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BIG POST IS BIG. And Important.
Hey Taxon! It's Dien and Sof here again. This is a monster post of monsterdom. Fasten your seatbelts for a tidal wave of teal dear. First, we want to try and address your various concerns, a little more in-depth than on the last post, and then... we want to get to the fun stuff, and talk about Taxon's past, present, and future.
Concerns that were brought up in feedback
→ Tagging speed: Every single one of us has probably been guilty of this at some point in the game. I (Dien) know that I have, for sure. It's a common problem that some threads languish due to slow replies. It's bad enough even when it's merely a thread for character development between two people; it's worse if there's overall plot hinging on it.
Do Sofie and I have one instafix solution for this? No, sadly. It's something we've each fallen down on ourselves. However, in our experiences as roleplayers, here are some tips that CAN help keep threads going:
→ What time is it, anyway?: Regarding big plots and the timing thereof, handwaving, backdating, and all other forms of RP time not being quite the same thing as real time:
In an ideal world, game time could match real time. In a game where slow tagging is the rule and getting more than one tag on a thread a day is sometimes rare, it may not always be feasible, so a certain amount of flexibility regarding the 'time thing' is necessary to let plots organically end, and also have their consequences played out. Otherwise, why run plots at all, if their resolutions are always going to be handwaved because things need to move on?
On the other end of the spectrum, Taxon as a game CAN'T wait for a specific thread to conclude in a given plot before moving on to the next thread in that plot. Trying to do that results in hang-ups where one or two players who have a crucial scene to play out hold up an entire plot that can't advance until their scene is concluded.
The Etrigan plot's a prime example, really. Real-time, we started that plot in April; it's now August, and I personally would still really like to have the meeting post for those events-- because it's important to my idea of Jason's characterization (and others) to have it. But I'm also aware that it's redonkulous to be doing this on a five-month gap. So what's the solution? There isn't a perfect simple one, but here's the best compromise I can offer:
(And just because it IS still ongoing: yes, the meeting post for the Etrigan plot will happen. Yes, it'll be vastly backdated. As to what 'time' it is in Taxon right now? It's whatever time it is to the characters. The weather is artificial and so is the calendar, for them, so it shouldn't matter that much whether it's really 'August' in Taxon or not.)
→ OOC planning and communication in general: Hopefully the return of weekly-ish chats and bi-monthly SOTTs will help with this aspect of things.
→ Metaplot: See below.
→ NPCs: As mentioned in the last mod post, you are free, and encouraged, to create NPC Extras. For that matter, we're ecstatic if players want to take initiative in helping us flesh out the aliens, once the metaplot really starts kicking in. As for NPCs created by the GMs for player use, we will write up entries on a few of those, and players are absolutely welcome to use them in creating plots.
→ Consequences: See Metaplot.
→ Chances for non-powered characters to contribute: We think there WILL be those opportunities in the metaplot, and encourage you to suggest more ways that there can be.
→ If we didn't answer a concern you brought up: then we missed it. Please remind us!
Holy @#*$, It's a Metaplot, Get in the Car!
Here comes some major teal deer. Grab a drink, get comfy. We'll try and explain exactly what Taxon is, who is responsible for the PCs being here, and what the state of the universe outside of Taxon is like... and, most importantly, what the future holds.
So what are the aliens, anyway? --The story so far
The 'hamsters' are, of course, not hamsters in their native form. To human eyes, they would appear physically as nothing more than bright patches of colored light. It's possible they used to have corporeal bodies that they have evolved beyond by the equivalent of a 'digital upload' of their consciousnesses, and it's equally possible that IS their native form, but either way, they do not naturally have 'bodies' as we recognize them.They're hyper-intelligent shades of the color blue!
However, they are quite used to operating bodies, and, among themselves, use a variety of custom-built forms, some more mechanical, and others more organic, based on the needs of the task at hand.
They are an extremely advanced species from a very distant star, in relation to Earth. They would consider themselves a peaceful and pacifistic people. They also consider themselves the only truly sentient species in the universe, although there is considerable debate among themselves over whether humans and some other alien races qualify.
For purposes of shorthand, let's call them Travelers.
They, uh, travel. The species as a whole spends a great deal of time exploring the universe. They have extremely advanced spacecraft, capable of FTL travel and communication, in which small groups of ten to twenty Travelers jump from system to system, seeking intelligent life (well, intelligent life by their standards) and the beauty and wonder of the universe.
About twenty Sol-based years ago, a group of Travelers entered our Solar System and began their usual scans. One of the very first things they found, in the vicinity of Saturn, was a free-drifting personal escape pod from a human spacecraft. The pod had been extensively damaged by space debris, and the person inside was so long-dead as to be nothing more than a petrified space-mummy, but the pod had, among other things, a digital library of media intended for the occupant's entertainment.
Thus, the Travelers' first exposure to Homo sapiens was, primarily, a collection of stories.
While they are extremely intelligent, the Travelers are also very different from us. Just as it would be difficult for us to make inferences about a culture wholly foreign to us, using only their more fanciful fiction, the Travelers struggled to comprehend humanity through this data. They have a very shaky understanding of 'fiction', and, especially initially, were unable to realize that not all depictions in the library were factual.
The Travelers eagerly sent news of their find to the rest of their species, and continued exploring the system, discovering the good old third rock from the sun. They have conducted surface explorations of Earth, but the planet is not really a very friendly location to be anymore: a dead world, irradiated and polluted.
(As for humanity itself? Long extinct. The human race appears to have gone extinct somewhere around the year 2100-- a thousand years before the Travelers entered the system. Off-world colonization had just started to be a real possibility when the War to End All Wars [this time for real] broke out on a planet already strained to desperation in a jostling panic for dwindling resources. Nuclear weapons, and worse, were deployed. It seems likely that humanity was completely destroyed, fulfilling all the Doomsday scenarios at last.)
While the Travelers did find some surviving records and media on Earth, their most complete source of data remained the original digital library from the escape pod-- surviving in an anaerobic, mag-and-rad-shielded, and gravity-free environment for a thousand years had miraculously allowed most of the data to remain intact. The same could not be said for many records on Earth.
The Travelers did what any self-professed scientifically curious and incredibly advanced species searching for other life forms decided to do: they brought us back.... as best they could.
With approval from the rest of their species, the initial group of Travelers to our system spent years in study of their discovered digital library, trying to analyze the narratives within and construct AI approximations of the 'people'. They parked themselves within sight of the dead planet (there was this convenient moon just lying around, with lots of handy subterranean chambers), appropriated space on the moon for their social/scientific experiment, and set to work fabricating an advanced virtual reality system for their AIs to play in.
They named it Taxon.
In science, of course, many experiments end in failure: this was the case with several of the first iterations of Taxon. Multiple versions of Taxon were discontinued (but remain in the Travelers' computer systems, digital ghosts for the interest of science), and many, many 'people' were created, found to be flawed or unstable, and purged again from the system.
The current version of Taxon in which your characters live and think-they-are-breathing is Taxon in its eighth major iteration. It is a very detailed virtual environment, populated by artificial intelligences who think they are people and have been lovingly and closely modeled on fictional artifacts from the dying days of Earth's history.
The things these 'people' do are recorded, observed, studied, and sent back to the rest of the Traveler species, who are, on the whole, quite fascinated with this little experiment. It's also caused a lot of division and debate among the Travelers, but.... more on that to come.
Okay. So now what?
The ultimate goal of the Travelers with this experiment was twofold: one, to determine if humans meet their standards of 'sentient', and two, to bring them back in a more permanent and less-dependent fashion, if so.
The jury is very much still out on the first question.
The Travelers can be divided into several distinct schools of thought regarding Taxon's People, as follows:
As far as the long-term goal of possibly bringing people back 'for real'... VR was only to be the first step. Eventually, the Hamsters intended to give us 'bodies' in the same way they themselves use bodies-- disembodied intelligences operating physical forms. They would download the AIs into bodies as close to our originals as they can replicate.
They've done a few trial runs, so far. Some of you may remember that, if your character went on hiatus, they had dreams upon return of 'experiment-like stuff'-- waking up in tubes behind glass, being poked and prodded, that sort of thing. These were first attempts at housing your character's digital consciousness in a carbon-based body. The bodies weren't viable, and each died within a few hours of being “born”. The Hamsters went back to the drawing board.
They're about to get a huge incentive to hurry up.
The Human Rights-ers know that as long as the Taxon subjects exist only virtually, it will be very hard to 'free' them in any significant fashion. Essentially, Taxon is a fishbowl and the fish can't be taken from it without ceasing to exist... right now. They've been exerting pressure on the Hamsters to put more effort towards a corporeal Taxon, and in the near future, they are going to attempt something drastic to try to bring about this goal. You see, one of the Hamsters who is involved in the Taxon project shares the Human Rights' camps view, and has been coordinating a plan...
The rogue Hamster will attempt to hack Taxon's operating system to, once again, try to send a message to the Taxon populace. For Taxonians, this is going to be an unpleasant experience as the environmental simulation gets majorly screwed with.
Communicating with the Taxonians is a secondary goal of the HR-ers: the first is to manipulate the Hamsters into going forward with full biological integration of Taxon, under the premise that a biological Taxon is more stable than a virtual one-- it can't be hacked, at least.
And that's when things will really get interesting for Taxon as a whole...
A Rough Timeline of Things We'd Like to Do (Let Us Take You for a Ride)
→ Soon (aka, sometime this month): For a few days, Taxon's operating system will be hacked and will act in strange and disconcerting ways. Taxonians may write this off as 'just another glitch' at first, but it seems far more random and less theme-driven then some of the past ones have been. A more extensive write-up will happen, but general ideas:
→ Immediately after the Hack: Candy!Taxon. Bear with us here. The Hamsters will make a rather panicked broadcast in which they apologize for the recent disruptions, attempt to soothingly assure everyone that nothing is wrong, please, go about your business, look, look, let's all have something nice and fun and sweet, okay? OKAY.
And they'll kick off a back-burner scenario they've had of Taxon as, essentially, a 1980s morning cartoon with a candy theme. Taxon Candy Mountain. Peppermint People. Gumdrop cars.
Jess has proposed running this glitch for us, so she'll be in charge of the plot and posts pertaining to such things. We are sure you will all appreciate your sugary, sticky, sweet existences, and by appreciate we mean 'hate'. This glitch is scheduled to run for two weeks, but we're not at all set in stone on that: if people petition for longer, we can do that. And remember you can always backtag to things!
→ September-November: Becoming a Real Boy. This is not really a 'glitch' or a 'plot' so much as it is an ongoing thing happening in the background, which your characters can notice, respond to, be bothered by, or write off as you like. Basically, the Hamsters are transferring Taxon over to a biological platform: your characters' AI brains are being loaded into physical bodies, and sent back out into a newly physical, fabricated, nano-bot assembled Taxon. It looks just like the old one. As far as your senses are concerned, it is the old one. Where the weirdness may come in is in your own body.
The following things are OPTIONAL-- you do not have to do any of them, if they don't interest you, but they are clues that something is going on with your bodies. Feel free to suggest additional things that can go wrong here:
By November, though, the transition will be complete and all of these side effects will cease (unless you really want something to continue, which is always an option).
(Also at the start of September: the aliens purged some things from their memory banks. Communications logs from past inhabitants of Taxon, which were accessible on the tablets to very savvy characters, are now gone. Characters who learned, via word of mouth, of things about Taxon that they never personally experienced (such as Taxon being located inside a cavern) will forget that information. This is just to make sure that all the player characters are starting on the same ground regarding 'what they know'; it's a little bit of a fresh start. If you're like 'wait, does this impact me?' then chances are, it probably does not.)
→ November through early 2014: More attempts by the HR aliens to make contact. Weird messages on tablets. The HR aliens may attempt to appear, on the tablets, in the guise of people characters know, in a misplaced attempt to gain trust and be reassuring (think that scene at the end of Contact). They did not apparently learn from the Hamsters' attempt to be 'reassuring' by being fuzzy animals.
→ Sometime in early 2014: Perimeter breach! Team Free-the-Humans will manage to physically blow a hole in the wall of the cavern where Taxon is housed. For the first time in current resident memory, you can get out. If you dare. But the caverns and lunar surface beyond Taxon are very dangerous places, so you'd better take a friend... and be prepared for the Hamsters to try and get you to go back inside.
It's for your own good, after all. The Hamsters don't want you to get hurt. Because it's much harder to repair you, now that you are real boys and girls.
→ No time frame designated yet: Here comes total, free-wheeling, wild speculation. What happens next? That will largely depend on your actions, Taxonians, and your suggestions as players. Sofie and I do not want to dictate a plot in one direction: we want to work with you to see where your imaginations can go. That said, here are some possibilities we have yelled at each other in our mad, four-in-the-morning babbling:
Various things that fit nowhere else in this
As long as characters are in Taxon proper, glitches and other personal plots can, of course, still happen. None of this metaplot is meant to replace any of the things you want to get up to in Taxon; this just provides the overall framework and backdrop against which normal, crazy Taxonian existence is occurring.
But what about after you're out of Taxon (if your character elects to leave)? How can you have gender-switching shenanigans, or bursting-into-song shenanigans? Must all For-the-Lolz be left behind in this grim new space dystopia?
Of course not. After all, your brain is still an AI, even in a physical body, and it's an AI operating in an experimental chassis. Glitches of personality can and will still result! Even glitches of body aren't off the table-- your bodies are infected with numerous assembly nanites, which, occasionally, may get programmed to do things which can only happen in the handwaved science of a far future where aliens appear as giant hamsters.
Would this mean no new characters could come into the game, if the characters left Taxon?
HAHANOGODFORBID. Rest assured we'll find ways to justify the arrival of new characters.
I don't like change and it's scary and I'm not really sure I want the game to go this direction.
Talk to us! We want everyone to be happy, but we think the game also needs purpose, and a direction, for players to care. There is only so much of a static prison society that characters, and players, can tolerate, after all. In the past, Taxon has remained a dynamic game due to the influx of new characters, but, for better or worse, we have a small group right now. The dynamic part of the game needs to be something the game itself contains, and not something dependent on outside players finding us.
(That said, we are of course still welcoming outside players, and please do keep asking people who you would like to see join the game. Fressssh meat.)
So while we get that change can be scary and that nostalgia is powerful, let's try and jump together and see where we land. Worst comes to worst, we can always reboot the things that don't work.
To reiterate: nothing is set in stone, everything is up for development. This is YOUR GAME TOO. Pursue plotlines that matter to you. Help us make the game into the place where you can do that. We hope you'll weigh in on things here, and we hope you're excited as we are. Questions, suggestions, and 'how about if we....' are welcome and encouraged. Oh, also, please suggest better names than 'Pessimists' and 'Human Rightsers'. Good God.
Concerns that were brought up in feedback
→ Tagging speed: Every single one of us has probably been guilty of this at some point in the game. I (Dien) know that I have, for sure. It's a common problem that some threads languish due to slow replies. It's bad enough even when it's merely a thread for character development between two people; it's worse if there's overall plot hinging on it.
Do Sofie and I have one instafix solution for this? No, sadly. It's something we've each fallen down on ourselves. However, in our experiences as roleplayers, here are some tips that CAN help keep threads going:
-Have an ending point in mind. Small talk for small talk's sake is all well and good, but it can lead to repetitious tags that add nothing new, with both players twiddling their thumbs and wondering where the thread is going. If you and the other player are both fine with a thread that goes for as long as the two of you can stretch it? Awesome! Just make sure you're on the same page.
-Don't be afraid to drop a PM and ask the other player for clarification, direction, or anything else. It's easy not to (God knows I have), to be lazy and let the tag languish instead, but prompt tagging is a two-way street.
-Make sure there's things in your tags for the other player to respond to! I often have a rule of thumb for myself when playing with someone I don't know well yet: I try to insert a question into every one of my tags. It gives the other player something to do and it mimics the give and take of real conversation. Conversely, when your character gets asked a question, ask yourself, "Am I answering this in a way that provides meat for the other character to react to?"
-Even if your character is a laconic, grumpy sort (hi Jason) or doesn't state their true feelings or thoughts easily, you can still provide internal narration of their own thoughts, and use actions to indicate emotion. Body language is your friend with the antisocial sorts.
-Try and match the effort you're given. Not all of us write novel-length paeans in our tags, of course, but it's very dispiriting as an RPer to write multiple paragraphs of text to someone else and get a few sentences back. Give yourself room and time to write a tag that you're happy with.... unless your problem is never tagging back at all. Then you're maybe being too harsh on yourself. ;)
-If it's been more than 72 hours and you're still stuck on a tag, drop the other player a line or an OOC note if it's feasible, even if it's just to say 'I really can't get into the headspace to tag, I'm so sorry, can we OOCly discuss what happened and handwave this one?' It's only polite. And yeah, this rule needs to hold for your GMs too.
→ What time is it, anyway?: Regarding big plots and the timing thereof, handwaving, backdating, and all other forms of RP time not being quite the same thing as real time:
In an ideal world, game time could match real time. In a game where slow tagging is the rule and getting more than one tag on a thread a day is sometimes rare, it may not always be feasible, so a certain amount of flexibility regarding the 'time thing' is necessary to let plots organically end, and also have their consequences played out. Otherwise, why run plots at all, if their resolutions are always going to be handwaved because things need to move on?
On the other end of the spectrum, Taxon as a game CAN'T wait for a specific thread to conclude in a given plot before moving on to the next thread in that plot. Trying to do that results in hang-ups where one or two players who have a crucial scene to play out hold up an entire plot that can't advance until their scene is concluded.
The Etrigan plot's a prime example, really. Real-time, we started that plot in April; it's now August, and I personally would still really like to have the meeting post for those events-- because it's important to my idea of Jason's characterization (and others) to have it. But I'm also aware that it's redonkulous to be doing this on a five-month gap. So what's the solution? There isn't a perfect simple one, but here's the best compromise I can offer:
-When you're posting something that specifically is meant to take place only a few hours or days after another thread, say so OOCly and plainly in the post. [Backdated to X]. It helps clear up OOC confusion.
-If you're in a thread that needs to conclude in order to let other posts move on, sit down with your RP partner(s), figure out between the two (or more) of you how your thread is going to end, and then stick a note up in the OOC community to outline the relevant data and let the other thread get started. Having multiple threads being played at the same time that technically happen 'after' one another is part of the nature of the beast when it comes to journal-based RP.
-If you know a plot is hanging on you, make an extra effort to post promptly. If you can't because of RL, make an effort to communicate that.
(And just because it IS still ongoing: yes, the meeting post for the Etrigan plot will happen. Yes, it'll be vastly backdated. As to what 'time' it is in Taxon right now? It's whatever time it is to the characters. The weather is artificial and so is the calendar, for them, so it shouldn't matter that much whether it's really 'August' in Taxon or not.)
→ OOC planning and communication in general: Hopefully the return of weekly-ish chats and bi-monthly SOTTs will help with this aspect of things.
→ Metaplot: See below.
→ NPCs: As mentioned in the last mod post, you are free, and encouraged, to create NPC Extras. For that matter, we're ecstatic if players want to take initiative in helping us flesh out the aliens, once the metaplot really starts kicking in. As for NPCs created by the GMs for player use, we will write up entries on a few of those, and players are absolutely welcome to use them in creating plots.
→ Consequences: See Metaplot.
→ Chances for non-powered characters to contribute: We think there WILL be those opportunities in the metaplot, and encourage you to suggest more ways that there can be.
→ If we didn't answer a concern you brought up: then we missed it. Please remind us!
Holy @#*$, It's a Metaplot, Get in the Car!
Here comes some major teal deer. Grab a drink, get comfy. We'll try and explain exactly what Taxon is, who is responsible for the PCs being here, and what the state of the universe outside of Taxon is like... and, most importantly, what the future holds.
So what are the aliens, anyway? --The story so far
The 'hamsters' are, of course, not hamsters in their native form. To human eyes, they would appear physically as nothing more than bright patches of colored light. It's possible they used to have corporeal bodies that they have evolved beyond by the equivalent of a 'digital upload' of their consciousnesses, and it's equally possible that IS their native form, but either way, they do not naturally have 'bodies' as we recognize them.
However, they are quite used to operating bodies, and, among themselves, use a variety of custom-built forms, some more mechanical, and others more organic, based on the needs of the task at hand.
They are an extremely advanced species from a very distant star, in relation to Earth. They would consider themselves a peaceful and pacifistic people. They also consider themselves the only truly sentient species in the universe, although there is considerable debate among themselves over whether humans and some other alien races qualify.
For purposes of shorthand, let's call them Travelers.
They, uh, travel. The species as a whole spends a great deal of time exploring the universe. They have extremely advanced spacecraft, capable of FTL travel and communication, in which small groups of ten to twenty Travelers jump from system to system, seeking intelligent life (well, intelligent life by their standards) and the beauty and wonder of the universe.
About twenty Sol-based years ago, a group of Travelers entered our Solar System and began their usual scans. One of the very first things they found, in the vicinity of Saturn, was a free-drifting personal escape pod from a human spacecraft. The pod had been extensively damaged by space debris, and the person inside was so long-dead as to be nothing more than a petrified space-mummy, but the pod had, among other things, a digital library of media intended for the occupant's entertainment.
Thus, the Travelers' first exposure to Homo sapiens was, primarily, a collection of stories.
While they are extremely intelligent, the Travelers are also very different from us. Just as it would be difficult for us to make inferences about a culture wholly foreign to us, using only their more fanciful fiction, the Travelers struggled to comprehend humanity through this data. They have a very shaky understanding of 'fiction', and, especially initially, were unable to realize that not all depictions in the library were factual.
The Travelers eagerly sent news of their find to the rest of their species, and continued exploring the system, discovering the good old third rock from the sun. They have conducted surface explorations of Earth, but the planet is not really a very friendly location to be anymore: a dead world, irradiated and polluted.
(As for humanity itself? Long extinct. The human race appears to have gone extinct somewhere around the year 2100-- a thousand years before the Travelers entered the system. Off-world colonization had just started to be a real possibility when the War to End All Wars [this time for real] broke out on a planet already strained to desperation in a jostling panic for dwindling resources. Nuclear weapons, and worse, were deployed. It seems likely that humanity was completely destroyed, fulfilling all the Doomsday scenarios at last.)
While the Travelers did find some surviving records and media on Earth, their most complete source of data remained the original digital library from the escape pod-- surviving in an anaerobic, mag-and-rad-shielded, and gravity-free environment for a thousand years had miraculously allowed most of the data to remain intact. The same could not be said for many records on Earth.
The Travelers did what any self-professed scientifically curious and incredibly advanced species searching for other life forms decided to do: they brought us back.... as best they could.
With approval from the rest of their species, the initial group of Travelers to our system spent years in study of their discovered digital library, trying to analyze the narratives within and construct AI approximations of the 'people'. They parked themselves within sight of the dead planet (there was this convenient moon just lying around, with lots of handy subterranean chambers), appropriated space on the moon for their social/scientific experiment, and set to work fabricating an advanced virtual reality system for their AIs to play in.
They named it Taxon.
In science, of course, many experiments end in failure: this was the case with several of the first iterations of Taxon. Multiple versions of Taxon were discontinued (but remain in the Travelers' computer systems, digital ghosts for the interest of science), and many, many 'people' were created, found to be flawed or unstable, and purged again from the system.
The current version of Taxon in which your characters live and think-they-are-breathing is Taxon in its eighth major iteration. It is a very detailed virtual environment, populated by artificial intelligences who think they are people and have been lovingly and closely modeled on fictional artifacts from the dying days of Earth's history.
The things these 'people' do are recorded, observed, studied, and sent back to the rest of the Traveler species, who are, on the whole, quite fascinated with this little experiment. It's also caused a lot of division and debate among the Travelers, but.... more on that to come.
Okay. So now what?
The ultimate goal of the Travelers with this experiment was twofold: one, to determine if humans meet their standards of 'sentient', and two, to bring them back in a more permanent and less-dependent fashion, if so.
The jury is very much still out on the first question.
The Travelers can be divided into several distinct schools of thought regarding Taxon's People, as follows:
-The 'Hamsters': the initial group of Travelers who found us, and whose experiment we are. Their opinion of us is, essentially, benevolent and protective, but not terribly concerned with our dignity and rights. They think of us as you might think of kittens or puppies: adorable, entertaining, fascinating... but to be kept inside their puppy pen for their own good, and certainly as a lower form of life compared to themselves.
-The Pessimists: Many of the Travelers who watch the Taxon broadcasts are very concerned about what they see as an innate propensity to violence built in to the human psyche. The mentality of the Taxon subjects appears to delight in conflict and destruction, as they see it. They worry that humans are an incurably dangerous species, and believe the Taxon experiment should be discontinued entirely, or at the least, very heavily monitored. Humans should definitely not be brought back on a wide scale.
-The Human Rights-ers: On the other end of the spectrum, there are Travelers who watch Taxon and are convinced that not only are we sentient, we are imprisoned entities who obviously resent our imprisonment and our manipulation. They argue that our destructive natures are a symptom of reaction to captivity. They believe that the situation should be explained to us, and that we should be 'freed' from Taxon, and welcomed into the universe at large. (Probably not as full equals, though. I mean, look at them, they're really not very bright, are they?) While this predates most of the current Taxon playerbase, the HRs were responsible for the broadcasted, but garbled, messages of May 2011, and, thus, the Hamsters' subsequent disruption of all spoken language in the city.
-The Popcorn Munchers: To this last group, we are entertainment, pure and simple. The Hamsters regard us somewhat paternally, and do not consciously seek to make our captivity worse-- over time, they have realized that things they find 'interesting' are traumatizing to us, and now seek to avoid these. The Popcorn Munchers, in comparison, are that breed of fan who is like 'YES, MOAR ANGST, MOAR'. They submit suggestions to the Hamsters for some of the nastier glitches/plots, and pressure them to inflict them upon us. As the Traveler society is essentially a collective of group rule, sometimes they win out-- they offer to pledge their influence against the Pessimists, and keep Taxon going... if they get to see everyone fighting pygmy hamsters on a desert island.
As far as the long-term goal of possibly bringing people back 'for real'... VR was only to be the first step. Eventually, the Hamsters intended to give us 'bodies' in the same way they themselves use bodies-- disembodied intelligences operating physical forms. They would download the AIs into bodies as close to our originals as they can replicate.
They've done a few trial runs, so far. Some of you may remember that, if your character went on hiatus, they had dreams upon return of 'experiment-like stuff'-- waking up in tubes behind glass, being poked and prodded, that sort of thing. These were first attempts at housing your character's digital consciousness in a carbon-based body. The bodies weren't viable, and each died within a few hours of being “born”. The Hamsters went back to the drawing board.
They're about to get a huge incentive to hurry up.
The Human Rights-ers know that as long as the Taxon subjects exist only virtually, it will be very hard to 'free' them in any significant fashion. Essentially, Taxon is a fishbowl and the fish can't be taken from it without ceasing to exist... right now. They've been exerting pressure on the Hamsters to put more effort towards a corporeal Taxon, and in the near future, they are going to attempt something drastic to try to bring about this goal. You see, one of the Hamsters who is involved in the Taxon project shares the Human Rights' camps view, and has been coordinating a plan...
The rogue Hamster will attempt to hack Taxon's operating system to, once again, try to send a message to the Taxon populace. For Taxonians, this is going to be an unpleasant experience as the environmental simulation gets majorly screwed with.
Communicating with the Taxonians is a secondary goal of the HR-ers: the first is to manipulate the Hamsters into going forward with full biological integration of Taxon, under the premise that a biological Taxon is more stable than a virtual one-- it can't be hacked, at least.
And that's when things will really get interesting for Taxon as a whole...
A Rough Timeline of Things We'd Like to Do (Let Us Take You for a Ride)
→ Soon (aka, sometime this month): For a few days, Taxon's operating system will be hacked and will act in strange and disconcerting ways. Taxonians may write this off as 'just another glitch' at first, but it seems far more random and less theme-driven then some of the past ones have been. A more extensive write-up will happen, but general ideas:
-Fluctuating levels of oxygen, lighting, and gravity in Taxon.
-Objects appearing distorted.
-Cryptic writing appearing in mid-air, or on your skin, or on a wall
-The projected sky, buildings, and scenery of Taxon dissolving into nothingness or static
-Laws of motion and inertia behaving in unpredictable fashions
-Suggest other stuff!
→ Immediately after the Hack: Candy!Taxon. Bear with us here. The Hamsters will make a rather panicked broadcast in which they apologize for the recent disruptions, attempt to soothingly assure everyone that nothing is wrong, please, go about your business, look, look, let's all have something nice and fun and sweet, okay? OKAY.
And they'll kick off a back-burner scenario they've had of Taxon as, essentially, a 1980s morning cartoon with a candy theme. Taxon Candy Mountain. Peppermint People. Gumdrop cars.
Jess has proposed running this glitch for us, so she'll be in charge of the plot and posts pertaining to such things. We are sure you will all appreciate your sugary, sticky, sweet existences, and by appreciate we mean 'hate'. This glitch is scheduled to run for two weeks, but we're not at all set in stone on that: if people petition for longer, we can do that. And remember you can always backtag to things!
→ September-November: Becoming a Real Boy. This is not really a 'glitch' or a 'plot' so much as it is an ongoing thing happening in the background, which your characters can notice, respond to, be bothered by, or write off as you like. Basically, the Hamsters are transferring Taxon over to a biological platform: your characters' AI brains are being loaded into physical bodies, and sent back out into a newly physical, fabricated, nano-bot assembled Taxon. It looks just like the old one. As far as your senses are concerned, it is the old one. Where the weirdness may come in is in your own body.
The following things are OPTIONAL-- you do not have to do any of them, if they don't interest you, but they are clues that something is going on with your bodies. Feel free to suggest additional things that can go wrong here:
-Aliens get small details wrong on your body-- your eyes are now the wrong color, or you're right-handed suddenly after being a leftie all your life
-Your muscle memory and coordination are awful for a few hours, like you've forgotten how to walk
-You experience strange memory lapses, just losing hours or even days at a time to blackouts (as the aliens restore your consciousness to a back-up point, probably due to needing to put you in a new body)
-Weird itches or phantom pains
-Ringing in the ears
-Strange dreams of being poked and prodded on examination tables
-Fever or flu symptoms
-Being massively hungry, or craving certain foods, due to your body having certain deficiencies
-Strong sensations of deja vu
-SUGGEST OTHER CREEPIFYING STUFF
-People with superpowers: you can, if this interests you at all, just nix powers totally during the transitional period. The aliens are working on getting baseline human bodies right-- maybe superpowers are something that are planned for a future update. Tweaking powers is also a valid way to creep out your character. Vampires might find they don't crave blood, or can walk in the sunlight. This is a chance to muck with the things your character takes for granted about themselves, so go wild.
By November, though, the transition will be complete and all of these side effects will cease (unless you really want something to continue, which is always an option).
(Also at the start of September: the aliens purged some things from their memory banks. Communications logs from past inhabitants of Taxon, which were accessible on the tablets to very savvy characters, are now gone. Characters who learned, via word of mouth, of things about Taxon that they never personally experienced (such as Taxon being located inside a cavern) will forget that information. This is just to make sure that all the player characters are starting on the same ground regarding 'what they know'; it's a little bit of a fresh start. If you're like 'wait, does this impact me?' then chances are, it probably does not.)
→ November through early 2014: More attempts by the HR aliens to make contact. Weird messages on tablets. The HR aliens may attempt to appear, on the tablets, in the guise of people characters know, in a misplaced attempt to gain trust and be reassuring (think that scene at the end of Contact). They did not apparently learn from the Hamsters' attempt to be 'reassuring' by being fuzzy animals.
→ Sometime in early 2014: Perimeter breach! Team Free-the-Humans will manage to physically blow a hole in the wall of the cavern where Taxon is housed. For the first time in current resident memory, you can get out. If you dare. But the caverns and lunar surface beyond Taxon are very dangerous places, so you'd better take a friend... and be prepared for the Hamsters to try and get you to go back inside.
It's for your own good, after all. The Hamsters don't want you to get hurt. Because it's much harder to repair you, now that you are real boys and girls.
→ No time frame designated yet: Here comes total, free-wheeling, wild speculation. What happens next? That will largely depend on your actions, Taxonians, and your suggestions as players. Sofie and I do not want to dictate a plot in one direction: we want to work with you to see where your imaginations can go. That said, here are some possibilities we have yelled at each other in our mad, four-in-the-morning babbling:
- The Hamsters, desperate to try and keep their project under their control, start attempting to Negotiate with characters. You want to go home? Sure, they can give you home again (or a facsimile so close you can't tell the difference). Just come back inside the cave. You want to be human again? Free of your demon? Free of your powers? Immortal? We can totally make a deal. Just come back inside the cave. We promise everything will be alright.
-The line between the Pessimists and the Humans First aliens gets drawn deeper and deeper, until disagreements become actions... and a ship of Pessimist aliens comes to try and wipe Taxon's citizens out. Can they fight alone? Or is it time to find allies?
-Can the humans prove to the Pessimists they're NOT a species that solves all its problems with violence?
-IS humanity all really dead? What if off-planet colonization did happen, before Earth bit the big one?
-Other alien races, less intelligent than the travelers. Friendly? Not friendly? Being locked up and studied, or roaming the spaceways in their own primitive craft?
-Steal a ship. Travel to Earth. Explore the dead ashes of every dream you ever had. Commit suicide. Okay no wait don't do that part.
-Steal a ship. Sail the galaxy. Find a world that can support life. Build a new Earth. Live happily ever after.
-All of the above!
-None of the above!
Various things that fit nowhere else in this
As long as characters are in Taxon proper, glitches and other personal plots can, of course, still happen. None of this metaplot is meant to replace any of the things you want to get up to in Taxon; this just provides the overall framework and backdrop against which normal, crazy Taxonian existence is occurring.
But what about after you're out of Taxon (if your character elects to leave)? How can you have gender-switching shenanigans, or bursting-into-song shenanigans? Must all For-the-Lolz be left behind in this grim new space dystopia?
Of course not. After all, your brain is still an AI, even in a physical body, and it's an AI operating in an experimental chassis. Glitches of personality can and will still result! Even glitches of body aren't off the table-- your bodies are infected with numerous assembly nanites, which, occasionally, may get programmed to do things which can only happen in the handwaved science of a far future where aliens appear as giant hamsters.
Would this mean no new characters could come into the game, if the characters left Taxon?
HAHANOGODFORBID. Rest assured we'll find ways to justify the arrival of new characters.
I don't like change and it's scary and I'm not really sure I want the game to go this direction.
Talk to us! We want everyone to be happy, but we think the game also needs purpose, and a direction, for players to care. There is only so much of a static prison society that characters, and players, can tolerate, after all. In the past, Taxon has remained a dynamic game due to the influx of new characters, but, for better or worse, we have a small group right now. The dynamic part of the game needs to be something the game itself contains, and not something dependent on outside players finding us.
(That said, we are of course still welcoming outside players, and please do keep asking people who you would like to see join the game. Fressssh meat.)
So while we get that change can be scary and that nostalgia is powerful, let's try and jump together and see where we land. Worst comes to worst, we can always reboot the things that don't work.
To reiterate: nothing is set in stone, everything is up for development. This is YOUR GAME TOO. Pursue plotlines that matter to you. Help us make the game into the place where you can do that. We hope you'll weigh in on things here, and we hope you're excited as we are. Questions, suggestions, and 'how about if we....' are welcome and encouraged. Oh, also, please suggest better names than 'Pessimists' and 'Human Rightsers'. Good God.
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All in all, very interesting. I will have more thoughts when I am not a) tired and b) work brain.
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(I swear 2 god I will settle down and have metaplot thoughts [tl;dr plans = YAY] eventually I just need to wrap my head around this.)
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Dien's phrased the player aspects of a slow game much better than I could, but I'll extrapolate on the actual passage of time In-Game, as it were:
Of course characters' Taxoniversaries still matter. Of course holidays and birthdays and whatever else you, the players, want to incorporate in your rp still has a place in the game. It's just a matter of...
Okay, I'm gonna put this in movie/tv show terms for the sake of visualization:
In a tv show/movie, (ideally) we only ever get to see the characters do "important things". By that I mean Things that are relevant to the plot. Everything to do with getting from point A to point B is cut from the finished product - unless something happens during that walk/bus ride/etc that drives the plot or character development.
That is roughly how time will function in Taxon. Big events will take place in a certain month and time of year, but the downtime afterwards where there's not really a lot of things going on doesn't need the same amount of screen time. We'll of course play aftermaths and fall outs and stuff after plots, for sure, but those are "important things" from our POV as mods. What you decide as players to be important to your character's arc or overall development is of course entirely up to you, and we encourage all kinds of initiative.
We'll have regular SOTTs, in which we ask everyone to fill out a Character Relations Meme detailing what their characters have been up to "behind the scenes" or even "between the scenes" since the last Big Plot.
Like the big post says, nothing is set in stone, and if there's something that just doesn't work, we are more than willing to change stuff again.
In the words of Tim Gunn ( ;3): (We'll) Make it work!
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Glitch's vanishing post went up July 24. Based on the posts before it I sort of mentally set it as a couple weeks after the Battle of Sanctuary, then Emma's post (someone please remind me how to shot tags) as a few days after that, which puts it close to mid-May. Ish. Depending on how much time
is an illusioneveryone else OOCly thinks has passed since the event I'm running my timeline off of. Theoretically it could be a month or so later and so maybe it was June, or maybe things have been REALLY boring and he went away on the date the post went up, three months after the end of the Etrigan plot.But I don't want to do that because I don't want to zap three months of everyone else's potential continuity away, and I really do think we're operating in a not-long-post-Ettie world ICly.
...am I making any sense? tl;dr for the next event/SOTT will we have some OOC consensus of how long it's been ICly since the Ettie thing?
(THOUGHT: use weird metaplot stuff to fold time back up so when October rolls around there can be pumpkins...unless literally no one else gives a fuck and we get to autumn when we get to autumn even if it is February.)
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Glitch's disappearance, as I understand it, does indeed happen relatively shortly after Etrigan is put away, that's how I was reading it, at least. After that, things are relatively quiet until the upcoming Hacked!Thing and Candy Taxon, which will happen, as far as characters are concerned, in their 'midsummer'. When the next SOTT goes up (September 1), I'll clarify within it that Taxon is now in autumn and in September, and characters can sum up using the SOTT anything they were doing over the summer that needs mentioning.
I get what you're saying about not wanting to assume time has happened for other people when it maybe hasn't, but I think that with people backtagging whatever they want to have happened within that period, it is not a serious issue.
Obviously, if anyone else has concerns or complaints with this as a timeline, please tell us! *waves big sign*
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Far as hamster names, how about Nobles for the Human Rightsers, both to refer to the nobility of their cause, and their belief in the (adorably stupid) nobility/value of humans? Or The Precious, refering to the value of their cause, the value of the humans, and some hamstery version of, 'You think they're people? oh, that's precious.'
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about your dragons":The Backstory Stuff: good. Very good, very sense-making. Space Mummy was a giant nerd with an affinity for turn fo the 20th century media (can we call hir Sam?)
Alien Society: aka things I've wanted to mess with for years but never got to because Shit Kept Happening. More yes and good. Also for Pessimists how about Fatalists since they want the faux-humans "dead". Alternately: Futilitarians.
Actual Plot Stuff: ...oh the degree to which we will be Discussing Things re: re-apping what's his name. This is also good and progressive and exciting! And I think probably worth something of a relaunch, and possibly a rebranding. See below.
Random Notions: Unfortunately in the wider world of DWRP Taxon is still something of a punchline ("lol wasn't that the no-anime-allowed game that also banned Twilight and was wanky as fuck?" and yes always referred to in the past tense). Breaking through all that to get in new blood...let's just say all my past efforts have failed. ON THE OTHER HAND there's a strong anti-jamjar/stuck-in-a-city movement afoot, so if we push the broken jamjar angle that could work in our favor.
Really though I don't want to appeal to the masses, I'd just like to see a couple, three new people in. And then each of them can bring in a couple, three of their friends each. Something.
I hate to say it but we may need a plurk.no subject
And then let me begin again by saying yay. It's good to see you excited about the new angles we're bringing into gameplay. The times they are a-changin'. /cue harmonica solo
As for rebranding and reputation: right now we're not overly concerned about whatever Taxon's 'reputation' may be among DW RP circles, mostly because neither Dien nor myself are invested in those circles.
We're interested in finding players who stand out to us as original RPers who are playing things from the canons you might not normally see. Taxon has always been something of a haven for the oddball characters from obscure media, and while we of course welcome any characters, we're not worried about a popularity contest, a re-branding, or being visible on Plurk/Twitter/Instagram.
What we are interested in, however, is making this the best game it can possibly be. I don't think marketing the game through social media is the right way to go.
This might change in future, but at this point in time, Dien and myself will be putting our time and efforts to the streamlining of the community and getting the new premise sorted. Adding on other platforms would not only be counter-intuitive, but counter-productive.
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This is giving me some hilarious ideas for what transitioning Remus would be like (can we say puppy ears and tail?)
Change IS scary, but also good and I'm loving seeing this overall plot idea going up.
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