Neptune

More Information Club Roleplaying Club Roleplays, or Public Roleplays as they are also known as, are made by the community for everyone to take part in. If we don’t have it, you can create it and become a Game Master. These Roleplays take advantage of the Club system of our site; and can be found under the explore menu, then clubs. Just above the most right hand side of the clubs display page, you should see a filter option where you can have it so that you’re only seeing the roleplay clubs. That way you can see the clubs that are completely dedicating to fulfilling the roleplaying desires. Once upon a time, back in the ages of antiquity, there were only a few roleplays on EcchiDreams. The four, fixed Scenarios; Blackberry Falls, Craethiel Kingdom, Utopian Curse and Andromeda. These were the only ones we had, and they were located in the main forums in their own sections. But still, people yearned for their own scenarios. Admittedly, we were sketchy on this idea but we warmed up to it. At first, these first customisable roleplays were, like with the old scenarios, sitting in the main forum with their own section. It was still quite restrictive with what you were able to do. Finally, we were introduced to the feature of Clubs. This allowed us to allow Dreamers to have the freedom to set up their roleplay how they wish, as they would own the club. It is even possible for Dreamers to set up their own staff within their club, to be their own moderators. We do, however, recommend that you check out this guide, if you actually want to make one. It will take you through a step-by-step guide as to how to set up your very own Club Roleplay. Once you’ve organised your idea and put it together, thinking about what kind of people you want to roleplay with you, how much reading you want to be involved with the story, and what criteria you can think of, post it up. Remember; the Home Page of your roleplay is a doorway into your universe. There are a few tools within this club that can be utilised by the Club Creator: Home Page - You are able to set up a Home Page for your Roleplay, that you can customise to your liking. It acts as the doorway into your Roleplay and is the first thing a potential Roleplayer sees when they first enter your Club. This is the perfect place to hold vital information, such as the difficulty rating of the roleplay and links to important threads. To find out more about how to set up a great homepage to your club, click or tap here. Gallery Category - This allows you to have a special category, and even albums within it, for the images that relate to your club. You could set one up to hold the character images and their profiles. You are able to have more than one category, allowing you to set up a separate one for different functions such as characters, and extra information images. Topic Forums - This allows you to have a special forum where your topics can be posted, such as the main roleplay thread, extra information threads, or even side stories. Again, you are able to have more than one forum allowing you to set up a separate one for different functions such as roleplay threads, side story threads, character threads or even extra information threads. Staff - As an owner of a Club, you have the power to make members of your Club into staff for that particular club. You have the ability to grant individuals Moderator, or Administrator titles, both with abilities to moderate the club. See the Club Roleplaying and You guide for more information on their permissions. One thing we absolutely recommend spending some time on is a Roleplayer Preferences sheet. And if you can, advertise your roleplay with our Advertising Services, which uses EcchiCredits, our contribution based currency. Lastly; in the unfortunate event that a Dreamer has come into your universe and is starting to become a nightmare: Just report their post, and let us know if you need an impartial third party arbitrator; if we’ve tried everything to resolve and it’s not working for whatever reason then we can take a last resort method, and close the door to that dreamer from your roleplay and removing them from your club.

Making a good Roleplayer Preferences Sheet The Roleplayers Preference Sheet is a feature of EcchiDreams that is closely linked with the Roleplay Suite. It’s a very useful way to let other roleplays know what roleplays you are involved in, and also what you are willing and unwilling to do. This will help you to be able to find a roleplaying partner that is compatible to your skill and tastes. Setting up a Roleplaying preference sheet is a relatively simple process, and it is easily found from the EcchiApps menu at the top of the EcchiDreams Page. Once you are inside of the forum, you will be greeted with a list of current roleplayer preferences that have already been completed by other roleplayers. Feel free to browse around them, and see what they have done. When you’re ready to, you will see a button on the right hand named ‘Add new preference’. Click this, and you will be taken to the preference form for you to fill up. We will go through it step, by step. Remember: Only ONE Preference Sheet per Dreamer. Additional Preferences will be removed, as this is meant to be a page about you, as a Roleplayer. Not what Roleplays you are doing, or want to do. Infractions may occur to repeat offenders. Title The first thing that you should perhaps do, is give your preference sheet a name. We advise that you make it something easily relatable to you and your roleplaying. One of the easiest ways to do that is to use your member name, to clearly indicate that it is yours. You could keep it simple, and just put your name and then “Roleplay Preferences” or you could be a little more creative such as “Here are Neptune’s Roleplaying Preferences!” Once you have titled your preference sheet, we can move on. You will notice that the next several things that you see are several selectable fields. One thing you must note that at the moment, the only way to select multiple fields is to hold down the Control (CTRL) key on your keyboard while clicking the options you wish to highlight. It is a clumsy way to do things, however it is our only method of doing it. We are looking at other possibilities, but this is what we have thus far. Private Roleplay Participation This is a single choice, drop down menu which will add a badge to your Preference Sheet which will indicate to other Roleplayers your preference when it comes to Private Roleplays. There are three options within the drop down menu I prefer not to say: This is what you would select if you would rather not let it be publicly known that you do Private Roleplays. If you only do it with a select few and are very selective with who you roleplay privately with, then this might be the option to use. No, so please don’t ask: This is the option to go for if you do not do Private Roleplays at all. It will add a red badge that stands out. I do private roleplays: This adds a badge indicating that you are available to do Private Roleplays and thus people may ask about it. You should even consider posting up a post on our Private Roleplayers Bulletin Board, to advertise your roleplays. Preferred Roleplay Length This is another single section, drop down menu that will indicate the length of Roleplay that you prefer to do. This means the roleplay as a whole, rather than the individual posts, from the very first post to the last of the roleplay. There are four options within the drop down menu: No Preference: This is where you have no real preference when it comes to the length of a roleplay, whether it’s a short roleplay with only a few posts, or a very long roleplay that could take years. Short Roleplays: Select this if you prefer short roleplays with small storylines. Perhaps even porn without plot. Long Roleplays: Select this if you like long roleplays with a good long, engaging storyline that doesn’t go on for too long. Extremely Long Roleplays: These roleplays tend to be extremely long, take a long time to do and have huge intricate storylines. This is likely only for extremely experiences roleplays who like to write novel length roleplays. Preferred Grammar/Spelling Competency This is another single selection, drop down menu that will indicate to other Roleplayers what you prefer when it comes to the spelling and grammar within the posts of the people you roleplay with. Some people simply do not care, however there are those that would prefer someone that is able to produce a well written post with little spelling mistakes and almost immaculate grammar. There are five options within this drop down menu: No Preference: This is the option that you would choose if you have no preference when it comes to spelling and grammar. Fairly Competent: This is the option you would choose if you want your roleplay partner to be fairly competent, perhaps knowing the difference between their, there and they’re and to have a nodding acquaintance with a dictionary. Extremely Competent: This is the option you would choose if you want your roleplay partner to be as meticulous as you are when it comes to spelling and grammar. You prefer partners with a very good grasp on both and to be able to write a well structured post. Don’t mind spelling, must have good grammar: This is what you select if you want good grammar, such as knowing how to use punctuation and proper sentence structure. However you are not fussed when it comes to spelling. Don’t mind grammar, must have good spelling: This is what you select if you want good spelling, such as knowing how to spell conscious and other complicated words, but you’re not too fussed on the grammar side of things. Preferred Post Length This is another single selection, drop down menu. While it seems similar to the Roleplay length above, it is not. This deals with the length of each individual post. Some people don’t mind extremely short posts, such as one liners but there are some that cannot stand such short posts. This will let you indicate to other Roleplayers where you stand on this. There are six options within this drop down menu: No preference: This is the option you would select if you don’t mind engaging with a roleplayer that does one liners, or one that likes to write miniature novels. You do it all and are very flexible when it comes to what your partners like doing. Very Short: This is the selection to make if you prefer one, or two sentences per post. You prefer being short and to the point with your posts, and you prefer that in a roleplaying partner as well. Short: This is the selection to make if you prefer two, or four sentences per post. So not quite one liners but perhaps not quite a paragraph as well. Again, you prefer being short and to the point with your posts, and you prefer that in a roleplaying partner as well. Long: This is the selection to make if you prefer at the very minimum, a single paragraph of text, to up to three. This is more commonly seem with more experienced roleplayers, who like something more substantial than a few sentences to read and respond to. These posts usually have a reasonable level of detail to them. Very Long: This is the selection to make if you prefer at least between three and six paragraphs of roleplaying text with your roleplays. You prefer a good level of detail, and something quite meaty in which to read. Extremely Long: This is the selection to make if you prefer extremely long posts that span more than six paragraphs. This is usually seen with very experienced roleplayers, who love to have a good amount of detail. Will Roleplay the following 'Fetishes' This is the first of the main multiple choice fields. Remember to press ‘CTRL’ in order to highlight multiple sections. This is the list of fetishes that you will absolutely roleplay, so pick carefully. The list is in alphabetical order, so it should be easy to find the ones you want to select. If you’re perfectly willing to do anything, then there is an option for that too, as you can see from the image. If you’ve selected that, then there is no need to select anything else. Will not Roleplay the following 'Fetishes' This is the polar opposite of the previous field. These are fetishes that you will absolutely not roleplay. For example, if you will absolutely not roleplay amputees, then this will show up in your preference. That way, other roleplayers will know what limits that you have set in terms of fetishes and the things that are out of bounds. Will Roleplay the Following Genres This field deals with genres of roleplay that you will happily do, such as the ones seen in the image above. This deals more with the roleplay world in which your characters will find themselves in. Again, as this is a multiple choice field, you can select multiple options. Will not Roleplay the Following Genres This is the polar opposite of the previous field. This is the selection of Roleplay genres that you will absolutely refuse to take part in. For example, you might not like the taste of a Dystopic Roleplay. These selections will appear on your Preference Sheet and make it clear to any potential roleplayers what genres you will refuse to take part in. Will Roleplay with Types of Roleplay Characters This field deals with the types of characters that you are willing to roleplay with, such as species or particular traits such as drugged, alcoholic or housewife. This includes characters that you yourself roleplay with, but with characters that others roleplay. Will not Roleplay with Types of Roleplay Characters This is the polar opposite of the previous field. This is to clearly outline which characters you are unwilling to roleplay with. For example, if you do not your character getting involved with a promiscuous character, then this is the place to highlight that. Again, like with the fetishes, this is to clearly outline any limits in regards to the characters. Full Preferences and Disclosure This text editor is seen at the very bottom of the Preferences form. This allows you to put things that the rest of the forum has missed out, in your opinion such as other fetishes that aren’t listed. Also, if the option was not expansive enough for you, you can add more detail. For example, if you don’t participate in Private Roleplays, you can state the reason as to why. Here is a list of potential content that you could include: Disclaimer: To basically state that the options and actions of your characters aren’t reflective of your own. For example, one of your characters may have racist views due to a plotline, but you yourself are not racist. Just because an actor plays a peadophile on a television, doesn’t mean that they are a peadophile in real life. A little background: About you, as a roleplayer. For example, how long you have been roleplaying, how you got involved and some more detail about how you have evolved over the time. Restrictions: Some absolute no-nos that you want clearly ironed out. There are some things that Roleplayers just cannot abide by, so putting it here in this text box would be a good idea. Plots: Put a list of plots that you are currently involved in. These can be Private, or Public. You could also state whether or not someone can join in with such plots. Extra Information content: Perhaps you want to state pieces of Extra information that you own, such as your own created species. You could put information about them, to show off to other roleplayers that you’re creative, as well as the kind of content you might engage with. Currently involved Roleplays: You could put a detailed list of Roleplays that you currently get involved with, whether it’s a public club or a Private Bulletin. You could also include links. Comments and Reviews Comments The Roleplayer Preference Sheet section allows you to comment on other people's preferences. This could be a request to roleplay, or a general comment about the Preference itself, such as a piece of advice on something that could be added or a comment about how much you like the Sheet itself. This is basically the conversation part of the page, allowing other Dreamers to interact with you as the Roleplayer in question. Reviews This allows other Dreamers to post up a Review about you as a Roleplayer. You are also able to write reviews on the Preference Sheets of other Roleplayers, about any of the Roleplays that you have engaged in with whether it’s public, or private Roleplays. You could mention about their skills as a Roleplayer, their general competency, what you really love about roleplaying and if they’re a good roleplayer to engage with. Be advised: Only write a review if you have actually Roleplayed with that individual. Any reviews done by someone that has not Roleplayed with the Preference Owner, will be removed.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide Protips These are things on EcchiDreams you can do to increase active engagement with other roleplayers: Be Active If you’re hardly active and never respond to anything, then roleplayers will know you’re a bad choice to roleplay with. Some members will only roleplay with other active members. If you’re only on every weekend or so, then state this in your roleplay preferences. Follow your stuff By following your own topics, if for whatever reason you do forget to check up on things, you’ll be emailed when someone makes a reply. When creating a roleplay topic, locate this button at the bottom left hand corner with ‘Notify me of replies’, and make sure it’s checked. This means that when someone posts in that area (be that the main RP, Character ID or OOC) then you’ll get an email about it, or at least be notified on EcchiDreams. Our notification system is highly configurable, and it’s extremely easy to do so. Even from the Follow/Following button at the top of your own topic, you can select how you get your notifications; just a notification and/or an email straight away, or a digest once a day, or once a week. Alternatively you can look at this activity stream, which shows you updates on things you follow. Not only that, but each Club has their own activity stream of what goes on within the club, so you can check for new posts or even new Dreamers that have joined. Sand Box Use the Sandbox to sort through your posts before you officially put it up. This allows you to properly space everything out, and to tweak it so that it is perfect. That means that you can post up your threads perfect, everytime. The Sandbox can not only be used for your roleplay information, but also for sorting out your Character IDs before they are officially posted. This is very useful if you are doing something like transferring text over from an outside word processor such as Word or Google Docs, and you need to correct the formatting. If you are creating a new Character, and are only using the site to work on it, you can use the Sandbox to allow you to work at a relaxed pace so that you can perfect it. Image Control By pressing CTRL and right clicking on the image, you can select ‘edit image’, or by double clicking/tapping on the image, you can actually alter how the image is displayed. If you want it nestled into the text, you can select its alignment. If you want to play around with the thumbnail size, you can also do that, though it’s recommended to keep ‘Keep original aspect ratio’ ticked. Once you’ve clicked update, you’ll be able to see how it looks in the editor to give you a rough idea of how it’ll be displayed.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide Tips and Tricks Communication Make sure that you keep the communication flowing between yourself and the players involved in your roleplay. That way, if any questions come up, they can be answered. This also helps you form friendships with those that you are roleplaying with, and hopefully encourages them to stick around with your roleplay. Disputes Try and settle them fairly and neutrally; take in all the facts before you make a decision. Don’t be hostile, don’t use an accusing tone, and don’t assume guilt right off the bat. If you can’t deal with it, don’t hesitate to get a member of staff to come in and act as an impartial third party. Say No Don’t be afraid to say no to players. If you’re the Game Master of a roleplay, you need to keep the players in line to prevent them from going off all over the place and ruining the roleplay. Don’t be afraid to refuse a character if it is not suitable for your roleplay; although if you refuse a character, take the time to explain why the character is not suitable so that the player can attempt to correct what is wrong, or create a newer, more suitable character. Don’t be afraid to take the blame when things go wrong. It makes the players respect you, as you’re willing to own up to mistakes. The players are looking to you, being the one in charge, and thus you are more relatable if you admit your mistakes. Treat your players the way that you want to be treated. Injuries and Death If a player refuses to allow their character to become injured, don’t hesitate to enforce injury onto the character. Their characters cannot always get away from situations without a scratch and will pick up injuries along the way; force the issue if you have to. When it comes to death, though, try and avoid it, especially if you are new at being a Game Master. If your roleplay has the potential for character death, let them know in the extra information, the opening post and the homepage of the roleplay so that it is expressly clear, and let players know yet again when they join. Don’t let them accuse you of not letting them know when it’s clearly stated, as players sometimes do not take the death of their characters seriously, especially if it comes as a surprise. Mental and Medical Disorders Sometimes it is best to avoid both of these, especially when it comes to players that you are unfamiliar with. Some players can roleplay both medical and mental disorders well, however others will not play it so well and can end up ruining an entire roleplay, because they are more after attention than they are after a good roleplay. This can cause a lot of friction between Dreamers, and can have a dramatic affect on the Roleplay as a whole.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide The Homepage Format Your Home Page is the first thing any Dreamer will see when they first click on your roleplay club; it’s a doorway into your Universe. It needs to look good. The first thing you need to keep in mind is to keep it neat and easy to read. If you cramp everything together, use bad colours, or use an unreadable font then this will put roleplayers off; you could have the best RP in the world, but if its information is poorly formatted, no one will want to read it. The title of your roleplay has to be visible. Perhaps bold, underline, and centre it, so that it catches the eye. An image might help as well, likely below the title, that would reflect your roleplay. Try not to use an image that is really small; likewise, you don’t want an image that is too large either, as that will break up the post and make it messier. Another important component of the opening post is a description of your roleplay; try to put in as much information as you can, and make your roleplay as appealing as possible. Use this as a means to draw other Dreamers into your roleplay. Now that you’ve drawn in your Players, it’s a good idea to link back to any extra information about the roleplay so that they can read further into it, as shown above. It’s also important to link back to your Character ID thread, or image category, so that Dreamers will know where to post their characters. Once you have any outside material linked into your home page, you then need to put your rules, and the requirements of joining; be sure to make these very clear and easy to read. A list is a very good way of doing it, as it nicely paces out the text, and makes it simple to make out. Although another good place to do the rules and requirements is the description of your roleplay forum. If your roleplay is a large one, don’t put all the information in your home page. Leave it as a means to draw people in, and use the extra information, or forum descriptions to hold all the other information for Dreamers to read through; otherwise, your home page will be very long, cluttered with information, and it may put dreamers off. Keep it simple, and to the point. Don’t hesitate on putting up an Out Of Character thread, or even dedicating an entire forum to it, linked back to your roleplay. This gives an area for any dreamers to talk, and ask questions, about your roleplay. It is also a good way to announce to all players involved of any plot events that are coming up, to prepare them to get on and post. For an even more detailed guide on how to create a Home Page, then check this guide out.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide Characters This is a section to give advice in regards to NPCs. Game Masters can use NPCs as a tool to help drive a plot forward. They are the means by which to guide the characters to where they need to be, and can range from very simple NPCs such as a shopkeeper, to a more in depth and important NPC, such as the King - who is the father of the Princess that needs to be rescued. The important NPCs, or Featured NPCs as we sometimes call them, are often considered ‘essential’ and thus unkillable. Try and keep the essential NPCs to a minimum. Featured NPCs tend to be a little more fleshed out than regular NPCs, with their own backstory and personality. They often have more to say as well, whereas with regular NPCs all you really need is a small amount of physical description; sometimes these NPCs will not even speak a single word. Try not to overwhelm the roleplay with NPCs which will take you a long time to write about, as NPCs usually come and go, only being there for a few scenes. If you have a large number of NPCs, try and only use one or two of them to represent the ‘NPC group’, and to provide a face which the playable characters can interact with. Allow Players to decide who the more interesting NPCs are, and build them up from there. Sometimes, a regular NPC may evolve into a more important NPC later down the line due to the player character's actions. Whatever you do, never take the spotlight away from the playable characters; they are the main protagonists of the roleplay, not the NPCs. The sole purpose of an NPC is to serve the roleplay. Never forget that.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide The Universe The Universe is the world of your roleplay and everything inside of it. This is where the characters will be interacting with one another. When creating your world, you need to be careful not to make it too complicated. If we are going with the heroes and the princess example again, and you are providing the players with skill options for their characters, you need to be careful not to give them too many to choose from, otherwise they will have a hard time deciding. So complete freedom within your Universe may come back to haunt you and, ultimately, work against you. Have some structure in place for the players to follow, like only having a set of ten skills from which they could choose. You also need to make the genre of the Universe very clear. With our example, our main genre is that of a Medieval Fantasy adventure. This gives the players a starting point to create their characters around. In such a genre, they are unlikely to come up with a cyborg character that can pilot ships; it just doesn’t fit within the genre. Also keep in mind that the Universe with its world and lore must tie in with not only the genre but also the premise and the plot. The Heroes and the princess probably would not suit in a Sci-Fi genre which takes place on a space station. Having these elements fit together helps make a good, detailed, and more importantly, a believable Universe. Once your premise, plot, and genre have been decided, create the world in which the roleplay will take place. For this roleplay, I would limit it to the size of a Kingdom. I would plant down various locations as well as the scale of the landscape and the layout of the country. While having a large world can be fun, try not to make it too large otherwise the characters will become lost within it and the story might not ever progress. Try and put down as much detail as you can, like the name of the princess, the name of her town, the name of the dragon guarding her, and the name of where she is being kept. Name the towns, the villages and the recognisable landmarks such as mountains and rivers. Decide the kind of environments that your world is, whether it is a lush rainforest or a desert. Your extra information can serve as a means to give the players a rough idea of your world and how it works; sometimes even using things like maps will help. Once you have the main environment, you need to begin to populate it with people. For some roleplays, simple humans will suffice, but in our example we can expand it to include elves, fairies, dwarves, and other mythical beings, intelligent or otherwise. With a dragon about, it’s not unreasonable to think that there are also Unicorns or Griffins. You also need to consider whether or not you will allow players to introduce a new species that populates this Universe. Think about the kind of societal structure there would be within your Universe. In my example, there would be peasants, serfs, villagers, townsfolk, cityfolk before moving up the social hierarchy to include the richer middle class, and the elite class. You also need to consider what impact the characters can have on the Universe that they have been placed into. If they are not allowed to have any impact, players might feel a little discouraged. Allow them have some power over what happens in the Universe such as being able to kill non-essential NPCs although try not to have every NPC non-essential. The only things that should shake the Universe on a large scale is predetermined plots. Lore Lore is extremely important to the creation of your universe in almost all cases. It is the backstory, nay, the very backbone of your universe as it stands today. How detailed you want to get with this could be dependant on the story you’re crafting, and the skill level your roleplay is set to. It could be from everything at the start of a main protagonist’s life to the moment just before you start roleplaying it, or it could be from the first moments, and first recorded history of your universe’s creation. It can be complicated, or it can be very simplistic. Who? What? Where? How? Why? These are the five questions you need consider when making Lore. Because you need to think about the depths of the universe, and answer the questions. Using the example of the saving the princess again, we’ll explore the five questions piece by piece so you have a rough understanding of the type of questions you need to ask. This is only a guide; you may have more questions, or completely different ones, depending on your roleplay. Now we’re going work though the questions and show thought processes and such; this is to give us an idea of how this universe works, and to see how easy it is to break the construction of our universe down, so you can build it bit by bit. Whilst the core questions will be the same, the individual questions likely won’t be. Together, we will attempt to reverse engineer a back story from the information we know from our example: ‘Fantasy style, rescue of the princess from the dragon’. It’s a simple concept, so let’s try and make it interesting. Who? For this section, we’ll be looking at the characters. We’ll briefly touch on their relationships, how they’re connected to each other, and so on. To look at this with a questioning eye, we need to examine some basic questions before we can proceed. Let’s assume that your character is the main protagonist, after all - this is your roleplay. The others are coming along for the ride, and enjoying your character’s company. We already know what the basic theme of this roleplay is: it’s a bunch of heroes saving a princess from a mean old dragon. From here we can start building a lore. Some questions we can start asking are: Who is the main protagonist? Who are his/her friends? Did the protagonist grow up with family? If not was s/he raised by a pack of wolves, or something? Who were their role models? Were they born into a rich family or a poor family? What race is the person? If non-human and growing up around humans - did they ever have issues with racism, being directed towards them/projected towards humans? What do they like? What do they treasure the most? Who do they love? And so on… As we stated, how deep down into this person’s private life we go is entirely up to us. It’s important to establish these things and think about them as we’re answering them, so we can build up the kind of society that he or she came from. Ideally we can try linking these things with movements of the plot. For things we want to leave up to pure randomness, if there are two potential answers, we can flip a coin, or roll a die. Sometimes it helps if we come up to fork in the road and we like each idea equally. So let's make up some stuff and answer the question. So this could be the opening for the roleplay; her having some kind of religious or moral crisis, as she may have had before. That’s pretty much it: we had some ideas of what we wanted with the story, and we fit it into her personality. Noticed the underlined words? That’s because we’ve not mentioned them yet, and there’s a bit of a question as to what they are. Nothing is set in stone, and things can change, especially considering this is just brainstorming session. Now we’ve briefly examined the main protagonist and gotten a bit of background, let's look at the other characters in the roleplay. We know already that we are off to rescue a Princess, and this opens up some more questions such as: Who is the princess? Does she have any siblings? Who is her father (the King)? Who is her mother (the Queen)? Who is the dragon that has taken her (the douchecanoe)? Just like our character (Na’tey) is sum of all her past experiences, so too are the royal family that we found you dealing with. Let's find out who the people who she’s getting involved with really are, shall we..? Just for fun, let's throw a little plot twist in there, and see where we end up. So there is some background on the Princess, as well as her despicable sounding family. We now we have more than a few questions, like: if the Guild of Arcadia are sworn to uphold the rights of the individual and to defend the freedoms with honour, then why are they asking us to help a King who has subjugated his people into slavery? Also what is this ‘thing’ that was so important? We’ll answer that in a moment, in the ‘What’. Notice how we avoided thinking about the dragon? Just to buy more legitimacy to the plot we need to put a pin in this and work it out later, as we don’t know enough about the lore so far to say what type it is, why it does what it does, or whose (if anyones) dragon it is. We’ve now looked at the parents, as well as the princess and main protagonist, but we’ve put a pin in the dragon for now. Now we’ll move onto the bigger picture so we can answer: Who are the people who inhabit the land? If there are other kingdoms, who are they ruled by. We’ve got a vague idea that the land is some kind of mythical fantasy, perhaps with elements of survival and/or adventure. I suppose that was obvious by ‘dragon’; sure, some might argue it’s hardly creative. But then, we’re not trying to be original, if there even is such a thing; we’re trying to be somewhat unique with an unoriginal idea. So we can probably populate the land with other mythical fantasy type things, such as: beasts, monsters, orcs, dwarves, giants, maybe some type of vampire or werewolf as a rare (perhaps random) encounter, some fairies, pixies, sprites, witches and wizards, and some trolls (for keks). As for the next question, we’re going to pick a number at random to generate a number of cities; in this case it was twelve so, picturing a rather blank looking map, we put down twelve cities. Then we do it again for a larger number than before, to get the towns that will be scattered across the map, which is twenty. This is just one part of the world, one country even, so we shouldn’t be too worried about having all of the possible inhabitants there. Some of these cities and towns might be one species only, some might be mixed species. Another reason why we might not include every one is evolutionary biology - maybe this a warmer climate and some of the species that adapted for cold might not live here, because it’s too warm for them. Now we can see just how we started with “Who”, we’ve started building the world and the universe it inhabits - and we’ve not even started roleplaying yet. In the next section of this chapter we’ll be looking at answering new questions. What? We have a few questions from the previous section that we need to answer before we get cracking on with the next set of questions. The first set of questions we need to answer is: What is the Guild of Arcadia? What is this ‘thing’ the Princess wanted? What drove the royal family to commit such heinous acts of oppression? The Guild of Arcadia is a seemingly unaffiliated group of ‘heroes’ (to lack a better term). They’re ‘racially diverse’, which has caused some friction within the guild from time to time, but they agree on a core principle of beliefs; that everyone is entitled to individual rights, no matter what species, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Quite frankly they’re not interested in ‘identity politics’; they know these different species are different, that they’re not equal, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be treated with the same core rights as everyone else. What the Guild is more interested in is using these differences to gain a tactical advantage over their enemy. To win wars; not to start them, but to finish them, victorious. The Guild is built on a solid foundation of honour, and they rarely get involved with everyday politics. They take contracts and weigh them against their core beliefs; it’s debated on by the Elders of the group, the wisest, once recruits who have won and worked their way up to the top, like natural selection: weeding out the weak and those unfit to rule. This is why they’re good, usually. Every now and again a rare contract comes up; perhaps like this one was, the contract is just ‘save the princess’, perhaps the contract holder with the intention of just bringing his daughter back home… But perhaps the Guild has taken it to mean something else; ‘save the princess’ isn’t a lot to go on. The mission is indeed to save the princess… To bring her back to the guild so she can face justice. So basically this is where ‘good people’ come from. During this time period ‘good’ will definitely be highly relative; meaning it’s the best of the bad set of apples. Perhaps it was a rare contract. Perhaps there was an ulterior motive behind actually accepting it. Would the Guild of Arcadia actually agree to return someone in their custody, knowing what she did? After all, the contract said nothing about bringing her back, only stating to save her from the dragon; which, it seems, is in both their interests. What is this thing the Princess always wanted, and what drove her to killing those people just because she didn’t get it? We could go for one of two options here: either come up with a reason that is so grand that it might try and explain away the slavery; after all ‘Good’ is relative here. Or we could go with a slightly easier way out by going for something that would make the characters think bringing her to justice isn’t such a bad idea after all, so some worthless mundane excuse or other. Both ideas have potential story lines, one adds a dimension of complexity, however we just want to keep the Princess somewhat simple for now. This is a good one to flip a coin on; after all, wanting a bit of randomness is awesome. So we’ll flip a coin on this one, and we ended up with the simpler one, so let’s say that it was going to be a diamond encrusted sword, and all she needed to do was wait one more week past her birthday. Maybe the character feels like the dragon is where she needs to be right now, eaten and just left to her own devices (or rather digestion). Or (more likely for the sake of a plot), she might be more dead set in bringing Leyf to justice, and is probably more than happy to bring in Leyf’s good for nothing father, too. As for what drove them into this: perhaps war. Fighting for so long with so many people, the royal family turned to their population and enslaved them to keep the hungry war machine powered. Unfortunately, there is perhaps not much of a military anymore, which is probably why the King hasn’t sent his own forces to the dragon, and instead had to rely on a contract to someone else. Maybe he’s running yet another failed communist-esque dystopia? That’d be a cruel little unexpected twist in both the genre and format, which contrasts strongly with the heavy emphasis on individualism from the Guild. It’s possible the two sides either dislike one another, or are actually at war with each other. We need to look at ‘How’ Arcadia got the contract in the first place, and how did it get handed down to you. In the brain storm we’ve answered the question of what the politics of the Royal Family are. They’re some kind of hyper-authoritarian, communist-like enslavers. But what would be the obstacles of the quest? Obviously if the Royal Family found out that the Guild has taken the contract, it could spell trouble, as the Royal Family have no intention on paying the guild even if they returned the princess safe and sound. It’s far more likely the King would offer a slightly higher sum to some assassins to take your group out (giving us an enemy to be wary off, or even defend ourselves against). There could be other obstacles you could face, similar to side quests in video games, where we need to get better armour, better weapons, to gain ‘exp’, and ‘level up’. They could get progressively harder with ‘beasts’ and ‘monsters’ we have to fight. Chances are our characters will be visiting some of the other villages and towns (in which case repeat from above to generate our soon to be canonical lore). They should have their own backstories, and it doesn’t need to be anything complicated; after all they’re just a ‘break’ from the main quest. But if we wanted to go full Bethesda, then by all means we can add as many little details as we like, just bear in mind we have to keep on top of it (maybe keep a document of information about each location). What are the risks and rewards? The dangers could be as many or as a few as we like; as such it’s already very risky, in that the Royal Family has apparently taken out a contract for the assassination of our characters… It’s likely that they will only try to assassinate your character after they’ve gotten the princess away from the dragon, so they can risk their lives so the assassins don’t have to. This again fits; If battles get progressively harder the further away from the Guild you go, then that means they’ll get progressively easier as you head back to the Guild… Which is going to be boring. This is where the assassins appear, once we have the vain princess. Where? Remember earlier when we started out with a blank map? Well now we’re going to start filling in that map. Thanks to our trusty random number generator we’ve already added twenty towns and twelve cities. We know one of the cities was destroyed ‘a couple of decades’ ago, as this serves as the protagonists original home city. We know that one of the cities is run by the oppressive King, and there’s an undisclosed place on the map where the Guild is. For the rest of them, we should flip some coins for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ places, and randomly dot them about for now; we might not use them all now, and we shouldn't dwell on them too much, as we’re mainly going to focus on the areas the protagonists will be visiting enroute to the mountains. As for the others, we will repeat these questions with later, fitting them into the current lore. There is nothing stopping us from adding these now, although... Personally I’d try to go more in detail about them later, as the first quest is my sole focus right now. For our dragon: we’re going to want somewhere with a lot of airspace, unlikely to be touched by man, and where the dragon can make a lair. A cave on top of a mountain is as cliché as any, and why not? It’s two more obstacles to overcome. Where is it, and how do they get up there? To add some survival elements in, and knowing what geography is typically like, these mountains are likely to have rivers coming off them; places where our heroes can get a drink, or make rest, at a camp site. There might be fish in the river, or other game to hunt nearby, for food. There could be possible dangers within the mountains, such as large creatures that have been known to tear giants in two, or even other dragons. The heroes will have to either fight, or avoid the creatures. As for where would the quest start, perhaps the Guild of Arcadia would be a good place to start. Probably a reasonable distance away from the mountains, perhaps six days by foot, if they went straight there (which they’re probably not - Side Quests, after all). Others in our group might wish to be from neighbouring kingdoms, either through guild outposts in any of the towns, or from the guild itself, given the quest by one of the elders. We’re also going to withhold some of that information, so they don’t know about reasons until after they get back. You’ll see why, when I go over the summary. How? Now we’re on to the hows, such as: how does this world work, and how do the protagonists complete the main questline? How does the release of information play out over time, as we don’t want everything to be revealed from the get go. Other questions we’ve got to consider are: How good are lines of communication? How did the princess get taken, and what were the sequence of events that lead up to it? How did the Guild get hold of the contract? How was life here before we got started? How do the species get along with each other? How common are dragons? How do they usually respond to dragons? How common are dragon related kidnappings? Whilst it’s not set in stone, the idea that it isn’t a high-tech society is good as a limitation on the plot, a non-physical barrier for our protagonists to adapt to. So there might be some physical messengers that walk around; this would very slow compared to radio communications and, with the dangers, nowhere near as safe. So chances are the players won’t know why they’re being attacked by elite groups of assassins on the way the back. Though the lines of communication to and from remote locations are poor at best to nonexistent at worst, this lack of communication is not a bad thing; it’s a plot driving device, and could end up becoming the sole focus of a questline much later on to improve the network of communications around the area, as long as we can find something else to become a plot driving device. But this would depend on the popularity of the roleplay; if it’s very popular, then after the main quest is done we should definitely do so, to form a new quest. If not, when the main quest is over, and if there’s no desire to continue, then the story is done and we can go on to make another, using what we’ve learnt to make the next story better. The princess was taken when she was just outside of a city or town that she was returning from, perhaps if it’s on the route of their journey, our characters can ask at the city or town when they pass it, to get more information. There was some kind of battle between her guards and the dragon, and the dragon was injured slightly, but her guards were decimated in the attack, and it took the Princess. As to physically how? Perhaps it just picked her up with its talons and flew off. There’s no need to get complicated with it, and that answer is sufficient for the purposes of the storyline. This would also suggest that the dragons here are Wyvern-like, in that they have wings as well as dexterous appendages that can be used to pick things (and people) up. The guild got hold of the contract by buying it of a contract trader in an undisclosed place. It isn’t too important right now for the story, but perhaps these ‘contract traders’ are something to touch on later; they take contracts to sell at a lower price to more gullible parties. They could either be friend or foe, or most likely - neither. They’re all about that cash money gold currency. This contract, through these means, ended up with the Elders, who debated it before giving it to this group of heroes to do in the form of the order: ‘Save the Princess, and return her here, to the Guild, alive.’ This stops us from giving too much away, which we’ll cover in the next section in the ‘why?’ Life here was pretty typical for the time; people hate certain other people, and there is friction between some of the species, although not everywhere. The more species involved, the more complex relationships have to be. Take, for example, if there were just two species: Elves and Humans. At the best of times they try to work together, but at the worst of times they distrust each other immensely. Adding a third species into the mix: the Tarzamox, who are almost elf like; perhaps these get on better with elves than they do humans because their share a similar mis-trust, or maybe it's the other way around. The orcs are probably on their own side, smashing any notion of a dichotomy, and we can build upwards to get the rest of the relationships with species they’re likely to meet. This helps determine the history between the groups: say if the fairies are universally hated, then has there ever been a war between them and the other groups? Did any sides band together to help them win the war, and going back to what - what was the outcome? These will be questions you’ll answer when you repeat the cycle. For now, I’m going to say that whilst some groups did band together, it was very much a war that the fairies had to fight from all sides. Such a thing decimated their forces, and as such they’re quite rare in this area, and any that do exist are probably ‘domesticated’ or otherwise ‘pacified’. This could spell trouble for a later plot, like if fairies from other regions or countries, far from this one, find out about this, and decide to liberate them or get revenge. To answer how they could get along with each other is simple; mutual interests, trade, and cooperation. Perhaps, in this universe, this will only go on for so long before the old frictions start grinding the fragile peace and uneasy truces down. How long this ultimately lasts for is unknown at this point, but for the duration of this particular quest - it’ll last long enough. How common are dragons? At this point we should try to refrain from putting certainty on it, but what we will say is - in this region at least - that they are very uncommon to downright rare. But that doesn’t mean to say it’s the same elsewhere. It could be that many people simply do not believe in this ‘nonsense’, and will laugh you off before walking off. This might make the residents of the city or town that she was kidnapped outside of skeptical about telling outsiders about what happened after being laughed at and ignored. It’s possible some see it as a fairy tale (which here could have a double meaning due to the fairy war), and/or that the city or town are covering something up; this is certainly possible. Because they’re so absurdly rare, not many people believe in them until it’s too late, and dragon related kidnappings have never been heard of before. Which begs the question... Why? Now, we’re going to finish answering the questions to tie the whole thing together. After this is where we’d go back and fill any holes, if we needed to, by repeating the core questions, who, what, where, how, when, and why, with new questions relating to that species. This is where we dot the I’s and cross the T’s; so we can present the Lore, and tie it into the plot, and build the environment in which the universe lies. The questions we have so far are: Why was the princess taken? Why did the quest fall on our main protagonist Why was our main protagonist of all people asked to do this? Why do you do what you do? Why is the Guild getting involved? What do they get out of it? Why did the King rely on a contract to get his daughter back? Why was the Royal Family so tyrannical? Now this being EcchiDreams, we’ll want some kind of ‘kinky’ plot-twist. The dragon isn’t stupid; it’s intelligent, and able to be reasoned with, especially if you have a dragon speaker on your team. Now, this is something that’s probably either rare, or these dragon speakers have a set of abilities can be used for other things (Like Skyrim and how you can ‘Fus-ro-Dah’ your enemies.) The reason the dragon has kidnapped the princess is because... wait for it… it wants a sexual partner, and it’s chosen the princess to be its love glove. At this point, the main protagonists might either be too horrified or too awed to do anything but sit and watch; hell, by the time they finally come across the dragon, it could be cumming across the princess. The dragon may be aware of their existence, but does nothing to stop them so long as they do nothing to it, almost welcoming them to watch… What? This is EcchiDreams after all. At this point, the protagonists might decide that this is a fitting end for a slaver, and just turn around to go back and tell the Guild what has become of the princess. But, for the purposes of the plot, we will leave what happens up to the players; they can either kill it, or return back. The reality is the same, and this could just be an illusion of choice. Whatever it is, it isn’t the job of Lore creation to decide, but from that we can tell, sometimes these dragons like to have sex with other species, and why not? It has an impressive specimen of a sexual organ, and the Princess seems to be enjoying it at the very least. What the dragon might have in its cave could be an insight into how dragons work, from gold and jewel collecting, to ‘love glove’ collectors. They’re intelligent enough, so maybe a dragon speaker can understand the motives; perhaps there’s a method to the randomness. Like this dragon (who one would assume was the evil one in this), could be ‘good’ (relatively speaking), and it only takes those that it deems guilty, or maybe it’s going to make love gloves out of our characters too. Either way, the protagonists may not try to reason with it, and instead attack it. Again, that’s up to the story. You could settle for a boss fight here; or, if you decide to continue the quest, the boss fight could be the King. Many people might thank the guild for that. The quest fell on our characters because they were either brave or stupid enough to take it; or, using already established (although not set in stone) lore, the elders decided you were best suited for the task; your character, after all, could be the one who is the dragonspeaker, that would make sense. But perhaps the abilities haven’t manifested themselves because you’ve not encountered a dragon before, much like in Skyrim, with the Dovahkiin. This would answer our question of why her of all people. The team mates were likely to be assigned to her too, so there is a chance for personal character developments between the team members. This could show how the Guild of Arcadia do things. Yes, sometimes there is friction, but it’s the common objective they focus on; they fight alongside each other and look out for it each other. Perhaps this bonds them together, and lets them see that they’re not so bad after all. If this is the case, then the Guild of Arcadia would be shown to have some wisdom behind its ideology; especially if this works without the characters killing each other before the quest is finished. The guild are getting involved because they saw an opportunity to do so, and they saw a chance to start putting the royal family in question on trial. Perhaps they already know how militarily weak the kingdom is, and are trying to overthrow the king to give the city to the people (we can decide on the long term consequences of that later, and can be used as another plot). They might have no interest in money or politics, and that’s not what is motivating them; perhaps they earn money elsewhere anyway, and their own politics is good enough for them. This, therefore, allows them to focus on their overarching mission: to fight for individuality. This is probably their primary motivation. The King relied on the contract because his military has been grinded down. Over time his population have been suffering from gene pool problems; the meek and submissive had been allowed to breed, whereas everyone else would have been purged. What’s left of his military now polices the slaves and make sure they do what they’re told; he can’t spare these, as they’re needed to reproduce and replenish his own military. The dragon came in at the worst possible time for the King too, as what was left of his military was wiped out during the Fairy war. They simply do not have the manpower to take on the Guild in a fight, and the Guild are using this to to their advantage to spill as little blood as possible. The King knows he has enemies out there, and has been maintaining a bluff with them to stop their attacks. If the King goes down, this will expose a power vacuum which could have serious consequences in terms of destabilisation, but perhaps that's inevitable. The Royal Family is like this after generations of war; their resources, units, and willpower have been severely depleted. They’re opening in debt which they’re having problems digging out of. The enslavement happened way before the economical problems however; it started when they needed manpower to make the tools of war, and so on. They employed the power (or rather enslaved every man, woman and child who wasn’t fighting in the war) to provide for the war instead of being ‘lazy cowards’; after all it’s for the greater good of his community that they win. Because of this, their economy went into turmoil; although since then the slaves no longer manufacture but are forced to mine or farm, to get the country out of debt, and to sexually serve the ‘Police’ there for reproductive purposes. As for what they can do to get out of it, the King’s only two options at this point are to continue and get worse, forever trying to achieve a utopia that simply will not happen, or to surrender himself; if that means his life to the sword, himself to their custody, or his mind to insanity, that is again up to you later on. In Summary... We’ve been able to blend a lore into the plot and story, giving us a semi-elaborate tapestry to work from. We have a back story now to our roleplay; because we worked it all out, we can start building on it. From everything above, we now have this as the back story: The story takes place in a mythical fantasy realm, within which there are many factions and species. These various species don’t always get along with each other, but there is a barely maintained peace at the moment that’s keeping them all from war. That said, they have been capable of banding together against a common enemy. There are the orcs, beasts, monsters, dwarfs, giants, maybe a type of vampire or werewolf as a rare - perhaps random - encounter, some fairies, pixies, sprites, witches and wizards, and some trolls. Some of these species have sister-species, like the elves and the ultra rare Tarzamox - a type of purple skinned elf. Some of the above mentioned species are incredibly rare in the region; the dragon, as far as Arcadia knows, is one of a kind. Most people in the region don’t even believe dragons to be real. Fairies, Pixies and Sprites are pretty rare too, especially after the other sides won the Fairy War a couple of decades prior to the beginning of this story. The King (the father of the Princess) is a hyper-authoritarian, communist-like enslaver, as is the whole royal family. They’ve enslaved their population for generations to feed this war, but now they’re on borrowed time, and the Guild of Arcadia has come to collect; all they needed was the right time. That right time came when the Princess was kidnapped, and early reports suggested that she was kidnapped by a dragon. Although the Guild’s scouts didn’t come by this information easily, off closer to the mountains there stood a town from which the woman was taken after her guards were killed. The town’s people had outright avoided the whole truth with the King, saying that she left the town safe and sound and headed back to the kingdom. In truth, they saw a dragon fighting and were too scared to stop it, so they cowered in their homes hoping the dragon wouldn’t notice them. When the dragon flew away, they tried telling other people the truth; however they’d get laughed at, and told to stop making up stories - no one believed them. One yarl could have made reference to moonshining, or shrooming the water supply. This contract was taken from another guild and traded through a system of contract traders, before ending up in the laps of the Guild of Arcadia; our characters are from this guild. The Guild of Arcadia are a seemingly unaffiliated group of heroes, to lack a better term. They’re ‘racially diverse’ which has caused some friction within the guild from time to time. But they agree on a core principle of beliefs; that everyone is entitled to individual rights, no matter species, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Quite frankly, they’re not interested in identity politics, nor are they interested in politics. Their core beliefs focus entirely on individual rights. They know these different species are different; they’re not equal, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be treated with the same core rights as everyone else. What the Guild is more interested in is using these differences to get a tactical advantage over their enemy. To win wars; not to start them, but to finish them victorious. The Guild is built on a solid foundation of honour; and they rarely get involved with everyday politics. They take contracts and weigh them against their core beliefs. It’s debated on by the Elders of the group, the wisest; once recruits who have won and worked their way up to the top. Like natural selection; weeding out the weak and unfit to rule. This is why they’re good, usually. Every now and again a rare contract comes up, like this one ‘save the princess’, with the intention by the contractor to bring his daughter back home… But the Guild has taken it to mean something else; ‘Save the princess’ isn’t a lot to go on, but the mission is indeed to save the princess… To bring her back to the guild so she can face justice for her crimes. She is a piece that Arcadia want to take out of the game, so they can go after the royals and free the people from bitter enslavement. A Tarzamox is critical to this storyline; our character is an incredibly rare dragon speaker... Unfortunately, she is very rusty with this skill; she doesn’t even know she possess it, and the first inkling she’ll get is if/when the dragon speaks to her. The dragon will tell her some history that her species has with it’s own. They weren’t just dragon speakers, but dragon riders. It’s a very old dragon, and knew her mother intimately (and perhaps ‘intimately’); this is why it didn’t attack. She learns of a ritual that will help the others on her team to become a new generation of dragon riders - and this particular dragon thinks the goals of the Guild are noble and honourable. However the dragon won’t be allying with her any time soon, as it needs to consult with the others. The sex is something it does to prevent it from going insane, as they suffer from a neurochemical imbalance if they’ve not done so for too long. Instead of taking it out on innocent people, it finds the most guilty and uses them. But with it’s unique shaped sexual organ driving even the hardest of souls sexually insane under it, it’s not really much of a punishment. If allowed to live, it will go and seek out more of its kind and try to help Arcadia later. But this is dependent on how the characters will act. The World is a rather large place, and most of it is yet to be explored; the same is true about the region our characters in. To the west they have the Mountains of Akzen, in which the dragon resides in the far southern edges. To the north-east, the Kings kingdom, and to the south-west, between the Guild HQ and the mountains, is the town from which the Princess was taken. In the south, heading from west to east, is a rather large river and fertile soils. It’s the farmland owned by the farming guild who have no interest in politics, just economics and food. The Guild of Arcadia is allied with them, in exchange for food they get very real defence. The river goes by the town they need to head to, and is a great place to fish and even get relatively clean water. The town in question is full of suspicious people, and the mayor seemed to be a little insane (wonky tophat and everything). They’re fearful of the dragon, and a quasi-religion has formed around it because of the dragon’s sightings, although this was never our dragon’s intention. No one believes them, and they’ve become reluctant to talking about it with outsiders, for they grow weary of ridicule. Perhaps doing some quests for them will help them open up to the protagonists? They have a few problems and could do with a hand. Maybe then, finally, someone in the group can convince someone that they will take them seriously. That person opens up in front of our protagonists, and the group will watch, observing their actions, which determines how much they open up with. This is a low-tech society; to get messages between places, physical messengers have to deliver news and letters, which isn’t always reliable due to the beasts and monsters out there. These people keep their only primitive lines of communication open. The quest fell to our characters because they have a Dragon Speaker - or rather, Rider; the guild somehow know this, perhaps through the use of mages and such. Na’tey is assigned a team (the other characters), and she has to work to sort out potential internal conflicts as well as external ones. She leads with her team, not from behind them. But who is she, exactly? She is called Na’tey, and is the daughter of two dragon riders called Shen’yae and Holt’zal, who died when their city was destroyed in the Fairy war. But it wasn’t just the Fairies that destroyed the city; the city was in the crosshairs of all sides involved. Our leader character doesn’t specifically hate everyone for it, but she does subscribe to a ‘better way of handling things’, which is why she joined the Guild of Arcadia. It doesn’t pay well unless you complete a job, but it does put a roof over our protagonists heads, gives them comfortable beds to sleep in, and work to do. The Elders are seen as benevolent and, in this realm, they probably are. The Elders are made up of people who used to be teams; they work they way up in rank and, as they age, they come off the battlefield to train recruits, new and current alike. They become leaders, and somewhat rightfully so for this militaristic guild; after all, the strong survive, and this world is the survival of the fittest, smartest, and best. The Princess is… Or rather, was… A spoiled little brat. Just because she didn’t get the present she wanted for her eighteenth birthday, she threw a hissy fit that saw the the end of the lives of one-fifth of a section of her father’s people; all because she had to wait a single week longer to get what she needed, because production was slow. In the end, she just made the situation worse for herself, and had to wait a few more weeks. When she did get the money, she went to a city somewhere near the town she was taken from to get her Diamond Encrusted Sword, which was returned to her father as it was dropped at the site she was kidnapped from. The reason she passed through the town was to pick up supplies for their two day trek back home with their horses. Of course, she never returned home, because the Dragon assaulted her party, killed the guards, and took her off to the mountains to be its sexual play thing so it could prevent itself from going insane. The Princess, Leyf, isn’t to be taken back to the King; instead she’s supposed to be taken back to Arcadia, as those were the orders. There she’ll not be returned home, but put on trial. At some point, the King finds out that the Guild of Arcadia has the contract, and sends out assassins to come and get the princess, and kill our characters for their troubles. We meet the Mercenary Guild, something that the Assassin’s Guild would take a very disapproving view of. The Mercenary Guild will kill for anyone that pays them enough and unfortunately, as the King has no intention on paying Arcadia, and Arcadia have no intention on returning the princess unless she’s found innocent (which she isn’t), the King has used the money to put a contract out on their heads; they won’t know about this until the mercenaries start attacking, and even then they have no idea as to why until they get back. This is just a summary using the ideas we built up before. So, now we have our lore, we might be tempted to just write it all up and post it in the extra information-... Whoa! Slow down there buddy! We don’t want to give it all away before it’s even started (unless it’s established, and we’re doing a fanfiction roleplay). Instead, we should scatter the Lore throughout our universe, and engage the players to pick up its bits and pieces. We shouldn’t just tell them. We should show them. Like we did above. As said earlier; how detailed we make it is up to us. There are other things to consider such as: Day/Night Cycles and Temporal measurement. - If this isn’t on Earth, does it follow a different amount of hours in a day? How many days make up a week? How many days and weeks make up a month? How many days, weeks and months make up a year? So on. Unique flora to this universe. - Similar to Nirn in The Elder Scrolls games, do you have plant life that is ‘alien’ outside of the fantasy realm? Unique animals to this universe. Different coloured sky (Eg: crimson sky) The stars, the moon, and the night sky. Landmarks, Ruins, and Temples. Other things unique to your universe. We’ve established a fairly deep lore now, and we have an idea on how the universe operates and its driving mechanics. This only took a few hours to write, and was considerably easily to do once it was thought about. Once the ball started rolling, the ideas just flooded out onto the pages. For the purposes of what we want for now, this is pretty good to start a roleplay with; coupled with a premise, a plot, and a story, of which it would be entwined heavily with, it’s a solid backbone Lore, waiting to have more information made for it.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide The Premise, The Plots and The Story Many people think that the story, the premise, and the plot are the same thing; they aren’t, but they all come together very nicely, like ingredients to a pie, a nice little Roleplay Pie. The premise is the overarching purpose of the roleplay, such as a roleplay about a group of travellers that have to reach a safe location while navigating a frozen wasteland. The plot is the series of major events that stretch from the beginning to the end. The story makes up everything in between. They are all different levels in the direction of roleplay. The Game Master is the one that comes up with the premise of the roleplay, and most likely the important plot points of the game. But it is the roleplayers who are the ones that are writing the in between parts; the story. Writing a story and roleplaying are two very different things. When writing a novel, you are often doing it yourself; however, when in a roleplay, you will be writing with two or more people who will all be contributing. As the game master, it is you who will be determining how the roleplay will progress. You are the one in charge of the game; you are the one that creates the Universe and sets the limits. This section will hopefully help you develop your premise and plot. One thing to keep in mind is to always make sure that there is a means to get from one objective to another, so that the plot can continue flowing. Do this until the roleplay reaches its designed destination, or until it dies. If the roleplay has no goal to be met, then you as the Game Master could direct the players, by telling them where to move their characters; for example, in a city roleplay, sending the characters to the cinema. But do give players time to properly flesh out and develop their characters. One of the tools that a Game Master has at their disposal is the illusion of choice. This ties in with the making sure that the players have a means to get from one objective to another. Give the players a choice; however, each choice leads you to the same outcome to progress the plot. For example, the players are given the choice to save one individual over another. There are several things the players could do; save Jane, save John, save them both, or save neither. But every single choice leads to the same outcome: progression to the next objective. If either of the them are saved, they could have the passkey to save another. However, if neither of them were saved, this passkey could be in their possession, or near them. This might not be suitable for a truly branched story, where the choices of the players have consequences throughout the roleplay and impact the end result. In order for this kind of roleplay to work, you need to plan out beforehand what the plot paths of the choices are, so that you can know the eventual outcome. A good way to do this is to note down all the major plot points, and dictate what the consequences of each choice will be. Of course, if your roleplay is an open world sandbox type, then this might not be too useful to you, unless you are having story plots within the boundaries of the open roleplay. Essentially, your roleplay will be around for as long as people are interested; it may eventually die, however. The main thing to do in that situation is to develop interesting plots to keep the players active and interested. Step One - Outline The first step of creating your roleplay is to pick the premise which, as I explained above, is the core idea of the roleplay. Try to come up with an interesting premise for your roleplay. An epic adventure to save the princess from an evil dragon, or a world torn apart by a zombie apocalypse and survivors must reach safety. But keep in mind that stories require conflicts and adversities to overcome; this is what keeps things interesting, and is what helps keeps players engaged. In the case of the princess, the heroes may have difficult lands through which they have to traverse, and difficult monsters to defeat before reaching the final boss. Some premises will be shorter than others. The end goal of a simple romance would be getting together, and that would be a lot shorter than the heroes going on an epic adventure to save the princess. Neither of the premises are better than the other, just different, and will be carried out in different ways. But, also remember that sometimes you can have secondary premises within your main one. Let’s take the romance and the epic quest for example: the main overarching premise is the epic adventure; however you could also include the premise of two of the heroes getting together as they are drawn close together by the adventure and adversity that they are facing. Another thing to consider is plot twists that keep the players on edge and second-guessing themselves. Let the players become comfortable before pulling the rug out from underneath their feet with a good plot twist; though do find a way to make it work with the premise and the plot so that you aren’t left with large plot holes. Also remember that the premise is tied in with the genre of the roleplay. For example, the premise of the heroes saving the princess can be tied in with its medieval genre, which will help influence how the plot progresses. Step Two - Extra Information You need to put down as much information about your Universe as you can in an easy to read manner, so roleplayers can understand quickly how your roleplay Universe works. Take your time with this. Don’t rush it. Think carefully about what you are putting down. If your roleplay has a definite premise and fixed plot points, brainstorm what those points are, and how they will be linked together. Use this to put down as much information about your roleplay as possible. One of the main things you need to have settled is the setting of the roleplay, as in where it shall be situated. A roleplay about a zombie apocalypse will not be set in a fairy fantasy land; although if you could make that work, it would definitely be interesting. But regardless, the setting can set the tone of the roleplay. A roleplay set in a wasteland will be different from one that is set on a space station. Make sure to detail out the setting in the extra information to give the players so that they can easily picture it. You also need to consider the types of characters that will be in your roleplay. Due to the fact that you can have character restrictions, you can set out what types of characters that players can have within your Universe. For example, you might only let people have human characters. Or if you were going for fantasy, you might allow for species like elves, dwarves and fairies. If the setting is a Sci-Fi, you might like to allow other players to create original species. The last point is, what is it that the characters are trying to overcome? What is their conflict? What is it that drives the players forwards? It doesn’t have to be complicated, either. With the heroes saving the princess example earlier, there are various conflicts that the heroes face. The environment which they have to traverse, the possible adversaries they face along the way (such as bandits and wild creatures), and the ultimate adversary: the final boss, in this case the dragon. It looms as a large, almost unbeatable object that blocks the players from their goal. Their characters, throughout the roleplay, have developed and grown, perhaps having to meet certain requirements before they can challenge the final boss and try and overcome it. Then, once they have overcome it, they can finally reach their goal: the Princess. Step Three - Kicking it Off Now that you have your premise, plot, and extra information in place, now it’s time for you to get into the action once you’ve created your roleplay. As the Game Master of a roleplay that follows a plot, it is your responsibility to help guide the players to get the characters to where they are meant to be. You are the one that determines what happens. You determine how characters have to get out of certain situations. When you think of your plotline, try and think about obstacles which the characters will have to overcome. Try and come up with at least two or three for a short premise; more for a longer one, although try not to let it drag on for too long. Let’s take the princess example again, and let us say that the characters have gotten into a spot of trouble. They find themselves locked inside a room in the castle, and they appear to have no way out. As the Game Master, you describe to them the scene that is around them. You also should know the means by which they can get out, whether it is finding a key, or by making a contraption that would enable them to escape. Keep this information from the players, and lay down the hints within your descriptions to allow the players to work it out for themselves. Again, if you have arranged certain plot devices beforehand, keep the players in suspense by only revealing them when they’re at that point. As you’re progressing through the plot, go along the ways of many movies, shows and games. The obstacles that they face become progressively harder before the ultimate climax. This allows the characters to develop nicely and at a suitable pace to prepare them for the final battle. Don’t overcomplicate things; this restricts the players and they might not be able to progress smoothly, or it may be too hard for them to progress at all. Step Four - Orgasm Climax The ultimate climax of the plot. The dragon before the princess, in our example. This is the tipping point of your plotline. This is where the characters come together to bring down the final obstacle in order to finish the story. Once the dragon has been defeated, the characters can claim the princess, which means that their plotline has finished. But, just because this particular plotline has finished doesn’t mean that the Universe itself has to end. The same with the characters. A sequel could come about, with a different premise and plot, just in the same Universe with the same characters. Step Five - Bask in the Afterglow Wrapping Up Once the ultimate climax has been reached, and the story is drawing to a close, take the chance to tie up any loose ends or little subplots that you may be running. This is basically the epilogue of the story, and its only purpose is to tie things up and to finalise this story. So let us summarise the main points of what I’ve been saying; A clear premise and a clearly mapped out plotline. At least 2 or more major obstacles which must be overcome, that become progressively harder as the roleplay progresses. A clearly marked end of the story, like the defeat of the dragon and the rescue of the princess. And while this is the end of this story, it might not mean the end of the Universe. Try and keep these things in mind, as a roleplay that is simply made up as it goes along sometimes suffers from plot holes and can become rather derailed, which may discourage players. That said, not everything should be set in concrete; allow room for flexibility. You should, however, at least have the simple things of how, where, why and what, which you can use to gently guide the players towards the end goal. As with Sandbox Roleplayers, you are the one that creates the Universe, but allow roleplayers to do as they please within it. Without a means to keep them entertained, players might become bored and wander off, eventually killing the roleplay. Allow them, and even encourage them, to create their own plots within the environment that you have provided. This helps keep them entertained and roleplaying longer in your Universe. Every roleplayer is different, and and will prefer different things to others; some prefer more linear roleplays, while others prefer more of a sandbox experience. Just create the Universe you want, and allow players to enjoy your creation.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide The Beginning Before you even start creating your new universe; you should probably think about the mechanics behind it, or the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff. You’ve probably got some idea what kind of universe you want to create, which is great, but there’s a few things you should probably consider first. Remember, you and your fellow roleplayers are telling a story here, the story of your universe, through roleplaying. Difficulty/Skill Level Deciding this now sets the tone for your roleplay, as this is how much effort you expect to put into it, as well as how much effort you want other roleplayers to put into it. To read more about skill levels please read our Roleplay Difficulty Guide, to give you some idea what we class as what skill level. Character IDs Character IDs are important for roleplays, it establishes which character belongs to which person. You may wish to customise your own character ID to suit your needs from our standard template, either remove things or add them where necessary. If you’re only after a casual roleplay you’ll probably want just bare basics; if you’re making an expert roleplay you might decide that what we’ve provided isn’t good enough, and why settle for less? Feel free to customise it. The template to your character ID, if you go for a custom one, should be within the first post of your character ID topic or in the description of your character ID category within your club. Alternatively you could have a policy that is ‘Roleplay as your Account’ which means you roleplay as the account you used to register to EcchiDreams, but for nearly all scenarios, this would not be applicable or advisable. Extra Information Currently there is no all encompassing guide on how to create an extra information topic, because it differs radically from one roleplay to another. It is also an optional feature within the clubs, however it is a very useful tool. The Extra Information can cover a variety of topics, such as: Lore and canon, especially if you’re roleplaying an already created fictional piece of work (example: Pokémon Roleplay) How the universe in your roleplay works - Again try to explain it as accurately with as few words as possible, even if this ends up being several paragraphs long. Species Profiles - If you have made original species, or if you are using some or all species from the fiction you’re basing it off, this would be a good place to put it in. NPC’s - If you have non-playable-characters in your roleplay here would be a good place to add them. Technology - when we say ‘technology’ we don’t just mean starships and lasers, or computers and calculators. It could be useful to describe common technology, as well as the technology level that is core to your roleplay. Maps, so that roleplayers can have a general layout of the environment. You could include a list of popular, or notable locations within the roleplaying environment. And so much more. Things to consider before constructing your universe There are several things you need to keep in mind before you start building, and then finally playing in your new universe. Some of these are going to be ‘well; no shit…’ and some of these, hopefully will be deeply insightful. Formatting This can be critical to making your topics readable, as well as just plain tidy. For sure; if you like the look of another roleplay use their formatting - just don’t copy and paste everything from their roleplay to yours. Refrain, if you can, from using clashing colours, as this will make your text hard to read. We don’t have a dark ‘EcchiTheme’ where it comes to content, so no matter what colours people have customised their theme with, one thing will stay the same - the place in which the content of a topic is displayed. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there will be a white background for people to read from, so very light/neon colours against this will not be a good idea, you’ll want to choose colours that contrast with white backgrounds. You have to bare in mind that colours also vary from monitor and display to monitor and display, and even from person to person (EG: Colour Blindness). What might look fantastic to you, might not look great to someone else. So try to keep it uniform and as noticeable as possible. In most cases you wouldn’t need to have different text colours at all. The harder something is to read, the less likely someone is going to roleplay there. Story Structure A story needs a few things to be great. A story needs a good beginning to hook the reader, this will be covered in greater detail in ‘The Premise, The Plots and The Story’ in the next chapter of his guide. As funny as it is; this is quite relevant, as Stewie brings up some key goals of a story structure in his mocking of Brian. Planning the Environment, Backstory and Lore For the purposes of stuff to think about as preparation before starting on your epic quest to make a roleplay, you might want to consider a basic environment details to your world. If you have absolutely no idea what story you’d like to make then it’d be a good idea to pick a genre of your story and start from there. This, again, will be covered in greater detail in the ‘Universe’ Chapter. Maybe apply some thought exercises. For example: if you went for a post-apocalyptic style roleplay; before you even start working on the story, you need to paint the environment: How did the apocalypse come about? Was it expected, or at least somewhat expected, or did it take everyone by surprise? How is the world going to be affected by this? How is the life going to be affected by this? Has the wildlife become dangerous? Things that used to be safe, or okay with proper medical attention, are now potentially life threatening. How do people cope? What about the supply of narcotics and weapons? Do people use the pre-apocalypse currency? What little gems are hidden in your world that if other characters examined, they’d get more information about it. Anything that survived the apocalypse, that adds atmosphere and legitimacy to your universe; but not necessarily have anything to do with the story. This is just one example of a genre; but you can see how we’ve started to probe the world before the idea of a story has even started. From there, you can make your stories come to fruition. If at first you don’t succeed... There are many sayings; if you try and fail, you can learn from your mistakes and pick it back up. If you never try, then sure, you’ll never fail; but you’ll never succeed either. At first you might fail, don’t let this discourage you; that’s what the ‘failure demons’ want you to do. Taking feedback is critical to success as well as your ability to handle criticism. If your first response to criticism is blocking, banning or throwing temper tantrum; guess what’s going to happen? … Exactly. If you need advice; or feedback, on a currently made roleplay, then check out the Game Master’s Corner. One question you might be asking on this site is: Do I have to create a anime/hentai roleplay? The answer is, no. EcchiDreams does have its roots in being a hentai themed roleplaying and general interests community forum; while hentai/anime and manga has been at it’s core, it’s since grown and kind of branched out. It’s now a roleplaying community first, general interests second, and whilst it’s still based in the roots of hentai, your roleplay doesn’t have to encompass this at all. It can be anything you want; since, back in the day, where there were only set scenarios you can roleplay in, none of our roleplays were ever tied to any specific anime, hentai or manga.

Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide Introduction Table of Contents: Introduction - what this guide covers. The Beginning The Premise, The Plots and The Story The Universe Characters The Opening Post format Tips and Tricks Protips Introduction This is a very large, all encompassing guide. Its purpose is to help you, the Game Master, to create and develop your Universe. While this guide might not suit everyone's needs, it is here to assist you in starting up your roleplay, and is written by people who have started up roleplays. This is a guide for Roleplayers, made by fellow Roleplayers, so if you have suggestions or feedback, then please send either @Neptune or @Temaelrinan EcchiText with comments, as we’re always open to it. We know we’re not perfect, and if you have some criticism then by all means share it. If you’re new to the whole scene and don’t know what roleplaying is (welcome to the club by the way), then you may like to get a basic crash course; please see our Introductions: Crash Course in Roleplaying guide. If you wish to read a crash course on how to create your own club roleplay, then please read our Club Roleplaying and You guide which will give you a step-by-step guide on how to set everything up. Assuming you know the basic premise of a roleplay, or you’ve read the above mentioned guide, then this guide will get you started on nearly every aspect you might be thinking about for creating your Universe, and might include some points for you to think about for your own creation. Remember! How much detail you go into is completely up to you. We recommend keeping it concise and as simple as possible to understand, but not all roleplays can do this. Also the first post in your roleplay is a doorway into your Universe; it needs to be attractive and have links to the relevant information topics, character ID topics and out of character topics if you have any. This guide was written by: @Temaelrin, and @Neptune. Proofread by: @SMFoxy If you need advice on making a roleplay, or feedback on a currently made roleplay, then check out (and post in) the Game Master’s Corner.

How to create an attractive Home Page for your Club! Tips and Tricks Using Images as titles Remember above I spoke about utilising images in your Roleplay? As well as putting a title at the very top of your Page? Well why not combine the two? Using an image editing program to add text to your image can achieve these two purposes easily so that you get an effect like this: Roleplay Difficulty Image The image that I showed off above, that was a nice clear indicator of the difficulty level? Well it’s pretty easy to find it, and include it into your Roleplay. The images are here, in the Roleplay Difficulty Guide. Find the one you want, and right click on it and copy the link (The option “Copy Image Address”). Then return to your Home Page editing page and in the bottom right corner, click on the “Insert other media” menu to open it up. When it has, select “Insert image from URL” and when the dialogue box appears, insert the link and click the purple “Insert into post” button. Then the image will appear into your post and you can format it to your liking. Colour Make the use of colour in your Home Page, although don’t make it look like someone tie dyed the page. Keep your colours consistent, and compatible with not only other text colours but also with any of the images that you use. You don’t want to make your page look garish and over the top. You also don’t want to pick colours that cannot be read off of the white background. See here for a guide on good text colours to use. Readability Try and keep things as neat and as uniform as possible. Titles could perhaps be bolded, underlined with the text being larger than the body text. But try not to mix and match formats and text sizes in the same sentence. It will look messy, and it will be unreadable. Not only that, but try not to make text too large, or too small. Too large, and it’s difficult to read through the text which will be broken up especially for mobile users and those with smaller screen resolutions. If your text is too small, it will force Dreamers to have to magnify just so that they can read it and it may be hard on the eyes. Try and keep body text a consistent size across your entire Roleplay. For example, text size 14 in the text editor is a good size. It’s readable on both large, and small resolution screens and it is perfectly readable on mobile phones. For small section titles I use the next font size up; 16. I will usually also bold and underline them to make them stand out. For main titles, I tend to make them a large larger, perhaps even going as high as font size 36. I will bold and underline, and change the colour as a main title really should stand out from the rest of the text without being too messy about it.

How to create an attractive Home Page for your Club! Relevant Information While having nice pictures on your Home Page is nice, you also need to ensure that your Roleplay has all the relevant and important information regarding the roleplay. Here are some suggestions of which you could put into your Home Page: Roleplay Description This is the main bulk of the relevant information on your Home Page. You could make it factual, and state the basic information about your Roleplay. Or you can be a bit more descriptive with it, as if you were writing the opening paragraph of a book. Entice Dreamers to come into your world. Make it sound as exciting as possible, without stating anything false. For my Craethiel Kingdom Roleplay, this can easily be achieved. It’s a Medieval Adventure Roleplay which means I can entice Dreamers into my Roleplay with the chance of epic adventures across a dark, and treacherous land: See how I made it sound exciting, yet kept all the important information there and clearly visible? I was also careful not to make it too wordy, so that it didn’t bore people to read it. Try and keep it to a manageable length. Too short and it might be lacking information. Too long and you’ve watered things down too much. Remember that this is, in effect, a summary description of your roleplay. Try and write it in such a way that makes the reader pause and think to themselves, ‘This sounds interesting. I want to join this.’ Relevant Links If you decide to have a small area with your relevant links, you could link potential Roleplayers to the most important pieces of information. For example, if you have any Extra Information Threads that detail out any Lore of your Roleplay, then you could link it along with any other related Information topics, such as the Roleplay World. This allows a Roleplayer to enter the playing field, with this knowledge at their fingertips. If your Roleplay requires a Character ID, then you could link them to the relevant thread, or gallery section of your Club. This in turn should lead them to all the information they need to know about creating and posting a character. A link to this section would also allow a potential roleplayer to read up on already existing characters which could either give them ideas as to what to do with their own character, or give them an idea as to whom they wanted to roleplay with. Roleplay Rules Personally, I think that this is a must-have on the Homepage of your Roleplay. Not only that, but it should be clearly visible as well so that Dreamers cannot try and use the excuse that they didn’t see the rules. If you’re going to be using the suggested Standard Roleplaying Rules, then you could either copy them to your Home Page, or include a link to the Guide. You can use them as a backbone to put your own on top of, ones that are relevant to your Roleplay. For example, for a medieval Roleplay, you could include a rule that no character can have space age guns. Not only does it not fit in with the theme of the roleplay, but it also grants unfair advantages of one character over others.

How to create an attractive Home Page for your Club! Use of Images Images can be quite a powerful tool for your Home Page. They’re eye-catching and they can grab the attention of anyone that is browsing around your club. They’re also an extremely good way to visualise things to potential Roleplayers. Perhaps the first thing to start off with, is giving your Home Page a title. It could be as simple as stating your Roleplay name. Or, you could be a bit more personal and have something such as “Welcome to…” and then put your Roleplay name. Or, “Come on into…” and again, have your Roleplay name. It would be a good idea to bold, and underline the title as well as to make the text larger so that it is immediately visible at the very top of the page. Just underneath the main title, I like to place a nice eye-catching image that is relevant to the roleplay; The image itself is fairly large and very eye-catching. The colours of the image match very well with both my cover image, and my icon, with its pinks and blues. It matches the theme of my Roleplay by having a silhouette of a castle on the left, as well as having a figure with a horse on the right next to the tree. It’s best to go for large, or medium sized images for your Home Page. Small images are hard to see, and might make the page look sparse and lackluster. If you come across an image that you would love to use, but seems far too small for what you want, you can also attempt to right click it, and search Google for that image. You might come across a larger image, although you need to be careful not to pick out anything that has been artificially enlarged as that can cause blurriness and blockiness which would look very unattractive. You could also search for similar images and find another that you could use instead of the small image. If you pick an image that is perhaps a little too large to put into your Home Page, you could use an outside program such as GIMP or Photoshop to clip it down in size. If you’ve already uploaded it to EcchiDreams and have it in the editor, double click on the picture and you will see this: This will allow you to not only edit the size of the image, but to also dictate where in your post it will be going via the alignment settings. For smaller images, it would allow you to put text beside it instead of having a large white space where nothing it happening. Another image that you could definitely include on your Homepage, is one of the images from the Roleplay Difficulty Guide, which clearly shows the difficulty of your Roleplay with an easy to understand visual representation. For my Roleplay, I included this image underneath my main Home Page image as well as the spot where I have marked for my main Roleplay Information. I also centered the image so that it is clearly visible. This is because I want it to be one of the first things a Roleplayer sees so that if they do not feel they are up to the Difficulty level, then they’re aware straight away. I also put a little information regarding the absolute minimum expectations: I ensured that the text was centred as well, and was of a font size that is easily readable to anyone looking at my home page. I kept the information regarding the difficulty short, simple and to the point. I don’t need to embellish myself, nor get too complicated.

Club Roleplaying and You! How to start your own roleplay There are a few things that you should be made aware of before you start your own roleplay. You are already familiar with the four types of clubs that can be made, for varying degrees of privacy for you and your roleplayers. Club users Each club has four levels of users. This is one of the reasons why we love the Club system for the public roleplays, as it allows the Club Owner to moderate the content within their own club with limited intervention from Site Staff. This gives the Club Owner a huge amount of autonomy within their own roleplay. They can do as they wish with their club, as long as they’re not breaking the site ToS. The Owner would also be able to appoint their own Administrators and Moderators to help police the roleplay although at this time there cannot be more than one Owner of the club. Club Administrators and Club Moderators are not staff members of the community as a whole, and it is just for the club that they are the Administrator or Moderator of; exceptions are of course actual community staff that are Club Administrators and Club Moderators. Club Leader/Owner: A Leader has some of the permissions of a Site Moderator, within their own Club. They do not have these permissions outside of their Club on the main site. They can also appoint Administrators and Moderators within their club, and add content areas. The Club Owner is automatically the Leader of it. Administrator: They have the same permission level as the Club Owner, so you must be careful as to who you appoint. They can do everything that a club owner can. So again, be careful who you make an administrator. They help the Owner not only moderate the club, but they can be immensely helpful in helping set up the Club and the content areas to build up the roleplay. Moderator: As the name implies, Club Moderators have the ability to moderate content posted within the club on a non-destructive level which can easily be reversed by the Leader or Administrator. Members: Any other Dreamer that have joined the club but have no permissions to moderate the area. Above the Public Club, they do have permission to post content within the club. Guests/Visitors: People who have not joined the club in question. Private clubs are completely invisible to these Dreamers, and closed clubs show up on the club directory but the content within the club is not visible until they become members. Open clubs are visible, but cannot be posted in by a Guest of Visitor. Public clubs don’t require joining in order to post in. The ability for a Club to have their very own Administrators and Moderators, is a fantastic feature especially for large roleplays that have a large amount of Dreamers that get involved. It would help the Leader keep the club running smoothly and cuts down on the amount of work that the Leader has to do to moderate their own club. Permissions This is the current permission sets with the clubs, that the Leader, Admins and Moderators may have. If any of them change, then this guide will be updated to reflect them: Permissions Club Moderators Club Administrators Club Owners Pin Content This makes a topic within the club appear at the top of the topic listings, much like how pinning content works on the Forums. Unpin Content This demotes a topic within the club from appearing at the top of the topic listings. The topic will be listed normally when unpinned. Hide Content Hiding content hides a post, image or topic (for example) from appearing to other club members. View Hidden Content Allows your club staff to see hidden content. To help stand out to club staff, the hidden content will appear highlighted in red. Lock Content Locked content cannot be replied in by your club members, which is great for setting rules and such. It also allows topics that are finished to be locked, as an archiving tool. Unlock Content The ability to unlock content that was previously locked. Not usually needed unless there is an event that opens on specific days for example. Reply to Locked Content Allows your club staff to reply to content that is already locked, useful because it means you don't have to unlock it, reply and then lock it. Add Features to Club Adding features to the club such as a calendar, topics page, gallery, and so on. Edit Categories/Features Editing already existing features on the club like a Gallery Page, Topics Page and so on. Can Promote Members to Administrators/Moderators Self explanitary; this is the permission sets who can make people staff. Invite Dreamers to Club (Closed/Private) Usually for Closed and Private Clubs; allows your staff to invite Dreamers from the community to your club and/or roleplay. Remove Members From Club The ability to remove members from the club; this could be for a whole host of reasons, and if your club is open (Not Private/Closed) nothing stops the Dreamer from rejoining. Edit Content *Potentially Destructive* Editing other people's posts, images and so on that other people have posted. If you edit a post it will come up at the end of the post that it was edited by you. Move Content *Potentially Destructive* The ability to be able to move content within clubs they are a moderator/administrator or owner of. This is disabled across the board. Unhide Content This is disabled due to technical limitations. Please consult a member of the Community staff to have content unhidden for you, please be clear as to what you want unhiding (by posting a link to it). Delete Content *Destructive* The ability to permanently delete people's content. This is disabled across the board, if you want something deleted please speak to a member of the Community staff. Split and Merge Content *Potentially Destructive* If you have posts for example that are posted one after the other by the same person you can merge them, this requires the ability to edit content. For the meantime this is disabled. Starting a club Roleplay Now that the nitty and gritty things are out of the way, now it is time to learn how to actually create a Club. The first thing that you’re going to need to do, is to look at the very top of EcchiDreams to where the “Explore” menu is. Hover over the menu items, and you’re greeted with this menu: Once the menu is open like in the picture to the side you’ll see a list of menu items. If you click on “Clubs”, it will take you straight to the Club Directory. This is where you can see all of the clubs that are available, and visible to you, some are roleplay clubs, some aren’t. You can filter these results once you’re inside of the Clubs section by using the “Filter” button. There may be some that aren’t visible, but unless you are a member of these clubs, they will remain hidden from you. In the top right hand corner, there should be a nice big button labelled “Start a Club” which is what you need to click on to start up your own Club. As soon as you click on it, you’ll be greeted with the club creation screen: As you can see, I have already filled in information regarding the club. These can be changed later with your new, shiny Owner permissions. As you can see, I have added a brief description. I deliberately put the skill level of the roleplay at the very beginning so that it is clearly visible to those that have yet to join so that they know that there is some minimum requirements to be able to roleplay within it. For now, I have set the RP to ‘Private’ because I am still setting it up and I don’t want people to see anything until I am ready for them to do so. The privacy setting can, again, be changed after you’re happy that everything is ready. I have not bothered to put in a Club Icon, just yet. I’ll show you why in a bit. I’ve selected the type of Club that it is going to be, a ‘Roleplay Club’ so that it can be easily filterable by the clubs that are roleplay specific clubs. As you can see in the very bottom, there is a list of automatically created features. By default, they are all ticked which will start you off with one forum and one image category. Once you’re happy, click on “Save” and it will create your new club. At first, this is what greets me; It’s very plain and bland, with nothing going on. The perfect blank canvas. As you can see, it has created the gallery (Images) and forum (Topics) categories that it asked about when creating the club. These can be renamed later. For now, I am going to set up the club icon and the banner image. The reason why I didn’t set up the club image, when creating the club, is that doing it there doesn’t allow you to crop the image the way you like. If you leave it alone, and add the club icon after creating the club then you’re able to do this edit. Not only that, but uploading the image can cause it to become blurred and unattractive. The image I picked for my icon was quite large, thus I had to crop it down and make the image smaller so that it would fit for the icon, and look good. In the left corner of the icon, you should see a small grey image icon. Click on this, and it will bring up the image uploading window. When you’ve uploaded the picture you want to use for the icon, you will be greeted by the window below: As you can see, the crop itself is slightly away from the edge. For mine, I just made it fill the entire image and then selected save. Now my club has an icon! Now that we’ve got a club icon, let’s pick out a cover image. I have an image already, a lovely landscape picture with a cherry tree, some mountains and even a small building in the background that is scarcely visible. In much the same way as you change the cover image in your profile, click on the ‘Photo’ button which will bring up the window that allows you to upload an image. Once you have done that you are able to reposition the image to your liking. Once it is done, click on the “Save position” button and you’re done! Now, with both an icon and a background image, it looks beautiful! My icon contrasts with the cover image, making it stand out instead of just blending into the cover image and not being very visible to the members. Roleplay Content Now that we have an icon and a cover image we need to look at adding content to our roleplay so that Dreamers can join it, and immediately get stuck into some good roleplay action. You might have noticed that in almost all of the screenshots that have been showed, there is a button on the right hand side of the screen, above the small member bar, called “Manage Club.” When you click on it, we are greeted with this menu: From this menu, we can do a lot to really make our roleplay become alive. From here, you can edit almost every aspect of the club: Club Settings The Edit Club Settings option allows you to edit the settings of the main club, including the name, icon, description and the type of club. This can only be done by the Owner of the club, giving them sole control over their club although the EcchiDreams staff do have staff powers that grant them the ability to edit a Dreamers club as mentioned in the permissions. They generally won’t do this without permission, unless a violation of the ToS has occurred. Invite Members This is where you can invite specific Dreamers to come and join your club. This is especially useful for getting members to join a private club which is otherwise invisible to them. The form has an auto complete feature so if you type out the first three characters of a Dreamers username it will show a list of dreamers with that username, if the Dreamer you’re looking for is in the list you can click on it and it’ll fill out the rest. The more characters you put in the more it hones in on the search and you can repeat this as necessary to invite the multiple Dreamers you want to invite to the club. Once a Dreamer has been invited, it will send them a notification that lets them know that they have been invited. When they click on it, it leads then to this screen. To join, all they need to do is click the green button, and they are now fully members of your club! Home Page The Home Page is not something that is active by default. It is where you, as the Club Owner, can put information about your roleplay. As this is the first thing that Dreamers will see when they enter your club, it would be best to make this page as attractive as possible to entice Dreamers into being interested in joining. To activate the Home Page, bring up the Manage Club menu and click on the Home Page option. When you do, you are greeted by this: If you click the greyed out slider button, then the menu will change into this: You now have access to a Text Editor, much like what you get when you are posting in the main forum. In this text editor, you can change the font style, colour, size and other formatting such as bolding, underlining, alignment as well as being able to put images into the post. All of these features can be utilised to create a very attractive Home Page. I have made a small mock-up below, although it will not be my final Homepage. It’s purpose is to show you what an example Homepage might be like. For a more in-depth guide on how to make an attractive home page, click here. Change Type Despite the fact that you can change your Club from a General Interests Club into a Roleplaying club in the Club Settings menu, this is not the same Club Type. This is more the privacy setting of the club. From this menu, you can change it to one of the four types; Public, Open, Closed and Private. Manage Features This is where you can disable or delete any of the Club features that you have implemented. When you click on this button, you are greeted by this box: At the moment, you cannot use the Convert to Forum, or the Convert to Category as that requires Site Staff permissions. All it does is allow you to move the threads within the topics forum, into the main EcchiDreams forum. However, you are still able to disable or delete features. When you disable a feature, it causes it to disappear from the feature menu that you see below the cover image. If you simply disable a feature, then it can be re-enabled in the Manage Features menu: If you delete a feature, however, it will be permanently removed. When you delete a feature, a dialogue box will appear asking if you’re sure. This is so that you do not accidentally remove a feature that you didn’t intend to. If you are absolutely sure that this is what you want to remove, then click on “OK”. If not, select “Cancel”. If you go ahead with the deletion of this feature, you will be greeted with this page: You can continue at this point, and delete any of the content within that feature such as topics and images. These will be forever lost to you so if you have anything important, it would not be a wise idea to do this arbitrarily. The Community Staff may not even be able to restore content you’ve deleted so again - be absolutely sure you want to do this. If there is indeed content that you wish to save in the feature, you do have the power to move it somewhere else. Uncheck the “Delete Content” box, and it will allow you to navigate the “Move content to” drop down menu. When you do this, we suggest moving the content to your Sandbox Forum so that it is hidden from view and it doesn’t conflict with any other forum on the site. No other Dreamer, other than the staff, can see what people post in your Sandbox forum unless you’re the topic creator. Thus it is perfect to hold ‘removed’ content from a club because you can still see it, and you can still utilise it. Bear in mind that once you have moved it, you cannot move it somewhere else without the help of staff. Adding a Club Feature: Topics As you can see from the drop down menu, the top two options is to add new features to your Club. Topics, and Images. This is a fairly simple process, and will add a new tab to the list that sits underneath the cover image. The Topics Feature is the in-club forums, where you and the members of your club can post topics, and interact with other members of your club. When you click to create a new Topics tab, you are greeted by this screen: As you can see in the top you can decide the name of the tab. If it is where you are holding your Roleplaying topics, you could name it “Roleplaying Topics” or even something a little fancier like “The Tales of Craethiel” although that is quite wordy. The description allows you to display information about that tab, and what it is for. If we keep to the roleplaying topics example, you could put the in-game rules of the roleplay. For example, stating that characters can only be human. Or that you only want wizard and witch characters. You can also use the description to describe to the members of your club how to use the tab. For example, if you are wanting everyone to use the main prefix of ‘Side Story’ when they are doing a side story, then this would be the perfect place to do it. It is basically the introduction to this section of your club. Use it well. The next part of the form deals with tags, and tag prefixes. The tags are part of a system on EcchiDreams which makes it easier to search for similar content. For example, if you tag all of your roleplay content with ‘roleplaying’, if another dreamer were to search for content containing the tags ‘roleplaying’, your content would appear to them providing that your club isn’t private, or closed. A prefix is a tag that appears beside the title of your topic, which makes that particular tag stand out. This can be used to immediately identify a certain topic, with a certain tag such as ‘side story’ so that your members know that, that topic could contain some very saucy material. Due to the amount of power that you as the owner has over the club, this is about to get rather complicated. The first part of the tag forms gives you two slider buttons: If both of these are in the ‘on’ position like above, then this will allow the members of your club to use tags, as well as prefixes. In the off position, your club members will not be able to use tags, or prefixes. That’s simple enough, right? This is where things begin getting more complicated. For the moment, I will skip over the defined tags as we need to explain the tag modes, first. Underneath the option to make it so that topics within this forum require a prefix, you will see a drop down menu; There are four options within this drop down menu: Inherit: Members within your club can apply whatever tags they wish. This is the default tag mode of most of EcchiDreams. Open: Members can do tags themselves, but defined tags will be given as suggestions of which they can pick from. These suggestions appear when you start typing in the tag box. Closed: Member must choose from a selection of tags that is outlined in the Defined Tags. Prefixes only: Member cannot tag and will have to select from a list of prefix options. Now that I have explained what the tag modes are, we can move onto the other tag options which can be used in conjunction with tag modes to allow you full control over the tag system within your club. Define Tags As you can see with the small text, these defined tags will appear as options within a Closed tag system. Members cannot input their own, and must choose from these options. With an Open tag system, these defined tags will appear as suggestions which the member can select from but it doesn’t limit them to just those options. As I mentioned earlier, underneath the defined tags field, you have an option that forces a requirement for every thread to have a prefix. This is self explanatory, as it forced the members of your club to assign a prefix to any thread that they are creating. Default Tags You, as the Owner or Admin of the Club, have the power to set up default tags. With the exception of the ‘Prefixes Only’ tag mode, it will force these tags onto every thread. With the Open tag system, the default tags will appear in the tag field. The defined tags will still appear as suggestions when you type in the tag field. In the Closed tag system, again the default tags will appear in the tag field with the option to add more tags from the list that you have set out. Allowed Prefixes These are selected from a list of prefixes that have been set by the site staff. This adds a drop down menu to the thread creation page, with a list of prefixes for the members of your club to choose from. In order to add a new one to the list, select “+ Add Tag” and scroll through the list to find the one you want to add: At the moment there are four of these tags, to use for your purposes: Main topic: To highlight the main thread of your roleplay. Extra information: To indicate a thread that details out additional information regarding the roleplay. OOC: This tag means Out of Character, for use for threads where Dreamers can interact with each other without disrupting the flow of the Roleplay. Side Story: This tag indicates a side story, which is loosely attached to the main roleplay thread but involves a separate adventure, or a sex scene, which would disrupt the main flow of the roleplay. If you have any suggestions of other tags to add, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the Community Administrative staff although we would only add tags that would be used on a regular occasions across numerous clubs. These tags are likely tags that will be used commonly, and have been grouped together in the drop down menu for ease of selection. The other tags that can be seen, are not suitable for the club roleplay. In the next field, it is possible to set a Default Prefix that will appear for each and every thread inside of that forum: For example, if you create a forum which is completely dedicated to Extra Information, you could force every thread to have ‘Extra Information’ as the prefix. Honestly, doing this is a little pointless if every threat in the forum is dedication to the extra information. It would be better to let members add a prefix of something more appropriate to do with their thread. For example, if they’ve created a species profile, they could add the prefix of ‘Species’ which will immediately identify what is in that thread. Tags Allowed The next two fields deal with the maximum and minimum of tags that can be used by the members of the club. The site default is twenty five tags. You can change it to include as many, or as little as you like. Try to be realistic about it. It’s very rare that someone has been able to use up twenty-five tags in a single forum thread. Although keep note that even if you were to set a minimum amount of tags, if a member tags their thread with a number of tags under your minimum limit, it will still post. Forum Type The very last option gives you two choices: The Discussions type is the type that is primarily seen in the rest of the forum where you have a list of topics where Dreamers can post and interact with one another. This is the forum type that is usually utilised for the actual Roleplaying threads. Questions, on the other hand, allow members within your club to ask the club community a question. Other members will be able to respond back to the original question, and the community can vote on which answer is the best. Or, the Owner can mark the best answer to the question. Your members can also set up a poll, for other members to answer. When starting a new topic within a Questions forum, there are two tabs: As you can see, you have your standard title, tags and text editor which will allow you to format your question however you wish. Even if you set up a poll, the post will still appear underneath it so it allows you to explain your poll to other members of the club. If you select the tab ‘Poll’, you are greeted with this content creation page: Select the ‘Add Question’ button, and you can add in a new question: This will add a poll to your question, which other members can participate in. You can even make it a multiple choice question, and allow members to select from the numerous choices that you have put up. You can also either hide the information of who votes in your poll, or make them public. You can also add an option to automatically close a poll after a certain amount of time. For example, keeping it open for just a week. You don’t have to add just a single question, either. You can add multiple questions to one poll. The Questions format can be very useful to set up as a feedback system to your roleplays. If roleplayers are having problems, and want to ask others for help then they can post up a question detailing their problem. It would also allow the Game Master to ask the roleplayers questions about events that occur in the roleplay, and get feedback from them. Once you have finished setting up everything to your liking in the window for making a new forums tab, click ‘save’ and it will take you back to the home page, or the activity page if you have no home page. You will notice that there is a new Topics tab which is named whatever you called it. You are able to easily edit it, by going to that tab and clicking on ‘Manage Club’ and selecting ‘Edit this forum’. Here you can edit all the settings that you were given when adding in that new feature. Adding a Club Feature: Images Adding a new images tab is a lot simpler than adding a new forum tab to your club. Like before, you will need to go to the ‘Manage Club’ menu and click on ‘Images’ in the ‘Add Club Feature’ potion of the menu. When you click on it, you are greeted by this window: Again, you can title this new tab whatever you wish. If you are using it as Character ID, you could call it ‘Character IDs’ and leave it as if. Underneath the title, you have a description box. Like with the Forum, you can use this to detail out what images are to be added to this category. For example, if you’re using this tab for your Character IDs, then you can put in your Character ID template which the members of your club have to fill out to be able to get involved with your roleplay. Underneath the description box, there are three options that you can either keep enabled, or disable them. Allow Albums: This allows the members of your clubs to create albums within the image category. This is very useful in separating images up per member, and allows members to keep their characters all in one place. This prevents things from getting too cluttered. Allow Comments: This allows members to comment on images within the category like one is able to do in the main EcchiDreams gallery. Allow Reviews: This allows members to review the images posted up. By default, this is disabled, but you can enable it so that members can, for example, review characters that are posted up. Once you have selected what you wanted, you can go ahead and click on the purple save button. Like with the forum, it will send you back to the home page, or the activity page and you will be able to see you new images category in your tab list. Like before, if you wish to edit any of the settings of that particular tab, select it before clicking on ‘Manage club’ and select ‘edit this category’ which will allow you to edit its settings. When the new image category is up, this is what it would look like: The images will appear at the bottom of the description: As you can see, I have my own Character Album which will contain all of my main characters. The images tab is fantastic for use with your Character IDs. The description of each image allows you to place in a Character ID sheet. It allows you to keep things neat and organised. If a character has multiple images, then they can be posted up and linked to the main Character ID profile. Finishing Touches Now you’re aware as to how to add new features to your club, and how to use the options available, you should be able to set up and begin running your own roleplay. How you set it out, is completely up to you. There are no rules as to its format, or any minimum requirements for a roleplay. The ball is entirely in your caught. If you’re still unsure as to what kind of roleplay you want to do, or how design one, I recommend the following guides: Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide How to develop a large, engaging plot How to make an attractive Home Page Tips Follow the content within your club! This will allow you to be alerted to when people post new images, new threads and reply to topics within your roleplay. It helps you keep on top of everything, and to deal with any situations that arise. You can also follow each and every thread, so that when new replies are added to it you are notified: Whenever you do a new post, whether in your own thread or in a thread created by someone else, you will have the option to follow the thread. By default, the slider button is greyed out unless you’ve activated the option to automatically follow content you post to automatically in your main account. To activate it, click the button until it’s in the green ‘on’ position.

How to create an attractive Home Page for your Club! Introduction Table of Contents Introduction Use of images Relevant information Tips and tricks So, you’ve created a Club for you and your fellow Dreamers to Roleplay in. You’ve set up your topics, and you’ve prepared everything to begin playing. But you want to do a Home Page for your club, but you’re not entirely sure what to put in it, to make it draw in more Dreamers. Well, this guide aims to help you with that. The Home Page of your club is the portal to your Roleplay, and thus it’s best to make it as attractive and informative as possible. You need to get across to potential members, of what your club and roleplay is about and make it look eye catching too. The purpose of this guide is to advise you on what you can potentially do with this portal page. It is not here to set out a standard that you must follow. Remember; this is your roleplay and thus you have the ultimate, and final decision on how it looks and what information is visible to Dreamers that join your club. This guide will be filled with tips and tricks that you can utilise and take advantage of. If you want to start up your own Roleplay, but are unsure as to how to go about this, check out these guides: Club Roleplaying and You Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide Introductions: Crash Course in Roleplaying Roleplay Difficulty Guide When you use the homepage feature the activity of the club will be moved over to it’s own tab, “Activity” which will remain next to the homepage tab as a core feature of the club. This is one of the reasons why setting up a homepage is not only recommended but is encouraged because it keeps the two pieces of information separate and the activity list might not look so attractive on the homepage.

Club Roleplaying and You! How to find and join a roleplay The roleplays have different policies that are set up by the Game Master as such it’s largely dependant on what type of roleplay they have. Their first post, homepage, or any form of extra information should cover what needs to be done; however in the rare case that it doesn’t you should send them an EcchiText or seek out an OOC section so you can ask. There are four types of clubs: Public: Anyone can see these clubs, and anyone can post in it even without joining the actual club, but anyone is able to join the club. Open: Anyone can see this club. However they must be a member of the club in order to post content within it. Like with the Public, anyone may join this club. Closed: Clubs that anyone can see in the directory, however joining must be approved by the Club Owner, the Club Administrators or Moderators. Non-club members will only see the member list, and not the recent activity or content areas. Private: These clubs do not show in public and users must be invited by the Owner or Administrator. Staff can still see these clubs, even if they’re not a member of it, but that is due to over-arching staff powers. For the closed clubs, there is an approval process that is exceptionally simple and straightforward with an “Accept” (Tick) or “Reject” (Cross). Owners and Administrators (Possibly Moderators) get a notification when a Dreamer requests to join and the Dreamer gets a notification if they’ve been accepted or rejected. When it comes to looking for a roleplay, the only ones that you will be able to passively browse are the Public and Open roleplays. If they have a Home Page, this generally tells you what the Roleplay is about and might have information about the difficulty of the roleplay so that you can assess if it suits your skill level. If you’re unsure, send an EcchiText to the Owner of the club and ask for more information. In addition to the Home page, all clubs have a description which the Owner may have put information down as to what kind of role play they have, and the general premise. This may be enough to interest you, and get you to join. Each club may have different requirements for joining. The first step would be joining the club itself. But you might still be required to do things before you roleplay. For example, you may be required to fill out an entire Character ID sheet, and have it posted up in either their Images, or in their Character ID thread. You may be required to post up an extra information, with details regarding your character or a location of your characters that is to be involved in the roleplay. It will be different for each and every club, so pay attention to the requirements and if you aren’t sure, ask!

Club Roleplaying and You! Rules and Recommendations To prevent chaos, anarchy and outright pandemonium we have a few rules for Club Roleplay Creators (Game Masters). General Rules As the Game Master, choose your Administrators and Moderators carefully. They have the power to pin and hide content. And in the case of Administrators, they can also remove members from the club entirely or elevate other members to staff positions without the consent of the Club Owner. Thus, they have the power to absolutely ruin a club roleplay. We strongly recommend that you only elevate those you trust to these kinds of positions, especially as Administrators have the same power as the Owner of the club. Note: We may not be able to undo the damage caused by a rouge Club Administrator or Moderator. We’ve restricted the permissions as much as possible to try and mitigate the damage from being permanent as much as possible. Conflicts with other roleplayers are bound to happen at some point, you should try to resolve these issues rationally with each other, as best as you can. However if you cannot resolve the issue contact a Senior Member of Staff or Community Administrator who will attempt to act as an impartial third party to arbitrate the dispute. Be aware that the Game Master of a Club, as well as their Administrators and Moderators, have the power to ban you from a Club if you become too much of a nuisance by breaking club or roleplay rules. This means that you will be removed from it and you will no longer be able to post. Starting a Roleplay Your Roleplay must conform to the basic standards set in Section 17, and Section 17 Paragraph 1 of the Terms of Service. Clearly state any roleplay rules - If you don’t want the rules to be any different, put “EcchiDreams Standard Roleplay Rules” with the link. But, for example; if you’re running an “Witches/Wizards Only” Scenario this is where you’d put it. You can add or take away any rules from this ruleset for your roleplay. Read on for more information. The rules of what goes on in the roleplay are up to the creator of the club, the club Owner. Posts can be reported, however these reports to not immediately go to the club owner. Instead, they go through the main site report system. Staff can then make the club owner aware of the report so that it can be dealt with. It is recommended that you use the report feature for violations of the site ToS as that is indeed a staff matter. Violations of the in-club rules would be better taken directly to the owner of the club so that they may deal with it. Your Rules do NOT override the Terms of Service. (For example in Character ID’s you are not allowed pictures of Minors either nude, and/or in sexual situations). Your rules are in addition to the Terms of Service enforceable only in your club. At this time, Club Roleplays cannot have more than one owner, but they can be transferred to another member of the club. In order to have the owner of a club changed, you must contact a member of the EcchiDream staff who will be able to do it, since you cannot do it yourself even if you are the Club Owner. We recommend the following: Tag - To make their roleplay searchable; usually niches, or something that makes your club roleplay unique. Typically what you want people to search for to find your roleplay. For example you could put the difficulty of the roleplay in there too. You really should make it clear what difficulty your roleplay is, otherwise it’ll be considered as ‘Mixed’. If you want you may use one of our images from the Roleplayer Difficulty Guide, as this is easily noticeable. Joining a Roleplay The Club Roleplays are considered public, and thus anyone who is visiting EcchiDreams can read one that is posted up. Rules between roleplay to roleplay could be different especially if they still have their own rules. If you join a roleplay, and break these rules, then you might be asked by the Game Master to leave the roleplay. If you persist, then staff may become involved - a scenario nobody wants. If things continue like this, then the Owner of the club may remove you and deny you re-entry. The obvious exception to this being the Private Clubs which only allow the members of that club to see it, and it operates on an ‘invite-only’ basis. This is no limit to how many you can roleplay in at any one time. That said, you must adhere to the rules of that roleplay. Your Character ID must be valid in the confines of the stated ID, if there is one. We recommend the following: Making a Roleplayer Preferences Sheet. Some Game Masters may use your Roleplayer Preference Sheet for applications; or even outright require one to be filled out.

Standard Roleplaying Rules Character Creation You must create a valid character ID and post it in the appropriate thread before you begin Roleplaying with them. The Character ID must be complete with at least a paragraph of Bio before it’s considered a valid character ID. There is no limit to the amount of characters that someone may have. Featured NPCs are allowed, complete with an image and description. A featured NPC can be played only by the creator of said NPC, unless they give permission to others. Those roleplaying someone’s featured NPC without permission will be asked to discontinue doing so. Be realistic with money and jobs. A character should not seem to have an unlimited supply of money but no plausible way of earning it or getting it. You may not use a character that has the same name or image as another character in this roleplay, as this creates too much confusion. However if the character is an identical twin, et cetera, an exception may be made so long as you have permission from the owner of the original character and a note is made in the character bio. You are not allowed to create a character that is in a position of power to affect the Roleplay on a large scale. This includes, but is not limited to Dean/Mayor/King ect. You will have to ask the permission of the roleplayer owner before you can have your character has such a position of influence.. Overpowered/Godmod Characters aren’t acceptable here. If your character has a massively powerful ability there must be a massive weakness. You may not kill another roleplayer’s character without the permission of its owner. If permission is given then send a message to the roleplay owner detailing who/how/when the death will occur. If a death is caused by a character that also belongs to the victim, suicide, or accident then a message does not need to be sent to roleplay owner. Once a character is deceased edit their bio stating this or ask a member of the staff to delete it. A deceased character may not come back to life/be Roleplayed again without permission from the Roleplay owner. If you wish to do this submit you reasons why you believe it should be allowed in a message to the Roleplay owner and wait for approval. Character IDs must be posted before they are allowed to Roleplay again. Roleplay Hentai, yaoi, yuri, furry, monster sex, bestiality et cetera are allowed within this Roleplay however make sure to keep sex in the side threads unless it is stated that the main thread can have sex. Restrictions on Extra Information threads must be respected. For example, if an extra information thread is of a place within your roleplay, and does not allow characters to enter if they are under the age of 18, then characters younger than 18 will not be allowed within that location in the Roleplay (Unless the thread owner gives permission). These restrictions should be plainly visible in the extra information post. If you are RolePlaying with another user, one on one and they disappear for two weeks without a reason for their absence (Like they didn't say they were going on holiday, etc), then you are allowed to restart your character once more if you choose to, or have your character move on. Characters that godmod or metagame will not be tolerated. You will be asked to tone it down, or the posts and/or the character will be removed. Do not post in the RolePlay like you're replying to a thread from the forums, for example, simply posting 'Oh, that's so cool!' or 'This Roleplay is stupid!'. Another thing that is not allowed is posting in the RolePlay like the OOC forum, for example, only posting 'Oh, I will post soon guys!'. Small OC text is allowed (in brackets “()” “[]” “[[]]” et cetera) as long as the majority of the post is roleplaying content. Inactivity No singular character will be removed for inactivity. Any character that is posted by a roleplayer will be considered active, as long as the roleplayer is active within the roleplay in some manner. So characters can be inactive, and they will not be removed, as long as the roleplayer is posting within the roleplay. Side stories inactive for more than six months will be closed. A request may be sent to a member of staff to reopen the story but if it falls inactive again it will be closed permanently. If at any time you are Roleplaying with a member that has gone inactive you may have your character move on or restart their arc with someone else (Read above) If you will be absent make sure to post a Leave of Absence and keep it updated to prevent other roleplayers moving their characters along and side threads from being closed.

Club Roleplaying and You! Introduction Table of Contents Introduction Rules and Recommendations General Rules Starting a Roleplay Joining a Roleplay How to find and join a roleplay How to start your own roleplay EcchiDreams Standard Roleplay Rules EcchiDreams Standard Character ID Club Roleplays take advantage of the Club system on EcchiDreams which gives you, your own little corner on EcchiDreams where you can have control over the content within it. The Club system was introduced in The Summer Update, announced on the 26th July, 2017 by @Temaelrin. The Club system allows for sub-communities within the community of EcchiDreams. But, of course, we at EcchiDreams immediately saw their advantage of being used for Roleplaying and allowing our members to have much greater control over the roleplays they publicly post up. The Club system, for this purpose, is exceptionally powerful at what it does. It allows the creator of the club to have complete control over what happens within it, and even gives them staff-like permissions within it so that they can hide, pin or lock content within the club (But not outside of it). At the moment, there is a limit of six clubs that you can create, but there is absolutely no limit to the number of clubs that you can join. So the possibilities are limitless! This guide covers the basics and should help you get started. That said; if you need help at all, do not hesitate to ask. We are here to help in any way that we can. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend trying and familiarise yourself with the following: Roleplay Clubs - The Game Master’s Guide Roleplay Difficulty Guide More Information: Roleplay Clubs. You’ll be setting up your own Club in no time! This guide was written by: @Neptune