So, where do we start???

I'd definitely like to continue on with the characters we have, but what's the best way to do that? Here are some ideas I've been thinking about, and I'm not sure which is best.

- continue the story as is, but it is a number of months after the previous storybook. That way, we have a small bit of history that we all know and can refer back to it. Perhaps at this point Elbridge is with the thief-takers. Since we all invested a decent amount of time in this, it allows us to continue.

- back the story up to the point where Savv goes back, then take it a different direction. Kind of like a choose-your-own adventure story where you didn't like the outcome and bounced back to a previous page before you made the bad decision.

- Take the same characters and the same steampunk thief-taker setup, and just....start over.

So, that's my take on things. Also...did anyone keep any of the character profiles? I thought that I had the one for Jarvis, but I haven't found it yet....which means I probably don't have it.

Only thing that I still found was a small handwritten note with a list of most of the characters and a one-word summary of them.
Ralkin - Portals
Stephen - Richboy
Jarvis - Inventor
Joe - Fireninja
Aleck - Darkguy, dislikes pathmakers
Jack - Armour

Not in this list:
Savv
Aran
Drew
Aria
Rajar
...uh...forgot the name of the latest new character

I would say we should start all over with the same characters. Kinda sucks, but I just don't like the idea of having part of the story missing. There was a lot in the original story that I liked, but it's gone and I think we should just leave it that way.
Writing a summary of the latest events and then continuing in one of the ways that you suggested might be fine too, though.

I have absolutely nothing. I had kept the original character profiles, but deleted them when I lost all else, as I didn't think there'd me much chance of getting anything back.

Besides, I think we need to move away from the setting of PMOG anyhow.
By all means keep your character (or as close as you can remember or want to have it), and have a SIMILAR kind of setting. If nothing else, we may now want to be wary of copyright infringement of PMOG/Nethernet stuff, now that we're a separate entity.

I still like the idea of thief-takers in a steampunk setting, where various characters also have certain abilities. I also reckon we need to cut down the amount of central characters. That was where it all started to get out of hand for me. Five max for the core group.

Personally, I'd also like us to start taking an interest in characters' histories too (like we just about tried to towards the end)

Another thing - might it be an idea to try and get an idea of the shape of the world our folks are going to inhabit? Even if it's a rough idea, we could then get an idea of distances and relative proximity for countries/cities.

Here's my thoughts for a plan of action (assuming it's just the three of us fer now):

Write (or re-write) biogs for characters - two apiece so we have the core group plus an extra to float about. Hash out the basic abilities available and come up with new names for them, maybe? Maybe the sixth character could be a rarely-seen boss or similar (something like the TV Avengers or Charley's Angel's had.

Establish the world. How many landmasses, seas; rough idea of where some countries and cities are. Do we have a base of operations, if so, where is that? Are there places we frequent or avoid?

Research. I do know about geography and geology, but I know I don't know enough about tech (even Steampunk types). I certainly need to read up on a few things...

How's that for now? Please let me know if there's a problem with that idea.

Cheers
Matt

Hm...I'm not really scared of copyright infringement. I don't think Gamelayers is like that. Still, since we're doing this here, we might as well develop our own background.
I don't really like the idea of a boss much. I'm not totally opposed to it, but I'd rather not have a boss. So if Ob Thundersnot likes the idea, I wouldn't mind it much, either.
All the rest sounds good to me, let's do that.

Overall, good plan of action. Start over...roll out the biogs of the main characters...I like it. Good point about the world..geography, cultures, hideouts, enemies, friends, etc. Get a good sketch of these, even though in the previous biogs, we did have some detail on other countries....just didn't have where they were in relation to others.
Not real sure about having a boss character either. I liked the somewhat chaotic way that some characters stepped up and moved back depending on the situation...but is that workable in the long term? Gonna have to think on that a bit.

By the way...I believe I'm going to keep Jarvis pretty much as is, from what I can remember and then add a new one.

--edit--

By the way....how should we go about forming this world...same as with characters? Create a country/region and add details and then try to mesh them together?

If we just start off with our characters to begin with, yeah?

If we take two apiece, so we have six available. I'm going to keep Ralkin as far as I can remember it too, so no probs there. I only threw out the idea of a boss, just as a possibility of having the sixth person being useful. That, in turn, depended on there only being five in the core group.

When we're developing characters, may I suggest we alter the abilities slightly? Nothing to do with fears of copyright, but more to have a fresh start and to make this more our own. Ralkin, if you can recall, had almost internalised the portal power, so he was certainly on that road already. A destroyer could be tele.. um - explosive (note to self.. look up the damn term...) and a vigilante could be some kind of neural suppressor that stops others from accessing their own abilities - instead of using a St Nick. You get the idea
If we claim two classes each for our characters, is that fine? (NB, that's one class per character, two per writer)

Once we have the characters roughly laid out, then we can worry about geography etc. I have had a little experience with maps (Geology at school and a D&D dungeonmaster to boot), so I don't mind sitting down on that one.

One thing I will say (and I have to say this sounds familiar to me here), I need to wait until after Easter to really sit down and think about this as I have my folks coming to stay for a few days. The house is nearly clean, but there's still stuff to do.

I can do quick things, but ye'll have to bear with me on in-depth stuff.

I too, have a lot going on at the moment. I could possibly hope to get at least one biography up in the next few days and the other sometime next week. So, yeah...it'll be a little slow getting things going at first.

All for altering the abilities, but I also think we could go a different direction than what PMOG/Nethernet has set up as classes. I don't have any good examples/ideas at the moment, but I'll continue to think on that.

I think we should just start with determining a few basic things about the world before making the characters. I'll just propose a few things, and if you agree that this is how we should do things, you can add to them or take things off the list. If you disagree, I'll just leave it for later.

-The main way of getting to places are trains and steam-powered ships.
-Other forms of transportation do exist (like steamtanks or airships), but they are hi-tech. They may be mass-produced in a few decades, but right now, each one of them is unique.
-The country were the story takes place is very industrialized, among the most highly-developped nations in the world.
-Special powers are rare-maybe 5% of the population have them (thief takers would of course favour people with powers, so about half of the group might have supernatural abilities).
-People with powers are feared. Most of them hide their powers. Although they generally get into high positions in the military, they rarely succeed in politics.
-Rumour has it that the most highly ranked politicians actually do have powers that helped them get as far as they got, but they're hiding their powers.

Yeah. So tell me what you think about the stuff that I've written.

Overall, I see no objectionable things. So, if we are sticking with similar abilities as last time, this makes the thief-taker bunch even more freakish than your average person.

I like your suggestions, especially regarding the transport system.
I'll be getting back into this shortly... bear with me.

I don't want to be too involved with the 'behind the scenes' bits; it's only fair. But; I'd be happy to help with the invention of the world, like cities 'nd objects 'nd things. I love doing things like that

For maledicus' train idea, just use the Greater London train map. It's complicated enough and I think the whole 'supernaturals are to be feared' thing could make for some awesome plots! X-Men, plz?

Oh, and you know how you're talking about a very industrialised (I SPELL THINGS THE BRITISH WAY! RAWR!) area? ... can there still be grass? It would be sad if all the grass had gone. Then again, that could make for some awesome plots, too.

Umm... that's it. I don't want to add. Bai~

Finally! I brought the whole original group of writers together again. Yaaaaaaay!
Which brings us to our first problem: more writers means more characters, so someone will have to only use one character. I expected to have Mnesomeye back with us anyway, so I'll volunteer, since I was planning to do that right from the start and never even thought about my new character.
Having only one char has its upsides too, and I really liked Savv, so I definitely want Mnes to have her own char again.
So, about the grass: when I said "very industrialized" (I spell things...in a weird mix of the American and the British way, since I learned both and constantly mix them up ), I meant compared to the rest of the world. I imagined a world mostly like our world at the time of the industrial revolution: a lot of new technologies have been invented but haven't spread to the whole world. There's a lot of pollution, because mankind hasn't realized how harmful those new technologies can be. People might be complaining about the bad air or about the declining numbers of fish in the rivers, but there's not a big movement of environmentalists yet. So at least in the world that I had imagined, yes, there's still grass. Probably should have made that clearer. Talk about the stuff that I added. Now. Oh, and I think there should be colonies and empires.
Moving on...so, why don't you want to be involved in the "'behind the scenes' bits", Mnes? I think we could sure use another creative mind to make this as good as possible, but I guess it's your decision...
Next (and last) point on my list: I think I'm going to make a portal on my Nethernet profile to this page, just for the few people who might still be interested. Right now, the whole page is open for anybody, so I think you can even write here without being a member. I'm planning to change that for the story thread, but wanted to keep it that way in the discussion forum, since I don't mind people telling us a few things about the way the story should go, and I can delete any posts here anyway. The "Randomness" forum would be invisible to outsiders. Anybody have a problem with that, or are you fine with my plans?
That's all for now, see ya!

Hmm... I think we ought to make this invite only - and even then, let's get things sorted out first, yeah?

"Invite only" isn't possible, but not allowing new members is, as well as new people having to request membership from the admin. So, how private do you want this forum (or each one of the specific forums) to be? Invisible to outsiders, read-only, allow writing? The thing is, I'm not really concerned about annoying posts by outsiders. If there actually should be someone who wants to comment...go ahead. If I find the comment disrespectful, I can delete it immediately and simply close the forum if the person continues. I don't really care too much about that though, so I'll just do whatever you guys think is right.
By the way, this forum can be heavily customised, so if there's anything that you guys want, just ask me if it can be added (I could add a gallery so you could post pictures of some of the places/objects/persons in the story, or I could add character sheets, I think. Never really checked how they work and if they are suitable for the biogs).

If we can keep the story thread clear of anyone that is not approved, that's my only concern. Discussion thread seems to be appropriate for others to jump in and comment. Any other threads can be either hidden/limited/open....depending on what they are, I guess.

That's my two cents.

Michael

I was just thinking that you could have two people with one character, which would help keep the group size a little smaller and also you could go into detail about the characters' histories more ^o^
Waaaaaa, too much art coursework *sob*

Yeah, that's what I thought too, since Spikey wanted a limit of 5 for the group and one character who does...something else, more than one person would have to have only one char. Since there is already the possibility in here to have one of your characters as a minor character, I guess that's not really necessary, though. So to me, it doesn't really matter if anybody chooses to write more than one biog or not, as long as everybody gets to make at least one.

Ya, I like that idea. So um... do we have enough information we need to start? Or does everyone want to still work on the story theme?

I think we've got enough, Spikeyboy and Ob Thundersnot still seem to be busy, though. But if you want to start posting your character summary, just do so.

Seriously; if we need to spend more time on the story idea, then it's fine. Spikey wanted to make a map, too. I was just wondering if we had enough information to get it off the ground, that was all. I'll post my character description when the other two aren't so busy ^_^

I'm going to be getting my head down into it this w/e - I would have done it last one, but I was pretty rough all through it.

Let's just get profiles done, then I can perhaps bring them altogether from there.

Well, if all goes well, my home will have an internet connection Sat morning. I've been tinkering with Jarvis' biography and should have it set by Sunday or Monday...if all goes well with the internet connection. Since the wonderful folks at Time Warner cable have had nothing but blunder after blunder on this install, I'm not counting on them getting it right this time...but hopefully they will.

Also, I don't yet have a second character completely worked out...just rough ideas, so that one may take a few more days.

*cheerfully sprawls onto a sofa and waits*

I'm working on Ralkin's bio tonight, but I'm trying to remember what categories we had before. In the face of a failing memory (it's the age, sorry. Wait til the bladder goe.... crap..), I laid down these categories as a guideline fer myself:

APPEARANCE
ABILITIES
OTHER SKILLS
WEAKNESSES
LOCATION(S)
PERSONAL HISTORY

The 'location' category is essentially us trying to come up with a little background information about where our characters are from, where they live, and where they operate from (prior to joining the group). Please note that, while I have separated out the 3 sub-sections, they may not actually be different. Also, you don't necessarily have to post details of their geography; it's mainly just to get a feel fer yer character.

Ditto fer the personal histories: just a basic idea to get things straight, but only reveal what ye want.

Hope folks are up fer those ideas.

I think the SCIA people just used our template and changed it to include magical powers, so I just deleted the magic category and added location:

Name:

Age:

Gender:

Appearence:

Strenghts:

Weaknesses:

Personality:

History:

Other:

Location: