#neoevent

PHASE ONE

Darkness, first. Sudden and absolute, the city is plunged into silence. The quiet is uncanny, without the offset of the neon buzz of lights, without the glow of a hundred city windows and all the brightness of a wild city under the world.

This phase lasts for about two hours. It’s not the end of the world. Telecommunications still work, particularly those on independent battery life or wired through implants. For the most part, while people are surprised and shaken, things progress through the evening as normal. The time is 9pm, when it begins. Thanks to the season, it’s fully dark at this time, but the night is not yet underway.

PHASE TWO

By 11 pm, the backup generators that are installed in some places, such as Afterlife,

which has quickly become a brightly lit haven for gossip and rampant speculation, go out. This makes little sense, considering they aren’t externally connected to the power grid, for obvious reasons.

Speculations that this was purely an effort on the part of Zeus and their father’s company to wreak havoc begin to weaken in the wake of this. Some decry that perhaps Ares and their myriad helpful hackers have something to do with this, while others point out that it makes little sense for them to throw their own world into upheaval.

Even the Afterlife has gone dark now, and there isn’t a one amongst the denizens of Elysium who can remember a time that last happened that wasn’t, for example, 9am on a Sunday (and even then, there are cleaning staff and stockers about). This is a cause for more alarm. Communication has become spotty and unreliable but not nonexistent. Tension mounts and there is a strange feeling in the air.

PHASE THREE

Time passes. It’s 1am but there are few signs of sleep. No one seems able to let go of the anxiety that interrupted connection brings. Some joke that without fast connection to the internet, without a tablet or display that can reliably function, it feels as though they’ve broken an arm, or sprained an ankle.

Now, suddenly, it seems they’ve lost an appendage all together.

Against all possible odds, with no explanation, rhyme, reason, or fanfare, all implantations and augmentations have ceased function.  Holohair is rendered plain once more, data jacks lose connection, retinal displays go dormant. Eye enhancements vanish, strength augmentations are disabled, emergency weaponry is no longer triggerable or deployable. Only bone lacing, reliant on titanium coating of the bones, for the most part remains untouched. Anything that requires external connection is, in particular, fully disabled. All cosmetic interfaces from tattoos to eye color adjustments shuts down. Chemical inhibitors or reflex adjustments go dormant.

Chaos and fear descend.

In a population so incredibly reliant on the cybernetic, what do we become when we are all reduced to purely human?

CAMPAIGN MECHANICS

Due to a lot of our inspiration coming from the tabletop RPG Shadowrun, we’ve decided to bring in a campaign style element to our events! Thus, they will have a relatively long duration OOC but be more short term within the context of the game.

IC, this particular event will span a period of 3 days, from 9pm on Saturday to 10 pm on Tuesday. OOC, however, this event will run from 2/15 to 3/15.

The tag for the event will be “neo.system failure” and muses are encouraged to also tag based on phase and location (referenced below).

So, what makes this “different” as an event? Well, we’ll be implementing some new mechanics in order to ensure that active progression can take place. In a tabletop RPG, turns are based on the completion of actions and on movement. For us, we’ll be seeking to emulate that in a few ways.

First of all, there are a few guidelines we would like to highly encourage for the event period:

We suggest putting a pause on your current threads, or at least a priority on event threads, since we’d like to develop the plot out of this.

We suggest a 300-500 word range on replies to ensure everyone can keep the action and movement going in a more “rapidfire” situation.

We suggest cross referential threading! This means making use of location and phase tagging (e.g. neo.afterlife, neo.phase2) in order to see who else is currently around your characters and implementing that in your own threads. For example, if two threads take place in Afterlife, and in one the muses get in a bar fight and in the other two muses are drinking their concerns away, the latter might then write about noticing a friend in the midst of that fight or might notice the fight and stumble away from the chaos, or find that it heightens their own worries in the situation, etc. We hope this will encourage people to keep up with threads and actions outside of their own, to greater cause a network of plotting and interacting to develop in a way that would mimic the chaos of these things in real-time.

GETTING STARTED

For the first phase of the event you may send a submit to the main noting your character and saying you want to roll a dice. We will roll a dice from 1-4 for you, and you will then be randomly paired with a location and a partner in that same location, as well as a brief scenario, as a DM might provide to a party at the beginning of the campaign. Additionally, if you are open to obtaining multiple random partners to accommodate later joiners, please let us know! Please note it is optional.

You’re then free to thread based on that and to perhaps get a chance to bring together muses that might not have much occasion to interact otherwise (and of course you’re welcome to plot out and thread anything else you’d like to explore with other muses as well).

Throughout the OOC weeks of the event we’ll be keeping an eye out and sending curveballs and additional details through the submit boxes, so be sure you have yours open.

Anyone is welcome to join at any point in time, and of course if you prefer to opt out of the event or any part of it for any reason, you’re welcome to do that. And in such cases, we do encourage other members to not pause non-event threads with anyone opting out.

Champions tagging: