Roleplay Forum - Storyteller's Circle's Roleplaying Forums

A mighty and grand fleet looming in space silently may be a mental image that inspires grandeur and awe, but the process of creating one is something that can seem titanic and terrifying. It is an undertaking that is sizable and time consuming, but like most things in life, it can be done if you set your mind to it and create a plan. Science fiction is something that is both interesting to many, and fun to write once you begin to delve into its depths and understand it, be it in nature realistic (known as hard sci-fi) or taking advantage of more fantastical elements (or soft sci-fi). The intention of this article is to go over steps that outline the steps to take to take the seed of your ideas for outer space and allow you assemble your armada piece by piece.

To this end, this article will be broken into two primary sections: the Navy Building Process and Ship Design. So without further ado, we shall move onto the first topic on our outline: The Navy Building Process...

Metagaming in its simplest definition is the use of knowledge your character doesn’t have. It can come in many forms, though. Often, it is simply a lack of experience that leads to metagaming, but other times metagaming is utilized deliberately to gain unfair advantages over other players. This guide is geared towards helping the former to understand what metagaming is and how to avoid it. It is also to help recognize the latter type of player so as to avoid them...

The Apocryphon of Saint Eadwald

"Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them."
- Job 1:6

A historical dark fantasy roleplay set in Eastern France, it follows a group of individuals who become tied together through the effects of a mysterious book deemed heretical by the church. Now they must stand against the Inquisition, an invading army, and monsters that threaten their way of life. As these threats enclose on them, they must learn to survive them, and bring peace back to their homeland.

Based in a custom Eastern French Duchy in 1191, players will be tangled up in a number of storylines that will change the shape of the French countryside, and potentially history.

A unique science fantasy set on a megastructure of cosmic proportions fleeing from immortal horrors. A setting predicated on a ubiquitous hard magic system centered around constructs of solidified mana, and featuring eight races, seven of which are unique and alien in their shape. The setting is intended more as a backdrop for different tones and themes of RP rather than as a unified story setting, so there are opportunities for most genres of RP, including epic fantasy, horror, action-adventure, mystery, and drama.

The world of the Ark: a boat-shaped construct so vast that it would take up a significant portion of any solar system is was in, dwarfing even the largest stars in it's scale.

Signup thread: https://www.storytellerscircle.com/threads/beyond-the-ark.7483/

In the past we've always opened our monthly highlights with a special section for users who have really gone above and beyond, or who make a concerted effort to make storyteller's circle a welcoming place.

This months special thanks will be going to the people who made this month's site overhaul and upgrade possible. Thank you to Ver, Sokka, and Vauvanukke for their contributions to our site upgrade campaign, and a very special thank you to Yun Lee for her substantially large contributions to our site upgrade campaign. We also would like to thank Script and Yun Lee for their continued monthly support of Storyteller's Circle.


Things have been a bit slow in this area as of late, but we've had some new interest checks and RP openings crop up in the bulletin board, so make sure you swing by and check them out. A roleplay site isn't much without roleplay! And while not a NEW roleplay, I would add a special note that The Convergence Series has posted up a new side-story that's worth taking a look at. The Convergence Series has proven itself a consistent and welcoming roleplay for all sorts of players.

Keep an eye on the bulletin board in the days to come as well, because we'll be making an active push to get people posting their roleplays ideas up! The more we get churning, the more welcoming the bulletin board is going to look to new users.


Oh boy, where to begin! Site Upgrade! As most have noticed, the month of January was largely focused on getting the place cleaned up, polished up, and ready for February's recruitment drive. This has come with a fresh new look to the website, as well as a lot of small changes throughout. The conversations system has been replaced with a much more involved version that offers a greater deal of control and flexibility for people. This includes the ability to remove participants from group conversations, build a system of auto-sorting conversations, the ability to rejoin conversations you have left (and to see when people have left conversations with you), and more! Make sure you take a look and familiarize yourself with all the new functions.

Most of our former features where smoothly transitioned and replaced, though you may notice some minor variations.

And I'm also happy to say we got our old dice-roller replaced! The new one runs much smoother and isn't riddled with the bugs that forced us to retire the old one, though isn't as intuitive in how to use it. If you want to try it out, we set up a thread for experimenting. To use it you make a post first and submit the post, then you edit that post to attach a dice roll to the post. You can add multiple dice rolls to a post, but can't edit or remove previous ones.


What we're doing right: Well, still being here is the big thing! Especially our dedicated regulars that have been turning up for years now. That long lasting connection with the website will only be a boon in moving forward and drawing new players and new activity to the place.

What we need to work on: New users! Things have slowed down over this past year, and only a concerted effort by our users will see that change. So in the coming weeks we would encourage everyone to participate in February's voting drive, and take the time to frequent the introduction forum for new arrivals, and even just take a moment to browse new content in the creative forums. Only takes a few moments to like someone's post, or to post some feedback when asked for. These little things make people feel less invisible and more part of the community.

Sneak peak for February: RECRUITMENT DRIVE!!! With TopRPSites resetting on the 1st of February, we will be hitting the month off with a huge push to draw new users to the website. Much of the month will have the staff (and hopefully the rest of the community as well) focused primarily on advertising and recruiting. Let's all see a strong start to 2020.

From our wiki: "Convergence is set in a fandom multiverse where events have been set into motion to cause beings from disparate dimensions to, despite all odds, meet each other. With the multiverse becoming more widely known, dark forces seek to reach out and take whatever power they can muster from these chaotic opportunities, and it’s up to those who would stand against them to put a stop to these evil schemes. The background and lore of this series is constantly expanding, creating a rich and varied history with a growing cast of thousands."

The Convergence Series is a multifandom crossover epic roleplay that follows an overarcing story and lore, featuring dozens of popular franchises and characters. While we are fandom based, we absolutely welcome OCs as well, and anyone of all writing styles or experience; in fact, we go out of our way to make our roleplays as newcomer-friendly as possible!

Convergence offers many different roleplaying options. Our Main Events are big, multichapter roleplays that serve as another chapter in our lore. Side Stories are smaller roleplays with a slower pace that tend to go on for a longer period of time. We also have a few casual jump-in Sandbox roleplays which anyone can join at any time. And of course there are One-On-One roleplays if you'd prefer writing a story with one other person. No matter what kind of roleplay you enjoy, Convergence has it!

You can find us here over in the Epic Roleplay Forums. We have a lot of different roleplays going on, there's bound to be something for you! Hope to see you over there soon!

(Icon by @Bomb)

3 Years?!

So it's been just over 3 years now since the opening of Storyteller's Circle! And that time sure did fly by. I'm pleased to say that we're still standing and revving up to make this year a good one!

We'll be kicking things off with a major recruitment drive over the next few months to really try and liven the place up with some new faces and new roleplays. Anyone wanting to help out with that can do so in two very important ways.

One, be ready to vote daily for us on TopRpSites when we start up a voting drive in a week when TopRpSites resets its votes. Historically speaking, almost all of our traffic has come through TopRpSites, so if we can get all our dedicated regulars voting enough to push us back up into the Top 10, that will greatly increase the traffic. I can't understate how this is the best way to help out in the days to come!

And two, be ready to engage new arrivals. TopRpSites is great for bringing new faces in, but a site is nothing without a connection between its users. Taking an interest in new arrivals, helping them get situated, and welcoming them into (or joining their) roleplays is what keeps people around.

In addition to our recruitment drive we will also be restarting our monthly highlight articles. They've been popular in the past, and they really help to highlight content and users and liven up the front page. So keep an eye out for those!

As we prepare to overhaul the website next week and work to rebuild our player base, we made the decision to do a one time archiving of any roleplay or roleplay interest-check/advertisement that hasn't had any posts in the past three months.

This is purely to clean up the forums as we start heavy advertising so new players can more easily locate active roleplays instead of seeing a wall of 7 pages, and realizing only 5 of them are recent.

If any roleplay was archived that ISN'T Abandoned (I know people often take long hiatuses and then pick roleplays back up again), just let me know here or via a PM. We will at any time reinstate any roleplay thread from the archives (which can be viewed from the archives link at the top of the webpage). No reason necessary, just let us know it's not abandoned.

If anyone has an interest check that was archived that they're still interested in doing, we encourage you to go ahead and re-post it. The more interest checks we have up, the more inviting the place will look to new arrivals.

So! One year! For some that have been here from the beginning it scarcely seems like its been that long already, and for others it no doubt comes as a surprise that Storyteller's Circle has only been up and running for one year now.

The place has definitely come a long ways from its beginnings as a ragtag group of a dozen or so people looking for a place to put down roots, and it only continues to grow day by day. When we opened our doors on November 1st of 2016, we were anticipating an uphill battle to really bring the place to life, but much to our surprise and delight the appeal of the place spread like wildfire. In a matter of weeks we had a large enough user base to take a top position on TopRPSites.com and after that... well here we are now

Much of this success must be attributed to the users who have made this place their roleplaying hot-spot. Both in doing their part to uphold the spirit of Storyteller's Circle, our rules, and our open/inviting community, as well as more personal involvement in helping to bring new users here through voting, and helping to alleviate some of the financial costs of Storyteller's Circle through generous donations.

In particular, Storyteller's Circle would like to acknowledge and extend a very special thanks to Faithy, Nilum, Script, marsbat, and Sokka for being our top five donors throughout our opening year. It is with their help - and many others - that we have been able to provide many of the features and services that we do. While we can only offer so much in return, we would like to extend the offer of a personalized user banner to each of you - of your own design/color - as well as a specialized trophy (pending with our new trophy update soon to come). Details regarding the banners will be provided via PM.

And while it's not as easy to track individual contributions through voting and other methods of helping Storyteller's Circle grow, we will also be offering a one-time trophy to all approved accounts who registered within Storyteller's Circle first year (again with the soon to be release of our new trophy update). Just a little something to note and acknowledge those that helped to build up Storyteller's Circle's foundation.

In other news, many of you may have noticed some new faces among our staff here on Storyteller's Circle, and that's largely in preparation for making a push towards ensuring that our second year is as successful as our first. With the general growth of the site, we have been looking to expand our Warden team with Silence as the first new addition of hopefully more yet to come, and we have also brought on our first Designers, Griffith and Machina Somnium, with Lialore to head the new team. With the establishment of our Design team, we hope to soon be able to offer staff organized assistance with helping people to develop their roleplays aesthetically through character artwork, map creation, banners, and more.

We also have exciting things on the horizon with the release of the latest xenforo update that carries many new features with it. We are still waiting for all of our addon developers to get their updated versions released so that we can get everything updated at once without any compatibility issues. But it's definitely something that we will be rolling out in the months to come! Anyone wanting to help out with this venture, we're putting aside any excess donations that we receive beyond the basic server upkeep costs to get all of our licenses renewed in preparation for these updates.

And on a closing note: Great job everyone on an amazing first year, and keep up the great work at making Storyteller's Circle such a great place.

As many of you know, we spent the last couple months easing off on general recruitment and site advertising to help give everyone time to settle in. This recap will be marking the end of that brief hiatus and a fresh new influx of new users soon to come! I'll start us off with our usual special thanks and recaps, followed by some hopefully exciting news.


With our pause in recruitment our introduction forum hasn't been hopping as much, but I'd like to extend thanks to @Gwazi Magnum, @Kian, @Pokc, and @Silence for their efforts in keeping on top of our new arrivals during the interim. Every new arrival is worth equal attention and assistance.

In addition, special thanks are also afforded for @Script, @_BB_, @6purplecats, @romamaro, and @Pokc for taking the time to recommend our website to others. Nothing says 'I support this community' like giving your personal recommendation to friends.

And lastly, but certainly not least! A very special thanks to everyone who generously donated to the website these past two months. @Script, @marsbat, @Jomber. Nothing is more humbling than the members of our community that help to fund our website. Thank you.


We have several new Epic Roleplays that have opened up their doors since our last recap including Planetscape GMed by @Southpaw, 1,000 Years After the End GMed by @Drakey, and Atlantis - City of Dreams GMed by @RyunaSiege. With our soon to be resurgence of new arrivals Epic Roleplays are a great opportunity to offer a home for large numbers of roleplayers and have historically been a key component to keeping large numbers of players engaged. We're always happy to see more of them open up.

In addition to our Epic Roleplays, we also had a new Multi-thread roleplay start up. War of the Ancients GMed by Shadowsong.

Though historically lagging behind our Epic Roleplays, our play-by-post roleplays have continued to vastly grow in number until they have taken a more prominent position on our website with over sixty different play-by-post roleplays active in the past two months! Congratulations to everyone who has worked hard to generate engaging content across our forums. In particular we would like to once again recognize Stahlheim College of Magic GMed by @ChelonianCommander as its rebooted roleplay proves as popular and engaging as its original. It is my sincere hope that in time our play-by-post forums will be filled with roleplays as lively and engaging as this one has proven to be for its players.


Our creative forums continue to be a popular destination for new arrivals and older users alike with new additions in both the artwork and creative writing forums. @ChelonianCommander, @Raging Glowwworm, @Madame Waldegrave, @Veronica, @Arx11, @King Lurk, @Joshua Raxter, @★Under The Stars★, @Jannistory19, @Focusedheart, @Shadowwell, @Drakey, @Imperatus Rex, @Lucifer, @FriendA, @Monster the Vamelfaer, @MJK2431, and @Grimsby all have new threads in the creative forums. As a personal favorite area of the forums, thank you everyone for taking the time to showcase your non-roleplay creative works for everyone to enjoy.


What we're doing right: Despite our decision to take a brief hiatus on drawing new people to the site, the people we already have smoothly took it in stride. Our roleplays continue to bloom, and new content is regularly being made available throughout our forums. This assures me that our decision to ease off the gas for a few months was the right decision to give people time to settle in and work into their stride without being so overwhelmed. Keep the content coming!

What we need to work on: While we have had a large influx of roleplays opening up through-out our play-by-post forum, I have noted many prove short-lived. This is unfortunately a struggle faced by many roleplayers and GMs alike. Long-lasting and engaging roleplays help build confidence with new arrivals, and I would urge anyone who may be struggling with keeping their roleplays going to contact our Warden team for advice and assistance if desired. We have a vested interest in seeing everyone's roleplays succeed!

Sneak peak for June: With out recruitment/advertisement hiatus coming to a close we will be renewing our TopRPSite membership subscription and beginning a renewed push for votes. With high rankings on the TopRPSite always comes a massive influx of new arrivals. Everyone should be ready! If people have new roleplay ideas they've been wanting to get off the ground, or want to flesh out their current roleplays with new players then June will be the month fopr it! Definitely make sure you swing through our introduction forum to scout out potential candidates and to get to know the new arrivals. Since all new members are required to pass through there, it's a great place to find players for your roleplays.

I would also lastly like to take a moment to note that the large quantity of donations we received at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017 had our server and site expenses paid up all the way through to June! That was a whole half a year! Unfortunately with June now arriving, so to has ended the surplus of donations funds. Anyone wishing to help out with maintaining our community, now's the time to do it! As always though, Dashmiel and I will personally see to any expenses not covered by donations.