Rules & Guidelines

[The Archivist]

Welcome.

Backstory of this Forum:
Once upon a time on the planet Earth, back in the first decade of this century, several hundred writers around the globe began writing/roleplaying (RPing) the stories of their own Star Wars inspired characters together in an app and in the boards of various social media discussion groups. A year later, many of those writers spread out and made homes for their stories on a few different websites that were lovingly created for them.

For several more years, they wrote... A Lot. When Earth life became increasingly busy, many of them eventually paused or stopped writing when it became challenging to keep up with an extra galaxy.

This forum was built by a few of those RPers who maintained close friendships but stepped away from actually writing for several years. We've carried the spirit of those stories around with us for more than a decade. Eventually as we've settled into our various grown lives, the creative want to keep writing our stories kept pricking at us. Finally we've stepped back and are revisiting them in a new setting.

We haven't necessarily made this writing space intending it to be for a large group of writers. But especially if all of this means anything to you, you are welcome to join us if you'd like to.

Here are the house rules:

1) Courtesy/communication.
Be respectful of others’ writing. If you're not familiar with a writer or what's happening in a thread, ask someone first.

2) Common sense.
Everyone should know the drill for character creation—
• Write original characters: No writing canon characters, direct descendants of canon characters, or anything like that.
• Be respectful of other people’s intellectual character property.
• Please keep Force-powers, resources your character owns, etc, based around what we see in the movies and novels and within general reason.
• Evil, cruelty, and romance are all fine. Do be tasteful and write at the level of Star Wars novels. Not Game of Thrones novels.
• Whenever in doubt, please refer back to rule #1.

3) Don’t worry about planetary control, full inter-faction wars, etc.
• We are for the most part focusing on groups of individual characters inside of a huge galaxy that keeps on spinning. Politics, planets, wars, crime, and factions are all likely going to do a lot of their thing in the background. Focus on the characters more than on the maps.
• Writing powerful or wealthy people is expected, but with great power comes great responsibility to remain thoughtful of other writers/characters.
• DO: Write heroes and villains doing EPIC things. Write heroes and villains doing MUNDANE things. Write people.
• DON’T: Write heroes and villains totally overthrowing governments, taking over planets, obliterating important places, or drastically changing the map of the universe without checking in with each other.

4) In-Character Aging: No need to speed up time.
• We write slow. Many individual scenes can take several months to physically write and play out, even if the scene takes place in a day or less.
• There is no need to worry about aging characters in mid scene. Just write IC time passing at whatever the natural level of your stories are.

5) This is a fresh start, but continuing character history and relationships is very welcome.
• Nearly anyone posting here will probably be continuing their characters’ story arcs from one or more collaborative fiction sites that we’ve been very invested in over the years. Whatever communication suits you, or the planning boards, can be a great tool for reestablishing shared character history or reminding others about important events.

• Consider this like a soft reset. It's perfectly fine if your character is a little different (or totally new) from whatever you may have started to write a decade ago. You can communicate about any of that on the planning boards or such if you'd like to.

6) This universe’s storyline is rooted in the past writing, but it is Not Exactly The Same as the settings many of our characters were first written in. This is a much smaller community of adults writing our characters together in an epic emotional setting, but a very relaxed play style.

• This setting is essentially Round 2 of writing the Force Nexus/"Jedi Disappearance" story launch point that our group of writing friends started working on around early 2018. We put a lot of thought, conversations,and writing into it, and it has really become our pride and joy.

• We designed the "present day" story arc to give us a jump point back into our character's IC lives after several busy years of our own RL absences while our characters were off living their own lives for half a generation.

• You're also welcome to enjoy writing anywhere else in the timeline. Childhoods, backstories, first meetings? Everything is fair game.

• The timeline is a pared-down setting that captures the spirit of 30+ In-Character years of story, reimagines them, and then gives our characters an emotional open-ended galaxy full of new problems and challenges to come to terms with.

The galaxy in this setting has been in turmoil.

It’s more than a little tragic. Most Jedi have been gone for 2 decades. Most Sith have been in hiding behind the scenes. Crime and small-scale wars are running rampant. Galactic politics have become very dystopian.

There should be room for all sorts of writing in it, and a variety of entry points into the story that give new or older characters options for how to drop in.

(There may eventually be something written to summarize the rest of the galaxy, assuming one of us gets around to that)