Analysis: Evan is exceptionally keen and analytical, capable of rapidly deducing the properties of most things he encounters based on very little available information.

General Combat Proficiency: Over the many centuries of his life, Evan has taught himself almost all forms of physical combat, including the usage of most types of melee weaponry, marksmanship, and most forms of martial arts. He may not be the best in most of these combat styles, but he's still a deadly fighter, especially considering the great versatility of all the things he has learned.

Polearm Mastery: Evan is virtually unmatched in melee combat using the quarterstaff and most types of polearms, including the scythe, battleaxe, lance, trident, warhammer, glaive, and halberd.

Dragon Combat Mastery: Evan is virtually unmatched in melee combat when taking the form of a dragon. This includes unarmed combat using claws, teeth, horns, wings, and a prehensile tail, aided by flight and breath weapons.

Abilities: Having once been unquestionably the most powerful and skilled magic user in the whole world, Evan has thoroughly mastered all three styles of magic. He possesses numerous abilities under each style, all of which he can use with deadly efficiency.

Full list of abilities

Spellcasting:
Energy Magic: These are the elements of energy Evan can create and control.
- Heat: Evan can create heat and fire of incredibly high temperatures.
- Cold: Evan can create ice and cold energy of incredibly low temperatures.
- Electric: Evan can create incredibly powerful electric currents and electrostatic discharges. Since this electricity is generated by magic, it can ignore the normal laws of electromagnetism somewhat.
- Chemical: Evan can create incredibly potent poisons and corrosive chemicals.
- Light: Evan can create magical light to heal, cleanse status effects, bolster other magic, and to simply inflict damage through molecular disintegration, in a way similar to burning but without heat.
- Dark: Evan can create magical darkness to drain energy, curse enemies with various weaknesses, and to inflict damage through rot and decay.
Material Magic: These are the elements of matter Evan can create and control.
- Gas: Evan can create air and other gases, and manipulate them to form gale winds, razor-sharp air blades, and compressed air bullets.
- Liquid: Evan can create water and other liquids, and manipulate them to form blunt melee attacks and pressurized waterjets.
- Earth: Evan can create stone and other earthen materials, and form various structures with them.
- Metal: Evan can create metals, and form various structures with them. Compared to earth, metal is relatively lacking in toughness but more malleable.
- Plant: Evan can create wood and other plant tissues, and form various structures with them. Plant is not as tough as metal or earth, but can regenerate much more easily and efficiently.
- Flesh: Evan can create flesh and bone, and form various structures with them. Flesh is not as tough as metal or earth, but can devour other substances to sustain and repair itself.
Aether Magic: Evan can manipulate the raw energy of magic, using it to pass through solid matter and directly damage structures made of energy. He can also use this magic to manipulate space, allowing him to create gravitational force, open portals, and teleport, though the latter two require around half a minute of uninterrupted concentration if the destination is not in Evan's immediate vicinity, and can't be done too many times in rapid succession.
Mind Magic: Evan can manipulate psionic energy to affect other people's minds in a variety of ways. He can make mental contact with willing targets to share thoughts, emotions, memories, and information. He can forcibly invade the mind of another, and attempt to extract information, influence the mind, or simply inflict mental damage; all of these things are resisted by willpower and magical power. He can defend his own mind, and has crafted a literal nigh-impenetrable fortress of psionic energy around his mind for protection, though the fortress must be repaired if damaged. And he can use psionic energy as an especially powerful sixth sense to scan and analyze everything around himself, even if his normal senses are disabled.
Crystallization: By combining his six material elements, Evan can create an exceptionally strong purple crystal that deforms like plastic under stress, and can be rapidly regrown. He can also project a luminescent purple mist that converts matter into his purple crystal on contact, molecule by molecule, in a manner similar to petrification. The crystallization energy can pass through already crystallized matter, so the crystallization process will start at the surface and spread its way down. This is comparable to destroying the matter and recreating it as crystal, so it's a damaging attack and can be resisted by strong defense.
Sunforce: By combining his six energy elements, Evan can create a bright golden yellow sunlight-like energy with dark sunspot-like flecks. The energy is intensely destructive, and subjects the victim to the damaging effects of all six energy elements simultaneously on contact, making it equally effective against most enemies regardless of elemental resistances and weaknesses.

Evocation: Evan has several Evoked magical items, mostly made of his unique brand of purple crystal and decorated with golden runes, themed around monarchy, due to his past status as the sorcerer-king.
Crystal Spire (staff): An intricate magical staff made of crystal, representing Evan's royal scepter. It's an incredibly powerful tool for channeling and focusing magic, and possesses the durability of Evan's special crystal, and thus can be used as a quarterstaff in melee combat. Additionally, the staff can transform into seven different polearms, by manifesting seven different heads on its tip. Each of the forms are briefly described below.
- Angel of Death (scythe, Light/Metal): A scythe with a pristine, silvery white metallic blade, in the shape of a thin angelic wing. With every strike, it sends out multiple translucent wing blades of white light that passes through solid matter to damage energy structures, before the solid blade it self strikes. When delivering a killing blow, this weapon is likely to destroy the victim's soul too.
- Devourer (battleaxe, Dark/Flesh): A battleaxe made of blackened, demonic-looking bone. The axe devours flesh, blood, and energy to empower itself or heal its user when cleaving into the body of an enemy.
- Stormbolt (lance, Electric/Gas): A lance that normally has only an ornate, yellowish bronze flute-like metal pipe at the end. When in combat, air and lightning pass through the pipe to form an incredibly sharp drill tip of electrified wind, able to extend itself with a thrust attack of incredible penetrative power (no sex jokes, please). The lance can also be thrown as a javelin, and will teleport back to the user's hand afterwards.
- Arctriton (trident, Cold/Liquid): A trident made of glowing, cold blue ice. The three prongs can rapidly melt, move, and re-freeze to trap an opponent's weapon, growing more prongs if necessary.
- Titan Blaze (warhammer, Heat/Earth): A warhammer made of what appears to be magma, wreathed in flames. Its molten state does not hinder its toughness in the slightest, and it can create extremely powerful fiery explosions at point-blank range with each hit. The explosions do not harm Evan or the weapon itself.
- World-Leaf (glaive, Chemical/Plant): A glaive with a blade that is a single slender, razor-sharp, vibrantly green leaf; the base of the blade is decorated with a yellowish white flower and a few smaller leaves. Despite its appearance, the leaf blade is highly durable, regenerative, and can strike with deadly speed, not to mention it drips with a variety of venoms and acids.
- Dragon's Soul (halberd, Aether): A halberd made of purple crystal, etched with golden yellow runes. This weapon combines the abilities and properties of all six weapons above, and is only used when Evan decides to truly treat an opponent seriously.
Crystal Raiment (robe): An incredibly ornate robe weaved from what appears to be crystalline threads, decorated with myriads of arcane runes, this represents Evan's royal robe. It possesses extremely powerful protective enchantments, capable of shifting its elemental properties to specifically defend against virtually any type of magical or physical attack. It can also change its form, into a suit of crystalline armor, or any outfit Evan can imagine.
Crystal Heart (orb): A fist-sized orb of runed crystal, this represents Evan's globus cruciger. The orb can assemble a physical body of any shape, out of almost any energy or substance in the environment, or out of Evan's own energy, to form a semi-autonomous golem servant, with elemental attacks corresponding to the materials it's made of. A large number of these orbs can be deployed at once to create Evan's personal army, though they still all run on his own energy.
Crystal Crown (crown): An elaborate crown made of crystal and decorate with runes. This item massively enhances Evan's mental clarity and reaction speed, potentially to the point of giving him bullet time, while boosting his already almost impregnable mental defenses. It also rapidly and automatically scans and analyzes everything around Evan, warning him of all dangers. Lastly, it can see a few seconds into the future, allowing Evan to react to almost anything and practically never get caught off-guard.
Gray Mantle (cloak): This is the gray cloak that Evan wears, an item that he's conjured some time in the past two centuries. It seals his power deep into his soul, and thus renders it almost completely undetectable by even the most skilled of sensors, making him appear much weaker than he is. But due to how it works, this item acts as a power limiter for Evan, preventing him from using any more power than his displayed level unless he deactivates the cloaking. The cloaking will automatically deactivate if he suffers any grievous wounds, and it does not weaken the strength of his mental defenses.

Shapeshifting: As a master Shifter, Evan can freely mix and match any and all features of all of the forms below.
Transhuman: This is Evan's default, humanoid form. Though it doesn't look very special, all of its physical attributes are superhuman, including but not limited to durability, strength, agility, reflexes, speed, senses, and rate of healing. It is also immune to all non-supernatural (i.e. not made from Magi or Tech power) diseases, and has effectively no vital organs, due to Evan's ability to survive without it and rebuild it at will. The body only appears scarred, as described in the Appearance section, because Evan chose to keep the scars dealt to him by the blows of those who fought back against his oppression, as reminders of his crimes.
Material Elemental: Evan can transform his entire body into any combination of his elements of matter, and freely shape that matter, though he typically transforms into crystal. This potentially grants him extreme durability.
Ethereal Elemental: Evan can transform his entire body into any combination of his elements of energy, and freely shape that energy, though he typically transforms into golden solar energy. This potentially grants him extreme speed.
Dragon: Evan can transform into a dragon of variable size, ranging from the size of a person to something... truly colossal, suffice to say. The dragon form possesses purple crystalline scales, and golden yellow reptilian eyes, and any mane or other hair it has is the same as Evan's pale blond. The dragon form's natural weapons are obviously incredibly deadly, including its breath weapon, which can be any of Evan's elements of energy, Sunforce, and Crystallization mist. The dragon form also has a third, vertical eye on the middle of its forehead, capable of firing an incredibly concentrated beam of any energy type that its breath weapon can fire. The third eye can also be manifested in transhuman form. If combined with material or ethereal elemental form, the dragon's innards can become crystal or energy. Evan's Crystal Crown can be worn when in dragon form, his Crystal Raiment can become armor for the dragon form, and his Crystal Spire can merge into the tip of the dragon's tail.

Possessions:
Crystal Palace: An underground laboratory twenty or so kilometers below sea level, somewhere under Mount Everest. It is protected by powerful magical barriers, anti-teleportation wards, and golem guards. Evan himself is the only person who can bypass these security measures, and teleport or open portals into the laboratory; anyone else will need to either break through the anti-teleportation wards or the magical barriers. The lab contains a number of apparatuses for conducting magical experiments, hand-crafted by Evan himself during the past two centuries. He usually returns to the lab and focuses on research for a while, whenever he gets tired of walking the Earth.

Alice

Name: Alice; Adaptive Lightweight Infiltrator/Combatant Mk.III.

Side: Tech.

Sex: Female.

Age: 18.

Race: Human cyborg, mutant, psionist.

Appearance: Alice has two split personalities, White Alice and Dark Alice. Her appearance changes depending on which personality is in control of the body.
There are some traits of her appearance that do not change regardless of which personality is currently in control. Both personalities are fascinated by the concepts of human aesthetics and sexual attraction, so they've moulded their shared body into a form they personally find the most beautiful (though such a form is unrealistically perfect and thus may be perceived by some people as artificial; her previous appearance was less than this attractive). Their body is 165 cm tall, with smooth fair skin, and a graceful, perfectly proportioned figure. Their face is that of an extremely attractive half-Asian, half-Caucasian girl, though it appears more youthful and cute than like a mature beauty. Their hair is long, straight, and usually a bit shorter than waist length, though the hair length and style may vary depending on mood. They usually wear a sleek, skintight, futuristic bodysuit, made of some ambiguously latex-like material, that covers their body completely from the neck down, decorated with faintly glowing Tron lines.
White Alice has silvery white hair, and sky-blue eyes. Her bodysuit is white, and its Tron lines are mainly electric blue, with shades of turquoise, indigo, and purple. The lines form smooth, fluid, liquid-like patterns. When wearing casual clothes, White Alice prefers simple, elegant dresses in white and light colors.
Dark Alice has jet black hair, and crimson eyes. Her bodysuit is black, and its Tron lines are mainly red, with shades of orange, magenta, and purple. The lines form straight, jagged, circuit-like patterns. Due to her vanity, Dark Alice has modified her bodysuit to be more sexually daring, turning sections of the bodysuit a slightly translucent dark red to show off her cleavage, stomach, and thighs; the bodysuit's shoes have also been given what look like two-inch stiletto heels (though a series of miniature force field generators in the shoes ensure that the heels do not hinder effective movement). When wearing casual clothes, Dark Alice prefers somewhat revealing Gothic-style outfits made of leather, in black and dark colors.

Personality: Since Alice has two personalities, this section is going to be rather long, so I'll put it in a hider.

Personality

Alice was once a genetically engineered killing machine, telepathically controlled since birth by the organization that created her, and thus had effectively no real personality at all; she'd never been allowed to develop one. However, when an AI merged herself with Alice and freed Alice from her creators' control, the process caused her true personality to develop at an abnormally fast rate. The memories of working as an assassin when under the organization's control, and killing countless people in cold blood, clashed horribly against her soul's naturally kind and empathic tendencies as her mind was rapidly developing, and resulted in her mind fragmenting into two halves as it attempted to cope with the guilt caused by all those murders. The traits of her split personalities mostly stem from this issue.
Both personalities share a few traits. They're both extremely intelligent. They're both intensely curious, especially about the things outside of the domain of logic (as mostly everything logical has been taught to them during their training as a killing machine), such as emotions, beauty, art, and enjoyment; they have strong desires to truly experience life for themselves. They also both strongly dislike killing, violence, and anything that causes suffering. However, these traits are expressed differently in each personality.
White Alice is a soft, quiet, gentle girl. She is highly empathic, able to pick up others' emotions easily. But due to her complete lack of experience in being an actual person, she doesn't know how to deal with the emotions she can perceive, so she's often introverted and withdrawn to avoid inadvertently hurting others. Her curiosity focuses the more subtle feelings of the human mind, such as love, sympathy, and happiness, and how these feelings are conveyed through media like art, music, and literature. Because of her empathy, she strongly dislikes any kind of violence and suffering, as hurting others is like hurting herself; she's the half that's tormented by the guilt of her past crimes. Thus, she's strongly reluctant toward using her powers, because of all the pain and death they caused in the past. This can bring great internal conflict and doubt when she wants to use her powers to help someone, but is afraid of hurting the other person instead.
Dark Alice is the half of Alice's mind that formed from it trying to stop itself from being torn apart by its own guilt. She does not feel bad at all about the murders she committed, since she was controlled by someone else when she did them; she thinks beating herself up over them is completely pointless and won't help anyone. By extension, this makes her callous and insensitive toward other people's suffering in general; she thinks it's meaningless to grieve about things like past failures and lost loved ones. Overall, she's highly selfish and hedonistic, preferring to focus her curiosity on the more primal human sensations and pleasurable physical stimuli, such as good food, beautiful sights, and, of course, sex. She's exceedingly arrogant and vain, believing herself to be a thing of utmost beauty and the pinnacle of technological perfection, which is why she insisted that she and White Alice make their physical body as beautiful as they possibly can. Her self-esteem is so high that she isn’t at all competitive or argumentative, as she feels no need to defeat or look down on others to validate her own self-worth. Unlike White Alice, Dark Alice does not feel bad about hurting others, but she also strongly detests violence, because of a combination of factors: she thinks she's a thing of beauty, not a tool of destruction; she'd rather have people admire her than hate her, fear her, or dead; she thinks it's beneath her to dirty her hands striking back against those too foolish to recognize her beauty and greatness; and she doesn't like being reminded that she was once a mindless tool used by her creators. Aside from this, she has no qualms about flaunting her powers by using them to effortlessly solve what she believes to be other people's problems, but she exercises restraint because of White Alice's fear that her powers may inadvertently hurt rather than help people, physically or psychologically.
Both of Alice's personalities are also interested in science, in how the world functions, especially the world of magic that they've recently discovered.
Since Alice only developed her personalities very recently, she's rather unused to a number of societal norms. She completely disregards social stigmas, has no sense of shame, and is rather lacking in what most people will call tact, or even common sense. Thus, even though White Alice is empathic and Dark Alice confident, neither of them are particularly good at interacting with people.
The nature of sexual attraction itself intrigues Alice greatly, including that of both sexes, so she can be called bisexual, or possibly pansexual. Dark Alice is interested in experiencing sex, but White Alice is strongly against any sort of casual sex, because she believes that a deep, intimate relationship with a single dedicated individual will be more emotionally fulfilling than a large number of casual relationships with different people. As a compromise, they've agreed to share a single romantic and sexual partner, and experiment on sexuality only with each other if they have no partner.

Faction: N/A.

Biography:
Alice was a test tube baby, a genetically engineered killing machine and superweapon, created by an extremely secretive underground organization whose details even she doesn't know. She was never allowed to naturally develop a personality of her own as, since birth, her mind had been continuously subjected to brainwashing and telepathic control. This reduced her to a mindless machine, willing to obey any and all orders given by her creators without question.
Alice had no childhood. Instead, she had only training, for the first years of her life. Before she even knew how to crawl, she was taught to telekinetically levitate. And as soon as she could walk, she was taught how to fight. Information of all kinds was uploaded into her brain. A sword-carrying oriental man taught her all about her psionic powers; an insect-winged woman with a thousand voices taught her about the various substances her mutant body could produce; and what seemed like nothing more than a face in a computer screen continuously improved the nanotechnology that had been infused into her since birth. She was moulded into the deadliest weapon they could make.
When Alice was eight years old, her creators began sending her out to the criminal underworld to work as an assassin for hire. Her fearsome skills and power made short work of most of her targets, and her infamy soon rose. All of the funds she earned went to her creators, for what means she did not know. For the next several years she lived like that, as nothing more than a tool.
When she was 18 years old, the Tech factions came into contact with the Magi. Some parties wanted the two sides to make peace... but other parties were determined to see such peacemaking efforts fail. A virtual idol, beloved by millions among the Tech population, was sent to Earth as an ambassador, part of a culture and art exchange, to promote familiarity and understanding between the two sides. Alice was hired to sabotage the operation, to hijack the virtual idol's physical avatar and turn it hostile against the Magi audience. So she infiltrated the spaceship that the virtual idol was aboard, and prepared to subvert the idol to her will.
What Alice did not expect was for the idol to be a powerful AI, empowered by psionics and a sliver of computational power from each of the millions of computers that her software was installed on. Alice was still more powerful, but the idol didn't go down without a fight. Knowing that she could not win, and having found out through telepathic contact that Alice was merely a mindless tool under someone else's command, the AI sacrificed herself in one final attack using all of her power. She tore down the barrier between Alice's mind and her own, overwrote Alice's control protocols with her own programming, and assimilated her mental traits into Alice. The next thing she knew, Alice was free, for the first time in her life.
Such a drastic change could not have left Alice's mind unscathed. Realizing the countless lives she'd taken under the control of her creators, Alice broke under the pain and guilt. The shattered remains of her newborn self gradually coalesced into two split personalities, one of empathy and remorse, the other of confidence and strength. After a quick discussion to work out their major differences, the two personalities of Alice escaped from the spaceship, and crash-landed on Earth.
It'd been a few weeks since then. No one from her former organization had yet come to capture Alice. Both personalities of Alice were slowly getting used to having an identity, and quickly growing interested in the emotions they could now feel. And they were fascinated by the new world of magic they found themselves in. However, many people in the new world were less than welcoming... She is currently wandering aimlessly around, learning all she can while trying to determine her place and purpose in the world.

Skills: Alice possesses a number of skills, most of which were programmed into her during her creation and training.

Full list of skills

Intelligence: Alice was created with genius-level intelligence.

Mental Resistance: Alice was designed to be as resistant to mind-altering effects as her creators could make her. Through a combination of strong willpower, psionics, and machine programming, her mind is all but impossible to influence through supernatural means.

Database: Alice holds in her memory a vast database, containing all manners of information regarding the latest models of technological weaponry, knowledge of scientific fields required to construct and operate such weaponry, effective strategies of using such weaponry to kill a variety of possible types of targets, and information on various technologies that can provide support roles in combat.

Observation: Alice has machine-like analytical capabilities, allowing her to notice and process subtle details with ease. For White Alice, this includes empathy, the ability to easily read people's emotions.

Eidetic Memory: Alice has machine-like efficiency in recalling information stored in her memory, allowing her to effectively never forget anything.
(If I make a mistake and accidentally have her forget something, feel free to dope slap me OOC.)

Agility: Alice is exceedingly nimble and agile, with machine-like reaction speeds.

Combat: Alice is highly proficient in most forms of martial arts, melee weapons, and firearms.

Stealth: Alice is trained to be silent and stealthy in movement when needed.

Omniglot: Alice is able to read and understand all languages currently on the Tech side, though she isn't well-versed in expressing herself using these languages. She can only fluently converse in English and Japanese, due to these being the languages spoken by the main three people who trained her. She also obviously cannot understand Magi languages that the Tech side doesn't have.

Musical Performance: Having merged with an AI that was a virtual idol, Alice has gained the AI's theoretical knowledge of being an idol singer, primarily about singing and dancing. However, she'll need practice before she can make use of that knowledge, and she's had no such practice yet.

(Yes, I put music as one of her skills for a reason, not just because it's glamorous. Alice is interested in art, and wants to stop being a weapon of destruction and become something more positive, so it shouldn't be hard to imagine why I've given her such a skill. As for why Japanese in specific, that also has a reason, but it's more subtle. I'll eventually discuss it in-character if the RP gets that far.)

Abilities: As a genetically engineered killing machine, Alice was designed with as many abilities as her creators could possibly put into one person.

Full list of abilities

Cybernetics:
Nanite Infusion: When Alice was only a single fertilized egg cell, the cell was fused with nanomachines that her creators designed specifically for this purpose. The nanites would then replicate whenever her cells replicate, and now every single cell in Alice's body is infused with nanites. This is one of the extremely rare cases mentioned in the first post of the OOC tab where cybernetics can be passed down to children, since Alice's hypothetical child would inherit the nanites from her egg cell. Due to these nanites, Alice can freely shapeshift her whole body at will, and function normally in any form that she turns her body into. This both acts as an extremely powerful regeneration ability, and allows her to construct all manners of futuristic weaponry or other technology out of the nanites; she frequently turns strands of her hair into blades. She can even split into two bodies, each controlled by one of her personalities. If her nanite-infused cells are destroyed, more can be created out of Alice's energy, using her psionic power of Atomakinesis, though this obviously cannot be done if she runs out of energy; it's thus possible to kill her with sustained damage. Her futuristic bodysuit is made of nanites, in a special structure that provides both excellent flexibility and protection. The bodysuit can be shapeshifted into any other outfit Alice can imagine.
Warp Generator: A device Alice can construct that allows her to teleport and create portals. Short-range teleportation can be done a few times in rapid succession, but more will rapidly tire her out. Long-range teleportation, and opening any kind of portal, needs up to a minute of uninterrupted concentration.
Cloaking Device: A device Alice can construct that renders her invisible, silent, and without smell, and also hides her from the sixth sense, though highly skilled or powerful sensors may be able to see through the cloaking. The device's effects may be extended to a small area around Alice herself.
Power Limiter: A number of devices that restrict Alice's power level. When active, Alice will appear to be much weaker than she actually is, but she won't be able to use any power above her displayed level unless she deactivates the limiters. If she suffers too much damage, the limiters will automatically deactivate, and they never affect the power of her mental defenses. The limiters were intended to help Alice in infiltration and avoiding detection, but now she mostly uses them to limit her own power, since White Alice is afraid of accidentally hurting others.

Mutations:
Chemogenesis: Alice can generate a large variety of supernatural chemicals from her body, with many types of effects, including acids, poisons, and even healing balms.
Dark Matter: Alice can generate a strange weightless substance from her body. The substance is black and purple, seems to suck in light around it, and gives a black tint when laced into other substances. The substance will selectively corrode anything Alice wants it to, producing powerful explosions as the byproduct. It can thus be combined with any other substance or object to increase its destructive power.
Transference Fiber: Alice can generate thin, wispy, translucent turquoise fibers from her body. On physical contact, the fibers can drain energy from enemies, or transfer energy from Alice herself to allies. The fibers by themselves are very weak, so they're usually threaded through Alice's other weapons to give them energy-draining properties.

Psionics:
Atomakinesis: Alice can manipulate the atoms in her body with her mind. This is an auxiliary ability mainly used in tandem with her nanite shapeshifting, to help her construct complex machinery on the spot more quickly. Using this ability, Alice can convert her atoms into her own energy, and vice versa, giving her shapeshifter baggage. Atoms are recognized as belonging to Alice if they're permeated with her energy signature, so powerful energy-based attacks can scour her energy signature from atoms and essentially "destroy" parts of her body; she'll then be forced to conjure replacement atoms from her energy. Atoms not belonging to her can be "assimilated" into her when she permeates them with her energy, though this takes at least a few minutes, and the atoms in question must not have any other energy signatures on them (i.e. can't have supernatural properties).
(By "atom", I mean the equivalent of atoms in my universe, under my laws of physics. Since there's no E = mc² in my universe, Alice can't make nuclear bombs by fiddling with atoms. Actual nukes in my universe involve a more complicated process of densely storing energy into atoms.)
Ergokinesis: A catch-all term that lumps together several of Alice's psionic abilities to manipulate various forms of energy. She can create and control heat, cold, electricity, light, and kinetic energy. These can be used for direct attack, or used as ammunition for her weapons.
Telepathy: This is essentially the same as the Mind Magic ability belonging to my other character, the Evanescent One. Her two personalities can use this to communicate with each other.
Brain Burst: Alice can drastically speed up her perceptions for short periods of time to perceive things in slow motion.
Spectral Form: If Alice's body is completely destroyed, she will continue to exist as a psi-specter. She can then rebuild her body using Atomakinesis, though this obviously takes a large amount of energy and time. To kill her, one must destroy Alice's psi-specter form too.

White Alice and Dark Alice each has her own fighting style, utilizing different combinations of the abilities above.
- White Alice uses a style that tries to nonlethally disable enemies, focusing on ice, electricity, chemicals, energy drain, and cloaking.
- Dark Alice uses a style that's all about raw destructive power, focusing on fire, light, dark matter, telekinesis, and teleportation.
Both personalities can use nanite shapeshifting equally well.

Possessions: None. Alice has absolutely nothing with her; even her clothes are made from nanite shapeshifting.

---

Due to the lack of player-created factions so far, I've created a few factions myself to flesh out the world a bit. If you have any ideas of fleshing out any of the factions below, or want to control one of them yourself, feel free to discuss with me about it.

Magi factions:

The Draconian Accord

Name: The Draconian Accord.

Side: Magi.

Composition: A mixture of most races, ruled over by dragons.

Location: Being the alliance of many city-states, each ruled by a dragon, the Draconian Accord is limited to no single location.

Description: Though few in number, dragons are exceptionally long-lived creatures, each one possessing power that the average human can only dream of. Many dragons are solitary, but others tend to use their power to rule over lesser beings, whether out of megalomania or a genuine desire to improve the lives of their subjects. However, the power of a single dragon is still limited, which is why the dragons who have chosen to rule have also formed a coalition with one another over the decades, to defend one another from other factions that possess more power than an individual dragon-ruled city-state. Power struggles within the Draconian Accord are more than common, but most of its draconic rulers are unified enough by a mutual sense of racial pride that they haven't turned on one another in outright war. For now.

Goals: The goals of the draconic sovereigns within the Accord vary from dragon to dragon. As of now, most dragons in the Accord are cautious but otherwise indifferent toward the Tech side's arrival, though some desire to conquer the "aliens", and a few may want to destroy them altogether. Some speculate that at least one dragon is secretly planning to ally with the Tech side to gain an upper hand against the other dragons.

Notable Members: [None created yet.]

Cult of the Multilith

Name: Cult of the Multilith.

Side: Magi.

Composition: Humans, constructs, and some spirits (earth and metal elementals).

Location: The Cult's main base is a large temple of stone somewhere literally inside the Himalaya mountains. The cultists have also built a few temples inside some other mountains on Earth.

Description: The Cult of the Multilith is centered around the eponymous metaphorical "Multilith", three "pillars" of beliefs that are twisted inversions of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. Cultists seek to become eternal, so that they'll remain past the end of the universe itself; to become indestructible, so that nothing may harm them or erase them from existence; and to attain absolute, immutable selves that will not be warped by the imperfect world around them. The Cult believes that most of the magical body modification techniques used by demihumans and Shifters are flawed, and that the three aforementioned "pillars of existence" can only be realized by becoming the stone from which their Multilith is built. Many cultists have already transferred their souls into durable stone construct bodies, while the highest-ranking members reside within monoliths of nigh-invulnerable magical stone housed in the Cult's temples. To the Cult, all beliefs other than theirs are impermanent and imperfect, so they have no qualms about forcibly converting others into stone constructs as the first step to absolute existences. The Cult is relatively new, having only been formed seven years ago, so it is mostly limited to secretive activities for now.

Goals: The Cult's main goals have already been listed in the Description section. It is currently considering allying with the Tech side, or at least obtain the Tech side's technologies somehow, to aid its goals of reaching invulnerability.

Notable Members: [None created yet.]

Puritus

Name: Puritus; the Purifiers.

Side: Magi.

Composition: Spawn, constructs, non-human-based spirits, and hybrids of the previous categories. Essentially anything not biologically related to humans.

Location: Due to its lack of organization, Puritus has no central base of operations at the moment.

Description: As one of the more unsavory factions on the Earth, Puritus is little more than a mob of random assorted creatures unified by only a nebulous sense of hatred for humans. Some of them may view humans as obsolete; some may desire revenge against human abuse; and others believe that humans were the root causes of all the calamities that befell the planet in the past. No matter the justification, Puritus has one goal, the complete eradication of anything bearing the taint of the human race. Though the first traces of Puritus ideology can be traced back to the past century, the group had never had any real power structure within itself, leading to its members frequently squabbling among themselves rather than actively harming humanity. This limits its effectiveness, despite the sizable number of creatures following the cause of Puritus today.

Goals: Puritus wishes to exterminate humans and all beings biologically related to humans, including demihumans, human-turned spirits, part-human hybrids, human cyborgs, human mutants, and human psionists. Since it's so disorganized, desired methods of human extermination vary greatly among members.

Notable Members: [None created yet.]

The Lawrencian Magocracy

Name: The Lawrencian Magocracy; the Magocracy; Sanctus Magicus; the First Haven.

Side: Magi.

Composition: 75% human, 20% demihuman, and 5% other.

Location: Being one of the largest and most influential of Magi factions, the Magocracy currently occupies most of what was once known as North America. Its capital, Old York, was previously New York City, renamed to such because it is a relic from the previous age of humanity.

Description: The Magocracy was founded and named after Daniel C. Lawrence, a survivor from the modern age and one of the first humans to rediscover magic. He, along with his fellow mages, used their newfound powers to cleanse the lands of radioactive waste left from the world war, and rebuild cities in which the survivors can live in safety. As such, a new government structure formed around magical power and skill, with the Council of Archmagi being the leaders of the Magocracy. To ensure that he could continue to protect his people even beyond the limits of his own age, Lawrence resorted to necromancy to transform himself into an immortal lich; most of the other Archmagi in his Council soon followed suit. Nowadays, the Council of Archmagi consists entirely of liches, the same ones that formed and ruled the Magocracy two centuries ago. Though their reign has been mostly effective and reasonable, a sizable portion of the Magocracy's populations are beginning to grow discontent, desiring for a change in leadership after so long.

Goals: Due to being survivors from the modern age, the Council of Archmagi remembers all too well the technologies that devastated the world two hundred years ago. As such, most of them are extremely wary of the Tech side's new technologies, and wish to drive the Tech side away from Earth. However, a few of the Archmagi may be secretly more tolerant. Aside from this, the Magocracy's only main goal is to provide a safe and stable living place for its members, though some of the Archmagi may have hidden agendas.

Notable Members:
Daniel C. Lawrence, High Archmagus.
The Council of Archmagi.
[Details not decided yet.]

Tech factions:

Johnson-Clarke Medical Corporation

Name: Johnson-Clarke Medical Corporation; J.C. MediCorp; the MediCorp.

Side: Tech.

Composition: 95% mutant, 50% cyborg; the two groups have overlaps.

Location: The center of the MediCorp's power is the J.C. Central MediStation, a space station near the heart of Tech space, where a significant portion of its medical and body-enhancement operations are conducted. A number of other MediStations are located across Tech territory. The MediCorp has some private space stations for research, which they do not allow the public to access; rumors say that the research in these stations are illegal and highly unethical.

Description: The MediCorp was once a pharmaceutical company in the bygone modern age, run by one Benedict Johnson-Clarke. After the global nuclear war, Johnson-Clarke was one of the people wealthy and influential enough to have escaped Earth via one of the spaceships. When xenogen was discovered during interstellar travel, Johnson-Clarke was one of the first people to conduct more extensive experimentation regarding the substance. He pioneered the development of controlled, medical xenogen treatments, which he patented and used to expand his company. However, Johnson-Clarke was also a businessman, an exceedingly greedy and ethically questionable one. As his MediCorp grew, he began focusing more on body modification and augmentation than medical treatment, and charged hefty amounts of cash to enhance the powers of the Federal military and other private armed forces; the company eventually grew to include cybernetic enhancements as well. Nowadays, the MediCorp doesn't quite hold a monopoly over bio-augmentation, but still significantly dominates the market, through both the legal and illegal routes. Though it has no official political power of its own, the MediCorp nevertheless boasts formidable influence, due to its numerous clients and contacts in the Federation, private organizations, and crime syndicates; rumors even say that the MediCorp has an army of mutants and cyborgs of its own. It is still run by Johnson-Clarke, who has kept himself alive over the past centuries through mutations and cybernetics.

Goals: The MediCorp has only one goal: profit. It cares not about the morals and ethics of its actions or sources of profit, and will do anything it can get away with. The MediCorp's stance toward the Magi factions are mixed, seeing them as simultaneously potential clients, competitors, and sources to steal technology from. So far, the MediCorp is taking a cautious approach, reacting to anything the Magi side does.

Notable Members:
Benedict Johnson-Clarke, CEO.
[Details not decided yet.]

The Mensa Brotherhood

Name: The Mensa Brotherhood; the Brotherhood of the Transcendent Mind; the Gifted Ones; the Society of True Enlightenment.

Side: Tech.

Composition: All members are psionists. About 20% are also cyborgs.

Location: According to its members, the Brotherhood's base, which they call the Mental Nexus, is located on a higher plane of existence that only those with their levels of superior mental power are capable of perceiving. In actuality, it is located in a pocket universe created and sustained by the members' psionic power, and accessed through astral projection and hyperspace connection. The actual pocket universe itself is physically very small, and the members only commune in a shared mental world housed by a dense network of psionic energy contained in the small pocket universe.

Description: The Mensa Brotherhood is an offshoot of the high-IQ society Mensa International from the modern age, created when psionics began to become more widespread among the Tech population. Regardless of whether the original Mensa was elitist or not, there is little doubt that the Brotherhood, which the current Mensa Interstationary (as in, between space stations) refuses to be affiliated with, boasts exceeding confidence in the inherent superiority of the mental powers of its members. To mirror the original Mensa, one must possess stronger psionic powers than 98% of all Tech inhabitants to join the Mensa Brotherhood. Members of the Brotherhood are all telepathically connected to one another through their Mental Nexus, which they believe elevates them to a higher level of consciousness. Many members of the Brotherhood look at most non-members with pity, and wish to "uplift" their supposedly more limited mental faculties to the levels of the Brotherhood members. Other members do not concern themselves with "lesser minds", and instead focus on honing their psionic abilities, aiming to rise ever higher in their transcendental wisdom.

Goals: The central goal of the Mensa Brotherhood is not a detestable one; they simply seek to continually improve themselves. Some members see the Magi side with disdain, believing that magic is inferior to their psionics, while others see potential in magic. A smaller, more radical section of the Brotherhood wishes to "improve" the minds of all non-members in existence, by forcibly connecting all of their minds to the Mental Nexus.

Notable Members: [None created yet.]

The Hive

Name: The Hive.

Side: Tech.

Composition: 80% mutoid, 20% mutant; all are psionic.

Location: The Hive has infested several space stations near the fringes of Tech space. These stations are now covered in biological matter, making them suitable habitats for the Hive's mutoid drones.

Description: Aside from the Hive itself, no one knows where, when, or how this swarm of telepathically-linked mutant monsters came into existence, though some speculate that they were the result of some scientific experiment gone horribly awry. The Hive consists of a large variety of mutoid creatures, all linked together psionically in a highly intelligent hive mind, even though each individual mutoid is little more than an animal. Occasionally, the Hive will assimilate an outside being into itself, by wiping the victim's mind and warping the victim's body with xenogen until it becomes fitting for the Hive's purposes. Despite the significant potential danger it poses to the rest of the population, the Hive is primarily concerned with its own survival, and thus has established a non-aggression treaty with a number of the major Tech factions; the Hive will not be attacked by these factions, but in exchange it will not encroach upon these factions' territories. This is not a permanent solution, however, and many still feel great unease toward the Hive's existence.

Goals: The Hive's only goal is to ensure its own survival. Technically, it will survive as long as a single Hive drone survives, as the drone can potentially reproduce and reform the Hive from itself. But the hive mind realizes that if it makes too big a mistake, it may get itself completely annihilated by an alliance of other factions. Currently, the Hive is cautious, considering the various Magi beings as both potential allies and potential targets for assimilation, as long as the end result benefits its survival.

Notable Members: [None created yet.]

United Federation of Humanity

Name: United Federation of Humanity; the Federation; UFH.

Side: Tech.

Composition: A roughly even mix of human cyborgs, mutants, and psionists.

Location: The majority of space stations in Tech territory are affiliated with the Federation. Its capital is Union Station, located at the very center of Tech space, one of the largest and most advanced of all space stations.

Description: The United Federation of Humanity is as close as the Tech side has to a single, official governing body. It was founded by the group of humans who originally left Earth two centuries ago, when they'd recovered enough to begin expanding their territory. Much like the most developed countries back in the modern age, the Federation is capitalist and democratic, its government headed by a president elected through the usual means. Affiliation with the Federation is voluntary, and grants a faction the protection and resources of the Federation and other affiliated factions. The Federation thus boasts considerable influence over numerous other factions and the Tech side as a whole. On the other hand, the Federation suffers from corruption and a number of other problems, meaning that many other factions hold significant sway over the Federation as well, more than legally and ethically reasonable. Nevertheless, the Federation is currently doing a fair job at holding the Tech side together, and its population is reasonably content on average.

Goals: As it is affiliated with so many other factions, the Federation's overall goal can be called either conflicted or nonexistent. The current president is in favor of reclaiming Earth as the Tech side's home, but wants to opt for coexistence with the Magi instead of war if possible. Of course, numerous other stances exist in the Federal government as well.

Notable Members: [None created yet.]

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic

I've made the OOC thread.

http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/80327-reclamation-war-of-technology-and-magic/ooc

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

Would you prefer characters to be posted here for acceptance or the characters tab? (just wondering because I know some people prefer only completed and accepted characters in that tab.)

@MelonHead

Yeah, please post your character sheets here, and move them to the Characters tab after they're accepted. The same applies to faction sheets.

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic (closed)

The interest check thread is here.

---

Introduction

In a corner of the universe, far away from most other forms of intelligent life, was a blue planet that its inhabitants called Earth. In the wake of battles between eldritch beings of unspeakable power long since gone, billions of years ago, the first lifeforms arose from the turbulent magical energies raging across planet's surface. From magic they were born, and so they could command such energies of the world, through naught but the raw instincts of their nascent minds. Over the eons the planet's environments stabilized, and its inhabitants grew ever more complex, until there emerged the first species possessing true sapience - humanity.

Humans' intelligence came at the cost of raw physical power, compared to the ferocious predators roaming the wilderness. To ensure the survival of their species, the strongest of human mages tore rifts into the Sea of Chaos, a universe parallel to their own and the source of all magical energies, and created a vast structure that would eventually come to be called the Dweomerheart. The structure became the cornerstone of human societies of yore, for it channeled the Sea of Chaos's energies and systematically distributed them among human settlements, saturating the environment, such that virtually every human was born with or developed powers of magic. With such powers, the humans became the planet's dominant species, constructing expansive cities and spreading to every nook and cranny of Earth. But also with such powers, the humans often waged war among one another, for individuality inevitably led to conflict.

All changed when there came a powerful sorcerer-king who sought to unify the world. Whether he was sick of humans' constant warfare and suffering, or simply driven by pride and greed, no one knew. But everyone knew that he was mad, mad enough to use a forbidden ritual to become one with the Dweomerheart itself. With the incalculable powers he gained from the nexus of magic, the sorcerer-king brutally crushed any who stood in his way, and enslaved the planet to rule it with an adamantine fist, bringing with him unprecedented peace but oppression for centuries. Unwilling to live under the sorcerer-king's reign of terror, groups eventually rose to challenge him, many of them united against their common enemy. After nigh-unimaginable amounts of bloodshed and death, the sorcerer-king was slain, in a battle that devastated the entire planet. In the battle died all magic users of notable power, and with the sorcerer-king died the Dweomerheart. Humanity survived the cataclysm, but magic was lost.

Humans slowly began to rebuild their societies from the smouldering ruins. Without magic, they came to rely on technology, creating tools that could be used by anyone of sufficient skill. Over the next centuries, magic was forgotten altogether as technology developed, until the world resembled modern Earth in our real life.

But humans did not remember their lesson from the sorcerer-king. They once again waged war with one another. Weapons capable of ending all life were unleashed, reducing the planet to a wasteland a second time. Technologies, however, were not lost this time. The most elite of humanity poured all of their remaining resources to construct massive spaceships and leave Earth, while the other survivors were left to die.

And that was the branching point of the sides of Tech and Magi. Through some miracle of improbable chance, the ancient power of magic stirred to life again just as all hope seemed to be lost for those who remained on Earth, allowing them to rebuild a second time. The humans that escaped the planet ruthlessly perfected their technologies, aided by alien substances they found during their interstellar travels, developing cybernetics, mutations, and psionics that could rival true magic. The two sides would have forever gone their separate ways, until two centuries after the initial split, out of nostalgia the Tech side decided to reclaim the planet that they abandoned so long ago and thought to be barren still.

Suffice to say, neither of the two sides expected, or were pleased by, the other side's existence. And neither were willing to relinquish the planet that they felt was rightfully theirs.

That is the current state of the world. Though not at outright war yet, the sides of Tech and Magi have reached an impasse with their negotiations, several months after their initial meeting. A multitude of factions exist within each side, all of them having conflicting motives and goals. Skirmishes between various groups are fought almost daily. The world is in a state of cold war, and the future is more uncertain than ever before.

You live in this uncertain world. But you have the potential to shape the future, for you are powerful, more powerful than many of those around you. But with this power, what future will you bring?

---

Game Overview

This game is intended to be a mostly freeform RP, where the plot is determined by the players’ collaborative effort. As the GM, I will play the game using my own characters, but I will not be directly responsible for the main storyline. Both the Tech and Magi sides have multiple smaller factions within them, as previously mentioned, and it will be up to the players to create these factions and construct a plot from their interactions and conflicts. For this reason, each player is allowed to create as many characters and factions as he wants, within reason, though each still must be approved by me. Since this is a serious, “advanced” RP, please don’t create more characters or factions than you can handle.

During the game, a player is allowed to introduce minor characters without writing up character sheets for them. But if a minor character starts to have a major role in the plot, I'll ask the corresponding player to write up a character sheet for said formerly minor character.

The special features of the Magi and Tech sides are listed below.

Magi

Powers:

As the name indicates, members of the Magi side are able to use their minds to manipulate magical energies and produce various effects. A detailed explanation of magic in this setting can be found in sections 2 and 2.1.2 of this document, and I suggest that you at least give the appropriate sections a skim. Overall, magic is not too different from the magic in other settings that use an “MP meter”, though there are subtle differences that may arise in specific situations, which should have been addressed in the links above.

Magic on the Magi side are primarily divided into three “styles”, each channeling magical energy in a different way. A mage may specialize in one of the styles, or dabble in more than one. There also exist overlaps between the three styles, and with sufficient skill one style can replicate the effects of another. Ultimately, the three styles are just “flavor”, since this game is played through purely storytelling, instead of tabletop RPG stats and mechanics.

In all cases, the ability to use magic is hereditary, though the specific forms of magic wielded by the parents may or may not be inherited by their children.

The three styles of magic are described below.

Spellcasting:
This is the “traditional” style of magic, like common depictions of wizards in fantasy literature, where the user projects magical energy to produce direct effects upon the environment. Any user can theoretically learn any spell, but each user has an easier time learning certain types of spells, determined by the user’s personality and experiences. Multiple spells may be cast at the same time, and combined into new spells. More skilled users can learn more spells and improve the versatility of their spells.
On average, Spellcasting tends to be better than other styles at sheer destructive power and large-scale complex effects, though its effects are relatively more short-lived, and it is less effective at protecting the user in battle.
Practitioners of Spellcasting are called Casters.
Examples of Spellcasting:
- A fireball that explodes on impact.
- A large circle of dark magic that absorbs the life force of everyone inside and feeds it to the caster.

Evocation:
This style of magic materializes magical items from the user’s soul. These items are produced from the user’s magical energy, and are manifestations of the user’s personality and experiences. Many of them take on the form of weapons, but they may also be tools, armor and clothing, or even “summoned” semi-autonomous creatures that obey the user’s commands. Each such magical item possesses magical abilities, in accordance with the parts of the user’s personality and experiences that the item is manifested out of. Multiple items may be evoked at once, and even combined. More skilled users can manifest additional items and give their items more abilities.
Most of the time, only a magical item's creator can use its special abilities, even if the creator willingly gives it to someone else, since the creator's thoughts are required to activate the item's abilities. Only special magic that hijacks other people's magical constructs can attempt to use another person's Evoked magical items, and even then the item will strongly resist being used against its owner's will.
Magical items produced by Evocation are linked to their owners through hyperspace, and are stabilized by their owners’ souls. If the object gets too far away from the owner (i.e. significantly greater than the Earth’s diameter), or the link is broken, or the owner runs out of energy, the object will destabilize and dissolve into energy. A highly skilled user of Evocation may be able to break off a fragment of his soul and embed it into his Evoked item to allow the item to exist without the user, effectively turning the item into a independent and semi-sentient magical artifact. Even in this case, the item will lose some abilities and become less powerful if disconnected from the user, because it is now sustained by a weaker fragment of its user’s soul. The truly skilled user can place his entire soul into a magical item, in which case the item won’t weaken at all, if the user is willing to abandon his original body.
Due to the ability to generate weapons and armor, Evocation can turn its user into a highly effective warrior or marksman, though it may have a hard time matching the sheer power and scope of Spellcasting.
Practitioners of Evocation are called Evokers.
Examples of Evocation:
- A magical sword that can send out waves of razor-sharp wind along its edge.
- An animated suit of armor that can both be worn and act as an independent fighter.

Shapeshifting:
This style of magic specializes in transforming the user’s own body, which is usually too complex and dangerous for generalized Spellcasting to accomplish. The magic makes changes in the user’s soul, and causes the user’s body to magically adapt to the changes, rather than trying to directly restructure the molecules in the body. The forms that the user can shapeshift into, as well as the abilities gained in these forms, are determined by the user’s personality and experiences, similar to Evocation. Multiple forms can be mixed and matched to create hybrid forms. More skilled users can shapeshift into more forms, and give their forms additional abilities.
Due to how Shapeshifting works, having too many forms will distort the user’s soul, and lead to deteriorating mental stability. Hence, even the most skilled users of Shapeshifting have no more than a handful of forms.
Compared to the other two styles, the abilities granted by Shapeshifting are the least versatile and complex. However, since it directly and easily enhances the user’s physical capabilities, Shapeshifting makes the user far more survivable than the other styles of magic.
Practitioners of Shapeshifting are called Shifters.
Examples of Shapeshifting:
- Turning into a horned lizardman with the ability to breathe frost.
- Turning into a giant spider that can spin webs and spit poison.

---

Races and Habitat:

All of the Magi side’s population live on planet Earth. However, due to the presence of magic, many types of fantastical environments from fiction can now be found on Earth, such as magical forests and underground cities. Aside from normal humans, Earth is inhabited by a variety of fantasy creatures, though most of them still have their roots tied to humanity. Since there are far too many types of creatures, they’re instead organized into several broad categories, listed below. Because of magic, most creatures can interbreed with one another, and produce fertile offspring, if their reproductive organs are compatible; Shapeshifting magic is able to make reproductive organs compatible for this purpose.

Demihuman: These beings are humans who had their bodies permanently altered by magic, and the descendants of such altered humans. Humanoid and semi-humanoid races in fantasy, such as elves, orcs, harpies, and merfolk, are classified as demihumans.

Spawn: These beings are magical creatures created by humans from parts of normal nonhuman creatures, formerly normal nonhuman creatures changed by magic, and the descendants of creatures in the previous two groups. Non-humanoid creatures in fantasy, such as treants, gryphons, and dragons, are classified as the spawn.

Spirit: These are beings with bodies made of magical energy, though the energy may be solid and resemble organic materials. Spirits were either souls that spontaneously coalesced into existence in areas of extremely concentrated magic, formerly non-spiritual beings who abandoned their old bodies in favors of new bodies made of energy, or descendants of other spirits. Unlike many species of demihumans and the spawn, spirits do not grow old upon reaching physical maturity. The more explicitly fantastical and “otherworldly” creatures in fantasy, such as angels and demons, and creatures made of energy, such as elementals, are classified as spirits.

Construct: These are beings created “from scratch” by humans or other beings, machines constructed from simple raw materials and animated by complex magical circuits. Some of them are no more than machines, but others can be just as intelligent as other beings, and may even have souls. Due to their mechanical bodies, constructs are usually not capable of reproduction. Golems in fantasy are classified as constructs.

Hybrid: This category is for beings born from the unions of parents belonging to more than one of the categories above, e.g. a half-orc, half-demon. Their traits are mixtures of their parents’ traits.

Tech

Powers:

If you’ve skimmed the document that I linked in the Magi section, you may have noticed that it says magic is a fundamental part of my fictional universe’s physics. Thus, the Tech side’s powers can be treated as, by the players OOC, as simply other “styles” of magic compared to the Magi side’s styles, with no fundamental difference aside from flavor. Again, flavor is the only thing that exists, since this game is only about storytelling. Since Tech powers were developed from innovations in modern human technology, they’re still seen as forms of technology by characters who use them, even though they operate on the same laws of physics that give rise to magic.

There are three main types of Tech powers, each originating from a different alien substance that the Tech humans discovered during their interstellar journey in the past two centuries. Similar to magic, one can specialize in one type of Tech powers, or dabble in multiple. Also similar to magic, the three types of Tech powers can overlap with one another in the effects they produce, and even with magic; sufficient skill can use one type to replicate the effects of another.

The three types of technologies are described below.

Cybernetics:
This group consists of futuristic machinery, as seen in many traditional sci-fi stories, implanted into the bodies of users. Such machinery is made from a variety of alloys and other synthetic materials, containing a metal called “unobtainium”, originally dubbed as such due to having properties considered too good to be true. Unobtainium is a semi-living (though thankfully non-sentient) metal, capable of forming highly complex structures and bonding with other substances and energies to display myriads of different properties. The internal structures of machines made of unobtainium-containing substances tend to change after prolonged usage, adapting to their working conditions and experiences. For example, a suit of powered armor may become more heat-resistant after long periods of fighting in a volcanic environment. This allows cybernetics to “grow” more powerful over time, like mutants, psionists, and magic users. Of course, not all cybernetics is created equal; some start more potent than others due to superior techniques in construction. Adaptation may also become impossible if the machinery is destroyed before it has the chance to adapt.
Due to the adaptive nature of unobtainium, a cybernetic implant is able to synchronize with and be empowered by its user, e.g. with the soul of a human or with the rest of the machinery of a robot that it is installed onto. This makes cybernetics more powerful when wielded by a stronger user.
For obvious reasons, cybernetics cannot be inherited by children, barring extremely rare circumstances that must be discussed on a case-by-case basis if they arise.
Compared to the other types of Tech powers, cybernetics is the least versatile, due to being the most restricted in material structures. But it is the most easily transferable, as cybernetic implants can easily be swapped from user to user. However, if an implant is empowered by a strong user, as described in the previous paragraph, the implant may be no longer as powerful if transferred to a weaker user.
Examples of cybernetics:
- A robotic arm that can transform into a plasma cannon.
- A mechanical eye that has adapted to seeing magical energy.

Mutations:
This group consists of superhuman abilities gained from the mutations in organic tissues. Obviously, ordinary mutations found in real life aren’t this exciting, but these superpowered mutations are caused by “xenogen”, a liquid mutagenic compound that some humans were exposed to in the past centuries. Those mutated by xenogen have their physiologies altered and infused by energies similar to the magical energies wielded by Magi, granting them special abilities.
Since mutations are genetic, they can be passed on to offsprings. A non-mutant may also become a mutant, by being exposed to xenogen or xenogen-infused body parts of other mutants. However, aside from the transplant of body parts, mutations cannot be “taught” or transferred from one user to another.
The abilities that a mutant develops tend to be correlated with his personality and experiences, if they aren’t inherited from parents. Through practice or traumatic experiences, a mutant may also develop new abilities.
Compared to other types of Tech powers, mutations tend to be the most limited in range and scale, as they’re usually limited to the user’s own body and immediate surroundings. On the other hand, mutations can enhance the user’s physical capabilities much more easily than other power types.
Examples of mutations:
- The ability to transform one’s body into liquid metal.
- The ability to generate and shoot electricity from one’s body.

Psionics:
This group consists of superhuman abilities stemming from one’s mind, and is the closest to actual magic used by the Magi side. Psionic powers originally developed when small chunks of a special crystal, called “psionite”, were implanted into the brains of human test subjects, though nowadays injections of psionite-containing compounds will suffice. The energy in psionite reacts with the human mind and soul (as described in the previously linked document about magic, if you’ve skimmed the appropriate sections), bringing out latent abilities of converting the energies of the mind into other forms and using them to affect the environment. The end result is something similar to the Spellcasting style of magic, with differences that are of interest mostly only to scholars and researchers.
Due to being intimately related to the mind, psionic powers are often highly instinctual, though there still exist schools of psionics that emphasize careful control. A psionist tends to develop powers suited to his personality and experiences, and may develop new ones over time. Psionic powers can be taught by one psionist to another, though this is relatively difficult, especially if the psionist’s mind is not very suited to perform the power he wants to learn.
One typically becomes a psionist by absorbing psionite into the brain, one way or another. This may be done through the aforementioned injections or implants, or by receiving the psionite from the gametes of parents who are also psionists. Thus, psionics can also be inherited by offsprings.
Compared to other types of Tech powers, psionics tends to be more adept and destructive and large-scale effects. But it does not directly enhance the user’s body, and may thus leave the user vulnerable.
Examples of psionics:
- The ability to generate and manipulate force fields with one’s mind, to use as weapons, shields, or extra limbs.
- The ability to convert psionic energy associated with one’s hatred into corrosive energy.

Note: Unobtainium, xenogen, and psionite are not extremely rare materials. They’re still not as common as, say, iron, but they’re not so rare that plot points can be made from obtaining them. These materials can be manufactured out of normal materials too, so there’s no risk of running out either.

---

Races and Habitat:

The majority of the Tech side’s population live on a large number of space stations, each around the size of cities. The stations are close enough to one another to make travel feasible, but not so close that they’re likely to crash into one another. They’re mainly connected to one another through a complex network of portals. Some settlements exist on the planets the Tech humans have encountered before, but not many, as living conditions on those planets are dangerous enough that it’s easier to build hospitable space stations than to terraform these planets. Management levels on space stations and other settlements vary, so they may resemble futuristic cities, dystopian slums, radioactive wastelands, and anything in between.

The main Tech settlements are many light years away from Earth, in another solar system. However, the Tech people have built portals connecting their home to a section of space near Earth, the portals powered by the star in their solar system. The Magi side, in retaliation, have also built some portals connecting to space near the Tech homeworld, these ones powered by energy from the Sea of Chaos.

Aside from normal humans, the Tech side’s populace is mainly classified by the types of Tech powers they use. Each type has two categories of beings associated with it, listed below.

Cyborg/Robot: “Cyborg” is a racial modifier describing any being who possesses at least one unobtainium-based cybernetic implant. A “robot”, on the other hand, is a machine made entirely out of cybernetics, though this category includes artificial intelligences as well. Many robots are simple automatons, but others are fully sentient and intelligent, despite having no souls, thanks to their complex, adaptive unobtainium circuits. A robot can become a mutant by grafting mutant body parts onto its mechanical body, and become a psionist by installing psionite nodes to its CPU. It is even possible for a robot to become human, or some other organic being, by first installing brain tissues into its CPU, then gradually replacing all mechanical parts with biological parts; this process is likely to cause the robot to develop a soul if successful. Lastly, a robot can abandon its body and become a psi-specter if it is a psionist.

Mutant/Mutoid: “Mutant” is a racial modifier describing any being whose body has been mutated by xenogen. A “mutoid” refers to a mutant that isn’t human-based, either a mutated non-human organism or a creature assembled from the biological matter of other mutants. As a rough analogy, mutants can be compared to superheroes, while mutoids can be compared to the monsters that superheroes fight. Mutants and mutoids can become robots by gradually replacing biological body parts with mechanical ones, and become psi-specters by becoming psionists then abandoning their bodies.

Psionist/Psi-Specter: “Psionist” is a racial modifier describing any being who can use psionite-induced psionic powers. A “psi-specter” is a being whose body is made of pure psionic energy, created when a skilled psionist abandons his physical body and creates a body of energy for his soul and mind. A psi-specter can reform its body as long as its soul still exists, and is highly resistant to physical damage, but more vulnerable to energy-based attacks. A psi-specter can produce psi-specter children with any being who has a soul, by letting the other being’s energy mingle with itself. A sufficiently skilled psi-specter can permanently possess a new body, making the body its own; this is the only way for the psi-specter to “become” a cyborg or a mutant due to its lack of physical body otherwise.

For all characters, Magi and Tech, a character’s raw power level is independent of the versatility of his abilities. Raw power is slowly increased through training and experience, while versatility depends on the character’s skill. There exists training that can increase both raw power and skill, but that doesn’t mean the two are directly correlated.

To prevent any ability from being overpowered, all abilities are subject to limitations described in section 2.2 of the document describing magic.

No character can start with both Magi and Tech abilities. Theoretically, there’s nothing preventing a character from having abilities from both sides, but the two sides simply haven’t been in contact with each other for long enough for anyone to have gained any meaningful abilities from the other side. During the game, a character may obtain abilities from the other side; it’s just that no character can start with abilities from both sides.

You may have noticed that I have not included any actual locations, structures, or cultures of any of the races or other groups in the setting. This is intentional. The players are expected to contribute to the setting and flesh it out with detail, through the creation of factions. I am not doing this out of laziness; I simply want this game to be a more collaborative experience, and not force the players to read up on too much backstory.

---

Rules

To avoid possible disputes, there are a few rules in this game that must be obeyed at all times. Breaking one of the rules for the first two times will only result in a warning, but breaking a rule a third time will result in you being banned from this game.

-2. All forum rules apply. Obviously.

-1. Do not respond to anyone who is attempting to derail this thread, or the main game thread. Report the person and move on.

0. I am always right. I am allowed to break any of the rules after this one because I am the GM. Don't even try to argue with me or twist the rules and use them against me, because I am always right. You can ask me to re-evaluate a decision, but ultimately I always get the final say. If I say a discussion is finished, it is finished; attempting to argue further is breaking this rule and you know what that means.

1. Don’t be a jerk. Try not to do anything that may possibly cause anyone to spit profanity at you. That includes but is not limited to killing, controlling, maiming, depowering, or doing anything unpleasant to another player's characters without the player’s permission, or derailing the characters' subplots. If a dispute occurs, try to resolve it via PM. If that doesn’t work, PM me.

2. All posts can be edited. If a conflict occurs, one or both sides will have to edit their posts. If I tell you to edit one of your posts, you have to. If you refuse to do so, your post will be declared invalid, non-canonical, and will be ignored by everyone else; responding to such invalidated posts also counts as breaking this rule.

3. Don’t be overpowered. If I spot your characters doing something they should not be capable of doing, you must edit your post. Otherwise your post will be considered invalid; retcons will be used if necessary. There is a link above describing the limitations of superhuman abilities in this setting, in the Game Overview section.

---

Signup Sheets

In this game, each player can create an unlimited number of characters and factions. The character and faction signup sheets will be included below.

Please post your character and faction sheets in the OOC tab first, then move them to the Characters tab after they've been accepted.

Character Sheet

Name: Self-explanatory. Put aliases, nicknames, and titles here too if you want, but please do make it clear which is your character’s main name.

Side: Magi or Tech. Pick one. Your character cannot be both or neither.

Sex: Self-explanatory. Includes all possible variations on human sex, e.g. both male and female, sexless, changed from male to female or vice versa, but are not limited to human sexes; some creatures may have sexes that are entirely outside the human male-female spectrum. Note that this indicates biological sex; things like gender identity go in the Personality section.

Age: Self-explanatory. Any age older than the maximum human lifespan must be justified using appropriate superhuman abilities. Since magic and futuristic technology only began developing two centuries ago, your character cannot be older than 200.

Race: What type of creature is your character? The list of races in the section above are only broad categories, so please be more specific if possible. And if your character is a hybrid of multiple races, please list all races involved.

Appearance: Self-explanatory. Please describe both your character’s physical appearance and clothes, if any.

Personality: You can flesh out your character as you roleplay along, but it’s still a good idea to give a general description of his or her personality. If you don’t know what to put, think about virtues, vices, intelligence, temperaments, religious, philosophical, and moral beliefs, sexual orientation, quirks, habits, etc.

Faction: Which faction does your character belong to? Put "N/A" if he or she is not a part of any faction. If you want to be a member of a faction created by another player, you must obtain that player's permission first.

Biography: Briefly explain your character’s life before the game began.

Skills: What mundane skills does your character have? Examples include but are obviously not limited to singing, cooking, and martial arts.

Abilities: This section contains your character’s Magi or Tech abilities. Please read the document listing the limitations of superhuman abilities, linked immediately below the descriptions of the Magi and Tech sides in the previous section. Your character can start with as many abilities as you want, but within reason. Your character also cannot start off more powerful than someone who can, with some notable effort, lay waste to an unpopulated normal city, unless you extensively discuss the character idea with me beforehand.

Possessions: List any items of significance that your character has in his or her possession. Magical items conjured by Evocation do not count; these should go under Abilities. Items in your character's possession can have special properties and abilities. It's possible for a Magi character to possess Tech items, and vice versa, if the items were taken from their previous owners. Again, you can have an unlimited number of possessions, but within reason.

Faction Sheet

Name: Self-explanatory. If your faction has multiple names, please indicate which is the main one used by the faction's members.

Side: Magi or Tech. Again, you must be one or the other.

Composition: What races do the majority of your faction's members belong to? If there are multiple, please list the rough proportions of each race.

Location: Where is your faction's base of operations located? If it has multiple notable bases, you may choose to list them all.

Description: What exactly is your faction about? Please also include some of your faction's history.

Goals: What does your faction seek to accomplish? Both general goals and goals more specific to the Magi-Tech conflict can be included. As examples, a faction may want to make peace with the other side, force the other side to leave, conquer the other side, completely destroy the other side, or obtain the other side's powers for itself.

Notable Members: Please list all player-created characters who are members of this faction. Note that if you want another player's character to be a member of your faction, you must obtain that player's permission first.

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic

I very much want to get involved with this, but I'm torn because the faction I want to introduce strides the line between magic and technology. I understand that you're set against "mixed" factions, but could we possibly work out an arrangement for this?

@Dead Cruiser

PM me your idea, and we'll see what we can do.

---

I'm new to the forum, so I'm not entirely sure how to do things here. Not including me, we have five people who already want to join (@clericbeast, @Shotgun Bear, @lydyn, @Warm Regret, and @Dead Cruiser), one person who may join later (@Sep), and three people who followed me here from Kongregate FGF and will probably join (@BCTheEntity, @Behemoth542, and @gammaflux). This means we have enough people to get the game going already, right? Do you guys think I should make the actual game thread today?

Reclamation - War of Technology and Magic

As a bystander can I just comment your characters sexual orientation shouldn't be their defining plot. It's what I got from what I read and I'm not the GM so hey, what do I know. But Straight Chars don't revolve around solely being straight and that isn't their defining trait so it should work both ways.

@Sep

I disagree with this. Heterosexuality is seen as the norm, and there exist a number of people who are prejudiced against homosexuality. Depending on the amount of education received, a homosexual character may grow up confused and conflicted about his or her gender identity and sexual orientation, not to mention potentially having to deal with homophobia. I think it's entirely feasible to have a character's central conflict revolve around his or her sexuality, if said sexuality is something different from the norm.

I mean he may do things differently but from roleplays, especially with the likes with this scope shouldn't hinge upon romance too heavily or they'll end up seeming corny.

@Sep

I also disagree with this. Whether a romance is corny or not depends on how well it's written, not the fact that it's a romance in a Cold War-esque setting. I'm a hopeless romantic too, and I plan to write a romance between a Magi character and a Tech character. If you personally find it corny regardless of how well-written it is, I can hardly do anything about that. But I certainly don't mind a character focused on romance, and no one else has complained so far either.

Also, according to the forum rules, if you're not participating in a forum game, you're advised to refrain from posting just to give critique.

If you are not a participant in an RP or an interest check, but are merely there to critique the thread, you should probably not be posting. Trolling threads is one of those things that the mods come down heavily and we are interpreting that liberally because actions that discourage people from posting interest checks run contrary to the entire point of the Guild – it should be a safe place for all roleplayers.

I know I'm new here, and you have thousands of posts, but that isn't going to stop me from pointing to the rules when I think it's necessary. If you're going to give advice, I think you should at least get yourself properly involved in the game first.