Our polygroups have been taken down for inactivity. The Graves Hall one has a notice, but I'm just going to let them take it down. I didn't receive a notice for Beyond and I wrote them a very sarcastic letter, but it was mostly just to share my ire.

Since we've been really slow I don't know that there's a point to saving our polygroups. They're a neat idea, though not entirely useful and polyvore's activity policy makes keeping them live a chore. I've removed the links from the communities and you can absolutely continue to include sets in your threads; we just won't have an accompanying group to share them at random.

It's that time of year again. Nanowrimo is upon us!

This usually means I take a month off from rp, write a novel, then come back in December just in time for holiday fun.

I'll still be here for modly duties, but I won't be doing much playing. Hopefully we'll kick off the end of the year with some exciting plots involving retiring prophets and disappearing stars!

During the course of moving the game over I only moved some of the npc journal. I wasn't sure which characters would still be used.

If you made a character that I didn't move over and you'd still like to use them, please do so (or let me know and I can do it).

Thank you!

Not sure if this wasn't clear before, but we can start playing over here as soon as your journals are made (and have joined the community). I set the community up for adult concepts, so you have to put a base age into your journal's info page (which you can hide from view) before I can add your journal.

RP Bingo is up. If you want to play just ask for a card.

In other news you might have noticed we have a new sister community. You can officially blame Becky for this one. It's called meridian and is based in the future from Graves Hall on the other continent (aptly called Meridian). Take a perusal if you like at the meridian tag on the mod journal. We haven't started play yet, but I imagine it'll be up and running pretty soon.

In other news in the process of moving the mod journal over here I did some housecleaning. I modified a few definitions, but nothing that affects anyone's current characters. For the most part I tried to tidy up the mod journal, since it was getting a little messy.

I still need to go through and add, subtract a few characters (since I know one or two of you have added one and dropped a few down to npc level). Just drop me a comment or an email and I'll make those changes as soon as you have the character information posted in your journals.

Last thing to note: the npc journals have the same password as before (as well as gravenews which is for everyone's use), but I don't feel comfortable posting them in the journal. If you need it im me and I'll give it you.

This one isn't so much of a big deal, but we're only allowed 100 tags on the community.

As a solution I'm debating removing the location tags. They're helpful, but I don't think they're completely necessary for browsing a storyline. Otherwise not all of the characters will have a tag.

Not going to lie, I shouldn't be surprised that we have that many characters. But we do. On both communities.

ETA: OMG. I went back through and fixed all the missing tags. We're almost at our 100 limit, so I didn't put tags on defunct characters whose players are no longer in the game (and I'll probably remove a few more if Joey says it's ok to delete a few threads he was involved in with some players that are no longer with us).

If we hit our limit again with new characters we'll find some way to deal with it. Because we're awesome.

So here's the deal. Sassy ported over the posts with lj-sec. Some of the tags didn't work and none of the comments moved over.

We should discuss as a group how we want to handle the comments. Would we like to googledoc them and add them to the bottom of posts? Do we want to re-do comments? Do we want to leave the comments where they are and consider it done (Sass has been hand saving many of these comments, so they won't be gone, we just won't have immediate access to them until we can figure out where to archive them (as an addendum, we're over our storage limit on the current archive site I have, so we can't add any more to it)).

Let's brainstorm here and come up with a consensus and how to handle old comments.

In the meanwhile, do feel free to continue working on posts that weren't finished on the old comm (here on the new site) and begin playing new things once your journals are set up.

And give Sassy lots of love because she's been working hard.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

I re-did the tagging system a bit.

I've added "!location:" to the beginning of places in the game so that they're all together and easier to find when tagging. I also added "!" to the beginning of other non-character tags (such as "letters"). Finally I deleted some errant tags and fixed misspelled ones.

I'll go through and fix all the links that lead to tags later once I've finished my overhaul.

On a side note my computer was glomped by an unfriendly virus and I'm borrowing Joey's until I can get it looked at (and hopefully fixed with minimal loss). Thanks for bearing with me!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

Inksome has been having some financial issues from what I could gather from this news post.

At the moment what this means is that our icon allotments, as we're all a bunch of free users will go down to 10 icons per journal. This is a pain for some of us (who have multiple characters on one journal), but it's not the end of the world. This may take effect on April 1st if things don't turn around, but I wasn't real clear on that point. It might be happening regardless. I figured you kids might like to know so you can figure out what to do with your icons should they be axed down to 10.

We've certainly been through worse times. Should Inksome close (which from the sounds of it would only happen in April 2011 if the money continues to leak, so we would have decently advanced warning) we'll try to find another home. I'd rather not spend another long winter on googledocs, but this is all in the far distant future so I'm not even going to think about it.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

After a long delay and no contact from our players on hiatus I've decided to remove their characters. They've offered no indication that they'll be returning to the game and only played in a handful of threads anyway. This really only effects those incomplete threads Ellie had which can be resolved any way the other player pleases.

I've updated the add all to remove their journals if you want.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

Your candidates are here. This will be our king (presumably) for the rest of the game. This will not be an adoptable character, however anyone can play him or her from graveshallnpc. We can (and probably will) add to his or her bio as we go, interconnect him or her to our characters, and build on the base structure I put down. The losing character could be put up for adoption if there's interest.

Name: Jackson Willis
Age: 187
Title: Parliament Official
Residence: New Meridian
Familiar: Delta, a partridge
Magical abilities: Iron. Abjuration. Wand.

( Jackson's bio )

Name: Marta Crane
Age: 30
Title: Board of Governors for Salem Academy
Residence: Salem
Familiar: No familiar
Magical abilities: Lycanthropy (this is a secret). Water. Healing.

( Marta's bio )

( To the Voting Booth )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

October approaches.

Round about in April I decided that we'd have an NPC king in the game from now on. We would all have access to the NPC king and we'd all be able to make decisions (game changing or not; and no, you don't have to run it past me if you want to do something radical).

So here is the round table, open discussion. What kind of king would we like to take up office on October 1st?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

In preparation for the murder mystery:

I started making potential victims! Ava Hofmann and her boytoy Lucas Taylor.

I've left their bios very unfinished because I want everyone to help make them. Since your characters may or may not be the one's killing them you should be able to help make them, so it'll be easier to make relationships and find motives. Even if you don't plan on participating in the murder mystery, you can still involve yourself by helping make the victims.

So start thinking on motives and who you might like to be a potential murderer (and I'm thinking too, maybe your character would hire someone to kill one or both of them, not necessarily pull the trigger themselves; we've got plenty of assassins for that purpose).

I'll make a post to start all this stuff up once our potential victims are a little more fleshed out.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

Made a little headway on the new archives site today.

In some ways it's better, in other it's just a pain, but as I'm learning how to navigate it I really like it.

I'd like to make a separate site to upload our chat transcripts to. The great thing is that I can make it visible only to people I want. The downside is that you'd need a gmail account (and I know some of you don't like to share your gmails). I have a compromise in that I have like 50 invites on my account and I can send an invite to you if you'd like to make a gmail specifically for this purpose (this also goes for those of you who don't have gmail).

This would protect our aim screen names and keep our transcripts to ourselves We can also do other things, like comment on pages, share attachments, and we could all use googledocs together (which is what we did between GJ and Inksome) if we run into a rough spot on the web, or if we want to do a two day chat thing (instead of real time, we could comment to each other over the course of two days so all time zones are covered; kind of a random idea, but it might work for us).

I'll make comments screened and you can tell me what you think, or let me know if it's ok to share with your current gmail on file at modthings (and if you're not sure let me know which gmail is ok).

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

Geocities is closing at the end of the year. Which I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't logged in to post our transcript this afternoon. It was nice of them to give such advanced notice.

Here's the thing. It's our backup archives, but I had always seen geocities as a reliable site (just in case bravenet went down geocities would be there if we needed to use it).

Google offers a comparable service that's also free. It might take me a bit to migrate everything over (it's nothing so simple as uploading, there's a lot of copy and paste involved).

Something of a preview: http://sites.google.com/site/modthings/

None of the links work yet, cause I'm still figuring out how to operate in the system, but it's a start.

The really nice thing is that I can add any of you with gmail accounts as collaborators, so that if anyone wanted to add their own content and help me keep it updated you could.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

So, so, so.

I'd like to aim for Saturday, May 16th late morning, early afternoon EST (which sort of accommodates everyone) for our next plotchat. Let me know if this will be an issue; I'll try to remind everyone as we draw closer.

Things I'd like to discuss in this chat: summer plot lines, any big ideas you have for the game (summer or otherwise), and the potential for a murder mystery.

Some ideas that we've stormed for the ( murder mystery )

So please, continue to storm away and gather up some ideas for our next chat. I'm really looking forward to getting back into playing mode.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

I've been feeling a bit like an absentee mommy. Oh school. Anyhow...

1. I'd like to have a plotchat once the semester is done for everyone, so if you could let me know when the last day of your finals are I can figure out a date for a plotchat.

2. Speaking of the end of school... I'm trying to gear up for summer plots. I've been brainstorming some ideas, if anyone would be interested, maybe some overarching plots, or things that would effect the world so if you wanted to participate you could. I had this half assed idea about a murder mystery (because I've been watching Harper's Island), but I'm open to any ideas.

3. If you had some crazy legislation ideas, now would be the time to propose them. I'm thinking that our unnamed interim king isn't quite sure how to handle things and signs things into law because he or she would rather not argue about it.

4. As something of an addendum I've been debating the idea of an npc king (as opposed to a player character) and I think I've decided (with input from you guys) that it's a better idea. We all have access to the npc journal and could each have a hand in how the king is played and it won't rely on just one player (who may wish to leave the game or take an extended hiatus which would put the king out of play; I'd like to avoid that happening again).

So, I'd like to hash out some more ideas during our plotchat for the new king and we'll officially name the king in October (because that's usually when kings are named).


I think that was about it. If you have anything to add, please comment.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

First: I made some (mostly minor) changes to the npc journals. I gave them a better layout and added some details to the npcs I added (making a master post for leos and one for parliament officials). I also added another permission to the npcs: adoptable. This option allows a player to pick up an npc for full time play if they desire (with or without changing the original concept of the character, with permission from the creator of course). Just make sure to specify if there are any requirements like permission, or if the character can be changed.

Second: Would we like to do another plotchat sometime soon? Is this weekend too soon? If yes, does next weekend work? Either way, would Saturday night (9pm EST) or Sunday afternoon (around 3 or 4 EST) work better? Please note: our chats do run at least 2 to 3 hours long (sometimes longer), so you don't have to be there right at the beginning. I know our timezones suck; I haven't found a good solution to work around it.

Third: There is no third. Just thought I should have a third, and then there wasn't one. I can say: I love some of the insano arcs going on right now and I can't wait to see what everyone has planned for their characters (y'know, outside of further torture).

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY graveshallnpc)

This is Carol, posting from the brand spanking new NPC journal.

This is a concept that is used in another game I play in and it works really brilliantly. I posted about the basic concept in the journal if you want to read up and perhaps use this in the game. I plan on adding my own npcs later (but I really have to get back to studying for criminal justice).

To get the password and begin using the journal, you have to friend it (the password is in the flocked second post).

I plan on spiffying up the journal layout later as well, at the moment it's just basic and working.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

Plotchats went well (transcripts are up in the flocked post).

I updated the contact info. For some players email is an easier way to get a hold of them (instead of aim). If you don't mind me posting your email (and if it is a better way to get a hold of you) please comment with an email you'd like me to list. I'll screen comments since this won't be flocked.

I really want to make Aylasian Fight Club. I'll work up some details (with Becky's help, cause she's actually done a seeding chart). Mostly it would just be a fun time OOC game to play.

I think that was about all I had to say. It's awesome to see you girls (and guy) up for plotting and playing!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gravesmod)

Based on the poll we'll split our chat up between Friday night and Sunday afternoon (I didn't list a specific time, but I'll hop online early and see who's on to start the chat). I'd like to keep them brief and to the point, since we're doing two to accommodate everyone who voted. I'll also open the chat post on Friday so if you can't make it to either chat you can discuss any ideas you have in threads.

You've probably noticed it slowed down in the community. This is something I expected given that school is starting up. At least half of us are students and my philosophy is that school (as well as life) comes first. It'll take us all a while to adjust to taking classes and doing homework to figure out our free time for rping. So never you fear; we're still here, just slow.