VERY good question.Hours wrote:Confirmed.
Although I wish to ask if this is a project run by a specific person, or else if we are simply allowed to run our own plots? Everything that is happening or has happened seems to have been started and run by Graybeard.
Myself and a few others are joining, and it seems akward to have to maybe jump through hoops to justify the presence of several new characters in the middle of a plotline.
The intent is for the whole thing to be as collaborative as possible. The initial thread (Kiyoka, now in the "Rear View Mirror" forum) started with one basic venue and a whole bunch of player characters coming in from their own perspectives, and coalesced into one "story line" into which the individual character lines fit more or less well. Early on, there was interest in generating a BBEG to lurk in the background and drive some events. It fell to Viking-Sensei and me to create that BBEG. When he became a new daddy, that left me with the responsibility of pushing the BBEG stuff, and for two of the three active threads (those two being closely connected and swapping NPCs, plot devices, etc.), that's the way it remains today. Nearly all of the game's threads are tied together by that. Many of the characters in those threads have been in them essentially from the beginning, and yes, they can be daunting to add new characters to -- although it has been done highly successfully.
"Airship Pirates," by contrast, was never part of the same "story line" as everything else, and was created exactly to let new characters come in without ties to ongoing plotlines, just as you suggest. The fact that I created the actual thread is coincidence; most of the scenario development has been done by Sareth, and there is absolutely no reason why anybody couldn't join the thing and start warping the scenario in brand new directions. I don't "own" this thing any more than you do.
All of this is a long way of saying if you want a new thread, by all means create one! That's what was done with Airship Pirates, for exactly the reason that you cite. More than one model of play can work here, and the only reason why the "serial story" model has been so dominant to date is just that the participants to date have liked it and helped make it so. Vignettes set in other, completely unrelated settings could surely be generated and work as well. Just gather enough interested parties and make it so! The only "requirement" is to follow the rules that Impy has established as regards conduct, consistency with the Poe-verse, etc.
This whole thing has now reached a level of maturity such that it's probably just the right time to do what you imply you'd like to see done, with a new start or two. Go for it! And please use this forum to bat ideas around as to the starting point(s).