Designing your House

I want to take a moment to offer some good general advice as you go about designing your house for Sanctuary. Noble Houses, which are part of the RPCSS world conquest system, are more then UO Guilds -- who often required nothing more then a group of friends with a love of hunting or crafting to form. The Noble Houses in Sanctuary are a vital part of the storyline and will face continual role-play challenges. It is crucial that you have a firm grasp of your own story, deity, ethics and goals.

Know your fiction

I strongly encourage you to base your house on a fiction that you yourself are well-versed in. Role-players are fiction and mythology fans, and often fanatics. If you base your house off elves from Lord of the Rings and are not yourself a LotR lore nazi, you will have to be prepared for those who are more well-versed in Tolkien's fiction to challenge you when you are off-page. You can, of course, try to claim that it's a different Middle Earth, but it likely won't undo the potential damage to your house's reputation.

This advice goes to your selection of the deity you intend to serve. At first, I thought it might just be a concern with using gods from real life religions, but it's not; it's really about knowing the lore you choose for your house.

Be Prepared

Conflict is going to start immediately. You will not get a grace period because your house is new. Once you start recruiting, pushing your agenda, or commenting on other's agenda, characters are going to form strong opinions about you.

Take the time to have your answers ready:

• What do you stand for
• Who do you worship
• Why should I follow you
• Why should I worship them
• Who are you against
• Who are you for

Talking things out with a RP partner definitely helps!

Don't be afraid to try again.

We have all been playing together for a very long time, and we have all be rusty and RP-flat many times in our lives. If you get into a scene where you got flattened because you didn't have the mental energy or were unprepared, its okay to ask your friends to gloss that over. It's hard to ask someone to completely forget a scene, but you can ask them to give it less weight, or chalk it up to having drank too much. Most of us will do so.

However, take the lesson and be prepared for the next time. Consider practicing your role-play with a small select group that can challenge your role-play and help you get into the right head space.

You can't win in role-play.

But you CAN have a sense of superiority! Let's be honest here, most role-players like winning debates with other characters. They enjoy the feeling that they got the upper hand, made their point and were viewed well by the audience. It's ideal when both sides in a conflict can feel that way, but if you are not sure of your own character's plans and motivations, you are not going to feel like you came out ahead.