Crossroads II: I'm on a Mammoth.

[Admiral Squish]

Well, we call it Daylight Savings Time, but yeah. Sorry, shoulda mentioned.

That would be a great help! I'll try to put wheels in motion to get the wiki set up, and we'll see how far I can get.

[Admiral Squish]

Well, the time is approaching, anyone else wanna get involved? Last chance.

[Admiral Squish]

Alright, it wasn't a super-productive call Saturday, but for the most part, that's because we have a basic idea of what all the different aspects of the setting should look like.
However, we did discuss a few helpful topics.

the Quiet
A big problem that came up again and again is the quite we're facing in the thread. There's not many contributors who still hang around, and it's an intimidating prospect to just jump into a thread this big and a project that's been around for more than two years of development. So, we are gonna have to figure out some way to start attracting new visitors.
The first step to get into the thread, as it stands, is a doozy. You've facing almost a dozen walls of text, with links and overviews and a lot of the information is changed since it got posted in the first place... It's intimidating. I think we need a more approachable first page. I'd love to hear suggestions on how to make that happen.
The next step would be the information itself. As mentioned, it's only really organized in the context of walls of text with lots of links, and it's all incomplete or changed by now. The contributors can't look things up, since there's no place it's all sorted neatly, so they just have to stay int he loop and remember all the changes made as they happen. That's why I was talking about starting a wiki earlier, it'd be a much more digestible way to dive into the setting, and it would allow people to look things up without having to sift the info out of 75+pages of text.
After that, we need to put the setting out there more, bring in new eyes, bring eyes back in after they've dismissed the setting already. Not exactly sure on how to handle that, beyond the current strategy of posting material out in new threads whenever possible.

Warrior
We discussed the possibility of fusing the warrior and hunter tactics lists, because there's some significant overlap in places, and it would save space in a final version. It does kinda limit the... unique-ness of the lists, perhaps.
I've been stuck a little bit when it comes to a 'transformation' tactic, one of the options under 'mysticism', and Steckie was helpful in coming up with a new approach to it that might work out. However, I've come to a bit of a new problem. Should the transformation be static, making the warrior always turn into the same form, or flexible, allowing them to take a different shape each time they transform?

Priest
Ultimately, we came to the agreement that the taboos/mandates idea was a good one, thematically, but it's not particularly great for the player.
I'm thinking of swapping in a sort of more-sparse tactics kinda list. Your choices aren't mandated by your faith, like, you don't have to follow X religion to get Y tactic, but the player is sort of expected to justify their choices based on their faith.
I'm vaguely pondering some sort of distinction between priests who focus of educating, enlightening, and leading the people as opposed to those who focus more on the world.
Oh, and I still have to go through and fix/modify the marked spells.

Cultures
This is obviously the next step after the classes, and once these are done, we'll have the setting basically playable. When we started, we had like 12 cultures just for the Cahokian league. Then we went down to two or three per area. Then there was a lot of hemming and hawing, then we came up with over-cultures, and rolled the less-significant groups into other groups, and now we have a decently short list. Arctic, Subarctic, European (incl. Caribbean), Northeast, Southeast, Mesoamerican, Southwest (Incl. Hisatsinom/Great Basin), Chinese (incl. Californian), Northwest Coast (Incl. Plateau), Little Folk, Plains, and Sasquatch. That's only 12. I've already done Sasquatch, so that's only 11, and my most helpful contributors have already gotten me started on 2 of them.

Little Folk
Okay, I think we solved a significant problem relating to the little folk culture. The problem is that little folk in different areas do take on some cultural aspects of the humans who live near them, like speaking their languages, dressing in similar styles, and such, so the little folk culture/s we were planning wouldn't really cover everything. On the other hand, they do have very distinct ways of life when compared to the humans around them. The solution: Give little folk a dual culture trait, like the trollkin had way back in the day. Basically, they get a little folk culture as a bonus culture, regardless of how they were raised, and they can select the local human culture normal-like. The bonus culture is a sort of ancestral memory thing, cultural norms picked up from the soul fragments that went into their own creation.

Races
Ultimately, I'm going to have to go through all these races and update them to fit the current setting properly. The touched, in particular, are going to need to be condensed pretty significantly, since they take up pages and pages and pages of space. Probably the little folk, too. A lot of the older races are definitely going to need rejiggering, too, like shadow folk, and such.

[Pokonic]

I don't think the lack of recent posts is anything to do with a lack of interest, it's just that time of year where schooling comes to a head for some people. Personally, I would think that a wiki would be a nice thing to set up, if only because it's quite easy to track down information through that.

[Mith]

Should the transformation be static, making the warrior always turn into the same form, or flexible, allowing them to take a different shape each time they transform?

Although I am always a fan for versatility, every warrior class I can think of historically with an animal totem always had the warrior have the one totem, not multiples.

Also, I do plan to frequent the thread more often, I just need to get the semester over with and my own contributions finished.

How about the difference between warrior and Hunter be more of just Dex. based vs the Strength based, so that a Hunter and a Warrior on the same "path" for the lack of a better term would have many similarities, but a completely different approach to a situation. The Hunter is a Rouge, and the Warrior is the Fighter.

I am aware that the above paragraph is hashing over things already stated, but I personally feel that things do not have to be entirely unique, just a different view of the same thing.

[Steckie]

So i've been thinking about the Little Folk Nation an how they're organised.
We decided to go crazy with bureocracy for them, and i still like that a lot. But realistically this wont make for a very effective nation, so we need to bump up their effectiveness a bit. Obviously we don't throw out the bureocracy, that's too interesting.
What we should do is take a bit of inspiration from the Dragon Age dwarves and their paragons. Basically the dwarves there have some sort of senate and a king ruling over them, but they also have legendary people that get declared paragons because they accomplished something amazing.

So what if we borrow that system for the Little Folk. There's a lot of different kinds of Little Folk, they have their needlessly complicated bureocracy and they make it work. But when a crisis or stalemate forms there are a few Fey that can just go over the heads of the bureocracy and order the Little Folk around to do what is needed.
Maybe it's an old and powerfull fey like Puck or Nuada, maybe it's a younger Fey that has done something heroic (aka: a PC). Whoever it is, they usually stay out of the politics and day to day affairs. They don't care about ruling the nation, but when something is wrong they step in with absolute authority and set things straight. They're the Little Folk version of the Cincinnatus

[Mith]

Sounds like the old Celtic legends where those that have shown themselves to be the best at the task were given command (Usually Strength of Arms to be War Chief, but that applies elsewhere for different spheres of influence). It was likely Celtic tradition as well, but the stories come to mind first.

[Admiral Squish]

The Quiet
I suppose the time of year likely has some bearing on it, but I do think we need to make some overtures toward getting more people involved. Don't get me wrong, I love our little band of contributors, and you're all exceptionally helpful, but there's only a handful of us left, and we're gonna need some new blood if we want things to keep moving with any sort of reasonable speed.

Warrior
That's a pretty good point. Maybe I could add an option or set of options that lets you make more than one form, or redesign the form each time you transform.
Yeah, that's pretty much the kind of thing I'm going for. There are some more specific differences, like hunters having tactics based on hunting techniques and warriors having tactics based on warfare techniques. Like, a warrior wouldn't get the trapping tactics, and a hunter wouldn't get rage tactics. Plus, hunting involves more general basic training, like track, trapfinding, and such, whereas warrior's all about the brute force.

Little Folk
I like it. It's kind of the logical extreme of what we had so far.

So, we have a nation that's composed of a whole bunch of little folk tribes that are all self-governing in their own distinct ways. Then a number of those tribes are given authority on the national level over a specific field. And then we have... 'deciders' (maybe we can make up a fae word for it...), individuals that have been given authority by the state as a whole to make swift judgement and settle conflicts.
I'm thinking the deciders are usually just called upon to settle a singular grievance or stalemate, negotiating or declaring an agreement between the parties involved, not actually making any laws or policies on their own, but I could also imagine that a tribe could sort of hand over all of their authority to a decider for a pre-arranged period of time.

I can totally imagine PCs coming in and demanding to see whoever's in charge and getting run all over the place as they try to figure out what's going on, from the local tribe's council, to the king of the tribe in the war seat, to the merchant-lord of the tribe in the economic seat, to the decider who steps in to settle the issue...

Trying to get a comprehensive grasp of the little folk political system and everyone who's got authority is all but impossible unless you're really involved.

[Pokonic]

The Quiet
I suppose the time of year likely has some bearing on it, but I do think we need to make some overtures toward getting more people involved. Don't get me wrong, I love our little band of contributors, and you're all exceptionally helpful, but there's only a handful of us left, and we're gonna need some new blood if we want things to keep moving with any sort of reasonable speed.

If we are serious, I would suggest posting a brief overview of the setting on the appropriate imageboard. Why? They are high traffic, and the general 'target audience' who would be interested in this setting of general would be, at the very least, present.


Little Folk Government:

I would rather not have it break down entirely by their role in society, but by their tribes. Tribes would often be elective, but what each would pick would differ between tribe to tribe. Finally, other benevolent fey would likely have at least some say in the proceedings of the government; they might serve as tie-breakers or simple enforcers, or trainers for spiritualists and shamans. Non-Little Folk could also be choice 'deciders' as they would have a reason to be loyal to the government (these uniforms are so comfortable! The stitch count is through the roof.) but not interested in the deep politics going on.

I would think it would be interesting if the main government issue of the day is wither or not the various 'foreign' Little Folk from Europe and such should get positions in the government itself.

[Admiral Squish]

Hay, gaiz.
http://crossroads-tnw.wikia.com/


It took me embarrassingly long to rewrite the blurbs to make them long enough to actually cover everything in the current edition. At the moment, I'm gonna go have me some cake and I shall return with a more involved post.

[Mith]

I like the the introduction page. I made a few edits (not sure if my comment will show, since I do not have an account), but basically I just edited some spelling errors and capitalized some proper names (ex. Great Lakes). I might have missed some though.

[Admiral Squish]

I always figured Great Lakes was lower case, since it's a group not a specific lake, but it seems you're right, it's capitalized.
And yeah, I saw the comment, it just posts them as 'a contributor'.

Little Folk Government
I'm not exactly sure what you mean with the role in society bit.
Each tribe is entirely self-governing, and the leadership of various tribes varies from dictators to presidents to councils to true democracies, but how they run themselves isn't important to the seats. If they can show themselves to be efficient and competent at a given task, the tribe as a whole is placed in this position of authority, and however they make their decisions can be used to make decisions at the national level, in regards to the role of their seat, in addition to their normal self-government.

I could see other fey being invited to join the little folk nation. Probably not all of them would have authority, or even participate in the system, but I would imagine them either gathering in small groups of similar fey, or sort of floating among different groups of their smaller kin. They would definitely make good candidates for deciders, though.

I would imagine that European little folk would be welcomed, but would form a scattered minority population that doesn't quite jive with the new world little folk, causing tension.

[Mith]

Since New World Few will be the majority, we probably shouldn't give their lands a Gaelic Name, since that will be the name from the minority of the actual population. Perhaps the Europeans will refer to the territory as that, but the First Nations people will not.

[Steckie]

Since New World Few will be the majority, we probably shouldn't give their lands a Gaelic Name, since that will be the name from the minority of the actual population. Perhaps the Europeans will refer to the territory as that, but the First Nations people will not.

Or we flip it around: the Gaelic (and the other Celtic languages) is the language of the Little Folk. The Celtic people were one of the few cultures that had a symbiotic relation with the Little Folk. Actually they're one of the few people that could stand their pranks and chaotic nature.
This makes things A LOT easier for us since we just have to use a Gaelic dictionary and we don't need to go searching for some obscure Native language dictonary.

Also, i think we actually need to get more Old World Little Folk. These are the well known Little Folk that people are going to want to play. It might even fit better in the story.
What if the Little Folk nation is a relatively recent thing. A year or so after Newton reconnected the Old and New World spirals and the dead god appeared on the plains something weird started to happen. Whenever a Little Folk person in the Old World uses a Link site they have a big chance (50%?) of somehow ending up in the Great Basin.
The Little Folk think that the Soul Pool has something to do with this. The Soul Pool is connected to the Spirals and the magic of the world and is made up of the souls of all the Little Folk that have lived and that will live, and sometimes when a few Little Folk die and their memories and the knowledge within come together in the Soul Pool and the Pool can come to conclusions. And sometimes it will even act on those conclusions.
This has happened a few times in recorded history: the closing of the Pompeii Nexus, the fall of the Western Roman empire, the Black Death, the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake. Every time the Soul Pool intervened (by using the Spirals) it saved the lives of countless Little Folk.

The only thing is that now the Soul Pool has been sending Little Folk to the Great Basin for roughly 50 years now and nobody has found out why.
Maybe it's because the Soul Pool feels the Little Folk need their own nation to survive? Maybe the Soul Pool sees some form of trouble in the future? Maybe the dead god on the plains had an influence on how the Soul Pool is able to influence the world?
In fact this last option is why the Little Folk support the plains tribes in their fight against the undead there.

Whatever the reason, the Old World Little Folk have set up a nation in the Great Basin and the New World Little Folk have flocked to the area because things have been getting a bit unfriendly for them ever since 1492.

[Mith]

Kind of tempting to tie in Danu, Don, the Caillech, and Hecate to the Spirals, especially with the Spirals being a literal Crossroad, and the Spirals also holding a mother figure to the Fey. Perhaps Gaelic is the main language used in the setting, but the nymphs and Dryads of Greco-Roman myths also fall under the umbrella for Fey. It might be a bit much, and (Dresden Files Spoilers past SG:

Spoiler:

Show

Jim butcher has used a Hecate Faerie tie in in his books

, but it can really work.

[Steckie]

I've been adding pages to the wiki, but i can't seem to find a way to create tables there. Does anybody here know how to do that?

[TheWombatOfDoom]

I've been adding pages to the wiki, but i can't seem to find a way to create tables there. Does anybody here know how to do that?

Unfortunately, my wiki fu is so bad, I don't know how to even post things...

[Steckie]

Squish, are some of the older races you made still considered canon?
I'm talking about races like the Adlet, Jaguar and Eagle warrior, the Spiritborn, the witchblood and probably some others i forgot to mention. Just need to make sure which ones need to get added to the wiki and which ones don't.

If i want to start adding classes to the wiki i'll need to know how to make a table.
I think i've added most of the stuff i can just copy/paste, any more i want to add is going to have to get typed out. Sadly the amount of typed out information is a lot smaller than all the untyped and unsorted information.
We've got a LOT of stuff.

[Mith]

This might help you Steckie.

[Steckie]

This might help you Steckie.

You'd think something like this would be helpfull, but sadly it isn't
The table button is aparently missing in the latest version and while it is sometimes possible to switch to an earlier version to make the button reappear, that doesn't appear for everybody. It didn't for me.
Maybe somebody that can get the button should just post the classes on the wiki.

Or maybe i could add the tables as a screenshot? Problem with that is that it's impossible to edit if changes are made.

Edit: oh, and Squish. In the Touched race there's a lot of feats that are a rough description but not fully typed out. Actually only the Beast Touched feats have all been typed out. If you have the time could you type out the others as well please? I'd do it myself but i think i'd screw up your feats.

[Mith]

That is weird. Perhaps you have to type or whatever their formatting code is.

[Murk]

Concerning "The Quiet" - I guess I'm one of those. I've been following this project every now and then for quite some time, because I like it. I also know next to nothing about D&D or American history, so I'm pretty much useless.

However, if I would have had some skills useful for you, I think you're right in that it could be hard to suddenly chime in. I think a wiki might help a lot, because it can - much better than the first post seems to do - give an overview of all decisions made. Not only for newcomers, but also for you guys yourself. It seems a hard job to remember all discussions and decisions made over 80 pages of forum.

I also think it could be very helpful to have a to do-list on the first post (or next one). I think for the Call to Brew that works very well: even simple passerby's or newcomers can clearly see what needs to be done, check if there's something of their expertise on the list, give a few suggestions or a piece of homebrew, without having to plough through a few pages of discussion. While it might not motivate people to join the discussion, it might be a small step towards getting more information and more crunch.

I also agree that posting as much finished products as you can on different fora would help. I always notice the responses to small posts come from very different people. Heck, if there's anyone with time, you can do a playtesting on the pbp-forums, which should attract some attention, or even draw some fluff-art and post it on the arts&craft forum. With a link to this project of course ;)

[Steckie]

I've gone through the thread and i think i've found everything we decided about the Knights. And then i started typing.
So now i think i've gotten a full write-up of the Knights Hospitaller, go check it out on the Wikiand make sure i didn't forget anything.

[Admiral Squish]

Sorry for my recent silence, it's been a busy week.

Little Folk Nation
Basically what steckie said, the idea was more that gaelic languages are sort-of-kind-of based on Fae. Sorta like how Troll was supposed to be a predecessor of germanic languages.

Wiki
I am so very happy to see how well this is working out! It seems to be getting along quite well!
Wombat, to post things, you go up to the 'contribute' menu in the upper-right under the header and go to 'create a page'.
Steckie, the older races are, for the most part, either getting heavily redesigned or dropped entirely. Everything you listed is dropped, replaced by the fancier new versions. As to tables... I honestly no idea, but I'll do my best to figure it out for ya. As to the touched, I'll try to get it done when I get around to going over them and simplifying.

The Quiet
See, now this is really helpful!
I've put the wiki link in the first post, and bumped it up a size to try and grab a little more attention.
I could absolutely imagine a to-do section in there somewhere. That sounds like a pretty dang good idea.
I am definitely planning to do a PBP playtest, just as soon as we have the warrior done, the priest redone, and I fill out that list o' cultures a bit more. I'm kinda torn, on one hand, I'd love to DM and put forth the very best impression possible, and on the other... sasquatch martial artist!

[Steckie]

Typed out the Treaty of Sanctus Crux today. I'm trying to finish a bit of the lore around the Knights first before i move to another topic.

[Admiral Squish]

Aaand it seems I lost track once again: This last weekend was the last weekend of the month, which means next weekend is the first weekend of the month, which means it's skypesmas eve! Not literally, but yeah, next weekend, skype!
Same bat-time, same bat-channel, Saturday at 3 PM EST. If you can attend, let me know, and if you have not yet attended but would like to attend, let me know that and also your skype-deets.

[Steckie]

I'll be there.

[Admiral Squish]

Most excellent!

Does anyone have any thoughts on my earlier post?

Also, anyone else want to step up and lend a hand with the recently-redefined cultures?
We've still got blank slates for African, Chinese, Great Plains, Northeast, Northwest Coast, Southeast, Southwest, and Subarctic. The rest have some measure of writeup in some form or another.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

Aaand it seems I lost track once again: This last weekend was the last weekend of the month, which means next weekend is the first weekend of the month, which means it's skypesmas eve! Not literally, but yeah, next weekend, skype!
Same bat-time, same bat-channel, Saturday at 3 PM EST. If you can attend, let me know, and if you have not yet attended but would like to attend, let me know that and also your skype-deets.

I'll be having a ton of people over for my "May the Fourth be With You" party, but if I get a chance to pop in, I'll let you know.

[Steckie]

Hmm, i think i could take a shot at African. It probably wont be as big as my write-up of European culture, there's probably less sources on African culture in the 18th century.