<90% irrelevant sidetracking history babble>
We're freeform, like your RPG. What's also very important is that
Crimson Feather is a means of mine to cheat - I've started countless roleplays in the past, but if you have ten to juggle, you can't dedicate enough time to all of them - it's crazy. I had to learn that. If you try and run several roleplays at the same time, regardless how good the ideas may be, they'll shrivel up and die.
RPs I've had the past (just look at the volume, the explanations are only there if you want to read them, they're not the point of this list):
KraiaKy - a roleplay universe not entirely owned by me, but given the name by me. This was a network of planets, each of which was represented online as a forum on InsideTheWeb.com. The genre was fantasy and it was all I did for the first years of my online time. I hate it now.
Thankfully, InsideTheWeb.com no longer exists and so the decision to stay or not was not mine. Dragons, dinosaurs, paladins, dark magic... you name it. I had a couple of planets in this one, five or six or so I think.
City of Flame and
Black Desert Sun - technically part of KraiaKy - CoF and BDS were counterpart planets in different dimensions. The inhabitants were linked to each other, so anyone living on BDS had a CoF counterpart. Other than that, they had no similarities... CoF was a desert planet inhabited by four species of dragons each with their own version of history regarding how CoF became a desert, and BDS was an underground cave system with living, luminous stones that were, if they were large enough, worshipped in temples.
Black Desert Sun I've always liked, it's the part of KraiaKy I miss the most. I made it non-freeform at the time, and each location in BDS tweaked the stats someone had. I think there were 6 stats and each went from 1-10... you had 35 points you could distribute. The main villain (gamemaster character) had 60 points, of
course.
I'll shut up about BDS now because I can go on for ages... *nostalgia*
Oddworld - There may have been a name for this one. Anyway, I started an RP on Oddworld once - a couple of people joined, but no one ever RPed, so I consider it to have been a "never started off" one.
Sehto - A pokémon game where the pokéball devices commonly don't discriminate - so if you're human, you can be caught, too. A nightmare, hellish place, which only became apparent towards the end when people realised how bloody sadistic they'd been.
It was a "think before you act" moral-of-the-story RPG I made for my girlfriend. It had the desired effect, plus an extra scaring.
Dusk Fallen - Modern day RPG set primarily in London, where a radicalist otherkin group is looking for ways to get more political attention than Greenpeace - and, ideally, wipeout mankind. (Yes, it was otherkin criticism. I think I'm entitled to that, being otherkin myself.) One had the choice of being supportative or against that grouping. We timestamped all posts so that even though we played for a couple of months, we barely finished a week IC.
And then it died. It had three players at peak point...
*cries*
Prophetic - A cyberpunk/fantasy/modern view of the world after the polar caps melted. People found telepathy, but they would die trying to use it, except for those who were infected with a virus that 'stole their soul' and rendered them not needing one. They would die ~20 years after infection, though, gradually phasing out until the strain on their tissue would cause a heart attack or other failure. Those people were called Sifters and kept away from society whilst at the same time being treated somewhat as slaves, as they were the only that could teleport. I called it Prophetic because I wanted to set it into the universe of The Prophecy, and get the Sifters involved in a new fallenangels-humans war of sorts. It never even started.
I might be missing some. The list seems too small.
Now, I'm not about to make statements about quality about the above. I'm thinking there'll be a reason they didn't pick up.
Anyway, all my first RPGs had one thing in common - they were for kids, unlike: Sehto, Dusk Fallen, Prophetic... they were either disturbing or just downright nasty. Those three were created after I made Crimson Feather. Crimson Feather was intended adult. The amount of "adult content" in the OOC channels of places like
Raptor Clan (not mine) and
Black Desert Sun was pretty high, mostly because of the general liberal mindset of the otherkin that made up about 90% of the players. But it was shallow, sex-only stuff. I didn't paticularily enjoy that so I decided to create a background for them to RP on. The basis of Crimson Feather was a story set in the KraiaKy universe, and then...
</90% irrelevant sidetracking history babble>
Then I read Otherland and wanted a universe like that. Somewhere where you could essentially chose your genre - you could wander off into space somewhere and call it sci-fi, you could involve yourself in political things on earth, you could play fantasy and cyberpunk if you involved yourself in the internet.
Crimson Feather is nothing else but me cheating. I used the ability to create online simulations to take some of my old RPGs and revive them
as parts of this world. Parts that we'd leave if they got boring. But the fact CF was and is in a constant state of flux has kept it alive for years. I first made it midway in the year 2000.
So it's not really solidly based on anything. It's just a world with the ability to be what we, as players, just happen to feel like.
Or what it needs to be to further the plot. Accordingly, the only rule a character needs to truly adhere to whilst creating their character is that their character is human when that char is offline. The character's online avatar can be anything.
Additionally, and maybe most importantly, I expect the players to feel at home. I'm not going to drag their characters through a plot whether they want to or not. I'm more likely to sit back and let them do what they want, and occasionally nudge the entire plot a bit further along. But fact is, Crimson Feather exists as a means for people to indulge in personal plotlines they have going.
*deep breath*
So, to get back on topic
I didn't get the impression the SS RPG was strongly encouraging mini plots. Wrong impression? (Note that it isn't criticism, Black Desert Sun didn't encourage mini plots at all, either, it just existed for the main plot really, and it was great fun!)
