ChamomileHasWords
New Member
Still accepting new members! The epistolary format of this RP makes it very easy to drop in and out, so you can drop in whenever you want.
Here's a slightly different from the standard idea: Everyone is a wizard submitting letters to a wizard magazine of some kind, produced by a wizard academy with a printing press for its members. I say "magazine" and you think of a glossy softback in a grocery store dating back no further than 1920, but the printing press was invented in 1436, so a small-run academic periodical is not outside the standard fantasy tech level at all. So all the wizards run off and have wizard adventures in the Elemental Plane of Magma or conduct alchemical experiments to combine spiders and cats in the academy cellars or go on an expedition to verify the accuracy of the Compleat Atlas of Hell after some errors were noticed, and then they write up what they're doing and submit it to the magazine. The magazine printer gathers up every letter written in by a wizard this month and compiles it into that month's magazine, prints out enough copies for all the wizards in the academy, and everyone can pick up a copy whenever is convenient. Some wizards submit a letter and collect a magazine on a monthly basis, others return after three years in the howling wilderness of Yug'tholep to drop off a 50-page travelogue/bestiary and pick up forty issues of the magazine printed for them and left in a giant pile in their office while they were gone.
Drop-In, Drop-Out
The epistolary format means you don't have to commit to seeing the RP through to the end. If you stop writing posts, that means your wizard stopped writing letters to the magazine, that's all. That suggests they aren't doing anything interesting enough to be worth writing about, but they don't suddenly become catatonic before quietly fading out of the story the way an abandoned character in a standard prose RP will stop responding and then everyone has to figure out how to move the story past that. If you go inactive and come back after a long absence, it might be because your wizard was doing fairly boring and straightforward academy administration the whole time, it might be that they spent several months on dangerous arcane research or distant explorations and have only just now returned to report on several months of activity (not necessarily at-length - just because they spent three months doing something doesn't mean they want to spend ten pages writing about it), or it might be that they were silently involved in events that unfolded in other letters, just not in a way that ever merited being named by the authors of those other letters.
What Epistles Can Be Submitted?
The magazine is a way for wizards to communicate asynchronously with their community since many of them are only sporadically in the academy's physical grounds. As such, submissions to the magazine can be anything that the author wants to let their fellow wizards know about. It might include an update on arcane research or exploration, a call to arms to do something about some approaching doom, a diatribe about how much a wizard hates a rival academy, or anything else. Two wizards might get into a drawn out screaming match through the medium of magazine articles and counter-articles. The magazine does have an editor who can reject articles, but their role is more similar to that of a forum mod than a modern magazine editor. They might impose a ban on specific hot-button topics or refuse to accept any more articles furthering an ongoing feud between two wizards or otherwise try to keep the peace, but they won't reject anything based on subject matter or quality of submission except in the most extreme of circumstances.
There are, however, two special OOC categories for epistles: Arcane studies and travelogues. Arcane studies introduce new spells and travelogues introduce new locations. The IC wizard academy doesn't necessarily recognize these as official categories, but they're important to keeping the collaborative worldbuilding straight. An epistle doesn't have to be an arcane study or a travelogue, but if it is, it needs to follow the rules below, which are designed to prevent one player from running away with too much of the setting.
Arcane Study
An arcane study introduces a new spell to the setting. If it's a powerful and complex spell, the epistle might literally be an arcane study recounting how the spell was discovered. If it's a weaker spell, the epistle might be a study guide for younger wizards or be a completely unrelated letter that happens to bring up the casting of a basic spell. What's important is that, as an OOC rule, an arcane study can only add one spell at a time, to prevent someone from walking away with half the spell library in their first epistle.
Every spell must have a unique combination of mana, and there are six quiddities of mana: Red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple. So there is only one spell cast with two red and one yellow mana, written as 2R/1Y. Spells with a higher total amount of mana are more powerful and harder to learn, and the total amount of mana used to cast a spell is the spell level. So, that 2R/1Y spell would be third level. Generally, apprentices can cast level 1 or 2 spells, most trained wizards can cast level 3-5 spells, and level 6-9 spells are the domains of exceptionally powerful wizards. A spell cannot contain mana from two opposed quiddities on the color wheel, so no green and red, no blue and orange, and no purple and yellow. This also means each spell can have a maximum of three quiddities, since once you have three, it's impossible to add another without adding one that's opposite to the quiddities already present.
A wizard has a quiddity themselves, and every spell the wizard uses must have at least one point of mana matching their quiddity. You can only write an arcane study for a spell your wizard can use. This means that single-quiddity spells can only be used by wizards of that quiddity, so if you're the only wizard with that quiddity (i.e. if no more than six people join this RP), you get to define all nine of the spells for your quiddity. For that reason, the usual rule about only defining one spell per arcane study is lifted for spells that use only your own quiddity. You can make as many of those as you like all in one go, since you're not taking away slots from other wizards when you do.
Mana is not consumed when cast and comes from magical creatures, locations, and objects. A wizard is themselves a magical creature and has one point of mana from their own quiddity. Additional mana comes from magic creatures and items they carry with them, usually familiars and wands or staves. Some wizards might source their mana from magic rings, magic swords, magic mounts, or any other number of magic things. The only thing they probably don't source mana from is magic locations, because it's hard to pack up a dolmen with you.
Exactly what quiddities mean will be defined in play. Some amount of reasonableness will be enforced. Blue quiddity cannot be the source of all fire magic, because if the quiddities are going to have elemental associations, then clearly fire magic should be red. However, quiddities don't have to have elemental associations. As quiddities get more defined, overlap between them will start to get more rigidly enforced. If the first healing spell uses green quiddity and you want to make a blue quiddity healing spell, that's fine - blue just has to heal in some noticeably different way from green. Maybe green is direct healing while blue is a life-steal, for example. However, if there are eight healing spells and they all use green mana and no healing spells that do not use green mana, then healing magic is green and if you want a blue healing spell, it needs to include some green as well.
Travelogue
Behold, the glorious map of the local realm:
This is a 13x13 hex map with the academy located at 7,7. When you write a travelogue, you define one of the hexes on this map, or else you define a distant realm.
Each hex is 24 miles across, which is about the range that cavalry manning a castle can patrol. This means each hex either has a castle or else has something else instead of a castle. Maybe it's troll country and no one can build a castle there. Maybe the castle is surrounded by a market town or a bustling trading port. Maybe there's a city there instead of a castle, by some ancient agreement at the kingdom's founding. Maybe the castle sits as a lonely outpost on a border march. Maybe there's no castle because the hex is an underwater holding of the merpeople. Regardless of the details, a 24 mile hex is big enough to be its own fiefdom with its own problems, and a 13x13 hex map with each hex being 24 miles across is about the same size as Great Britain in total. When you define a hex, you can decide who rules it, who lives there, what's going on, etc. etc. If you define a hex adjacent to the academy, they probably have some kind of relationship with the academy. If you define a hex adjacent to a bunch of previously defined hexes, then what's going on in that hex probably has something to do with what's going on over in those hexes, but 24 miles is far enough away that they aren't necessarily directly impacted. If you define a hex in the middle of the grey, then who knows what's going on over there.
The more of the local realm gets defined, the more other hexes need to fit in with what's already been defined. At the beginning, however, the only thing defined about the local realm is that there's a wizard academy in the middle of it. Does the wizard academy rule some or all of the local realm? Are we a hidden enclave in a land where magic is outlawed? Is the local realm split between many small kingdoms or united into one larger one?
A distant realm is in a different region of the world. It might be the neighboring kingdom, another continent, the South Pole, or another dimension. There are 168 blank hexes on the standard map, so we definitely shouldn't have to create distant realms due to running out of space, but if someone wants to write an epistle about venturing to the South Pole or a Japan expy or whatever, I'm going to make a new map instead of adding 400 hexes to the east/south edge of this one.
When you are defining a distant realm, you can define as many locations in it as you want. You don't have to limit yourself to one hex. Once a distant realm is defined, however, it must be added to one hex at a time just like the local realm.
Non-Wizard Characters
Only wizards can submit articles to the magazine, but that doesn't mean your wizard has to be your "real" character. Your wizard might be a Watson-style sidekick narrator to someone else entirely. They might be a wandering observer who rarely intervenes in stories that unfold around them. The epistolary format can do a lot of things besides literal letters.
Prose Roleplay
I don't want to get too far ahead of myself while I'm still writing the interest check, but I do want to put on the table from the beginning that if Isekai Hell can have five thousand different threads then it's not out of the question that Arcane Epistles will eventually spin off into a regular RP thread where we write out a third-person prose story about our wizards or other characters in this setting. I'm not sure how to handle major upheavals in the setting as a result of significant plot developments, and it might end up being handled in prose instead of epistles. I'm not putting a ton of thought into it right now, though, because that's a future that may never come and certainly not soon.
Here's a slightly different from the standard idea: Everyone is a wizard submitting letters to a wizard magazine of some kind, produced by a wizard academy with a printing press for its members. I say "magazine" and you think of a glossy softback in a grocery store dating back no further than 1920, but the printing press was invented in 1436, so a small-run academic periodical is not outside the standard fantasy tech level at all. So all the wizards run off and have wizard adventures in the Elemental Plane of Magma or conduct alchemical experiments to combine spiders and cats in the academy cellars or go on an expedition to verify the accuracy of the Compleat Atlas of Hell after some errors were noticed, and then they write up what they're doing and submit it to the magazine. The magazine printer gathers up every letter written in by a wizard this month and compiles it into that month's magazine, prints out enough copies for all the wizards in the academy, and everyone can pick up a copy whenever is convenient. Some wizards submit a letter and collect a magazine on a monthly basis, others return after three years in the howling wilderness of Yug'tholep to drop off a 50-page travelogue/bestiary and pick up forty issues of the magazine printed for them and left in a giant pile in their office while they were gone.
Drop-In, Drop-Out
The epistolary format means you don't have to commit to seeing the RP through to the end. If you stop writing posts, that means your wizard stopped writing letters to the magazine, that's all. That suggests they aren't doing anything interesting enough to be worth writing about, but they don't suddenly become catatonic before quietly fading out of the story the way an abandoned character in a standard prose RP will stop responding and then everyone has to figure out how to move the story past that. If you go inactive and come back after a long absence, it might be because your wizard was doing fairly boring and straightforward academy administration the whole time, it might be that they spent several months on dangerous arcane research or distant explorations and have only just now returned to report on several months of activity (not necessarily at-length - just because they spent three months doing something doesn't mean they want to spend ten pages writing about it), or it might be that they were silently involved in events that unfolded in other letters, just not in a way that ever merited being named by the authors of those other letters.
What Epistles Can Be Submitted?
The magazine is a way for wizards to communicate asynchronously with their community since many of them are only sporadically in the academy's physical grounds. As such, submissions to the magazine can be anything that the author wants to let their fellow wizards know about. It might include an update on arcane research or exploration, a call to arms to do something about some approaching doom, a diatribe about how much a wizard hates a rival academy, or anything else. Two wizards might get into a drawn out screaming match through the medium of magazine articles and counter-articles. The magazine does have an editor who can reject articles, but their role is more similar to that of a forum mod than a modern magazine editor. They might impose a ban on specific hot-button topics or refuse to accept any more articles furthering an ongoing feud between two wizards or otherwise try to keep the peace, but they won't reject anything based on subject matter or quality of submission except in the most extreme of circumstances.
There are, however, two special OOC categories for epistles: Arcane studies and travelogues. Arcane studies introduce new spells and travelogues introduce new locations. The IC wizard academy doesn't necessarily recognize these as official categories, but they're important to keeping the collaborative worldbuilding straight. An epistle doesn't have to be an arcane study or a travelogue, but if it is, it needs to follow the rules below, which are designed to prevent one player from running away with too much of the setting.
Arcane Study
An arcane study introduces a new spell to the setting. If it's a powerful and complex spell, the epistle might literally be an arcane study recounting how the spell was discovered. If it's a weaker spell, the epistle might be a study guide for younger wizards or be a completely unrelated letter that happens to bring up the casting of a basic spell. What's important is that, as an OOC rule, an arcane study can only add one spell at a time, to prevent someone from walking away with half the spell library in their first epistle.
Every spell must have a unique combination of mana, and there are six quiddities of mana: Red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple. So there is only one spell cast with two red and one yellow mana, written as 2R/1Y. Spells with a higher total amount of mana are more powerful and harder to learn, and the total amount of mana used to cast a spell is the spell level. So, that 2R/1Y spell would be third level. Generally, apprentices can cast level 1 or 2 spells, most trained wizards can cast level 3-5 spells, and level 6-9 spells are the domains of exceptionally powerful wizards. A spell cannot contain mana from two opposed quiddities on the color wheel, so no green and red, no blue and orange, and no purple and yellow. This also means each spell can have a maximum of three quiddities, since once you have three, it's impossible to add another without adding one that's opposite to the quiddities already present.
A wizard has a quiddity themselves, and every spell the wizard uses must have at least one point of mana matching their quiddity. You can only write an arcane study for a spell your wizard can use. This means that single-quiddity spells can only be used by wizards of that quiddity, so if you're the only wizard with that quiddity (i.e. if no more than six people join this RP), you get to define all nine of the spells for your quiddity. For that reason, the usual rule about only defining one spell per arcane study is lifted for spells that use only your own quiddity. You can make as many of those as you like all in one go, since you're not taking away slots from other wizards when you do.
Mana is not consumed when cast and comes from magical creatures, locations, and objects. A wizard is themselves a magical creature and has one point of mana from their own quiddity. Additional mana comes from magic creatures and items they carry with them, usually familiars and wands or staves. Some wizards might source their mana from magic rings, magic swords, magic mounts, or any other number of magic things. The only thing they probably don't source mana from is magic locations, because it's hard to pack up a dolmen with you.
Exactly what quiddities mean will be defined in play. Some amount of reasonableness will be enforced. Blue quiddity cannot be the source of all fire magic, because if the quiddities are going to have elemental associations, then clearly fire magic should be red. However, quiddities don't have to have elemental associations. As quiddities get more defined, overlap between them will start to get more rigidly enforced. If the first healing spell uses green quiddity and you want to make a blue quiddity healing spell, that's fine - blue just has to heal in some noticeably different way from green. Maybe green is direct healing while blue is a life-steal, for example. However, if there are eight healing spells and they all use green mana and no healing spells that do not use green mana, then healing magic is green and if you want a blue healing spell, it needs to include some green as well.
Travelogue
Behold, the glorious map of the local realm:
This is a 13x13 hex map with the academy located at 7,7. When you write a travelogue, you define one of the hexes on this map, or else you define a distant realm.
Each hex is 24 miles across, which is about the range that cavalry manning a castle can patrol. This means each hex either has a castle or else has something else instead of a castle. Maybe it's troll country and no one can build a castle there. Maybe the castle is surrounded by a market town or a bustling trading port. Maybe there's a city there instead of a castle, by some ancient agreement at the kingdom's founding. Maybe the castle sits as a lonely outpost on a border march. Maybe there's no castle because the hex is an underwater holding of the merpeople. Regardless of the details, a 24 mile hex is big enough to be its own fiefdom with its own problems, and a 13x13 hex map with each hex being 24 miles across is about the same size as Great Britain in total. When you define a hex, you can decide who rules it, who lives there, what's going on, etc. etc. If you define a hex adjacent to the academy, they probably have some kind of relationship with the academy. If you define a hex adjacent to a bunch of previously defined hexes, then what's going on in that hex probably has something to do with what's going on over in those hexes, but 24 miles is far enough away that they aren't necessarily directly impacted. If you define a hex in the middle of the grey, then who knows what's going on over there.
The more of the local realm gets defined, the more other hexes need to fit in with what's already been defined. At the beginning, however, the only thing defined about the local realm is that there's a wizard academy in the middle of it. Does the wizard academy rule some or all of the local realm? Are we a hidden enclave in a land where magic is outlawed? Is the local realm split between many small kingdoms or united into one larger one?
A distant realm is in a different region of the world. It might be the neighboring kingdom, another continent, the South Pole, or another dimension. There are 168 blank hexes on the standard map, so we definitely shouldn't have to create distant realms due to running out of space, but if someone wants to write an epistle about venturing to the South Pole or a Japan expy or whatever, I'm going to make a new map instead of adding 400 hexes to the east/south edge of this one.
When you are defining a distant realm, you can define as many locations in it as you want. You don't have to limit yourself to one hex. Once a distant realm is defined, however, it must be added to one hex at a time just like the local realm.
Non-Wizard Characters
Only wizards can submit articles to the magazine, but that doesn't mean your wizard has to be your "real" character. Your wizard might be a Watson-style sidekick narrator to someone else entirely. They might be a wandering observer who rarely intervenes in stories that unfold around them. The epistolary format can do a lot of things besides literal letters.
Prose Roleplay
I don't want to get too far ahead of myself while I'm still writing the interest check, but I do want to put on the table from the beginning that if Isekai Hell can have five thousand different threads then it's not out of the question that Arcane Epistles will eventually spin off into a regular RP thread where we write out a third-person prose story about our wizards or other characters in this setting. I'm not sure how to handle major upheavals in the setting as a result of significant plot developments, and it might end up being handled in prose instead of epistles. I'm not putting a ton of thought into it right now, though, because that's a future that may never come and certainly not soon.
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