Shard Plot Line

The new World Map and RPCSS are tied to the main shard plotline. The plotline revolves around the struggle and conflict between kingdoms and noble houses. Access to both the world map and RPCSS requires a character who is designed to participate.

By participate, we mean that the character wants to see their chosen god, kingdom, or noble house reach a position of power and prestige which will ultimately be in conflict with other characters' goals. Duty and ambition on behalf of the kingdom/house/god are perfectly acceptable causes for motivation.

Ask yourself this question when considering character ideas: "If my character is not going to further some god's own agenda, why was my character brought here in the first place."

If you do not intend your character to actively engage in the storyline, then you can simply say, "No access to world map needed for this character." If later on, you change your mind, we will be happy to have you post an update.

Please note, membership in noble houses is based on a character's ability to join the house guild. Guild stones are only on the World Map and will require characters to have access to the map to join the guild stone.

From Lara

There seems to be some confusion for those who have not role-played in a player-run world wide storyline before. I did not intend to be vague in the above clarification, so let me be a bit more blunt here. My goal is clarity, not offense.

I am not interested in the motivations of individuals. I care about characters who are going to pick a side and push the goals of that side forward. Summer Isle and Underhill have plenty of room for individual motivations, but the shard plot line is about a unified story. A story specific groups of people are telling together, not a clash of characters. Those groups are represented by the player-crafted and player-ran noble houses.

There are obviously lots of great stories to be told with the individual interfering with or rebelling against the larger plot, but that is usually when the story is primarily about the individual and the larger story line is little more than a back drop.

Those of us playing the shard storyline have no intention of being the back drop for a single character's private motivations. Consider how many people want to be that "lone goes against the grain" character ... In a player run storyline we'd have chaos .. not manageable plot lines. One of the main values to this type of collective storytelling is that players can actually stay up to date with a limited number of plot lines being driven forward by many people rather than a hundred individual plots that most of us are only tangentially aware of.

My advice is to seek a guild/noble house that appeals to you, and then write your character into that goal, along with all of the character's individual aspirations, rather than the other way around. Or seek out a group of players you enjoy playing with and craft a character that will share a goal with their PCs.

This issue came up often in the alpha. PCs who did not pick a side and get involved got ignored.