[@Guilty Spark] Much of the time I do have a plan in store for the story's path, but it shifts violently when characters make any grand decisions in character. The only issue with national RP's such as S-S, where players only have control over one-three characters, is that it's hard to have a grand influence without achieving the assistance of NPC groups, which I fully encourage.

There are currently a plethora of events occurring in Scattered shades that will become obvious in the first IC post, many of which are set in motion by not only the story's natural progression, but the characters in the previous iteration. I'll try my best to offer opportunities to the characters IC, but part of the responsibility falls with the players, and their courage to make decisions [i]in-character[/i] of course. Too many people are scared of affecting the GM's dogma to make decisions, I find, which makes it hard for GMs to really... Pertain to the desires of those who want to have influence in he story. By all means everyone, [i]please attempt[/i] to have influence, I'm not going to get upset unless you break the rules, or create lore without talking to me about it first.

Creating lore without consulting me is technically meta gaming anyways, so I doubt anyone's going to do that.

The old iteration of scattered shades might have progressed too slow for everyone involved (strange since more than half of the players dropped out after less than 2-3 pages of in-character posts), which might not be as much of an issue in this continuation, but patience is certainly appreciated for times when players cannot simply carry out their plans without any effort whatsoever. I'm not going to be allowing people who attempt to [i]raid an entire nation full of powerful mages on their own[/i] to kill off important characters, for example, haha. But if you try to do something like that carefully, you can definitely, well, shift the course of the universe pretty violently.