There we go, a nice descriptive title!

This is an idea I stewed up while thinking about a roleplay design that can flow quickly and smoothly while still stimulating interesting characters put into challenging situations, where writers can relax to some degree about the depth of their characters and focus on their immediate interactions. As scenarios and moods change, they'll maintain a focus on co-operative combat, surviving an actively hazardous environment, figuring out creative solutions to the problems that impede them, and negotiating with openly hostile NPCs.

The characters themselves are the core of the roleplay. They are a variety of weird and wonderful aquatic creatures connected by a short-range telepathic link, whose physical abilities are quantified by a set of stats and traits. I'm happy to accept pretty much anything in the way of character species or design process. See something cool on Deviantart? Design your own elite ocean agent? Sketch them? Randomly roll some traits and figure something out from the result? Water dragon? Jellyfish alien? Mermaid assassin? Shark with a human face? Do whatever you like.

Currently, I'm leaning to six stats- Strength, resilience, stamina, flexibility, speed, and response time, each measured on a scale of one (weak) to five (excellent) or six (really, really excellent). As well as assigning points during character creation, each player also has free points, which their character can use during their mission to permanently increase any stat they like, with subtle changes to their body that come along with it (sleeker shape, larger muscles, growing scales).

The more important aspect of each character is traits. Traits are versatile adaptations unique to each character's body. They might have razor-like blades, adaptive camouflage, keen eyesight, or long, dexterous tentacles. They might spit acid or glow brightly or pulse with heat or split themselves into two. Anything you can think of. Traits also have a level, from one to three, and they too can be added and improved according to the situation.

What the characters do and why is connected to another mechanic entirely- Flickering. The agents are constantly blinking in and out of existence in very brief jumps, usually too short to notice. During each blink, they exist in a state of shapelessness, in which they sometimes see fragments of mysterious dreams, designed by me as riddles and hints to where they came from that the characters can interpret however they like. Flickering is also a way of representing gaps between posts, with players too busy to post on a given day explained by a character flickering out for longer than usual.

Flickering is not entirely random, however. It is controlled by a larger force that telepathically instructs the agents before each mission. When their goals are complete, they flicker out of existence for a longer stretch of time, and flicker back into an entirely different environment, with a different task. Agents that desert their mission entirely sometimes flicker out forever, though other than that the force lets them do what they want.

The missions themselves are an exercise in dungeon crawling, with subtle hints of their own to who the characters are and why. Abandoned underwater cities still defended by failing robots? Vast, dark kelp forests with tribes of hunters lurking in the shadows? Cave systems littered with bones where frightened refugees whisper of watching eyes? Anything goes. The end goal of each scenario is fairly simple (find a treasure, unlock a gate, kill a dude), but there will always be several ways to approach it, and many paths to take, probably best handled in small groups that frequently come back into contact.

And that's about it! Whatever happens, it'll be a fair few days before I can actually start working on the idea. In the meanwhile, I'm open to any questions, suggestions, requests and ideas you might have.

Ed: The idea actually has a working title! MIASMA - Marine Inquisition and Self-Modifying Assassin unit.