M. Blackwell's Institute for Extraordinary Youth [Sandbox/LBGTQ Welcome!]

[TheGlyphstone]

I think what we need is a clear idea of what the genre/themes of the game is going to be. A boarding school for supernatural young adults is a setting, the various students and faculty are the characters, but what the game focuses on is important, moreso than pre-planning specific story arcs or plots.

[BlueOrange]

Good point! School settings, when focused on students, are natural fits for self-discovery and questions related to maturity, I think. Certainly, the appeal for me has a lot to do with an opportunity to portray immaturity in a dramatic way, and to examine the consequences of that, perhaps see some growth.

And supers is about power fantasy, and the fundamental question is therefore “How should I live when I have power that I’m ill-equipped to handle?”

[Miss Nyx]

So, I think I have some compelling villainy to portray as Orange, and I’m keen to pose a scene or two. So, I reckon I could run the mission to shut him down as an ‘inspired by’ game. People are invited to bring their non-godlike Blackwell characters: people who can’t just click their fingers and solve the problem.

(We could solve the problem by recreating the Puzzlebox setting, but I feel like I’ve done that setting. If someone else wants to play with ‘everyone is a god’ then I’m happy to talk to them about it.)

I have a very hands-off GMing style: I’m happy for minor NPCs to be puppeted at will. Feel free to establish or claim anything that seems reasonable.

I’m inexperienced with forum roleplaying, but I guess the thing to do will be to have an ‘end of turn’ clock, rather than a strict pose order.  If the clock has run down, or all the players have posed, then the villain takes a turn. That should work for team combat. But what to do in a multi-person social situation?

I’ve always had a tendency to go faster and harder, and so I’d want a solution that minimizes the slowing down. Ultimately, it’s not so much about the rights of the slow vs the rights of the quick: a story where things are happening is a story that people will want to be part of.

While I’m being constructively naive, perhaps the convention of location-based threads is worth reconsidering. Perhaps if people have personal threads and visit each other in those threads, the GMing can be distributed. Each person is responsible for ‘end of turn’ in their particular personal thread. Given the dimensional instability that’s involved, imperfectly matching timelines are to be expected.

I’m starting to feel like this is me proposing a new game, rather than me joining one :/

Your pitch does rather sound like in itself an entirely different game. As Glyph stated the world involved is basically a time loop of Mary Blackwell’s invention, a haven for young magic users, as such she does permit dangerous or otherwise neutral affiliated beings to live under her roof provided they are exceptionally well behaved. She would not allow an openly dangerous being with bad intention to live among them. As far as the order of posting, there are several boards and I would like to keep the style of plot moving events in between allowing everyone complete freedom to post where and when they please maintaining our sand box style of writing—players can work out posting orders between them should there be a large group or play one on one, makes no different to me.

The main antagonists of this game would be Glyph’s Order of St. Hubertus, basically men in black style magic-user exterminators. I welcome your character, provided that we don’t stray from the initially devised setting and the basic plot elements I had in mind when creating the game, but you are quite welcome to do a spin-off style Group Game of your own based off of this idea! I don’t claim it as my own intellectual property because in itself it’s derived heavily from the film “Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, right down to the character stylings of my main OC.

I'm still interested, of course.  Talia and Amy were both really fun characters, but please let me know if either of them was too powerful. >_>

Talia was a descendant of Mab wasn’t she? I may require a few minor tweaks just to better clarify her presence... simply because I don’t see why young magic users with parents or guardians in a powerful position would be in need of Mary’s protection. Amy was fine, I was very fond of her!

[BlueOrange]

Your pitch does rather sound like in itself an entirely different game. As Glyph stated the world involved is basically a time loop of Mary Blackwell’s invention, a haven for young magic users, as such she does permit dangerous or otherwise neutral affiliated beings to live under her roof provided they are exceptionally well behaved. She would not allow an openly dangerous being with bad intention to live among them. As far as the order of posting, there are several boards and I would like to keep the style of plot moving events in between allowing everyone complete freedom to post where and when they please maintaining our sand box style of writing—players can work out posting orders between them should there be a large group or play one on one, makes no different to me.

The main antagonists of this game would be Glyph’s Order of St. Hubertus, basically men in black style magic-user exterminators. I welcome your character, provided that we don’t stray from the initially devised setting and the basic plot elements I had in mind when creating the game, but you are quite welcome to do a spin-off style Group Game of your own based off of this idea! I don’t claim it as my own intellectual property because in itself it’s derived heavily from the film “Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, right down to the character stylings of my main OC.

That's the awesome kind of reply I'm learning to expect at Elliquiy :)  As per my later posts, I was thinking out loud, and I think I'd much rather fit into something than to do all the organizing and so on.  I certainly wouldn't expect a homicidal villain to be resident at the school!  I haven't seen more than a couple of minutes of Mrs Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (my wife has seen it and she hated it, which put me off), but I was assuming that the kids would occasionally leave the grounds to fix problems in the outside world, and that "Orange on a rampage" would be a problem in the outside world that would be worthy.

[Senti]

I appologise for my butting in but I have a day off work and all that and am trying to avoid housework. So forgive me ...but... Though I dont know the game well, from what I actually stalked it looks fantastic catching some of the shizzle on the game and comments brought me to think of The Boys and Umbrella academy. Certainly the Boys because the supers were just vile in that, sort of how they would be in a world that did not keep them in check. So that was just my little poking my nose in I will get back to my housework and again appologise...though it did kind of grasp my interest. (I loved the film by the way.)

[Callie Del Noire]

Still tempted to do some ‘out takes’ just to get the bloody ideas out of my head

[Horns]

Intriguing.. I my be interested in revisiting my Dhampir; Est. I did have fun writing up her character sheet and ultimately never got around to playing her. ^^; I'll be keeping an eye on this.

[TheGlyphstone]

Now I wish I could remember the full name for the Directorate, who are much more the classical 'Men In Black' in the sense of being a a quasigovernmental agency, but are at best secondary antagonists. Pretty sure it was worked out in the Discord channel though, which I've since lost the link to...



EDIT: Also, I just had a great thought. The question was why someone like Talia, with powerful parents or guardians, would need to be under Mary's protection instead. What if part of Mary's agreement with the supernatural communities is not simply protection/guidance/teaching, but a very strict political neutrality clause as well? To use Talia again, for someone as powerfully connected as Mab's granddaughter, she's going to find herself caught up in Faerie politics whether she likes it or not, and that sort of thing would follow her around no matter what school or which teacher she has. But the Institute can be neutral and maintain that neutrality since Mary's own pacts make it self-sustaining and not dependent on patrons or donors for funding. Extrapolate that to not just the Fae, but all the other competing and interconnected supernatural power blocs, and there could be great demand for a haven like that, in addition to the more 'common' sort of students who lack patronage or connections entirely. That's a common theme in and of itself for the 'boarding school'-type story, the intermingling and occasional friction of students from different social stratum.

Oh, and as an additional 'fun' complication - the Institute's official hands-off policy towards politics doesn't automatically extend to its guests. So if members of two different groups are both at the Institute to visit their relatives/wards, and they coincidentally happen to encounter each other, and this leads to a certain amount of informal diplomacy being conducted away from the official channels...there's another incentive for the major players to quietly keep supporting the Institute.

[Miss Nyx]

I’ll get responses to everyone’s inquiries when I’m out of work. Just thought I’d say I’m super stoked to see so many of our previous players as well as new writers interested! 😊

[Jefepato]

Talia was a descendant of Mab wasn’t she? I may require a few minor tweaks just to better clarify her presence... simply because I don’t see why young magic users with parents or guardians in a powerful position would be in need of Mary’s protection. Amy was fine, I was very fond of her!

Yes, Talia was Mab's granddaughter.  IIRC, the situation as presented in the original version of her backstory was roughly like this:

- Although Mab did have some of her nobles oversee the training of her son (Talia's father), she's pretty hands-off with him in adulthood.
- Talia's father, although he's obviously got a lot of innate power, is primarily a businessman in the mortal world.  (Whether Mab has any greater plans for him in the future is currently unknown.)  Not only does he spend a lot of time away from home, but he's out of practice when it comes to personally defending his family -- he would much rather have Talia in a safe place if she's in danger.
- Mab arranged for a few tutors to visit Talia as she grew up, but although she seems to care about her, she only visits Talia maybe once a year on her birthday.  Talia definitely doesn't have any fae bodyguards; Mab might avenge Talia if something happened, but she cannot be relied upon to protect Talia.
- Rather than set up a full-time training schedule as she did for Talia's father, Mab saw fit to call in a favor and ask Mary to take her in instead.  (Why?  Mab isn't in the habit of explaining herself, although one theory I came up with was that Mab thinks Talia will be most useful to her in the future if she's accustomed to the wider supernatural world, instead of spending all her time with the Unseelie fae.  Or maybe she thinks Talia would be happier there, if you can imagine Mab caring that much.  Who can say?)

TL;DR I think Talia is personally distant enough from Mab herself to justify her attending Mary's school, and her father is too busy to protect her.  If that doesn't work, though, everything is negotiable.

EDIT: Also, I just had a great thought. The question was why someone like Talia, with powerful parents or guardians, would need to be under Mary's protection instead. What if part of Mary's agreement with the supernatural communities is not simply protection/guidance/teaching, but a very strict political neutrality clause as well? To use Talia again, for someone as powerfully connected as Mab's granddaughter, she's going to find herself caught up in Faerie politics whether she likes it or not, and that sort of thing would follow her around no matter what school or which teacher she has. But the Institute can be neutral and maintain that neutrality since Mary's own pacts make it self-sustaining and not dependent on patrons or donors for funding. Extrapolate that to not just the Fae, but all the other competing and interconnected supernatural power blocs, and there could be great demand for a haven like that, in addition to the more 'common' sort of students who lack patronage or connections entirely. That's a common theme in and of itself for the 'boarding school'-type story, the intermingling and occasional friction of students from different social stratum.

That's good too.

[Callie Del Noire]

Well got most of the scene in my head out of my head.. will finish up in the AM.