There is sad news

So the drive returned, and the MySQL databases (which is what the Tiki data was) could not be retrieved. I'm sorry, J.

An update

The drive from the wikiserver is due for return on Wednesday. We should be able to pick our future course from there.

Building Fu

I apologize for being less than active recently. I've been occupied with making sure that I have enough work coming in so that Triv and I don't starve. That said, here's how we plan to put this very unique grid together...

London and Environs
This is the center of our world. Although we'd love to use the simplified borough structure from 1900-1965, the old district/vestry system from 1855 contains more flavor if less organization. These regions will be individual groups of rooms, only connected with themselves. For example, Westminster will be a collection of rooms that have no exits save those shared amongst other Westminster rooms. To get to other regional groups, we'd like to implement a +travel system, with a twist.

On CC, once we set up the Sky rooms, code provided a list once someone typed in '+land' or whatever it was. That list involved the numbered ground rooms that could only be reached by that sky room in particular, flagged appropriately if I'm not mistaken. We'd like to set up a single appropriate room per regional group (probably marked with an asterisk *) that allows folks to type '+travel' and bring up a list of the other single +travellable room per region. Whether the PC gets there by foot or by hansom is up to individual RP, and since every room within a regional group will be connected by exits to one another, players need only travel perhaps a single room before hitting +travel to get from, say, Westminster to Chelsea. Then another exit to the room in that region of their choice, if desired.

As we'd love to implement a form of the subway rail map that Prospero provided, +travel would only bring up the other subway rooms on their list. The same would go for aboveground railway to other parts of the country, once those get added to the 'grid'.

The Rest of the World
These rooms will be segregated into groups much like the regions of London, save that they'll be other places of note around the world. The asterisked rooms to get around these would be the ports, the airship docks, the hidden underground tunnels that lead from Tibet to Shangri-La and so on. World travel will always be a step away from the players.

The beauty here is that every player will know that when they're in an asterisked room, they can hit +travel and it will bring up the selection of destinations, whatever the RPed variety of travel it represents. If they don't hit one of the available numbers, the code will null and kick them out of the list and back to regular MU reality. I rather doubt I've got the code available that Forge on CC used to put this together, but it seemed a relatively simple process. At least from the building side, where we just had to make sure a certain attribute was set on all of the 'reachable' rooms. So, what's the concensus?

Frumple

So, the wikiserver is having a Moment with sufficient drama to keep a slew of tech-savvy drag queens happy for a while. It'll be back; ours is not the only domain hosted thereupon. It just...may take a little bit longer. I'm sorry for that, as it is quite the bother. What happened is that someone/thing hacked it and deleted everything it could. The worst of this means that anything that wasn't backed up may be lost for ever, though the drive was sent for such recovery as can be made.

I had written up some documentation on the wiki for the chargen and it was all entertaining and stuff. Being a genius, I also didn't back it up in a text file the way I do my code. Ah well! Here is a terse repeat:

Start with +setup. Do not start with anything else. I could not figure out a way to make the room force people to do this the first time they entered it.

Next, choose a background. Now, the backgrounds are listed on the wiki for the most part--but choose one first anyway! +bkground .

Then, set your attributes. +setstr # does Strength. Obvious variants are Dex, Con, Int, Wis and Cha.

Next, choose a role. There are seven total choices, also previously detailed on the wiki, and they are selected with +role . Man with the Machine is abbreviate to MWTM.

Next, choose feats, skills and powers. These can really be done in any order, but it's fairly important that they be done AFTER background, attributes and role. Feats don't limit your choices based on role, but powers do. The commands for this are +addfeat and +delfeat, +power , and +skill . Using +power or +skill for a power or skill you already have will delete it and free up the choice.

The usual stuff like desc, backgrounds, &etc is handled the usual way. I haven't installed a multi-descer, as I think about it, but I can probably find one somewhere, or if y'all have one you like we can use that. +notes are handled with +note--a command I had to write myself because the +cnote listed in +help is a lie.

+noteadd = to add, +notedel to delete, +nedit = to edit. +notes to list your notes, or +notes to list somebody elses. +note = to view notes. They are not limited in visibility at present.

+sheet views your own sheet, and +sheet looks at somebody else. Your innards are all exposed! Get used to it. My current revision makes feats that add a single bonus to stats show up in +sheet at this point, which means stuff like Iron Will and Lightning Reflexes and Wealthy should be reflected by immediate changes in stats. Things that have to manually set a bonus like Skill Focus and Talented will just have to be listed in +notes and remembered for now.

That should be it. If you can give it a shot, please do.

Enter the maze, rodents!

The chargen code is largely complete in its basic incarnation. This means I would like it very much if you all, especially those who love making characters, which is the same as saying "You all", would go try to stat them up for first level in my fiendish engine.

The commands are documented on the wiki under "MUX Commands" from the start page. They should all be accurate to the current version of stuff, but obviously if I mis-documented something I need to know. The code to view one's stats is +sheet . I will make it so you can view your own stats with just +sheet soon. Right now it does not add in attributes to skill ranks, nor does it add feat bonuses to specific things that can take feat bonuses.

Right as of this moment the wiki is inconveniently down, but it'll bounce back soon I'm sure. Along with our project it also runs a 24-7 NWN server, and those folks don't like their persistent worlds not to persist. It may also be the reason why the server itself occasionally crashes.

Lastly, I have turned on the Conviction system. This should not affect any player objects who have the Uninspected or Wizard flags. If you check +xp or +cp for any such characters and discover Conviction points accruing (most likely on Sunday), do let me know. You can also toy with +voting for each other to see how that works out.

Victorian Subway Routes

A helpful map with dates. I leave it to our builders to decide how much to incorporate.

Victorian Underground

Martial Arts

Adepts have their Hermetic Magic, their Mesmerism, and their Theosophy. Experts have their Inventions and amazing Vehicles. The Warriors out there are pouting because they haven't gotten any love. My goal is to make so much cool shit available in this game that everyone wants to make ten characters.

I use "Martial Arts" in the broadest sense, and my short list includes the following forms:

• Bartitsu: Publicized by Barton-Wright, this was a boxing/judo combination. It was made famous when, in "The Empty House," Holmes reveals he defeated Moriarty at the Falls thanks to his mastery of Bartitsu.
• Boxing: London Prize Ring and Queensbury Rules; John Sullivan is the greatest boxer of the age.
• Fencing: Foil, Epee, Rapier, and German Schlager fencing.
• Hung Gar Kung Fu: The style of Wong Fei Hong, star of over a hundred Hong Kong action pictures, and a valid Literary Character* from the period.
• La Cane du Combat: French cane-fighting techniques developed in the Napoleonic era. Now taught along with Savate.
• Quarterstaff: A popular British sport in the period, with many combat moves.
• Savate: The first Savate academy, the Charlemont Academy, opened in Paris during our period and accepted all classes and genders. Kicking, grappling, punching, and panache.
• Shao Lin Kung Fu: The style of Kane. The Shao Lin Temple was also notable for its resistance to the Manchus.
• Victorian Singlestick: This is a sport in our period; Teddy Roosevelt would later become an avid singlestick player.
• Wrestling: Mostly Greco-Roman in character.

My current plan is inspired by the OGL Martial Arts Mayhem: each style will have a list of requirements, with up to three degrees for especially robust styles. Characters who fulfill the requirements for a given degree of a given style will get, for free, a minor ability unique to that style. They will also gain access to a special technique, purchased as a feat. The system is designed to reward characters who collect feats and skills from a small list.

* This is the term I am using for what might be called a "Feature" in other games. That word is no good, as such characters are not actually "featured" in Penny Dreadful. They are no more or less important than "original characters" and are distinguished by one thing: they are Literary. Thus: LCs and OCs.

Villains

We have our first member of the World Crime League.

The Man with the Devil's Eyes

Invention

The rules for player inventions and patents have been drafted.

Tremble before Professor Grordbort's Patented Freeze Cannon!

Men With Their Machines

The rules for vehicles have been drafted.

Behold, the Amazing Steve!

Courage of our Conviction

So, Conviction, or Hero Points, or whatever you want to call player-controlled dramatic editing doohickeys are sometimes a tricky wicket in a MU* environment. On the one hand, simple regaining by time ends up with players pretty much never running out. On the other, +voting tends to be a popularity contest with little recourse. This latter is handled somewhat by Conviction having a hard maximum based upon your level, period. My further solution is to make Conviction regain at a set rate regardless of how many votes are received, with excess votes being saved for time periods when a player may be less active. Some players will still regain faster than others, but nobody will be constantly full if they use it at all.

Specifically, I think players should regain one point per day if they have four Conviction votes. I say four because my perception of the average scene size, or perhaps optimum scene size, is around five people. That's about as big as a social scene can get before wooziness sets in for a lot of folks, and for action scenes, the more is emphatically NOT the merrier. Conviction votes are supposed to be for acting in accordance with one's Virtue or Vice, but I read this with an addendum of "in a dramatically appropriate way" which is of course open to interpretation. If my numbers prove too generous, we can raise the number of votes required to regain. Currently, I figure letting people vote for a person once every three days is enough since I am sure that social interactions will be taken for fodder as readily as adventure scenes.

Now, in addition to votegain, I'd like to let players gain one point per week for free, as a special gift. Probably at a set time on Sunday morning, with a pithy comment about days of rest. This would permit players to regain a maximum of eight Conviction per week, which is enough to completely refill a 12th level character. If they're spending more than eight in one day (thus to be completely empty) they are quite busy indeed, and may wish to take a holiday before they get themselves killed.

This should result in characters always having a little Conviction, but not usually a lot all at once. It removes the more dynamic ability to award Conviction on the fly, but I think this is a little bit more stable for an uncontrolled environment such as ours rather than a tabletop setting with a single permanent GM. There is also the option to let players "cash in" votes at a premium to regain a Conviction point immediately. Including that, or not, is undecided as yet. I am also undecided on allowing Conviction vote transfers between alts. Unlike with XP, there's a hard maximum they will reach, so pumping all one's votes into a single alt really doesn't make a lot of sense--or difference. I'd like to consider XP transfers as well, but that is a subject for later.

Magic

I've worked the various elements of our magic system up into something we can reasonably work with. It will need to be tested, especially at medium and high levels. I am worried that a Magician with the right feats will be able to get his power checks up to absurd levels; but then each feat spent on something like this is one less power the same magician can use, so perhaps it will balance out.

So what you have are a large number of Adept feats which allow Magicians to add extra ritual stuff to their spells in exchange for a better success rate. The Spiritualist Role also got a couple of major tweaks: two separate power lists have been made, one for the Theosophist/Spirit Medium and the other for the Mesmerist. While the two do overlap in some areas, the former has the Cure powers while the latter has Dominate, Illusion, and other more traditional "mind control" powers. The Mesmerist also has a new Core Ability which allows the player to point at a bad guy and say, "Remember yesterday when we had tea with that guy? Well, I mesmerized him then, and told him to ignore us the next time he sees us!" It's retroactive hypnosis. Should be fun. This does not make the Mesmerist a new Role; it still uses all the other rules of the Spiritualist, it just has a custom power list and core ability.

There are four magical Traditions which are open to characters at this time. That's not as many as I would like, but I do not have the time to learn historically accurate voodoo or Confucian ritual magic. (Oh, but I will. I will.) Until then, players must pick one of these four Traditions: Hermetic Magic, Theosophy, Mesmerism, and Spirit Mediums.

I'm moving on to finish out the Invention rules tomorrow.

Sins of the Youth

So, Prospero asked the million-dollar question there about people and their character ideas. It's a good one to think about, a little, though working up a whole bunch of excitement behind a concept might be a little premature. But there's a question yet unanswered, for me--young characters.

Teenagers, really. I hate 'em, generally, and while I've enjoyed some teen drama shows/comics/what have you, most Mu* teen characters just bug the piss out of me. There are a few exceptions who actually manage to act somewhat like teens rather than playing adults freed from normal senses of responsibility while expecting adult authority. Of course, my not liking them is not reason enough to ban the whole species (and spray lest infestation return) but I do think it is a question to address.

In the 19th century, the idea of an idealistic 'childhood' was a thing somewhat newly manufactured, and there were a large number of children and teens working full-time jobs in horrible conditions as a part of the dark underside of the gleaming new industry. Adulthood came at a somewhat younger age, in that social sense. Still, teenagers are not the equals of adults--and I propose we handle it thusly: Create a Youth background which kinda sucks. Maybe +1 Con or something to represent youthful spryness, with no bonus feats or skills. Limit age to be above 14 or 16 no matter what.

What who where?

Is anyone working on a character yet?

I'm pretty certain I am going to make a Magician, to test out those Hermetic magic rules I am tinkering with. I'm doing research on names right now, looking for occult/Masonic connections.

Anyone else?

Another interesting tidbit..

This'd appear to be what the hip kids in our setting would be into!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani

More TikiWiki

Player background got another pass a couple days ago, resulting a lot of small changes and what I am now calling "Background 2.0" The Occult Detective (ala Carnacki) got added and descriptive text for each BG was also written.

Most of character creation is pretty good now; there are still many feats without explanation yet and I have not bothered to repeat info found in the Companion. Advancement includes an experience point chart, a faster rate for ability score bonuses, and the option to "retrain" things you don't like when you go up in level. The latter is swiped from the Players Handbook II. All six Roles are described. The Magician's High Ritual and the MWTM's Vehicle will need more explanation in the near future. New and modified skills have a basic description. I added a link in character creation to Triv's helpful collection of names. A new adversary was added: the Tong Enforcer.

Wiki Updates

I've been at THIS for hours today.

The "Fear & Terror" page is, I believe, done. The antagonists I have already shown you all have been uploaded along with notes on monsters included in True20 books. I have the two completed supernatural backgrounds up in rough draft form, and the raw text of the other backgrounds. I have a table that shows what an item's cost in pounds and dollars comes out to as a Purchase DC. I have outlines for my bibliography and the Stories chapter.

Idle Musings

So, I was thinking on the idea of having FCs in our setting, the historicals and literarys, and I still think the current iteration we were working with will be an entertaining one--but one problem does come to mind. Fictional characters of this time period will often be co-existing with their creators. How shall we handle this? Are the famous creators simply not FCs, given that most of them were considerably less well-suited by nature to the adventuresome life we have chosen for our PCs? Are they intrepid journalists and biographers of their age rather than imaginative visionaries of fiction?

I am truly unsure what answer to give to that question at present. It may just have to be decided on a case-by-case basis depending on the author and creation involved, since we are muddling time a bit to our own purposes anyway.

Feat namings

This is a relatively minor thing which has no overall system effect, but feat names must be less than twenty five characters to fit in the three-column display on a mu*. Any longer and they just get cut off. This affects relatively few feats--most notably Greater Attack Specialization got whacked down to Grt. Attack Specialization for lack of any better ideas. Others that I had to alter a little:

Improvised Weapon Proficiency was shortened to just Improvised Weapon
Armor Training (Battlesuits) was just changed to Battlesuit Training

Skills will need to be less than 29 characters, roughly speaking, to fit both the skill and the ranks and the ranks including attribute bonuses if I can ever figure out how to make that display. Right now that doesn't affect anything particularly, and even something crazy like Knowledge/Paleolepidoptery is only 25 characters long.

Little info tidbits.

This is the stuff that really brings the Victorian era home to me. Specifically the much mentioned 'saloop' that was the hot drink of choice before the arrival of tea and coffee as well as 'mignonette' apparently Victorians equivalent to air fresheners along with general eau de toilette.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salep

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignonette

Magic V: High Ritual (Secret/Visible, Low/High, Structured)

Okay, so, it's no secret I was not sold on any of our three magic systems. The group consensus seemed to be for the True20 Arcanist, but I realized a few days ago that this option had one more ugly feature: while it initially sounds great that Arcanists get 8 skill ranks a level to compenate for their low magic power, this pretty much removes the best thing the Expert role has going for it. (The Expert's core ability is notoriously weak.)

I continued to think, and decided I would have to make may own magic system in order to satisfy my desires for both genre and mechanics. I found some inspiration in GURPS Cabal, which has historically accurate Hermetic Magic welded onto the GURPS magic system. This convinced me I did not need to remake True20 magic, so much as create rule changes which simulated what I wanted.

Susan Temple IV

One small link

I added a link to the right, the Rude Travel Guide one. It isn't meant to be informative of the times as they actually were, but as one insulated English person thought them to be--full of offensive stereotypes and narrow-minded chatter. It's instructive, in some ways, depressing in others. At the least, it's an authentic voice from outside the normal literary canon.

Celebrations!

pennydreadfulmux.com now contains a very barebones TikiWiki install that we can play with. You can sign up for an account on the page. I'm still messing about with making it acknowledge my adminly rights but most of that won't be essential right away.

Also: In the vein of additional blood again, do you all remember Jones/Septimus from CC/Lucretius from LJ? He is a 19th century literature professor guy, but more than that, he is brilliant. Perhaps not very free time-ful, but now that we have a place to dump content, I think he might be a nice addition for just coming up with and scribbling down odd but brilliant ideas, generally of individual people or places.

Resurrection Men

Today's effort was to make another low-level foe for beginning adventurers.

The Resurrection Man

Additional blood

Not so much new, as I kind of need some coding help, and Jorg from CC is willing to assist a bit; he doesn't know how very productive he can be, but he might at least be able to solve some of the knotty problems I've run across. He and Josephine often come as a set, so this is a query: Do you all mind me bringing them by? I do not know that both will come, or either, but I think they could be good additions, at least friendly conversation, for the workings-on.