(go to Talzhemir's Dreams Page)

Talzhemir's RP Links

   Alot of people ask if I roleplay.
   Yes, I do, and I RP extensively.
   I run a weekly game of Teenage Demon
   Slayers, using Pocket Universe. I
   enjoy playing in Furcadia's "Ashland
   by Night" Guild, as well as many
others. I generally won't let anyone know I'm Talz... so,
any roleplayer you meet might be me. I have lots of alts,
both "Strict" and "Persona". Roleplaying is the aspect of
Furcadia nearest and dearest of all to my heart!

Here are some of my favorite RP links, and notes.

Furcadia RP

  • Understanding RP in Furcadia
  • RP is best held in Dreams that are put up regularly. Here are screenshots of some of the best I've found so far.

  • The minimum guidelines for RP
  • The Great Roleplayer's Pawbook

  • Furcadia's Chartered Guilds   I haunt the Chartered Guilds a LOT. (Chartering is currently down. :( )


    • For RPers, I now recommend using Psumonix's Furcadia Profile URL in one's desc. They are not official Dragon's Eye affiliates, I just think they've done a great job. Furcadia Profiles (and remember, never use the same password in two places!)

    THE DRAGONLANDS

    This is the setting around which Furcadia is based, the "canon" default history, classes, skills, geography, races, abilities, etc. This is the official default source material for Furcadia. (Nobody is forced to use it; it is an "opt-in" background.)

  • The Dragonlands
  • The Furre! Bestiary (not yet completed)
  • The Ruvir Charter --This is an example Charter for use in Furcadia's Chartered Guilds system. It includes links to the more up-to-date but not yet officially accepted versions of the web pages for the "special" characters: mages, vamp-furres, lycanthians, etc.
  • Latest edition of the Furre! rules
  • A previous, more elaborate edition of the Furre! rules, including early work on what would become "Pocket Universe"
  • The Rule of Cool a Furcadia-compatible derivative of Jon Peterson's Fate System



    • The following Strict Guilds use the Dragonlands as their source material:
  • Blackstone Continuity (since 2001)
          Blackstone Tavern
          Fion Meadrach Winery
          Moonstone's Edge Orphanage (no web page yet)
  • Draco Somnus Continuity/Lands Of Kasuria (since 2002)
          Scarhawk Castle
          Fortress of Dominus (COMING SOON)
          Panthera Keep
    • If you would like your Dragonlands-based Guild listed here, please contact Talzhemir online.


    Living Legends Game Releases

    By the guy with whom I wrote "Pocket Universe" comes this super-hero game that's much easier and faster than Champions. The true successor to the hit RPG "Villains & Vigilantes", LL uses the same stunning cast of badguys found in the V&V universe. Living Legends Home Page
    Download for $9.95: Living Legends on RPGNOW

    Pocket Universe

    This is the game that I co-authored with Jeff Dee. It is available both as printed and online editions. The design goals of Pocket Universe include keeping the price at what a student could easily afford, while at the same time offering an amazing amount of high-quality RPG FUN. These rules are much simpler than Dungeons & Dragons's d20 system. When the Furre! game is complete, it will use the Pocket Universe system mechanics.
  • Order Printable .PDF's of Pocket Universe and Teenage Demon Slayers Online!


    • QUICKSILVER
    This is a fantasy game co-written by me (Talzhemir) and Jeff Dee. It uses the Pocket Universe system. The flavor is almost like anime, with player-character mages able to bend the Living Metal to their own will... if it doesn't come to life and bite their face off first, of course.

    Quicksilver is only made available via printable .PDF file on 3 1/2" disk. It features humans, elves, goblins, hobgoblins, and pixies.
  • Order a QUICKSILVER .PDF disk online!



    • Rhostshyl

    Blessed with the permission of the actual author of the Silverglass series, J.F. Rivken, Rhostshyl is based upon these excellent books. It's a land of Amazons, Bards, Druids, Dwarves, Jesters, Knights, Rangers, Ring Bearers, Rogues, Shugo-yosha, Spellbinders, Undead, Witches, and Warlocks.

    Many players didn't like the idea that you could be discriminated against for not being a roleplayer. Rhostshyl was, for years, a place where being IC was optional. As a result, it was nearly impossible to create satisfactory in-character stories. Anytime someone wanted to get dramatic and have a situation in which meaningful events such as injuries and deaths could occur, it was usually openly ridiculed as a mere ploy to get attention.

    Eventually, an IC-only areas was created-- but its distance from the first-entry area of the MUSH, and being just one of many random areas, made it clearly feel "ghetto-ized".

    When RhostMUSH was first created, some players used used the code to create ICly powerful weapons. There was much disagreement over what a player had a "right" to make. This in turn led to dissent over what roleplaying a player was obligated to accept from others, for example, a sword attack. Ultimately, Rhostshyl still runs on what was confusingly referred to as "Full Consent": The player maintains total and utter control of their character, keeping the right to waive all effects at their whim.

    This formed the inspiration for Furcadia's CONSENT RULE: "If someone else poses something that implies your cooperation, you are free to act like it didn't happen."
  • Rhostshyl's Site
  • Peek in to Rhostshyl and play



    • GHOST MOO: Talzhemir's attempt to integrate coded combat and strictly-IC roleplaying

    In October of 1993, I was a player named Razorhawk on LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis's online community. At the time, there was hardly any concept of "IC vs. OOC". I was pretty sure that roleplaying couldn't survive in a place like that. I got together with the infamouos Quinn (Ron Avery), to create a game with "fast" randomized combat featuring his brilliant MOO creations, the AHaBs (Almost HumAn B*stards).

    After months of debate with Quinn, I talked him into separating all-IC areas from the rest of the MOO. I think one of his main objections to this was that it felt "restrictive" or "invasive" of individuals' creative interaction. Nevertheless, I worked very hard to document the IC basis of the world: a post-holocaust place where magic had returned to mesh or clash with science.

    My ultimate assessment is that the experiment was not a big success. Serious roleplaying and "fast" combat generally attract two very different kinds of players who don't always get along OOCly. Some players are far more fascinated with bashing on the heads of radioactive monsters than talking, and vice-versa. To keep all this going, an enormous amount of coded commands had to be written, plus, alot of files had to be read by any new player. It's not an easy game to play.

    In my defense, I was hoping that a certain piece of client software was going to become popular. This client interpreted text commands to put graphics on the screen, using both vector graphics, and buttons that performed macros. It took us from a simple all-text world to a system of putting buttons on the user's screen labelled "NORTH" "SOUTH" "EAST" "WEST" "KILL" "WHO" "PAGE" and so forth. (Bear in mind, the computer mouse was not yet common standard equipment yet...!) The placing of these buttons, and what macros they might send, was controllable through any text, such as what a MOO might display. I was even able to send drawings of some of the monsters this way.

    This marvellous client program had a major bug early on: the fill function used to plot shapes of color would overflow, turning the user's screen to a solid color! This, combined with their requirement that any artist pay $40 for the art-making program, hurt its popularity. The bugs were probably trivial to fix but then a fad caught on that made this interpreted-text-to-graphics client obsolete: HTML. It was outcompeted by the "Pueblo" text game client (now known as Pueblo/UE)

    Today, GhostMOO is a wasteland home to dragon-riders who roleplay with coded dragons that they can ride, mages who can cast coded spells, haughty corporate arcology inhabitants out slumming it, Mad Max-esque wildlings, and the Recoms-- "recombinant DNA" animal-people created by the unscrupulous Dakirion Industries as playthings and bodyguards for the rich. GhostMOO web pages Play GhostMOO


    AmberMUSH

    Also based upon existing published fiction, AmberMUSH brings the worlds of Roger Zelazny to life. On other MUSHes, "feature" characters from the books tend to be relegated to background or reserved aliases for staffers. On AmberMUSH, players may apply for the job of being "on cast". There's kind of an echo of this in that Furcadia's Primes may only be played by staffers, and they make their appearances during the public festivals such as Jujinka's Spring Festival, Jemmion's Rameen, and so forth.

    Thanks to Amberyl and other pioneers of online RP, AmberMUSH runs on what is called "modified consent". Players generally have full control of their characters except that "in character actions lead to in character consequences". Using a system loosely based on the Amber Diceless RPG, players pose attacks, and, according to good etiquette, let the intended victim decide the outcome. Players are forbidden from starting conflicts by "talking trash", etc. and then running away or logging out.

    The problem with Modified Consent is that rivalries tended to develop between the most well-matched player-character opponents, and these failed to get resolved. After three RL years, making up the ending to the fight gets to be very stale. So, many players left out of frustration, or boredom, eventually. (From this I concluded that random die rolls provide a needed surprise to all the players!)

    Also in the "minus" column, AmberMUSH players generally do not want to interact with someone unless that other character is powerful in-game. Being a longtime established place, it's rather difficult to "break in". (In general, players need characters of similar power level with which to interact, and if a crowd of players all leave at once for some reason, a kind of hole forms in the spectrum of power levels. I call this the "Gapping Problem" and it can occur in nearly every game out there.)

    Current ip and port address: amber.ambermush.org 5150
  • AmberMUSH home pages

  • Go directly to AmberMUSH right now and play it, if you like.




    • Castle D'Image

    This is an all-text MUSH. Begun on a server at East Texas State University, and then moved to Stanford University, Castle D'Image is a virtual place dear to me because I assisted with the earliest Building.

    The world of D'Image began as an anything-goes fantasy world, but gradually was narrowed down to be more like traditional medieval fantasy. It was here that I got my first inklings of why RP needs a coherent setting and pre-arranged background that everyone is sharing.

    A major disagreement between "wizzen" (the MUSH's high-level administrators) caused two versions of the Castle D'Image server to be running at the same time. I continued to play on both.

  • Castle D'Image MUSH's web page
  • Visit Castle D'Image now!



    • Dark Metal

    Although it has its faults, Dark Metal is one of my favorite Continuities. It is an all-text game with diced combat and coded support for character sheets. You posed your own combat effects, taking the time to be as sure as you can that grammar and spelling are nice.

    This was a "mature audiences" game, as in, players may be obligated to witness or participate in R and X-rated content. What I liked about playing the supernatural characters on Dark Metal is that the World of Darkness / White Wolf mechanics was that IC resources of blood, money, hitpoints, etc., were tracked and spent using coded commands. This led to greater ability to enjoy the fruits of one's own daring. Winning a fight when you don't know if you'll survive is substantially different from winning because you and somebody else OOCly decided you get to win.

    I had resigned from IC there, because of far too much evidence of major abuse of power by the admins. It began with the writing of "house rules" that patently favored the admins' own characters. It continued with creation of rules to give the home-brew cyber characters the equivalent of Celerity 6. It culminated in the playing of so-called "NPCs" (therefore inaccessible to non-admins and played exclusively by admins) of powers with no fair escape possible, and no warning to players.

    I'm currently playing on Dark Metal, and watching over the OOC stuff. Generally, you shouldn't hear a murmur from me, OOC. If you hear anything at all from me on the +BBoards, it probably means something's gone very very wrong, as in, oh dear.... These shadows have offended. Anyways, the admins there are a better crew, and I'm enjoying it alot now.

    The Fate Proposal: Precursor to the Furcadia "Rule of Cool"

    Around 1998, many pencil-and-dice "tabletop" RPGs were adapted for online use in all-text games. The transition was made from an intermittant game run by a referee ("game-master" or "storyteller") for about half a dozen players, to a persistent (constantly available) game with as little dependence on a referee as possible, for hundreds of players.
  • The Fate Levels of "Dark Metal" MUSH
  • Jon Peterson's notes on his 1998 Fate Proposal


    • In retrospect, the Fate system has been a fantastic success. There are, I think, two main problems to address, still. The first is "farming": a character can be left in an area at Fate 5 to garner large amounts of experience while never taking any risks. It's illegal to use a bot to keep connected while not roleplaying, but if the "farming" is done in an area with low traffic, nobody is there to complain. The main symptom of this problem is that you tend to be unable to find anything but Fate 2 characters out in the open.

    Another problem is that the "Black Dog" flag was completely separated from "Fate" ratings. "Dropping to Fate 2" means that characters may not plot the death of other characters. Players of Fate 3 rape victims are often duped into dropping to Fate 2, and then discover too late that they are OOCly forbidden to tell anyone that they were raped. Also, female characters with "Black Dog" are assumed to automatically be there because they want to participate in rape scenes, and the MUSH is overrun with IC rapists. (Consider this MUSH to be OFF LIMITS TO ALL MINORS!)

    A minor problem is that a more realistic outcome of conflicts has led to a game world that no longer resembles the game books on which it was based. Like almost every other WoD-based MUSH, the Sabbat have run over the Camarilla much the way a Mack truck gishes a rum-soaked raisin. Also, expect there to be extremely powerful characters who, both through luck and guile, have survived many conflicts. Unless you are playing Fate 2, you may be playing hardball with giants here.


    Dransik

    I'm not a staffer on Dransik but alot of their "Devs" are friends of mine. I helped out by working on the logo, for instance, and I run a little personal web page for my own amusement.

    Dransik is essentially a combat game, where you kill monsters and take their treasure. I think it's great fun. And hey, it's free for 30 days, so, maybe give 'em a try!
  • Dransik
  • Talz's Dransik Page



    • Phoenix-Speak

    The Phoenix-Speak project is a longterm goal of development in Furcadia. It can't be implemented until many major changes are made to the way the client works. The short form is that players will be able to build questionnaires, character generation engines, and databases of limited size using a scripting language similar to Dragonspeak.

    A Phoenix-speak project ("nest") can assign ID numbers to all unique users. That is, like Furcadia, it can tell users apart by a combination of computer and IP. That will enable furres to opt-in to a game on Furcadia in which they voluntarily make available the information of the identity of all alts that have opted-in.

    For example, suppose Terrah makes the Phoenix-Speak "Nest" for a "Worldtree" Guild. She doesn't want furres to play more than 2 alts there. So, she scripts it to tell furres that they must give the okay that she (and anybody Terrah authorizes) can see their "Terrah's Worldtree ID #". Then she puts in a line of phoenix-speak that says, "Limit furres to (#) alts per computer" and she sets it to 2.

    As another example, Stripycakes makes the "LoveStinx Matchmaker Database for skunks only." His "nest" is a bunch of questions that are asked when you register, a way to search for "all members who answered "B" to Question "5", and a way to view a fellow skunks' essay replies once you've registered. He allows unlimited alts, but does require all members to opt-in to allowing all other members' LoveStinx ID #'s. He also makes a command that lets you view "all alts played by a specific LoveStinx ID #"

    ID #'s are specific to the "nest", so if you register with LoveStinx and then with Terrah's Worldtree, there's still no way to know who plays whom between the two.

    Anyways, this is the kind of power I want to put in the paws of the Guilds. :)

  • Notes on the Phoenix Engine

    • I've also got an eye on Codraconic's botmaking efforts, called Silver Golem. Silver Golem may well contain the kinds of features that are needed to make Strict RP less difficult to run on Furcadia.
  • THE SILVER GOLEM PROJECT