#merrockplotdrop

[merrock]

They're calling it the storm of the decade… and although we just welcomed in spring, it looks like mother nature is not done with us. A snow storm is supposed to drop up to two feet of snow, as well as some ice afterwards, resulting in power outages and school closures throughout town. Good luck, Merrockites!

Welcome to our first plot drop of 2025! The OOC duration of this event is March 22 through April 5, and the timeline is as follows.

MARCH 22 -- weather warning issued.

MARCH 23 -- snow begins to fall late at night.

MARCH 24 -- snow day.

MARCH 25 -- snow day.

MARCH 26 -- snow tapers off.

MARCH 28 -- early morning ice storm.

MARCH 29 -- snowy, icy weather tapers off.

School will be closed all week, with kids expected to return on Monday, March 31st. There will be power outages throughout town, with loss early morning on the 24th of March, and return dates as follows:

DOWNTOWN: early March 25th.

SUBURBS: late night March 25th.

COASTAL AREA: various times March 26th.

COUNTRYSIDE: various times March 27th & 28th.

Road conditions in town are expected to be very poor. The countryside and further out in the coastal areas are expected to have the worst roads, with the suburbs and downtown a little more maintained, but traveling will be dangerous for the first few days. Please try to avoid going out, and if you do, make sure that you take your time and have the proper equipment!

With the announcement coming ahead of the storm, some Merrockites may plan to get together to weather the ... weather. Please travel carefully! Each area of town has at least one shelter open that will be providing food, water, bathrooms, generated electricity, and places to sleep for free if you need: Town Hall (downtown), Stubs (downtown), Breathe In (coast), Community Center (suburbs), North Shore (countryside), Harmony Ranch (countryside).

Good luck, Merrockites! Jump under cut for more info, and assigned writing partners.

While the storm timeline is outlined above, we are giving this plot drop a two week window to start threads! It will run from March 22nd through April 5th. You do not need to end threads after that point, but you can't start them after the 5th.

Because we want to encourage people to not just start, but continue threads with random pairings, we are assigning writing partners for this plot drop. Each writer must reply at least twice to the thread before the event duration ends, and ideally, we would like to see the thread reach 10 notes before it is moved on from -- or even better? We'd love to see the thread seen all the way through! It is up to you and your partner to choose which characters to write as.

If your partner is simply not replying to you during the event, please reach out to the admin team. If they are otherwise active, and not responding to your thread, we will give them a nudge for you. If they go inactive, and you would like to still be able to participate, we will happily pick up the slack and write with you ourselves, or ask someone else active to take it on! While we're not encouraging bubbling, we are saying this is the one time it's okay to always reply right away to a thread.

Kate & Mimi

Amelia & Rebecca

Rhys & Tash

Katelyn & Elle

Bri & Bee

Bee & Kate

Erin & Mav

Katie & B

Some things to take into consideration when plotting for this event would include:

where does your character live? who are their neighbors?

when the storm alert goes out, are they going to travel to spend time at one of the shelters, or with friends/family? or stick it out?

in a crisis, are they the type to lead and help others, or will they be relying on help?

how do they deal with no electricity?

what's their prep like? do they already have food, water and flashlights ready to go, or is it going to be a scramble to head to the very busy shops?

If you are looking for a place to start with ideas, here are some prompts that might help you out:

as the warning goes out about the storm, character A texts character B and asks them to buddy up and hang out.

unfortunately, character A wasn't paying attention to the alerts and got stuck on the road, asking character B to come save them.

character A and character B decide to get together to go shopping and stock up on needs before the storm.

alternatively, character A really needs some water, and character B just grabbed the last jug... what happens?

character A gets stranded on the road, and thinks they're in big trouble, until character B happens to notice them and helps.

character A and character B are together when they lose power, and build a fort to stay warm.

character A gets the brilliant idea to try to shovel their driveway and slips on ice, asking character B to nurse them.

character A needs help clearing their walks and asks character B to come do it, with the promise of cocoa.

the food is going bad! quick, character A, bring your generator over to help character B!

character A & character B have had enough of sticking it out and decide to walk to a shelter for food & drinks.

a dumb idea, character A and character B go ice skating, but the snow is heavy, and the ice had started to thin... do the math.

character A ends up crashing their car, and character B comes to help them out of the ditch.

character A shows up on character B's door step, cold, with no food at home, asking if they can hang out.

IMPORTANT NOTE: we will allow slightly heavier plots during this drop, such as injuries! However, we cannot have every single person in the group breaking an arm when they fall on the ice. Please send me a message here on main, so that I can know who is planning on doing what if you are doing something like an injury, car accident, heaven forbid getting some frostbite, falling in the ice, anything that might be triggering or a little bit heavy to read. You won't be told no! It's just a good idea for us to keep tabs.

We really, really hope that this can be an immersive, fun event for everyone to get involved in, that it might inspire some other fun interactions outside of what you are assigned! We will do a plot / thread call post in the OOC, as well, for anyone looking to plot and have fun. xx

[merrock]

PLOT DROP: GREAT BIG SNOW STORM!

For a little bit of fun over the next few days, we're having a snow storm in town! Starting Sunday night, around 8PM, a snow storm will be moving through Merrock, and is expected to drop well over a foot of snow before 12PM on Tuesday. School will be closed both Monday and Tuesday this week (and delayed on Wednesday) due to the weather, and you can expect power outages in the outskirts (countryside and coastal area) on and off Monday. The snow is expected to stick around for quite a while with the very cold temperatures we are experiencing this week.

If you would like to share a social media post of your character enjoying the snow and the storm, feel free! Remember to tag it as #merrocksocial so that we can see and share it. Open starters are welcome! If you don't have time during the storm itself, this snow will be sticking around for quite a while, so you can enjoy all sorts of wintry activities, if you would like! xx

[merrock]

PLOT DROP #2 VOTING!

All of the information (and the entries!) are up and ready for you to check out. Please be sure to read through everything so that you know how to vote and your vote isn’t tossed out! We will be accepting votes through December 24th, and you can vote if you did not enter -- everyone can!

CHECK OUT THE ENTRIES & HOW TO VOTE HERE.

Thank you to everyone who entered, everything looks great! xx

[merrock]

THE MERROCK HALLOWEEN DECORATING COMPETITON!

Drag out those boxes of decorations, get ready to be creative, and let’s have some fun! This year, Merrock is hosting a spooky (or not!) decorating competition, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with. Voting will open a week before Halloween, and the winner will be announced on the big day. Read below the cut to find out how you can participate!

ENTRIES RECEIVED: 10!

Welcome to our first plot drop, Merrockites! This one is a little involved, and absolutely not mandatory, but hopefully should be some fun for you. If you would like to participate, there are a few rules/guidelines we are asking for you to follow.

everyone may enter up to three porches/yards/spaces -- which means if you play more than three characters, you can only choose three characters to enter with.

all entries must be presented in a moodboard form, with 9 square images. this is to keep uniformity across the board. editing and presentation is up to you, however!

do not include photos of your character, it’s understandable if their decorations fit their aesthetic, but there should be no photos of them included. (makes it too obvious!)

although the point of the contest is porch decorations (or yard, or whatever you decorate), please note that creativity is key, so you can include any kind of spooky decor/aesthetic your character might use.

To enter, please create the moodboard and save it as a draft (do not publish your moodboard, or share it with anyone else), and send us the private link, so that we can save it. Don’t delete it, as it might take us a while to access all of them and work out the finer details of how to handle the sharing and voting! If you would like to include a caption, please use this:

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, MERROCK! Halloween & Fall Follies Decorating Competition.

We will take entries until October 23rd, with voting opening up on October 24th, and a winner announced on October 31st. Voting will be done anonymously, and although we as admins may enter, we promise that any of us who have seen the entries will not vote, since we know who submitted what.

Happy decorating, and if you have any questions, please let me know! xx

[merrock]

PLOT DROP #2 RESULTS!

Thank you so much to those of you who entered our plot drop, and especially to those who took the time out to vote this time around! We’ll be taking a break from this style of plot drops until we can figure some stuff out, but stay tuned in the new year for different fun drops (hopefully)!

In the meantime... there’s a lot of winners, and the reason for that is that we didn’t have a lot of votes, but want to be extra fair to those who did vote and be sure that it counted! So we have a number of second and third place finishers, and think that’s pretty neat!

If you would now like to publicly share your entered boards, you are more than welcome to. Congratulations to everyone, and thank you again for entering! Hop under the cut to see the winners.

THIRD PLACE WINNERS -- @rafaelcb, @emmamartel, @felixortz

SECOND PLACE WINNERS -- @joshlane, @milesjhn, @irisxanthe

FIRST PLACE WINNER -- @clemnewman​

[merrock]

THE MERROCK HOLIDAY DECORATING COMPETITON!

We’re going to give it another go! For our second plot drop, we are asking everyone who’s interested to enter our winter holiday decoration competition! This plot drop is not mandatory to participate in, but we are hoping to get lots of entries this time around. All of the details can be found under the cut if you want to get involved.

ENTRIES RECEIVED: fifteen.

As with our last competition, this is not mandatory, and should not be done in place of activity -- we’re giving everyone plenty of time to get involved, but are asking that if you do, you’re keeping active with all of the characters you play! Read on for some of the details.

this plot drop will run from Sunday, November 28th through Friday, December 17th. We will not accept entries past 10PM EST on December 17th.

everyone may enter two moodboards this time around. We’re hoping to get more entries, so we don’t want people to be overwhelmed with options when voting time comes around!

all entries must be presented as moodboards with square images -- please be sure you resize them to save us some time!

remember, the point of the competition is for people to choose based on the decor / aesthetic that they like the most, so don’t include photos of your character themselves, please!

If you would like to enter, please create and set up your moodboard as a drafted post, and then send us the private link (do not share with anyone else or publish it if you plan on entering it!). Do not delete your moodboard once you have submitted it, as it might take us a little while to be able to gather them all and get them formatted for voting! Again, entries will be accepted until 10PM EST on December 17th.

More information about voting will come as we get closer to time and see how many entries we have. Please note that due to my ongoing personal issues, details are subject to change. Participation in this plot drop will determine if we continue to do this style of competition in the future, so we hope to have a lot of entries, and most importantly -- have fun! xx

[merrock]

PLOT DROP #1 RESULTS!

Thank you so much to the players who entered in plot drop number one, and to those of you who took the time out to vote in our competition! Hopefully by the time we’ve hopped into the second plot drop, we have some of the kinks ironed out, and will see even more people getting involved. But I loved seeing the work that you put into your entries!

In interest of full disclosure, since we did not have very many votes come in today, we were split in a tie yet again, and rather than continue to ask for votes, or draw this out any longer (we’re ready for November!), I used this site to choose between entry number three and entry number five.

If you entered the competition and still have your moodboard saved, you are very welcome to share them publicly now, if you like. Thanks again! Under the cut, you will find the winning decor sets.

THIRD PLACE -- Matilda Tillman! -- @mattietillman

SECOND PLACE -- Olivia Hartman! -- @docolives

FIRST PACE -- Emeline Martel! -- @emmamartel