I have been writing as a hobby for longer than you have been alive. I have been a regular member and roleplayer of no less than fourteen different online forums during that time (including the old RPG), fivesix eight of which no longer exist.
I was previously a regular on the Homestuck forums, but I became so sick of thread turnover there that I asked around and eventually found the Guild. Since joining, I have exclusively only participated in Advanced RPs. Before Mahz gave NRPs their own subforum, I used to be an NRP regular in the Advanced Subforum. I am a Guildfall survivor, and know/regularly write with a few others.
If you ask anybody who has written with me in previous RPs, they should tell you that I have a generally open schedule, I post regularly and in a timely fashion, and I never drop an RP once I join unless the thread dies. Some of them may tell you that I have extensive expertise within the realms of Biology, Psychology, and Physics, which I will make no effort to validate since there is no way I can provide hard proof of aforementioned alleged expertise to anybody over the internet (though I am happy to try and answer any questions you send my way).
My favorite fandom is the Myst franchise, which seemingly nobody other than me has ever heard of.
I was a Contest Moderator for the Writing Contests Subforum for just a little bit over two years. I wrote the Moderation Policy for that subforum and I ran a contest called the Twelve Labours; you can still go there and see all of them and the entries people wrote for them in the Contests Section and the Victory Archives.
I have been quadruple secret banned from the guild discord. That is not a joke.
@Terminal are we allowed to team up with multiple people giving lives to one character? To team up IC or OOC? and other potentially questionable interpretations of the rules, such as deliberately making a round unwinnable for future round benefits?
What is your opinion on toons? In general, are you going by the potential for abuse, or just by the actual implemented abuse of strong powers, in terms of how difficult and warped things get? How is character death defined and determined?
As to multiple posters per character: It allows me to take more lives away from you all on a per-capita basis, so knock yourselves out.
@Terminal for the new round of TTL -- not the Final Hazard, but the First Labor -- I wished clarification of a point. How exactly do you determine what is trite? Usually that means overused. I do recall that you didn't like how I handled the matter of a character beating me, but I wouldn't think a character manifesting their own will and gaining the ability to function as a writer's block because of that will to be something often used, even if the idea of a character disagreeing with the author has been used. *tilt head* Will triteness disqualify an entry entirely? Because I'm not sure how stale an idea I've got , since invulnerable doesn't preclude self-destructing, nor does it rule out the idea of very specific weaknesses, given that many characters are presented as invulnerable with one or two glaring flaws. Take Superman. Or, for a more suitable example given the way you present these Labors, how about Achilles? =P
Here I was merely referring to how subverting the death of one's characters is, in and of itself, a trite and thoroughly played-out aspect of fiction that I am not looking forward to seeing in your entries. Subversion of the need for their death, in a general sense, is trite - regardless of how doubtlessly clever the accompanying excuse might be. As indicated in the clarification though, I would merely be unamused, and I did say I would not be as strict as I was in the original First Labour. I would be unlikely to disqualify an entry just because you revived the character, or said they were playing dead, or had it so the afterlife was already the focus of the setting anyway, etcetera.
@Terminal ...I'm not entirely sure what this is going to mean, but alright. I certainly wish to join and see what happens.
By the way, is it fair to try one round with an unwinable scenario, so as to get information for later rounds without losing lives?
The first round is intentionally going to be a touch softer than subsequent iterations, but I am afraid that is the only 'warm-up' you will be getting.
Oh! Right. Since a character's believability and their suitability for the setting and so forth are dependent upon the setting itself, are we submitting characters before or after the reveal of the setting?
When you say we must use our own characters, ones we created, I wish to make sure I understand the intent here. I have characters I've created that other people played and then returned to me. I have ones that I didn't technically conceptualize, but which I turned from concept to character, and which are entirely mine. I have characters that I was given permission to adopt for use from others, and ones I was given and then reworked a great deal (these I'm guessing are out). I also have characters that are entirely mine but were designed for use in a fandom, or in a world that was not entirely original. Which of these are and are not permitted.
Submit them now. Characters which you have made explicitly to participate in a certain fandom - such as Homestuck for example - are fine. Characters you have adopted from other people entirely are not, even if they have undergone substantial reinterpretation and development since then - if you identify them as being the same continuous entity, they are not really yours, are they? Characters you made using a concept as inspiration are fine, since the concept is not the character itself. If you made it initially, it is probably ok to use.
Additionally, given that we have 48 hours to reply, and that at times one person may be dependent upon another person's post before they may post themselves, and that will cut down the time from the full 48 to potentially far less, how do you plan to handle this so as to be fair to all participants? I have no problem with the 48 hour limit, but I do wish to have a full 48 or at least very close to post, and not merely a couple (and I've had this happen to me in other places for assorted reasons).
I intend to use the forum timestamps. The instant a post reads as "Two days ago," the deadline is reached. As for the consideration of needing to await another poster to respond - that is but another way in which the Contextual Reality is Not Your Friend. You may need to stretch some of your context muscles if you suspect you might not have the time to wait for the other party to post - perhaps their character got caught up in an awkward pause of some kind? Or perhaps you did not wait for them to finish what they were saying or doing? Reality does not hang up because of reliance on one person...unless you let it hang up and start to go skippy bonkers.
I cannot promise that the circumstances will always be fair. I can promise that I will generally avoid placing you in layered circumstances of contingent behavior with other posters since I acknowledge the issue may be problematic. I will leave it to your interacting with other posters to create that complication. My simple advice to you otherwise is to not treat the roleplay as a baton-pass relay race. That sounds like a good way to get all of your characters killed.
I also wish to ask if there are considerations made for those of us who are typing on something where proofing and editing are more difficult, and where autocorrect is a serious issue.
Given the nature of the roleplay, no. It is intended as a merciless sudden-death bonus round, and I already stated I am not making exceptions for scheduling - why would I for other issues? Make do and plan accordingly.
You mention that minor errors might be useful to adjust your manner of writing. I find this interesting. I also wonder if consideration will be given for narrative style and the voice of the character whose perspective is being used. I do hope it will. Additionally, I wonder how strict you are going to be in terms of what constitutes an error. For example: there are stylistic rules that different people handle with varying degrees of attentiveness, like placement of certain commas (the most obvious example, of course, is the Oxford comma, but there are other instances where one might or might not use a comma and it's a matter of how one wishes the sentence to flow), the use of a conjunction to start a sentence or a preposition to end it, and how one deals with pronouns for a single entity of indeterminate gender. If there are to be consequences that pertain to what in the end is a personal choice even if perhaps not technically correct (and there are debates over what are claimed to be the "official" rules for these and other issues), I would like to know. More serious transgressions, such as the egregiously erroneous use of "like" in places where it might be put conversationally but not in formal writing, or deliberate technical violations done for effect, are also a concern.
There can be stylistic differences in writing that remain technically flawless in composition - as demonstrated by @mdk, the showoff. As you noted though, people may make specific stylistic or aesthetic decisions in writing a passage that substantially alter its flow - and for those of you who have been paying attention to my reviews, you will know I am a stickler for passage structure that reads awkwardly. Such stylistic decisions might affect what I report to you, but have no practically meaningful effect on the information being presented. In effect, there is no 'error' too small for me to ignore, but some are so small or limited that any changes rendered are sufficiently negligible as to be irrelevant. You may find that distortions caused by deliberately erroneous stylistic choices will not greatly impede your ability to perceive the Iteration.
Or in more simple terms: The only errors you should be mindful of are errors serious enough that, in accumulation, would detrimentally impact your ability to read and interpret my own passages if I were to adopt those same errors.
Since I am feeling generous, here is an example incorporating your point regarding gender identification. Those who know me well are probably aware that I loath gender pronouns and, in casual conversation, will refer to most individuals as 'they' - and I typically assert that the usage is grammatically correct, though I expect there are plenty who would disagree with me. I will be aiming to keep my initial responses more generalized and free of such personalized clutter so as to avoid ambiguity. By default, the meaning of everything I write should be immediately apparent and clear. If you then began using they as a gender neutral first-person pronoun, I would likely adopt that method of referral, and that might not detract terribly from your ability to understand what I write - unless combined with other ambiguous usages of various pronouns or the word they specifically that would render its usage ambiguous. You could argue that such usage is not an error, and I would be inclined to agree - it is less me being strict about punishing errors and more the contextual reality adapting to what you present it with.
In essence: As the spiteful Termite I am, I will be going out of my way to pick out and incorporate 'stylistic choices' from your writing that make it harder to understand overall. I might also incorporate certain elements of your writing that, while harmless on their own, might synergize with other seemingly innocuous elements of writing to create an unintelligible mess. I will not be so unreasonable as to create patterns of error that do not exist, but I will take advantage of even the smallest genuine mistakes made.
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
The Twelve Labours
Welcome to the Final Hazard. This little project has been a long time coming now. For those of you who are not aware, the Final Hazard is essentially a Challenge Roleplay - intended as a difficult Victory-Lap-Roleplay for winners of prior entries in The Twelve Labours. You can participate even if you did not win any of the contests from The Twelve Labours Series One, albeit with a significant disadvantage (as you will see in the rules below).
As a warning both to TTL regulars as well as to newcomers: THERE IS NO GRAND REWARD AWAITING THE WINNERS HERE - beyond a spiffy forum trophy and bragging rights. This is important to keep in mind since the roleplay itself will be brutally unkind, and I shall be merciless in my work. It is my recommendation that you not participate unless you are utterly sure about what you are getting yourself into, are looking for a challenge to overcome, and are prepared to be ground into charnel paste by the lack of parity.
Since I expect people to pull a double take and question what the point of the contest is as soon as they see the Challenge Criteria, and since this will be my only real opportunity to show a bit of my hand without breaking the rules of the roleplay, I will just say that I have a particular Object Lesson in mind. Even if you are not particularly interested in what I might have to say, I should hope that the opportunity to sharpen your writing skills to utter technical perfection should be motive enough to participate.
May You All Live On in Song and Story, and my deepest apology in advance.
The Final Hazard
"History is an agreed-upon fiction."
Your characters cannot win or complete this challenge. Victory is out of their hands. Their suffering is pre-ordained, their escape from it impossible. The Final Hazard exists only to cause them anguish and torment.
To clear this challenge, you must determine why Victory is impossible. Then you must show me your Courage.
1. Follow the standard guild rules. 2. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 3. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 4. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 5. You must use your own characters. No roleplaying as characters you yourself did not create.
-The Final Hazard will operate as a regular, play-by-post roleplay thread. The story will proceed through a number of different roleplaying Iterations, each inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours. Each individual Iteration will be separated by a brief Period of Respite.
-During a Respite Period, the starting date for the next Iteration will be revealed - you may then choose in advance whether or not you intend to participate in that iteration (scheduling realities being what they are).
-Each Iteration will proceed at a breakneck pace - participants who are tagged for a response are expected to post within 48 hours, no exceptions. I will be holding myself to this standard as well. Before you open your mouth to complain about how unreasonable that is: I have a life outside the Guild myself. A job, accomplices I affiliate with, other things I waste my time on - and so does every other participant. Your circumstances are not so exceptional that I will make an exception. That said, a failure to post within the time limit does not eliminate you from the roleplay - but the penalty for such a failure is severe, as you will see below.
-You may submit any one character you desire to participate in a given iteration. Any character at all. You have carte blanche to go crazy. Let your inner power-tripper go mad, if you like.
-Each Iteration will progress until every poster character has been killed IC or has escaped the iteration, at which point the Iteration will end and the Period of Respite for the next Iteration will begin. Each new iteration will present opportunities to gain clues and information pertaining to the challenge. Each opportunity will invariably bring fatal risks.
-Each Iteration shall operate as a Holistic Contextual Reality. You are free to submit any kind of character you want. You are free to use any kind of standard of writing you like, be that sloppy and unpolished or otherwise. You are free to miss your individual response deadline. The Contextual Reality of the roleplay will alter to accommodate the circumstances, which is not as convenient as it sounds. The more broken or unbelievable a character is, the more hostile the Iteration becomes overall. The more errors you commit to writing, the more unstable the Iteration will become. If you miss the 48 hour response deadline, the entire Iteration will begin to collapse.
-Yes, this means that everyone can fail an Iteration due to one person screwing up. This is part of why the Period of Respite exists - it will alert you to whom you will be working with and give you some time to coordinate in advance. If a troll slips into the ranks, trust that I shall deal with them accordingly.
-If nobody participates in a given Iteration, The Final Hazard Will End. Everyone Will Lose. There is little point in maintaining the Challenge if there is no interest or possibility of participating.
-Every participant in the roleplay will have a limited number of lives. Every time a character dies within an Iteration, their poster loses a life.
-If you lose all of your lives, you cannot participate.
-Everybody has one life by default.
-You gain additional Lives by participating in The Twelve Labours forum contests and clearing the challenges. Each win grants you an additional life. Each Challenge Accolade you earn grants you another life on top of that. This applies to past victories in TTL: Series One, so TTL Veterans who already have some wins and accolades have a significant advantage here.
-You may donate lives to any other poster participating in the contest. You may not donate your last remaining life. If you donate more than a single life to another poster, one life is burnt in the transaction. This is applicable on a per-poster basis, meaning separate donations of one life only will not work. Each separate transaction of more than one life also counts, so if you are going to do this I would recommend large donations.
-All donated lives are considered to still be of the poster they originated from. If a poster who has donated lives runs out and is eliminated from the contest, their donated lives default to the ownership of the poster they were donated to. Posters may not donate lives which do not originate from themselves.
-Posters who have been inactive on the forum for a period of more than six months are considered inert - their lives cannot be traded and are considered null for the purposes of the contest until such time as the poster returns.
-Once All Lives have been Lost, the Final Hazard Will End. This means everyone has lost.
-The task of every poster - beyond mere participation in the Contextual Reality of each Iteration - is to fulfill the Challenge described above. As already stated, opportunities to discover clues and useful information will avail themselves to you during the course of each Iteration.
-Once you think you know what you are supposed to do, Show Me Your Courage.
-I will never openly confirm, deny, elaborate on, or idly comment upon any occurence/event that transpires in the roleplay under normal circumstances.
-You may ask me to confirm any theories you have and/or validate any evidence you have accumulated. I reserve the right to ask for a wager of any number of lives in return for confirmations and/or validations. Incorrect theories and/or irrelevant evidence will result in lives wagered being lost. No lives are lost if all theories are confirmed and/or all evidence is validated. In the event of partially correct theories or partially relevant evidence, all lives wagered are lost but I will specify all accurate parts of all presented theories and/or evidence.
Q. What was that about having carte blanche to go crazy with our characters? A. You may submit any particular kind of character for participation in a given iteration - they may be of any quality you choose and may possess as much personal power as you like. You may submit space pirates, elven mages, reality manipulators, gods, and ice cream vendors. Be wary of doing so.
Q. Why would I *not* submit the most powerful character possible? A. Each Iteration acts as a Holistic Contextual Reality. The more *broken* and *unbelievable* your character is relative to the setting and to the other characters present, the more hostile and inimical the Iteration will become - for everyone participating. The scale of escalation here is exponential, so submitting a character as powerful as an unrestricted reality manipulator would effectively render the Iteration unbeatable. The form this scaling threat will take varies, but typically will take the form of environmental hazards or hostile entities.
Q. What was that about writing, form, and instability? A. Each Iteration - as discussed - is a Holistic Contextual Reality. It is only as stable as you, the participant writers, permit it to be. For every individual technical mistake you make as a poster - typos, misspelled words, poor grammar, awkward sentence structure - the less stable the Contextual Reality becomes. The entirety of the Iteration will bend and contort to accommodate the errors you introduce into the world, making it progressively more and more difficult to perceive the world from our perspective as narrators. tl;dr: The more technical mistakes you make, the more deliberate errors I will introduce into my own posts. Have fun with that. There may be a measure of utility to this feature...
Q. What happens if I miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. The entire framework of the Contextual Reality begins to collapse. The laws of physics will cease to operate, spacetime will become a suggestion, cosmogone arbadacarba noose. This is a bad thing - it could render the entirety of the Iteration unbeatable. The more participants there are in an Iteration, the more leeway you have if one poster cannot make the deadline. You might be able to make do with mild disruption.
Q. What happens if *you* miss the 48 hour response deadline? A. Time in the Iteration will freeze, and your characters may safely peruse it in its entirety as though it were an art gallery. Particular areas, entities, and setpieces will include author's commentary, and all pre-established opportunities for clues will be revealed and expounded upon. The Iteration otherwise proceeds normally, unless another poster should miss their 48 hour deadline - in which case time instantly resumes.
Q. How might a character 'Escape' an iteration? A. By exiting stage left. At some points, opportunities for a given character to 'leave' the setting will present themselves. These may come early or later on as the Iteration progresses. If you suspect things are about to go terribly wrong, it might be best to play it safe and escape - if your character leaves the Iteration safely, you do not lose a life once the Iteration ends, be that end tidy or otherwise. However, if your character leaves without having found any worthwhile information or clues for you to interpret, the exercise has been a waste. You must take risks to discover the purpose of the challenge.
Q. Can I participate after losing all my lives? A. If somebody donates you additional lives, or if you gain additional lives through participation in TTL contests. Losing all your lives does not forever preclude you from future participation.
Q. I can join if I have never participated in TTL, right? A. Yes! You only get one life though, unless you participate in a TTL challenge or else have lives donated to you by another poster.
Q. What will the setting for the next Iteration be? A. You do not know in advance, beyond that it will be inspired by the mythical Twelve Labours and will adapt to your characters.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Lives
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
-An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. [1 Lost] -@Cruallassar 4 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 donated from shylarah] [1 Lost] -@Dark Wind 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@Doc Doctor 1 Life [1 Lost] -@Habibi359 has 2 Lives -@Holmishire 10 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Lost] -@JulienJaden 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@jumpadraw 2 Lives -An Anonymous Poster has 2 Lives. -@mdk 11 Lives (4 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@PlatinumSkink 11 Lives (3 Accolades) [1 Lost] -@Psyga315 4 Lives -@RomanAria 2 Lives (1 Accolade) [1 Donated to shylarah] -@Sen 2 Lives -@shylarah 2 Lives [1 Donated from RomanAria] [1 donated to Cruallassar] -An Anonymous Poster has 4 Lives (1 Accolade) -@WiseDragonGirl 11 Livess
Name: Entity: What are they? Age: Arbitrary linear measurement of ontological inertia across a single temporal axis imposed over three spatial dimensions. In the eventuality of timeless beings, a coordinate representation of their initial intrusion into the Contextual Reality shall be sufficient. Genre: An inquiry only to be answered with the utmost caution. Allineation: All That Rises Must Converge. A Dream of Stars and Soft Rains that Scour Dawn From Living Memory.
Barring the provision of a visual reference, provide sufficient written detail to enable others to mentally visualize the entity in question.
You want to write a character biography in a roleplay with a Contextual Reality involving other characters? Gutsy of you. The Contextual Reality will adapt to reconcile all relevant histories, which will always result in a stable Iteration but may create certain relative forms of weirdness for the characters involved. Creating a highly specific history might afford you the privilege to finely shape and control the setting the Iteration takes – as long as there are no inconsistent or conflicting histories. Needless to say, this section is optional and used at your own risk.
Include any description of your character’s personality, temperament, and behavior here. It is not mandatory and I will be proceeding largely on the assumption that your character’s personality will sufficiently establish itself over the course of the Iteration without you having to force-feed it to readers in advance.
I have provided some template fillers here for you, but feel free to organize and arrange this section as you see fit and is convenient.
Skills: What specific kinds of tasks does your character excel at doing?
Abilities: What native capabilities does your character derive from their nature or form? Are they particularly strong, fast, resilient, etcetera.
Knowledge: What forms of esoterica, arcane forces, forbidden secrets, or juicy gossip is your character aware of? A reference to any background of general study or education might be described here.
A Hot Pink Frock: Listed for the convenience of their next-of-kin, perhaps. Clothing, armor, equipment, weaponry, accessories, ornaments, etcetera.
Current Setting:
Active Iteration
There is no end in sight... If You want to Participate in the Second Iteration, wait for the first one to end.
The first of the new series of Labours begins. For those of you who are just dropping in and have no idea what this is, take a peek at The Twelve Labours Introduction Thread (it's a quick read, I promise).
For those of you who participated in the first iteration of the Twelve Labours, you may be interested to know that the new series will have a distinctively different thematic orientation - born both out of necessity and also because even my sadism has limits. Each task will less focused on mold-breaking and more on exploration with different forms of narrative - it should become evident what I mean by that once you take a peek at the first task below.
Let the First Labour commence. Submission ends at Objective Midnight, February 12th.
Entry Rules:
1. Jaffar's (left) thumb. 2. Follow the standard guild rules. 3. Obey the Dark Lord Sauron's rulesas well (just to cover all the bases). 4. Follow MY rules too. Let it never be said we did not warn you. 5. Send your entry to @Terminal by February 12th. 6. Be sure to include whether or not you want your story to remain anonymous! I will add your name only if I am given your permission! 7. Any explicit/mature material must be kept off-site. I will only post links to them with NSFW notices. 8. I reserve the right to simply toss out any story if it does not possess a basic modicum of good sense and taste. Do not make me. 9. All stories must adhere to a certain standard of quality expected of good storytelling. 10. You must use your own characters. Preexisting characters from franchise settings may only be alluded to. 11. If your setting is borrowed from a franchise, make sure to include a disclaimer and credit the original inventor of the setting used.
Prizes:
All winning entries will receive a forum trophy as well as a unique, custom forum title which they can activate and deactivate at their leisure. Additionally, winning entries of particularly exceptional quality will be awarded Challenge Accolades.
All winning entries will also be saved to a public archive, a link to which will be permanently available in my signature! I personally post in the News and Discussion subforums of the guild to congratulate and announce the winners as well. As a reminder, unless you specifically give me permission to include authorship of an entry, every posted story will remain anonymous (awarded trophies can also be hidden in your user profile, so you will not show up if people are examining the trophy groups).
The Twelfth Labour
"Silly man, with your bones beneath your flesh! Where is the use in that? You would do better to wear your armor over your skin, like me."
The Twelfth Labour
This Labour will task you to set aside every character you have made to date. Summon your drive and sup on impetus; the entirety of your work should be novel. You shall be tasked to create something unique - take heed, for they will be precious beyond knowing but subject to the most precarious of circumstances. How might you armor their hearts and their minds against the adversity that shall befall them?
Create the character of an invulnerable, mythical entity, and write an appropriate mythological legend of either a tragic or moral slant around them. The legend must end with their death.
This section exists specifically to ensure there is no ambiguity or ambivalence in what, precisely, the challenge requires of each participant. If you have any specific questions which are not addressed here, please send them to @Terminal for resolution.
For The First Labour of series two, I have asked you to write about the legend and death of a mythical, invulnerable entity.
Q. I have to set aside every character I have made to date? A. You are not to use any character you have already employed in the past -and- must also set aside those who you have already come up with in your mind and have been patiently waiting their turn. Every character featured in your story should be a brand new entity rendered from scratch.
Q. The new character must be invulnerable? A. The dictionary defines 'invulnerable' as an adjective meaning "Incapable of being wounded, hurt, or damaged." and "Proof against or immune to attack." There is a degree of nuance to the word which I will leave to your own interpretation. Bear in mind you will have the burden of establishing the exact fashion in which your character is invulnerable.
Q. I have to write a mythological legend? A. Your story shall not be told contemporaneously - it has likely, by this point, been distorted and corrupted by centuries of oral tradition and exaggeration. This is not to say your story cannot be told in the present sense; it should be that there are fantastical and/or otherwise legendary aspects present in the story which would normally be reserved as unbelievable hogwash or bald-faced lies. This point of clarification is more of a suggestion as to the aesthetic presentation of your story than a hard and fast rule, and I will be unlikely to fail an entry for not adhering to this point alone.
Q. The legend must be of either a tragic or moral slant? A. Like all good legends, either something spectacularly awful happens or else the listener is imparted with a questionable aesop. Or both. The story should either be tragic in its telling or else serve to elucidate a particular object lesson.
Q. The legend must end with their death? A. They were probably asking for it by being invulnerable anyway. Do the impossible. Be creative about it and leave behind studious notes. I shall not be as strict about this as I was during the original First Labour, but let it nonetheless be known that I will be neither impressed nor amused by clever (read: unclever by dint of being trite) subversions of this point. On the upside, unlike in the original First Labour, their deaths need not be unpleasant per-se.
Q. How long can my story be? A. As long as you feel is necessary. I will read any and everything submitted, irregardless of length, and write a review on it. Do not let the short three-day judging period dissuade you. If you have a 800,000 word brick for me, I will take it. Similarly, extremely short stories are also welcome. It is entirely possible for segues as short as three paragraphs long to clear the challenge.
Thanks again to @mdk, and the entire RPGC crew for helping with scheduling for The Twelve Labours!
Great thanks to @mahz and the other members of the guild staff for helping to renovate the guild and enabling the features that allow us to reward contestants and to advertise our presence.
The brilliant image of the Nemean Lion up above was made by CORinAZONe on DeviantArt, whose profile can be viewed here.
I have been writing as a hobby for longer than you have been alive. I have been a regular member and roleplayer of no less than fourteen different online forums during that time (including the old RPG), [s]five[/s] [s]six[/s] eight of which no longer exist.
I was previously a regular on the Homestuck forums, but I became so sick of thread turnover there that I asked around and eventually found the Guild. Since joining, I have exclusively only participated in Advanced RPs. Before Mahz gave NRPs their own subforum, I used to be an NRP regular in the Advanced Subforum. I am a Guildfall survivor, and know/regularly write with a few others.
If you ask anybody who has written with me in previous RPs, they should tell you that I have a generally open schedule, I post regularly and in a timely fashion, and I never drop an RP once I join unless the thread dies. Some of them may tell you that I have extensive expertise within the realms of Biology, Psychology, and Physics, which I will make no effort to validate since there is no way I can provide hard proof of aforementioned alleged expertise to anybody over the internet (though I am happy to try and answer any questions you send my way).
My favorite fandom is the Myst franchise, which seemingly nobody other than me has ever heard of.
I was a Contest Moderator for the Writing Contests Subforum for just a little bit over two years. I wrote the Moderation Policy for that subforum and I ran a contest called the Twelve Labours; you can still go there and see all of them and the entries people wrote for them in the [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/forums/45-writing-contests]Contests Section[/url] and the [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/79562-the-twelve-labours-victory-archive/ooc]Victory Archives.[/url]
I have been quadruple secret banned from the guild discord. That is not a joke.
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">I have been writing as a hobby for longer than you have been alive. I have been a regular member and roleplayer of no less than fourteen different online forums during that time (including the old RPG), <span class="bb-s">five</span> <span class="bb-s">six</span> eight of which no longer exist.<br><br>I was previously a regular on the Homestuck forums, but I became so sick of thread turnover there that I asked around and eventually found the Guild. Since joining, I have exclusively only participated in Advanced RPs. Before Mahz gave NRPs their own subforum, I used to be an NRP regular in the Advanced Subforum. I am a Guildfall survivor, and know/regularly write with a few others.<br><br>If you ask anybody who has written with me in previous RPs, they should tell you that I have a generally open schedule, I post regularly and in a timely fashion, and I never drop an RP once I join unless the thread dies. Some of them may tell you that I have extensive expertise within the realms of Biology, Psychology, and Physics, which I will make no effort to validate since there is no way I can provide hard proof of aforementioned alleged expertise to anybody over the internet (though I am happy to try and answer any questions you send my way).<br><br>My favorite fandom is the Myst franchise, which seemingly nobody other than me has ever heard of.<br><br>I was a Contest Moderator for the Writing Contests Subforum for just a little bit over two years. I wrote the Moderation Policy for that subforum and I ran a contest called the Twelve Labours; you can still go there and see all of them and the entries people wrote for them in the <a href="https://www.roleplayerguild.com/forums/45-writing-contests">Contests Section</a> and the <a href="https://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/79562-the-twelve-labours-victory-archive/ooc">Victory Archives.</a><br><br>I have been quadruple secret banned from the guild discord. That is not a joke.</div>
KactusPunch
Crown Sage
MarshalSolgriev
SkyeOfStars
princess
Zeroth
