Rigmarole

The Redwatch

I wanted to ask if mice families work the same way they do in our world. Mice don't have fifty siblings and fifty hundred grandkids before they've even hit middle age, do they?

The Redwatch

Thanks, River Goblin. I'll start working on the whole sheet.

The Redwatch

@River Goblin

Galan of Splittree

"We watch over a house divided against itself. The petty kingdoms of Gnaw must be forged into a single people."

Name: Galan of Splittree, of Glendale

Rank: Watcher

Appearance: A brown mouse with bright eyes. Though he longer makes his permanent home in the trees of the Glen, his coat retains an oily shine common to the mice from there. His distinguishing feature is the distinctive flare of his ears, as if he is always at attention. Galan has received his red cloak, the color chosen because his mentor noted that Galan, though still just a green band at the time, would tell every mouse he could that he was a Redwatch mouse, and the cloak would save him the trouble. However, Galan has only recently graduated into the ranks of the Watchers, and he still has a bit of water behind his ears.

Personality:
Galan is a partisan, a trait that is perhaps undesirable in a member of the Redwatch, though he thinks that partisanship is exactly what the Redwatch needs. He believes himself to have a lively intellect and spends his free time reading historical tracts. His reading has only deepened his already zealous loyalty to the Redwatch, seeing it to be the fragile string that binds the disparate mice kingdoms together.

Galan's village is carved into a large tree which had its heartwood exposed by lightning long ago, making the structures especially hardy. As a child, he was impressed that those mice that came before were able to eke out their living, even thrive, in a world that was even more full of danger than the one he knew. He grew up on stories of these and others of the first Glen mice, of the hardscrabble settlers who came and went, and especially of the militia of the Redfort. It was they who had made his village possible, and so he felt he owed them homage.

With the values he had learned from these stories, Galan found the current carelessness of the mice of the Glen, their easy acceptance that this was as it has always been and will be, baffling. He believed that the way the mice lived their lives could rupture at any time, and he watched with awe the local Redwatch members who fought to prevent that.

So when Galan came of age and could decide for himself what to do, where to go was never in question; he left for the Redfort with a wish to be part of something greater. It was there that he learned to read and write. Though he had the aptitude to be a scribe, Galan insisted on training as a Watcher. It was during this time that Galan learned of the frequent incursions into mice lands, the chipping away of the Westercroft. But he also learned of the suspicion that accompanied a Redwatch member wherever one went and the belief, shared even by some in the ranks, that the time of the Redwatch should come to an end. It was then that Galan understood that mice society as it now existed would eventually, and must, end.

Though Galan is loyal to the Redwatch, his loyalty to the monarch of Redfield, let alone the nobles of the other kingdoms, is questionable; he feels that their luxurious lifestyles is what insulates them from understanding the consequences of what is to come and their jealous suspicions to defend their noble titles are what prevent the people of Gnaw from being greater than what they are. He keeps that close to the coat, however.

Galan is confident, but protective of his pride. Though he is generous to friends, he can hold a grudge for far too long. He devours ideas, though one could say it's ideas that devour him.

The Redwatch

Galan of Splittree

"We watch over a house divided against itself. The petty kingdoms of Gnaw must be forged into a single people."

Name: Galan of Splittree, of Glendale

Rank: Watcher

Appearance: A brown mouse with bright eyes. Though he longer makes his permanent home in the trees of the Glen, his coat retains an oily shine common to the mice from there. His distinguishing feature is the distinctive flare of his ears, as if he is always at attention. Galan has received his red cloak, the color chosen because his mentor noted that Galan, though still just a green band at the time, would tell every mouse he could that he was a Redwatch mouse, and the cloak would save him the trouble. However, Galan has only recently graduated into the ranks of the Watchers, and he still has a bit of water behind his ears.

Personality:
Galan is a partisan, a trait that is perhaps undesirable in a member of the Redwatch, though he thinks that partisanship is exactly what the Redwatch needs. He believes himself to have a lively intellect and spends his free time reading historical tracts. His reading has only deepened his already zealous loyalty to the Redwatch, seeing it to be the fragile string that binds the disparate mice kingdoms together.

Galan's village is carved into a large tree which had its heartwood exposed by lightning long ago, making the structures especially hardy. As a child, he was impressed that those mice that came before were able to eke out their living, even thrive, in a world that was even more full of danger than the one he knew. He grew up on stories of these and others of the first Glen mice, of the hardscrabble settlers who came and went, and especially of the militia of the Redfort. It was they who had made his village possible, and so he felt he owed them homage.

With the values he had learned from these stories, Galan found the current carelessness of the mice of the Glen, their easy acceptance that this was as it has always been and will be, baffling. He believed that the way the mice lived their lives could rupture at any time, and he watched with awe the local Redwatch members who fought to prevent that.

So when Galan came of age and could decide for himself what to do, where to go was never in question; he left for the Redfort with a wish to be part of something greater. It was there that he learned to read and write. Though he had the aptitude to be a scribe, Galan insisted on training as a Watcher. It was during this time that Galan learned of the frequent incursions into mice lands, the chipping away of the Westercroft, . But he also learned of the suspicion that accompanied a Redwatch member wherever one went and the belief, shared even by some in the ranks, that the time of the Redwatch should come to an end. It was then that Galan understood that mice society as it now existed would eventually, and must, end.

Though Galan is loyal to the Redwatch, his loyalty to the monarch of Redfield, let alone the nobles of the other kingdoms, is questionable; he feels that their luxurious lifestyles is what insulates them from understanding the consequences of what is to come and their jealous suspicions to defend their noble titles are what prevent the people of Gnaw from being greater than what they are. He keeps that close to the coat, however.

Galan is confident, but protective of his pride. Though he is generous to friends, he can hold a grudge for far too long. He devours ideas, though one could say it's ideas that devour him.

True to the name

Hello. Had a craving for RP and here I am. I've been RPing on and off for years, mostly in the historical or historical fantasy genres, but I like a little bit of everything. What I really look for is some love given to the worldbuilding and lore. I'm not a stickler for the details*, necessarily, but for something that has a feeling of richness and hidden depths to it--a mythology, a past, a future, that kind of thing. My interests are history, philosophy, and economics, and that influences what I look for in an RP. This tends to mean those big games with big themes and big worlds and big errythang, but I think you can find that in the little things, too. Lastly, like the name says, I've been known to incoherently ramble about anything that catches my interest, so do take care.

*what's Aragorn's tax policy hurr hurr hurr**
**but actually I would love to hear about that

Sengoku Space Opera

Hello, newbie here. I have a craving for RP and wanted to be involved in a fresh game. I'm a fan of Sengoku history, so this is a treat. I'd like to join once this gets up and running.

I would like to ask a question, though. One of the things a reader of history gets from the Sengoku era is the sense of a clash between modernity and tradition. We modern readers see the ritual combat between samurai pushed aside for the mass battles between formations of ashigaru, the way of the horse and bow overtaken by pike and shot. In Europe, similar changes in the conduct of military affairs were both contingent upon and themselves partial causes of changes in social affairs--the centralization of states, the weakening of feudal power, the the eventual rise of the third estates over the nobility. But in Japan, because the Tokugawa were so successful in establishing hegemony, the feudal system, while it did not remain unchanged, did persist for two-and-a-half centuries more. In a sense, the Tokugawa were able to stop the clock, enough so that the beginning of the Meiji Restoration could be called a feudal revolt, the Shimazu of Satsuma and Mori of Choshu being powerful feudal vassals that had retained and expanded their power since the Sengoku era. What happened afterwards was in every sense a social revolution, of course--you can get whiplash from reading the history, with everything happening so fast, and you get the sense that it would have felt as if centuries had passed in the span of a few years.

But that Tokugawa would forestall this is what we know as modern readers. For people at the time of gekokujo, the sense that things could potentially explode all at once, even if only the most perceptive could wrap their heads around what that could mean, must have been dizzyingly present. Since this is set in space*, how would you emulate this sense of technological and military changes that could potentially lead to a rupture of social changes, something that makes the exoskeleton samurai think that their conscript counterparts might be getting the better of them?

*And let me just say that space feudalism is cool as heck. Depending on the level of development in a space setting, I think it makes eminent sense. If, for example, travel and communications between planets is possible, but takes both substantial time and exorbitant resources such that it takes tremendous collective (societal) effort to undertake, but at the same time makes control over many planets difficult because any central authority wouldn't be able to administer them or quickly go and suppress a challenge to their power, you have many of the ingredients that made feudalism a necessary and useful system for the powers-that-were, historically speaking.