Post by Failure on Feb 6, 2018 19:24:58 GMT -5
Bleach Gotei 3.0: Part Two
Introduction
First and foremost, my sincerest apologies for the constant delays on this release. Between the outage the other day and this being postponed twice, I certainly understand if some of you are frustrated, or got the idea that we don't care about BG anymore. Let me assure you that such ideas couldn't be further from the truth. It's because we care (perhaps too much on my end!) that we took the time to make sure the most important part of 3.0 got the attention it deserved and needed before we let this go out to the public. Hopefully, you guys can agree that the wait was worth it!
This part of the update is pretty big and covers a variety of topics, namely the five year timeskip you've all been looking forward to. Please be sure to read everything we have here so you don't end up asking questions that have already been answered. As always, questions and discussions about this update will not be in this thread. Instead, you may either reach out to staff via the #Player_Help channel in our discord (for quick, simple questions), or by making a post in this discussion thread (for larger, more in-depth questions).
At-a-glance Summary
Staffing & Board Changes
Staff Changes
To kick this off with a bang, Shun Minamoto is no longer the owner of Bleach Gotei (again) and I will be taking full control over the site. To most everyone, this is hardly a change. I have been, and will continue to be, the one everyone goes to with problems and concerns. The only major difference is you can yell at me when there's a site outage instead of Shun.
Due to the activity slowing recently (it's that time of year), we've decided to let Victoria, Mirabelle Bonnet, and Fáelán O'Mongan go for the time being. They all did wonderfully while on the team and, when activity rises in the near future, may very well see a return to the team. However, there's simply not enough to do to warrant so many hands on deck. Zazi will remain on the team as a Junior Staff member.
Junior Staff members do a lot of the day-to-day work on BG, including GP claims, updating the faceclaim list, and many other things. They also handle "low-tier" requests, such as Application Grades and Legendary Challenges.
Senior Staff members are the veterans of the site. They handle the more complex duties, such as approving powers and large requests. While they also handle all the things Junior Staff does, it's not necessarily their priority.
These two roles have been added to the discord channel to help reduce confusion as to what the staff ranks mean.
Board Changes
We decided to clean up the site to get rid of the clutter and, hopefully, make it a bit easier for everyone to navigate. None of the In-Character boards have been touched, though we will be updating their flavor text in the coming days to better represent the state of the setting.
The biggest change, however, is the changes to the Community Category. The Out of Character board and the Metagame Discussion board have both been merged into the Community Category and their former categories have been deleted. In both of these cases, we realized having an entire category dedicated to just one or two boards was completely overkill.
No threads have been lost in this move. If you cannot find your thread, please let a member of Senior Staff know.
The Vent Thread from Serious Discussion and the Recognition Thread from Of the Month have been moved into the OOC board. As such, the Serious Discussion and Of the Month boards have been removed.
The Request Workshop has also been deleted. It was an old relic of a time when BG tried to have a more hands on approach with helping players tell their stories. Nowadays, it serves no purpose other than to confuse new players. As such, we've moved all WIP request to the Request board found in the Character Maintenance category. As always, when your request is finished, simply bump it and mark it as Finished in the title.
The User Created Guides board has been moved into Site Discussion as a Sub-Board. The Sub-Board Character Mechanics has been removed as we no longer have need to reference it.
The Timeskip
As you all know by now, Bleach Gotei is implementing a timeskip of five years, which goes into effect today, February 6th. The primary purpose of this timeskip is to help cement the “now” as more than just a transient moment for all races, and to aid in establishing some changes to our setting that are best and most conveniently viewed through a retrospective lens. Rather than RP out the Seireitei Plague, the Rebuilding of Las Noches and the gathering of the order, we are providing the opportunity to consider these things having already occurred, meaning that characters will be able to start off by exploring the aftermath of these momentous events. Naturally, because of how Bleach Gotei works, exploring key moments during these events will always be possible via Pendulum threads.
Though this is a timeskip of five years, we recommend a certain flexibility in your storytelling. For Shinigami and Arrancar, time and date have little meaning, whereas for mortals it might play a much larger role. The passage of time on sites such as ours is always strange and varies from person to person, but for best results, try not to approach this timeskip as “the year 2023” so much as “my character five years from now”. This is, after all, a character-driven roleplaying community linked to a specific setting rather than current events, and thus your priorities should not be discussing current events as you imagine they will be five years hence, but rather what you think your characters will be five years hence. To this end, as paradoxical as it might seem, try imagining your character has simply aged five years and lived through whatever it is you imagine they have lived through in that time—but that the world outside the scope of our setting has remained the same. Again, this is more for simplicity's sake and you are of course free to approach it as you want, but it is our strong recommendation that people not get too absorbed into their vision of what they imagine 2023 will look like. What 2023 will look like isn't important, nor will it ever be. What's important is how the setting has changed in five years—not the world, not politics, not what model year the car your character is driving. Treat it as 2018, but everything your character knows has simply skipped ahead five years.
In practical terms, we also realize that it is unlikely characters will simply have sat on their hands waiting to age for five years, and to help represent this we will be implementing a one-time bonus of 1,000 non-base GP for all characters whose apps were finished on or before February 10th. In order to become eligible for this bonus, characters must complete at least one post-timeskip thread, at which point this bonus can be claimed as if it were a Legendary Challenge or similar. Characters will of course earn standard GP rates for any Pendulum threads that occur during the timeskip, but important to note is that simply stating that your character has changed during the timeskip is not enough to motivate a milestone. As always, milestones require this change to be shown.
Each race will be affected by the timeskip a little differently, but two events in particular stand out: the Seireitei Plague and the Rebuilding of Las Noches.
The Seireitei Plague
The past five years of Shinigami history are dominated by the sudden onset of a mysterious plague of unknown origin that wracked the fortress-city. With a cataclysmic death toll that left only a scant fraction of the Shinigami population alive, Seireitei has all but emptied, leaving both the city and the Gotei it housed shadows of what they once were. With no manpower to spare, the city has been neglected: buildings have been converted to storage for the piles of black bodybags yet to be incinerated, the parks and gardens have grown wild, reclaiming nearby alleys and buildings, and an eerie silence has settled over the white towers and streets of was once the jewel of Soul Society.
How it started, where it came from, and how it spread, nobody knows, but the Gotei quickly learned that it was an affliction that only affected Shinigami. Despite this, the city walls fell into place as an extra precaution, sealing Seireitei in quarantine. The first symptom, a mild blurring of memory, was innocent enough, but it quickly led to more serious signs of the Shinigami's mind and the connection to their Zanpakutō eroding. Paranoia set in, and people were accused of spreading the plague for something as simple as forgetting someone's name. Many healthy Shinigami were quarantined or worse—and many infected Shinigami did their best to hide their symptoms. The final stage of the sickness, signalling the onset of rapid and complete mental erosion, is a veneer of rust forming on the Zanpakuto. No Shinigami reaching this stage of the sickness is known to have recovered.
The Third Division worked tirelessly to better understand the plague in hopes of developing a cure, and while they were, at last, able to paint a more or less complete picture of how the affliction attacked the mind of the Shinigami, slowly fracturing it piece by piece, a cure was never found. Those affected were doomed, their symptoms finally culminating in a brief but intense state of insanity quickly followed by death as their heart simply stopped beating—their souls unable to maintain their spiritual bodies. Close—some would say invasive—inspection of those who were immune revealed nothing of use, but as the panic raged in Seireitei, the Shinigami knew that their work in the world of the living could not be interrupted.
Now the Soul Society is a crumbling ruin of what it once was. The surviving Shinigami are torn between rebuilding what was once theirs and maintaining an increasingly tenuous hold on Earth. What it means to be a Shinigami, and what balance means—these are concepts hanging by a thread that grows more frayed by the day.
Note that all player-character Shinigami are either immune or escaped infection entirely—with a lethality rate of 100%, once infected, death was certain. Shinigami player characters who wish to use this opportunity to become infected and die will—in this one instance—be allowed to gain Death GP unconditionally, with no thread required.
The Rebuilding of Las Noches
As Seireitei crumbles, Las Noches is being reborn. The Hollow-breeds have rebuilt their castle, and a new generation of Arrancar have risen up from the desert to take up residence in it as Espada. The three strongest are constantly vying for the dominant spot, but since no clear victor has emerged, they are locked in a stalemate for the throne, which has remained vacant since the death of the last regent. Lower-ranked Espada eye the muted conflict greedily, hoping to surprise them all and take control for themselves, and all of them are collecting Fracción as they bide their time, waiting for the opportune moment to strike and rise in the ranks.
Introduction
First and foremost, my sincerest apologies for the constant delays on this release. Between the outage the other day and this being postponed twice, I certainly understand if some of you are frustrated, or got the idea that we don't care about BG anymore. Let me assure you that such ideas couldn't be further from the truth. It's because we care (perhaps too much on my end!) that we took the time to make sure the most important part of 3.0 got the attention it deserved and needed before we let this go out to the public. Hopefully, you guys can agree that the wait was worth it!
This part of the update is pretty big and covers a variety of topics, namely the five year timeskip you've all been looking forward to. Please be sure to read everything we have here so you don't end up asking questions that have already been answered. As always, questions and discussions about this update will not be in this thread. Instead, you may either reach out to staff via the #Player_Help channel in our discord (for quick, simple questions), or by making a post in this discussion thread (for larger, more in-depth questions).
At-a-glance Summary
- The Character Database has been condensed. This was changed a few weeks ago, but here's the official statement for it!
- The Request Workshop is no more. All WIP Requests have been moved to the Request Board. When Requests are finished, you simply bump them and tag them as Finished.
- The Out of Character Category has been removed. Instead, an Out of Character board can be found in the Community category. The Vent Thread has been moved into the OOC board.
- Failure (aka Breezey) is the new Site Owner.
- Staff is divided between Senior Staff (Shun, Genki, and Failure, with Otto working in a supportive capacity) and Junior Staff (Zazi)
- Due to changing needs, Victoria, Mirabelle, and Faelan have been let go, and we'd like to thank them for their hard work as BG staff!
- The five year time skip is now live! We have both an OOC summary and an IC summary of the events of the Shinigami Plague to help you get an idea of what went down.
- All players may request up to 1,000 non-base GP to cover in-character growth during the five year timeskip. In order to qualify for the 1k GP, you must complete at least one thread that takes place after the five years. Players may still thread during the timeskip through TBTP threads. All threads that take place during the timeskip earn GP as they normally would and can count towards character advancements and milestones (All of this is expanded upon below).
- Las Noches has been rebuilt to its former glory and is currently "maintained" by the three Espada, all of which are NPCs.
- Rosaleda is the quirky, quick-tempered Primera. Though she's unpredictable and hard to get along with, her impressive strength has earned her the reluctant respect of the Hollows within Las Noches. Her Aspect of Death is Futility.
- Maxentius Livius is the quiet and leader-like Segunda. Known for his quick wit and strategic planning, many follow him not only for his proven experience in battle, but also the air of confidence that drips from him. His Aspect of Death is Intrepidity.
- Zhuang Hou is the conniving and demented Trecera. Often referred to as the "mad scientist", he certainly takes that archetype to the extreme. His Aspect of Death is Discovery.
- Reworked Racial pages and their associated histories will be trickling out over the next few weeks. Quincy and Arrancar racial information is finished, and both will be posted immediately with updated histories to follow. We will announce in Discord when the remaining pages go live.
- The Shinigami and Las Noches roster threads have now been condensed into single threads in their respected boards. These thread will be maintained by staff and will, hopefully, better preserve in-character information about the ranks and associated duties. Faction leaders (i.e. Espada and Captains) are encouraged to use the Metagame board, or Discord, to communicate with their faction members.
Staffing & Board Changes
Staff Changes
To kick this off with a bang, Shun Minamoto is no longer the owner of Bleach Gotei (again) and I will be taking full control over the site. To most everyone, this is hardly a change. I have been, and will continue to be, the one everyone goes to with problems and concerns. The only major difference is you can yell at me when there's a site outage instead of Shun.
Due to the activity slowing recently (it's that time of year), we've decided to let Victoria, Mirabelle Bonnet, and Fáelán O'Mongan go for the time being. They all did wonderfully while on the team and, when activity rises in the near future, may very well see a return to the team. However, there's simply not enough to do to warrant so many hands on deck. Zazi will remain on the team as a Junior Staff member.
Junior Staff members do a lot of the day-to-day work on BG, including GP claims, updating the faceclaim list, and many other things. They also handle "low-tier" requests, such as Application Grades and Legendary Challenges.
Senior Staff members are the veterans of the site. They handle the more complex duties, such as approving powers and large requests. While they also handle all the things Junior Staff does, it's not necessarily their priority.
These two roles have been added to the discord channel to help reduce confusion as to what the staff ranks mean.
Board Changes
We decided to clean up the site to get rid of the clutter and, hopefully, make it a bit easier for everyone to navigate. None of the In-Character boards have been touched, though we will be updating their flavor text in the coming days to better represent the state of the setting.
The biggest change, however, is the changes to the Community Category. The Out of Character board and the Metagame Discussion board have both been merged into the Community Category and their former categories have been deleted. In both of these cases, we realized having an entire category dedicated to just one or two boards was completely overkill.
No threads have been lost in this move. If you cannot find your thread, please let a member of Senior Staff know.
The Vent Thread from Serious Discussion and the Recognition Thread from Of the Month have been moved into the OOC board. As such, the Serious Discussion and Of the Month boards have been removed.
The Request Workshop has also been deleted. It was an old relic of a time when BG tried to have a more hands on approach with helping players tell their stories. Nowadays, it serves no purpose other than to confuse new players. As such, we've moved all WIP request to the Request board found in the Character Maintenance category. As always, when your request is finished, simply bump it and mark it as Finished in the title.
The User Created Guides board has been moved into Site Discussion as a Sub-Board. The Sub-Board Character Mechanics has been removed as we no longer have need to reference it.
The Timeskip
As you all know by now, Bleach Gotei is implementing a timeskip of five years, which goes into effect today, February 6th. The primary purpose of this timeskip is to help cement the “now” as more than just a transient moment for all races, and to aid in establishing some changes to our setting that are best and most conveniently viewed through a retrospective lens. Rather than RP out the Seireitei Plague, the Rebuilding of Las Noches and the gathering of the order, we are providing the opportunity to consider these things having already occurred, meaning that characters will be able to start off by exploring the aftermath of these momentous events. Naturally, because of how Bleach Gotei works, exploring key moments during these events will always be possible via Pendulum threads.
Though this is a timeskip of five years, we recommend a certain flexibility in your storytelling. For Shinigami and Arrancar, time and date have little meaning, whereas for mortals it might play a much larger role. The passage of time on sites such as ours is always strange and varies from person to person, but for best results, try not to approach this timeskip as “the year 2023” so much as “my character five years from now”. This is, after all, a character-driven roleplaying community linked to a specific setting rather than current events, and thus your priorities should not be discussing current events as you imagine they will be five years hence, but rather what you think your characters will be five years hence. To this end, as paradoxical as it might seem, try imagining your character has simply aged five years and lived through whatever it is you imagine they have lived through in that time—but that the world outside the scope of our setting has remained the same. Again, this is more for simplicity's sake and you are of course free to approach it as you want, but it is our strong recommendation that people not get too absorbed into their vision of what they imagine 2023 will look like. What 2023 will look like isn't important, nor will it ever be. What's important is how the setting has changed in five years—not the world, not politics, not what model year the car your character is driving. Treat it as 2018, but everything your character knows has simply skipped ahead five years.
In practical terms, we also realize that it is unlikely characters will simply have sat on their hands waiting to age for five years, and to help represent this we will be implementing a one-time bonus of 1,000 non-base GP for all characters whose apps were finished on or before February 10th. In order to become eligible for this bonus, characters must complete at least one post-timeskip thread, at which point this bonus can be claimed as if it were a Legendary Challenge or similar. Characters will of course earn standard GP rates for any Pendulum threads that occur during the timeskip, but important to note is that simply stating that your character has changed during the timeskip is not enough to motivate a milestone. As always, milestones require this change to be shown.
Each race will be affected by the timeskip a little differently, but two events in particular stand out: the Seireitei Plague and the Rebuilding of Las Noches.
The Seireitei Plague
The past five years of Shinigami history are dominated by the sudden onset of a mysterious plague of unknown origin that wracked the fortress-city. With a cataclysmic death toll that left only a scant fraction of the Shinigami population alive, Seireitei has all but emptied, leaving both the city and the Gotei it housed shadows of what they once were. With no manpower to spare, the city has been neglected: buildings have been converted to storage for the piles of black bodybags yet to be incinerated, the parks and gardens have grown wild, reclaiming nearby alleys and buildings, and an eerie silence has settled over the white towers and streets of was once the jewel of Soul Society.
How it started, where it came from, and how it spread, nobody knows, but the Gotei quickly learned that it was an affliction that only affected Shinigami. Despite this, the city walls fell into place as an extra precaution, sealing Seireitei in quarantine. The first symptom, a mild blurring of memory, was innocent enough, but it quickly led to more serious signs of the Shinigami's mind and the connection to their Zanpakutō eroding. Paranoia set in, and people were accused of spreading the plague for something as simple as forgetting someone's name. Many healthy Shinigami were quarantined or worse—and many infected Shinigami did their best to hide their symptoms. The final stage of the sickness, signalling the onset of rapid and complete mental erosion, is a veneer of rust forming on the Zanpakuto. No Shinigami reaching this stage of the sickness is known to have recovered.
The Third Division worked tirelessly to better understand the plague in hopes of developing a cure, and while they were, at last, able to paint a more or less complete picture of how the affliction attacked the mind of the Shinigami, slowly fracturing it piece by piece, a cure was never found. Those affected were doomed, their symptoms finally culminating in a brief but intense state of insanity quickly followed by death as their heart simply stopped beating—their souls unable to maintain their spiritual bodies. Close—some would say invasive—inspection of those who were immune revealed nothing of use, but as the panic raged in Seireitei, the Shinigami knew that their work in the world of the living could not be interrupted.
Now the Soul Society is a crumbling ruin of what it once was. The surviving Shinigami are torn between rebuilding what was once theirs and maintaining an increasingly tenuous hold on Earth. What it means to be a Shinigami, and what balance means—these are concepts hanging by a thread that grows more frayed by the day.
Note that all player-character Shinigami are either immune or escaped infection entirely—with a lethality rate of 100%, once infected, death was certain. Shinigami player characters who wish to use this opportunity to become infected and die will—in this one instance—be allowed to gain Death GP unconditionally, with no thread required.
The Rebuilding of Las Noches
As Seireitei crumbles, Las Noches is being reborn. The Hollow-breeds have rebuilt their castle, and a new generation of Arrancar have risen up from the desert to take up residence in it as Espada. The three strongest are constantly vying for the dominant spot, but since no clear victor has emerged, they are locked in a stalemate for the throne, which has remained vacant since the death of the last regent. Lower-ranked Espada eye the muted conflict greedily, hoping to surprise them all and take control for themselves, and all of them are collecting Fracción as they bide their time, waiting for the opportune moment to strike and rise in the ranks.
