For this exchange, you can nominate 10 Relationships & 10 Additional Tags that have something to do with the event theme. Tags are approved manually, so there may be a gap between submitting your noms and seeing them in the tagset.

We get a lot of questions about terminology around here, so I’ll try and hammer some of that out. These are in roughly chronological order.

Nomination: This is step 1 of an exchange, where you enter the ships, characters, or fandoms that you would be interested in writing/drawing or receiving fic/art for. These nominations go into the tag set (see below). A nomination is not a sign-up, meaning you don’t have to make any nominations to participate, and you technically don’t have to participate if you nominate, although it’s considered rude to nominate if you don’t plan to take part.

For our purposes, nominations are only ships

You haven’t signed up or made requests yet

Tag set: all the nominations people put in make up the set of tags that people who sign up can pull from to make their requests. You can only request things in the tag set. So if you really want to be able to create for (offer) or receive a certain ship, you’d better nominate them. Exchange mods can weed out tags that don’t suit the exchange. IE: if someone nominated shadowgast, we’d remove it, since we’re a rarepair exchange.

Sign-up: This is you committing to being in the exchange. This is also where you make your requests for what you want to receive and offers for what you want to create.

Request: These are how you get fic or art. The more different requests you make, the easier it is to match you to someone. For this exchange, you get to make up to 10 requests, and you must make at least 4 DIFFERENT ones. Requests must each include 1 fandom, whether you want fiction or art (in the additional tags), 1-15 relationships, and the ratings (G-E) you are comfortable receiving. You set these fields for all requests. More details like prompts, likes, and do not wants are optional but highly recommended. See DNWs for more information.

Offer: This says what you are willing to or want to make. You make 4-10 of these. They must include 1 fandom, 1-15 relationships OR “Any”, whether you are creating fic or art, and the ratings you will write OR “Any.” Note that you SHOULD NOT pick ANY unless you REALLY MEAN IT. Offers do not contain prompts or DNWs

Do Not Want (DNW): Your DNWs are things your gifter must avoid to create something you will enjoy. DNWs are expected to be used for things such as triggers, squicks, NoTPs, or things that would otherwise spoil your gift and are not to be used to "box" a creator into creating a one specific gift. Be specific in your DNWs. (See the exchange rules on ao3 for more information).

Dear Critter Letter: This is the Critical Role specific term for a Dear Creator Letter. Basically, it’s more details about your likes, dislikes, wants, DNWs, quirks, and the prompts. Read this for more information. These are OPTIONAL.

Assignment: You will get matched with someone! Yippee!! DO NOT TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE. Look at their requests, read their Dear Critter Letter, and then pick one (1) of their prompts to fill. You are expected to write 1 fic. You expect to receive 1 fic. Anything else is a treat.

Default: This is the POLITE way to exit an exchange. If you exit before the no penalty deadline, we bid you farewell and you can try again next year. If you exit after, you will not be allowed to participate in future exchanges. Default also applies if you do not complete your gift or post only placeholder fic/art by the due date or ignore DNWs.

Pinch-hit: This is when you swoop in to save an assignment after someone else defaults. Know that if you do this, the mods love you very much. Pinch-hits follow usual assignment rules.

Great question!

Tag Sets on AO3 are a neat feature that allows you to build a preset group of tags that people can request or offer in an exchange. Here's an example of a small one for a recent xuanlimian exchange and another for a big multifandom exchange.

The nomination process is where you submit the tags you'd like to be available when the exchange signup opens. The form will look something like this:

[described in alt]

The number and type of tags you are allowed to nominate will be different for each exchange.

So why use a tag set?

It helps ensure people will make requests and offers that can be matched! This is less of a problem with a single-fandom exchange like this one, but even within MDZS there are dozens of possible characters and even more possible ships — a tag set reduces the possibility that you request things no one thinks to offer (or vice versa) and can't be matched.

It lets people know what sorts of things other participants are interested in. Say you nominate the tags BAMF Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn and Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk — you might inspire someone else to offer or request those tags when they sign up.

Tag sets let you nominate new or non-canonical tags that other people can use to write their requests and offers. The AO3 exchange form only accepts tags that are either canonical (wrangled) or part of a tagset. Tags like Dàfàn Mountain Tea Shop Owner or T4T Wangxian or Punk Rocker Wēn Níng | Wēn Qiónglín don't exist as wrangled tags in AO3, but if you nominate them to the tag set, anyone can use them in their exchange sign-up.

For the case fic exchange, we'll be using tag matching to help make sure everyone gets an assignment they're excited about.

Tag nominations for the Case-fic Exchange are open — nominate the tags you want to see here!

If you've not done an exchange with tagset noms before, there's an explainer about how the process works below the cut.

Hey, Critters! Please use ONLY the FANDOM tags that have already been ADDED to the tag set. Specifically, do NOT use the “Critical Role (Web Series) tag!

Instead, please sort your relationships by which campaign they fall into— "Critical Role Campaign 1," "Critical Role Campaign 2," and "Critical Role Campaign 3," as well as “Critical Crossovers,” “Exandria Unlimited,” “Exandria Unlimited: Calamity,” and “The Legend of Vox Machina: Cartoon”

ALSO please note that you MUST distinguish between Campaign 1 and LoVM when you sort your tags.

Hi, great question! We did a rundown of the process with screenshots here for the previous exchange, if you'd like to check that out, or I'll summarize below.

Tag nominations will be handled through AO3 here — once they open, you'll see a "Nominate" button at the top of the page. For the Close Quarters Exchange, you'll be able to nominate up to 10 Relationships and 10 Additional Tags.

For Relationships, you can nominate:

Character A & Character B for platonic combos

Character A/Character B for sexual or romantic combos

Please do go ahead and use the canonical tags that autocomplete, if they are available. If you're adding a new relationship, mods may tweak your nomination to match canonical tag formatting (tone marks, name order, etc).

For Additional Tags, you can nominate tropes, settings, and story elements that relate to the theme, so things like:

Stuck in a Coffin

Arranged Marriage

Body Swap

Group Project

Get-Along Sweater

These can be existing tags or new ones you want to request/offer for this exchange!