starlight-academy

[starlight-academy]

starlight 2: survey results

"hey tess, are you here to answer these worldbuilding questions that have been in your inbox for Like A Year Now"

no, actually!! i recently put out a survey about a potential sequel roleplay, and i'm here to share my findings!! if you still want to express your interest you can do so here:

https://goo.gl/forms/erCNdF2n9e1AibKj2

but this will only cover the results at the time of writing. okay i'm just gonna get straight into it!!

who's interested? 

 all in all: sixteen people expressed interest for a sequel! twelve of you identified yourselves as returning players (out of the original fourteen) and good golly gosh that warms my heart. you guys are the whole reason i even considered doing this in the first place, so thank you!! i hope to deliver on your expectations!!

to the four newcomers considering joining: hey thanks to you too!! it's great to see some interest from new people (even though judging by your feedback, you all seem Pretty Unfamiliar with the starlightverse - that's okay though!!). hope you have fun with us!!

(for a bit of trivia: most of you remained un-anonymous! i sort of expected the few nameless responses i got to be from vaguely interested newcomers, but instead... they were returning players?? very unanticipated! very spooky.)

new or old characters? 

i plan to give the returning players the option to revise their old characters, as second-years! and it seems like out of those of you who are set in your decision right now (8 of you), most of you (5 in total) want to bring back the old students! i'm glad you had enough fun with your old characters to consider playing them again!! of course, a bunch of you (3) are planning to bring in new first-year students, which is also good! hopefully we end up with a decent mix of first-years and second-years.

returning npcs

i also asked the returning players if there were any npcs they'd like to see come back!! with the third-year students leaving the school and the staff likely being mostly absent (for plot reasons??) i was hoping to cut down my cast of npcs significantly. the 30-something i had originally... well, i hope to make it work in the vn, but for an active roleplay as gm it's kind of absurd. so i enlisted you guys to help me pick out the favourites to form the new cast of npcs!! here are all the characters who got mentions by you all:

...all in all, eight eligible characters scored votes!! that's a Pretty Significant decrease in number. most of them were second-going-on-third-years, which is fine since we'll have a fair few second-years in the player lineup. i might throw in an additional first-year or two of my own to help the newbies along, but aside from that this might just be the core npc cast!! very exciting!! hopefully now that my attention isn't split between Over Thirty Characters i can play these guys to their fullest potential!!

general feedback for starlight 1

you folks weren't afraid to speak your minds even with your names attached to the responses, and even though even the mildest of criticism can sting a lot i'm still very thankful for your responses!! i hope this will help to shape an even more fun experience for you all. here are the main points you all covered:

some of you felt like you weren't engaged enough in solving the big mystery surrounding the story. that's a pretty big bummer as far as i'm concerned!! in retrospect a lot of the story aspects were kind of obtuse (even if it all made sense in my head), and it was unreasonable to expect you to solve anything without doing some serious digging. that's my bad!! i'll try a lot harder to plant clues for you to find, as well as making the story itself engage you and your characters a bit more. writing a good mystery is hard at the best of times, but hopefully i'll do better this time!!

some of you are eager for more worldbuilding, and i totally get it!! i'm hoping to have a big jam session with the returning players before things kick off, since we have a pretty big time gap of events to cover!! if you guys have any curiosities regarding the starlightverse, hit me up so i can help better your understanding of the school you're in, and everything surrounding it! (i will... eventually get around to answering these questions in my inbox too, lol) i want the starlightverse to feel like a whole big thing instead of the school just being a weird anomaly.

more variety in magic?? also a fair point!! we deliberately kept things relatively simple in starlight 1, having only three main elements to work with plus extra bits like healing and buffs. realistically it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for wizards to all be split neatly into three "elements" (is storm really an element, though, really) and the way the magic system has been specifically set up for rpg purposes has bothered me for a while now. i don't entirely know what i'm going to do with it yet? personally i feel like the whole system needs reworking from the ground up but i don't wanna alienate you guys by completely changing how the magic works. it's gonna depend a lot on how the rp mechanics will work, so... i don't really know what to say about this right now. whoopsies

on a related note, you also asked for more classes and uhhhhhhhh i don't know how that's gonna work with most of the staff out of action but i'll see what i can do!!!!! honestly, though, the actual classes themselves are the least appealing part of running starlight for me because it means i have to try and fuckin explain how magic works in a setting where magic is influenced more by feeling than by strict rules. maybe i can find a way to deliver on the general purpose without actually holding formal classes? we'll see!!!

you also asked for more things to do outside of missions. like potentially heading out into town? it's uh... gonna be hard for you all to actually Leave the weird magic island that the school is situated on, but... maybe i can figure something out? or at least, give you folks more hangout spots so you're not just roaming the hallways all the time.

i will never divulge the rules of wizard cricket. sorry.

the rp format 

 regarding the rp medium, it seems like people are pretty eager to use discord!! i've been enjoying the discord rp experience myself and hopefully it'll be a bit easier on people than the Giant Collab Posts of olde. i'm even happy to compile the logs for later browsing if there's demand for that. in this case i would probably have a side blog to hold important events and missions and stuff.

old-school forum style is also a pretty viable option still, though, so i'll wait and see what i think will be most suitable before i make a firm decision on this

rp mechanics

i won't post the pie chart because there's a couple of "other" answers here, but i'll give you the gist of what the response was. upwards of half of you opted for either less combat focus or no combat whatsoever. this response was primarily coming from the returning players too, so it's pretty easy to see what you're all after. with that in mind i hope to turn down the focus on combat pretty significantly... though i'm not entirely sure yet how i'm going to do that. hopefully i can come up with some fun new quests for you guys!!

regarding the actual mechanics, i got a surprising variety of feedback! as in, i wasn't expecting a whole lot of suggestions at all. though, i'm not sure all of you were listening when i said how keen i was to simplify the system. ideally, i want something that's quick and easy and won't stress you guys out as much as the command system did, and also doesn't take a million years for me the gm to put into action. regardless, here's some of the ideas you guys had:

making use of a sort of lite dnd system, making use of dice rolls and coin flips, and/or a set of general stats that cover stuff outside of combat. basically, something that's quick and light on maths but works for a wide array of shit. this is the route that's most tempting to me right now, honestly. do you know how much time i spent crafting phantom encounters for starlight 1? it was too long. please go easy on me

expanding the array of magic elements is extremely tempting from a worldbuilding perspective, but i don't think it's going to do much to simplify combat. if we're going to steer away from command system style combat, though, it might not be too much of an issue, but then again it also might not actually play into the combat at all in that case. kind of a tricky scenario.

a couple of people mentioned bonuses for forging bonds between player characters rather than just with npcs, and also combo spells powered by teamwork??? while i think this has the potential to be Very Fun, i don't entirely know how it's going to work in practice. maybe i can come up with something though!!

in short...

i have a lot of fuckin work to do!!! but, your collective feedback has been super helpful so far. i hope i can put it all to good use!! let me know if you have any additional feedback or suggestions based on what you see here. anything that helps me flesh out a new system of mechanics especially would be very much appreciated!! thanks for taking the time to fill out my survey, and i hope you'll look forward to starlight 2!!!

[starlight-academy]

developing characters is hard

so i realise i still have a jillion unanswered questions in my inbox and like, i’ll get to them, but first i wanted to get some thoughts down on some stuff that’s been on my mind lately. i can’t guarantee they’ll be very coherent? but i wanna at least put it into words to help get it straight in my own head and also like, make it known that this is stuff i’m taking into consideration

this is about my (questionably successful) attempts in creating a racially diverse cast

okay so first like: this shit’s hard and it doesn’t really help that I’m White and also that i initially went about it in kind of a backwards way. i feel like a lot of my faults in this regard have been due to me trying to tack cultural backgrounds onto a stupidly large cast of already existing characters in kind of a hurry

lemme elaborate on my process. so i have a group of 30-odd weird alien kids, right? they already had names and personalities which with a bit (a lot) of tweaking could probably come out resembling a group of 30-odd weird adult wizards. now i was eager to get started with the starlight rp, so i didn’t really leave myself a whole lot of time to flesh out these fleshy human versions of my beloved fantrolls. i had plot shit and game mechanics shit to work out too (and they weren’t exactly a flawless work of art, either). my brain was kind of on overdrive

you’d think it’d be easy to figure out human headcanons for your own characters but honestly, a lot of the decisions i made were pretty arbitrary. some of them i already had pretty clear mental images for but most of them i really didn’t

so, for a lot of them i started with the name. i wanted to avoid the entire cast being all Whitey McWhitename but i also wanted them to be more or less recognisable as their original troll counterparts. and like, this might have been okay if i wasn’t rushing it, but i was rushing it, and so i ended up with a fair few a) inaccuracies and b) token-ish kind of racial identities, and it was all sort of a mess

i’ve changed a few names already. vered is ezra. hari is rani. luka and marie both have two surnames as per mexican naming conventions. etc etc. there’s still a lot of shit i gotta work through, though. here’s some of it

* as i understand it now, using magic is generally considered a pretty big no-no in islam. this discovery affected two of my characters: thana (torcht, the librarian) and banu (formerly professor avci). banu is the bigger issue since she is an active user of magic, so my first thought was to just make her a non-muslim and leave it at that, even though she’s from turkey which has a muslim majority population, but this feels like kind of a lazy solution. i’m also considering making her indian rather than turkish, since somehow there is only one indian character?? so that change could kill two birds with one stone, i guess. now that i’ve said it i’m kind of leaning towards that

thana is probably safer, i think. hopefully. having her being totally hands-off regarding magic feels totally compliant with how she’s already been handled in canon, at least. kinda sucks that she’s also the Only Muslim by necessity, but it at least feels like something i can work with and expand on during the story

* aarluk (formerly yakone) is a character i’ve wrestled with a bunch. i imagined him as inuit (at least, partially) from the get-go since it seemed like a logical transition from his old fantroll self. i wasn’t really aware at the time of the history regarding indigenous people and boarding schools (i.e. native kids being sent to government schools for assimilation purposes). and like, starlight academy isn’t a boarding school per se, it’s a university, but the idea of a native kid staying abroad at school for three years wasn’t really sitting right with me

i don’t know how much of the “boarding school” vibe actually translated? like, obviously most universities have dorms that students can stay at, so it’s possible that i’m exaggerating the problem. regardless, aarluk for the time being is half-inuit. he will be living with relatives nearby rather than at the dorms. i hope this will alleviate the major potential points of discomfort

* my other asian students are kind of all over the place at the moment. taeko and lily are japanese, celeste (who wasn’t even in the original rp) is chinese, mandy is korean, rhiannon is vietnamese, boy howdy it all feels very hollow and token-y. if i were going to change any of them i’d probably make rhiannon chinese; her surname is easily translatable and personality-wise she’s a good contrast to celeste. not sure yet if i’ll keep mandy as-is

it also kinda bothers me that most of them have western names, lol. i shamefully don’t really have much figured about their backgrounds (particularly for mandy and rhiannon) so this is something i could easily fix later down the line when i have more shit nailed down

* the group of third-years feels like, super white. only banu and mandy are definitely Not White. i don’t know if anyone’s really gonna look at the third-years in isolation but it’s still kinda tempting to change one or two of them

* maybe more jewish characters too? ezra and prof neuman are the only ones i have right now. maybe i could make one of the whiter characters jewish as well. i’m not sure yet

* i also just, gotta remind myself that trying to represent Everyone is completely unreasonable even with a cast of like 40 characters. i should be focusing more on fleshing them out and making them feel real rather than filling my Diversity Checklist(tm)

god why do i have like 40 characters. why am i doing this

is anyone still reading this?? i doubt it but hey thanks for reading. if you’re in a position to give me feedback about any of this stuff (or on anything i haven’t covered/haven’t thought of? that sticks out to you) i’d appreciate it lots. i’m trying my best but i still have a lot of work to do.

[starlight-academy]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY @tesspieceface ! ! ! ! ! today let us celebrate: Cube

[starlight-academy]

Lasers & Feelings is cool and good, but what’s even better is: wizards. Now you, too, can cajole your friends and family into goof-‘em-up wizardtime antics whenever you got a few hours to kill.

holy shit??? why should i even bother making a game now, honestly. starlight academy is all about both magic and feelings

[starlight-academy]

>_> hi. i finished them. finally. here’s the teaching staff of starlight academy.

plus the two non-professors who don’t fit in the photoset:

nurse becker (ishaza)

thana, librarian (torcht)

[starlight-academy]

i forgot to upload this here but tess said that dixon wants to beat me up so naturally, i fell in love

[starlight-academy]

how do phantoms anyway, they're pure magic and all but how well can they interact with physical stuff? can they be made intentionally or in certain shapes or purposes, or are they straight up random natural phenomenon

ok, so: a phantom’s properties are largely dependent on the environment. in places that don’t have a lot of ambient magic (i.e. most places) phantom formations will be small, infrequent and almost completely harmless. these phantoms are still largely influenced by emotions but there wouldn’t be enough magic floating around to sustain a stronger form. they would have basically no physical interaction with the environment and their influence on people would be minimal unless you’re sensitive to that sort of thing

places like starlight academy are a bit different because the concentration of magic is a lot higher, and phantoms form more easily and are generally stronger. in typical circumstances they’re still pretty minor threats. if they’re hanging around they generally have slight mental effects on people (like influencing their emotions or fuzzing up their thoughts a bit). they also have a higher capacity for physical interaction (maybe enough to like, randomly knock over a chair or something) but usually wouldn’t do so unless deliberately disturbed. 

it’d be feasible to intentionally create phantoms in this case, you just gotta be Really Feeling It and/or have gathered a lot of magic in one place. they usually don’t serve much purpose though, because they’re not sentient and kind of just do their own thing. the elemental alignment is determined by the magic energy used to create it. the form tends to be influenced subconsciously by the people around it at the time of creation but there’s no easy way to customise its appearance to your liking

the circumstances in the Starlight Story are different again because there’s an excess of magical energy being pumped into the system which leads to powerful phantoms popping up all over the place. these ones can actually be harmful as their mental influence can be pretty strong and they’re dense with magical energy. this sort of thing would basically never happen by accident unless you’re really careless with sigil usage or something

whoops thats a lot of words

[starlight-academy]

are phantoms the only threat in starlight universe or are there like weird dangerous magical monsters and Trogdors and such

there’s definitely some weird magical creatures, though probably nothing trogdor-esque. there’s two mostly distinct types of magical creatures in starlightverse

1. your classical monster-type creatures, like dragons and shit. stuff that doesn’t resemble real animals that we have irl. they only really show up where there’s an abundance of magical energy. they probably like feed on it or something? i’m not really sure yet. in any case they’re (usually) not a major threat to the general public

2. stuff that does resemble real animals, just with extra magical powers. luka’s telepathic snail would be an example of this. funnily enough they can often be more dangerous than the previous category just because of how unpredictable they are; animals aren’t typically built to use magic so it can manifest in weird ways, and they’re a little more widespread than the actual monster types

[starlight-academy]

what are the top wizard jobs, are there any good wizard careers outside of teaching, like wizard cops or whatever

well i mean if there’s wizards there’s kinda gotta be wizard cops, right. gotta deal with magic crime somehow. i think wizard cops would have to be specific to wizard crime though bc of the power imbalance between wizards and non-wizards. that probably applies to a few wizard-specific jobs tbh

i’m still debating over whether Rudo’s Wish (forbidding malicious use of magic) is in effect in this canon bc that sorta changes things in that respect. idk. shrug

but i mean there’s plenty of areas that wizards would have an edge in. like for example healing magic would be a huge asset in the medical field even if it’s not necessarily compatible with Every medical issue, magical or otherwise. magic doctors gotta meet strict qualifications but it’s quite a prestigious profession

[starlight-academy]

what's the state of how starlight magic works? how do wizard?

that’s a good question pal. i still gotta like sit down and figure this shit out properly (i am easily distracted) but currently what i’m feeling is:

in the rp the three major elements (fire, earth, storm) were fairly strict categories and any given wizard would generally fit into one of the three, or none of them, or all of them if they’re a real asshole who likes to make things hard for me, and there’s no real in-between aside from a few very exceptional cases. and like that sort of magic system works fine for an rpg but i feel like it should be more… loose, i guess?

i imagine that most wizards would have an affinity towards one of the three points on the Stupid Wizard Triangle (that’s not what it’s called) but it wouldn’t be as restrictive, i guess. like, an earth-aligned wizard could probably learn fire magic but it probably wouldn’t come as naturally to them

there probably wouldn’t be as much of a distinction between what we considered neutral-aligned wizards and tricolour wizards either. a “neutral wizard” would probably be sitting in the middle of the triangle with a fairly even spread of the three major schools of magic. a tricolour wizard in this case would just be a ramped-up version of that. to an extent the classifications of the whole thing are kinda arbitrary, really

other than that, it still works pretty similarly to how it did before re: how to actually use magic. you still need a medium/focus to channel magic through, runes and sigils are still things, etc etc. i just gotta figure out how phantoms are gonna work in a game where you can’t solve your problems by dealing 160 damage to your opponent

this is getting long and most people seeing this are gonna have zero context for it WHOOPS SORRY HOPE THAT ANSWERS YOUR QUESTION

[starlight-academy]

Aarluk, 14.

oops sorry i feel like a week behind on these (again) lmao, i had two characters for this prompt and it’s just vague enough that i needed a week to think about it. that’s my excuse

14. Doing something they don’t normally do

aarluk is allergic to cats.

[starlight-academy]

starlight academy??? whats that

here’s the third years bc i finally have all of them done lmao

[starlight-academy]

hey, remember these?? i’m still doing these. i totally didn’t forget i was doing these

here’s the second years (and vee). names + old fantroll names are in the captions again

[starlight-academy]

i don’t think i ever really clarified what starlight academy is for the benefit of people who followed me for fantroll shit: uh, they’re not fantrolls anymore, they’re humans and they all attend a school for magic. i ran an rp about this and i wanna turn it into a video game at some point. here are the first year students!!