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sticks and bones. ([personal profile] sticksandbonesmods) wrote in [community profile] outofsticks2024-10-25 10:09 am
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OOC PLOTTING: Like Branches on a Tree

OOC UPDATES:
  • Hi, this section goes first this month (SURPRISE!) mostly for the flow of the post.
  • The bonus AC store was updated! The following new things are available:
    • Ydalir now offers intermediate and major magic enchantments. If you want something enchanted and you’re not sure what “tier” it would be, feel free to ask us on the FAQ or the Discord Q&A. We realize these are kind of a vague way to shoehorn things into a category and our examples aren’t perfect.
    • Since all of the Guardians have been assembled/acquired, they’re now offering blessings. These range from 5 to 20 threads total depending on how powerful they are. They’re meant to provide you with either a temporary or permanent boon, depending on the item in question. The effects are detailed on the bonus AC page proper, but the items are:
      • A bottle of Zahliya’s fire
      • A bottle of Sinann’s water
      • A magically enhanced antler from Moder
      • A… mystery organ :) from Callan
      • And a rainbow tailfeather from Aurora.
    • After we see how people react to these new items, we will probably add more things in the future that are going to be cheaper. If anyone has something they super want, feel free to reach out to the mod team.
  • Wolfie will be taking a slight (not full) (but like 50%) mod hiatus during November to recover from burnout. This does not mean that Wolfie’s NPCs will be unavailable entirely, but this does mean that if contacted, responses will be much slower and/or the results of the thread will be handwaved. Unfortunately Wolfie’s brain is at war with Wolfie’s desire to be Doing. The general audience has already noticed this but now it’s ~official~.
    • Wolfie’s NPCs for reference are: All 5 Guardians (Moder/Zahliya/Callan/Sinann/Aurora), Zonari, the Behemoth, Ydalir, Beiwe, Elsword (only for those who wind up in the Garden), & Renard when he's unlocked (untreed).
  • This is a bit in the future, but Wolfie has alluded to doing a monster transformation type of event and the note is being made now because we know having art/designs in place is important to people for these. So far the plans are just “it’s happening” and we don’t want to put any upper limits on what people can and can’t do, but if you’re designing something early: Make it fit in with the setting reasonably. That means no super mechanical designs (mechanics where limbs are missing or existing cybernetics are fine) — no computers for heads! Bonus points if flowers/plants are added, but this is not mandatory at all because it’s not a Corruption event.
    • Also as a question for the audience: With an event like this, would you want it to be extended so people are a bit monster-y for longer than a month? Let the mods know, we’ve never done a super extended event so could be fun!
  • We slightly changed the plotting post template because at this point the old one is, well, old — almost 2 years! — and it’s time to change it to be more robust. Surprise! x2!
SETTING UPDATES:
  • So, speaking of those Guardians: Pure Vanilla & the other Guardians revived Aurora, the Sky Guardian. She is now available to contact freely on the NPCs page. With that comes a number of changes to the Grove itself:
    • The aforementioned blessings become available (others may be added later if you guys decide you really like these).
    • The native birds will often fly out and bring player characters mundane gifts (seeds, flowers, shiny things, a really cool stick, etc) as thanks for saving their patron deity.
    • The barrier keeping people from flying more than 30 feet up has shattered and reformed higher up. The vertical height limit is now 100 feet from the Grove/150 feet when standing on the lower elevated beach off the cliffside. This does remove the… glitch? From Luca’s bar where the entire world stops rendering after you head 30 feet up and look out the window.
    • The sun can occasionally be seen when the weather isn’t bad; it’s no longer almost constantly grey and overcast. One might even say the weather is “normal” and not “sad and depressing”.
  • Speaking of the weather, though: It’s Winter. It’s getting pretty cold. Throughout the month, small snowstorms will kick up, and this means that everyone’s flowers and vegetables will quit growing and die unless they’re in the greenhouse or otherwise indoors. Don’t worry, they’ll be back next spring, you don’t need to regain more seeds.
  • Normally, wintertime means that our friend the Black Sun/Forest/the antagonist guy goes into hibernation, and while that’s true this time, he has left one more small gift for everyone before he trundles off to go nap for 3 months.
PLOT UPDATES:
  • This month is a player plot! Everyone say “thanks Aspen” for the player plot!!
  • As the Black Sun goes to take his yearly nap, new pathways in the forest will open up, visible with or without the Golden Glasses and looking quite strange and inviting. Characters who walk into these pathways will be met with a dead end, where the fog wall will rush in behind them and trap them. A few hours later, they will emerge unscathed…
  • …but the characters themselves will be changed, mentally or physically or both. Other characters will still recognize you as “you” no matter what happens, and there’s the potential that other characters will not realise you’ve undergone changes and see you as “normal” (in the way they know you). You may look into the mirror and realise you’ve changed, or you may see nothing wrong and think you’re normal despite everything.
  • The Grove itself remains unchanged during this event, with only the characters themselves changing in minor to major ways. Memories themselves have been altered, too, with characters being led to believe that something different happened in their pasts. This can range from an early childhood memory being changed, to something within their time in the Grove being altered.
  • To quote Aspen’s provided example using Vash, some memory and therefore character alterations could be:
    • Not following Nai into Tesla's chamber, thus preventing Nai from being able to access the system. The ship never crashed, and they all lived happily ever after.
    • After finding his brother in his teens, the two banded together, with Vash believing that purging the world is a form of kindness and mercy for those that were trapped on No Man's Land. No one lived happily ever after.
    • Vash decided to stay in the Grove after Wolfwood's death. He was never corrupted, and everyone lived happily ever after.
  • These AU memories will last for a month, and it can include multiple memories & physical traits being changed. This is your AU, have fun, go wild. The only thing off the table here is turning into another creature if your canon/CRAU doesn’t align with it — so for example, Ryslig CRAUs could be another monster and that would be fine, but Mizuki can’t turn into a Harpy and start flying. That said, if your physical change includes temporary, 1-month long false Corruption and that’s how you become a creature, that’s fine, just hide from Zahliya, he will not hesitate.
  • With all of that being said, if you re-enter the forest paths, you will come out with a different set of memories/physical changes. This is for all of you who are indecisive and want to play out several AUs, you know who you are.
  • Characters who are too smart to just walk into the forest may find themselves tempted by a voice calling to them, or see an illusion of someone else wandering in, etc etc. And of course, if this event is uninteresting to you, simply do not have your character walk into the woods and the AUing is avoidable.
  • Unrelated to the differing paths, we’re holding a lottery for a prophetic vision below as well! Beiwe and Ourania will contact whoever wins, asking them to tend to a newly re-emerged clutch of dragon eggs on the beach — the coming winter is to be harsh, and the eggs are no longer protected from the weather. This will begin the process of unlocking, well, baby dragons, and also draconic blessings aka dragon features.
  • It feels weird not ending this with the OOC section so OOC section 2: We love you guys, ok thanks.

Please use the following form for plotting:

Character:
Canon:
CR: Who is your character? Any special powers or things they have going on? Any specific CR you want to kickstart?
Plans: What’s on the agenda for this month? Any interactions with the monthly event? Other things you want to do?
Not Seeking: Anything you'd like to avoid.
Anything Else: A permissions post, opt-in for a character-specific power or whatever else.
Recent Posts or Toplevels: For things you posted that you want additional tag-ins on or that might’ve gone missed.
Past Life Plotting Toplevel: From ye olde post.
Meme: Make us laugh.

eidxiety: (Default)

[personal profile] eidxiety 2024-10-28 10:28 pm (UTC)(link)
you floating evil sesa at me when my pigeon is on soft hiatus

i will be in your walls.
eidxiety: (Default)

Re: Wolfwood

[personal profile] eidxiety 2024-10-28 10:29 pm (UTC)(link)
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THINGS PLANNED THAT ARE A SURPRISE FOR LATER wait i know the things don't i. nevermind. dm me.

anyway if you de age this man in front of me re: the first AU i have to opt out of CR with you for the month i'm sorry fhfhfdh

anyway opferung bites him y/n
lupusxylem: (38)

[personal profile] lupusxylem 2024-10-28 10:30 pm (UTC)(link)
:)

:)))
lupusxylem: (41)

[personal profile] lupusxylem 2024-10-28 10:32 pm (UTC)(link)
LMAO YES YOU DO KNOW THE THINGS

Also nah dw Im not gonna do that he's just gonna??? be a normal man, like the most normal man you've ever met for that option LIKE PLS DW IM NEVER GONNA DO THAT I LOVE U

Also if Opferung DOESNT bite him I will be very sad
eidxiety: (Default)

[personal profile] eidxiety 2024-10-28 10:34 pm (UTC)(link)
listen you got me scared for a second. "he's technically 16" in the same vein as ain's "he's either 505, 23, or 5" /this one is mostly a joke

anyway, opferung ain bites the most normal wolfwood. the end.
lupusxylem: (47)

[personal profile] lupusxylem 2024-10-28 10:36 pm (UTC)(link)
The way Im choosing to do it is like, Wolfwood just stayed at the orphanage until he was 25 bc nobody wanted to adopt him. So now he just kindof works there?? Bc like what else is he supposed to do

Meanwhile Opferung is biting him and he's like hi buddy do you need some help are you good
andacht: (spiritualism-007 @LuXll_)

[personal profile] andacht 2024-10-28 10:41 pm (UTC)(link)
the carryover of "the existing CR still sticks" makes this extremely fucking funny ngl. wolfwood like no one wanted me, and in 24pt font he's just like

lupusxylem: (71)

[personal profile] lupusxylem 2024-10-28 10:42 pm (UTC)(link)
>nobody wanted me

Man standing two inches from him who wants him a concerning amount:
andacht: (spiritualism-005 @OTK___SP)

[personal profile] andacht 2024-10-28 10:42 pm (UTC)(link)
"i want that man in a way that's concerning to law enforcement" energy
ghostharasser: Art by me! (260)

Dooples Pines

[personal profile] ghostharasser 2024-10-29 01:20 am (UTC)(link)
Character: Dipper Pines
Canon: Gravity Falls/Deer Country CRAU

CR: Once upon a time Dipper and his twin sister Mabel were sent off to spend the summer with their weird great uncle Stan at his house-turned-tourist-trap in the woods. While Dipper figured it would be a boring, annoying summer, he uncovers a secret journal about the supernatural and from then on, the whole family is dragged into nonstop supernatural shenanigans, mysteries, and danger. After surviving an apocalypse orchestrated by a trillion year old chaos demon, the twins get back on the bus home at the very end of the summer.

Instead of waking up in Piedmont, California, Dipper wakes up in Deerington, Maine and then spends the next two-to-three years surviving in a horror setting. Deerington, being a nightmare dimension constructed by a dying eldritch girl, does eventually fall apart and dissolve, which leads to the people there waking up in Trench instead, aka Deer Country. Newly awakened and semi-eldritch, the people of Deerington learn to navigate the new world they're meant to build new lives in. Dipper spends a lot of this time pretty content. He has his family, he has a setting steeped in the occult to explore and learn in, and he's growing up in a setting that lets him really pursue his interests without backlash. However, their family starts slowly falling apart after the ocean begins calling them back to the sea. Stan first, and then the twins, leaving Ford alone. Bummer.

Sticks: Dipper wakes up in the Grove after speanding [??????] time bobbing around in an eldritch ocean as a squid and finds, oh no! He's here all alone without his family! Something he's never dealt with before! His start here is a little rocky because he is genuinely not sure what to do with himself and doesn't trust his own ability to make friends, but hey, it turns out, this place is full of freaks and he realizes pretty fast that making friends here was super easy because he too, is a freak. Rad. Eventually his uncle turn up, too and he's even happier. They have a house in the woods now just north of what used to be the burned town.

Plans: SO I WAS REALLY MEAN TO DIPPER IN OCTOBER, so I'm gonna chill the fuck out this month. I only have one current plan for the AU event and that's 16-year-old canon Dipper. Aka a Dipper that didn't experience Deerington/Deer Country and is, in theory, the Dipper living the life that Stick Dipper is certain he gave up. He won't be a wild difference to Sticks Dipper, but there will be some fun changes. He hasn't experienced The Horrors in the same way but he did have to go to High School. He's also going to read as completely human so anyone who could see Dipper's weird eldritch nature are going to see none of that here. He's going to be a lot more skeptical of things, and more suspicious of people and his humor is way more dry. Also? None of those scars, and he'll have both of his eyes! Wacky!

OTHERWISE Dipper is gonna be vibing this month, which should mean he's gonna be less active but we all know I'm a filthy liar.

Not Seeking: I killed him last month so no death LMAO. He's also off the table for romance.

Anything Else: Opt-in/out and overview of his Deer Powers!
Past Life Plotting Toplevel: HERE!
Meme:
Edited 2024-10-29 01:21 (UTC)
charlastan: Bulletproof Heart - My Chemical Romance (Hold your heart into this darkness)

Billie Sue 🌻

[personal profile] charlastan 2024-10-29 01:27 am (UTC)(link)
timidheart: (61)

Mayonaise

[personal profile] timidheart 2024-10-29 01:53 am (UTC)(link)
Character: Mayoi Ayase
Canon: Ensemble Stars!! (Austice CRAU)

CR: Ensemble Stars takes place in a mostly normal modern Tokyo, but it's a Tokyo that's a little to the left. There's an insane amount of important placed on the Idol Industry and Zaibatsus are still legal for some reason. There is also an entire clan of exiled people living under the ground and has been there for a few centuries. That would be Mayoi's family, who've been driven underground before the introduction of the koseki aka the family registry, leaving Mayoi and his family largely undocumented people without citizenship and rights. What does little Mayoi do once he realizes he loves the sounds of singing that often filter down below? He decides to become an idol.

Boy howdy was that more than he bargained for. Either way through some insane miracle on his and his family's part, Mayoi has papers (fake) and gets into one of the most prestigious idol schools and does his best to live a life on the surface. He gets assigned to a unit, and they get put through an insane trial-by-fire in order to keep their jobs, it all goes well and their group is starting to gain traction!

And then Mayoi ends up in Austice, which was a hellish, cold little european-style village that was full of horrors. He has a very poor time there, but he does get to spend a lot of time with people he likes, so /weighs hands. In the end, he doesn't entirely know his fate, because he remembers going off to do something in secret in the woods and then. Nothing else. He assumes he is probably turbodead!

Mayoi in Sticks is kind of still recovering from all of that while being very cautious about venturing out and meeting the people of the Grove. Slowly he's becoming less afraid of people here! He's found some ways to be helpful, which is what he thrives best on. Soon he will be silly again.

Plans: Mayoi is still kind of easing into the setting (A long process because of Mayoi's personality) so I am not planning to do anything crazy with him right now. If I decide on an AU i'll probably do it later in the month, but otherwise I think I'll just have him reactive for now, meeting all the weirdos instead.

I might have him leaning more into learning proper healing and such since he's finding confidence in working at the clinic after the Haunted Mansion incident, so that might be fun to explore. You can also find him attached to Mafuyu too.

Not Seeking: NA I'M OPEN TO MOST ANYTHING
Anything Else: Opt-out because he has A Personality.
Past Life Plotting Toplevel: Here!
Meme:
Edited 2024-10-29 01:54 (UTC)
charlastan: Bulletproof Heart - My Chemical Romance (These pigs are after me)

Stan Pines | Gravity Falls

[personal profile] charlastan 2024-10-29 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
Character: Stan Pines
Canon: Gravity Falls

CR: Goofy weird old man! He's a relatively new addition to the Grove, but he's adjusting like a champ. He's Dipper's Great Uncle (Grunkle) and also a CRAU from Deer Country (meaning that he has fire powers that he didn't have in canon and is also part squid. ....Don't look at me look at Jami they started it) so it's a little hard to surprise him at this point. He's still kind of unsure how he feels about the whole past life thing, but he hasn't been particularly vocal about that yet. You might know him as "that guy that writes in all caps and doodles all over the netbooks".

Plans: Stan is going to subtly get AU'd! He went through a lot last month with Dipper's death, so I don't really want to give off the vibe that he's an entirely different person at the moment. His AU is going to be that he made the million dollars like his dad told him to and came home with it, only for him to learn the hard way that it didn't matter, and that it didn't change how Filbrick saw him at all. There was always going to be some reason he wasn't good enough. This will likely not impact new CR much, but it will immediately concern his family when he doesn't respond right to normal teasing about money. And honestly? It will concern Stan too, since he went through losing all of his memories and regaining them once already - is this the forest messing with him, or is this a relapse?

Not Seeking: Somehow almost everyone in this game is too young OR too old to romance him. I wouldn't say never, but like. The reasonable options are slim.

Anything Else: He's an old man who has lived a very weird life that can't be summed up in one paragraph without sounding absolutely bonkers so I'm just going to say befriend him if you want the deeper lore! Also, the boards are probably coming off of the Pines' house now that October's over! THEY TOLD YOU SO THEY TOLD ALL OF YOU--

Recent Posts or Toplevels: Nothing super recent, but you can always hit his inbox until it's top level time again.

Past Life Plotting Toplevel: Right here!

Meme:
ghostharasser: (20)

[personal profile] ghostharasser 2024-10-29 02:08 am (UTC)(link)
crashes through the ceiling

HEY ASPEN

do you stil wannnna do a dipper and luca thread follow up to zahliyaquest?
purevanillacookie: (Default)

(frozen comment)

[personal profile] purevanillacookie 2024-10-30 02:08 am (UTC)(link)
sign pv up!
eidxiety: (Default)

[personal profile] eidxiety 2024-10-30 09:26 pm (UTC)(link)
ain will help learn him healing (checks notes) just not if he's AU'd at the time- but yk yk
unheiring: (Default)

[personal profile] unheiring 2024-10-31 04:33 pm (UTC)(link)
OH GOD YES IM SO SORRY I FORGOT. did you wanna kick that off or do you want luca to come find dipper? i'm cool either way (especially if we agreed to something specific that i'm not remembering)

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