George Elsworth

Hey all! Happy almost fall!

So, to cut down on the volume of times when I need to make large modding posts, and because I tend to know a few months out what we're doing, I've decided to do plotting posts in batches. They won't necessarily be quarterly like TDMs, just whatever feels right. If I need to break them up more, let me know! But for now it seems sensible that we go ahead and address all the heavy hitters that are coming up.

Also, quick shoutout to everyone--- I want to thank you guys for making the fairy party such a hit! We're still going strong and right in the neighborhood of 2000 comments. Events like these go really well every year, but I really could not be more proud to see numbers like these. I hope you guys made a huge profit on AC with all these threads!

Anyway, we've got some great stuff coming up in-game, so let's get into it! There's one more month of the summer TDM before we get into fall, and as usual, the autumn TDM will feature elements of Pumpkinfest. Harvey and I are still hammering out the details, but here are the concepts we have so far!

• Evil Corn Maze - get lost, maybe pocket dimension, maybe die, maybe monster
• Fishing tourney - brass rewards!
• Cordyceps mushrooms - terrible scary bad
• Frog Monster - frogs eat each other and eat people to become HUGE, pop it on something sharp to send frogs scattering
• Luigi's Mansion - people are getting painting'd, borrow a ghost vacuum and fight a boss to free a friend!
• Pumpkinfest - pumpkin carving, music, food, craft fair, etc

Let me know if you all have any thoughts about any of these that you think we should incorporate. Drop a comment in the questions/comments thread if you do!
In late August, when the Black Jade salmon usually begin their spawning run, reports begin to trickle in of people seeing the water in the Paring River take on an odd color and viscosity. The water will sometimes burble up like a wellspring with thick, dark green sludge. As time goes on, this sludge fills the entire river, from Hatchet Lake all the way down to Ripjaw Falls. Then from there, it begins to fill the sea, all the way up to the darkened edge of the barrier, until every inch of it is thick green muck.

But the real problem is what comes up from the depths of the murk, however. As the sun begins to set, monstrous fish creatures, bug-eyed and wide-mouthed, begin crawling up out of the sea. Some of them are only ankle-height but come in writhing swarms, while others are taller than most people and hulking. They all come armed with cutlery, and share a common goal--- make it up to the Paring River to deposit their eggs, and eat as much meat as they can on the way.

For the first day, there is chaos. No normal weapon seems capable of truly killing them, and they just keep on coming. But the next morning, there is a strange little novelty radio in the shape of a carved wooden grizzly bear catching a salmon in its mouth, and the voice on the other end has a solution for you.

Your mysterious benefactor will happily provide weapons for you that will fell those freaky fish properly, leaving you with a liberated town and a ton of delicious fresh salmon! All you have to do is collect the golden gleaming roe dropped by the monsters you kill. And the more you collect, the more he will reward you.

This event is based on the game Splatoon, specifically the enemy rush co-op mode called Salmon Run, but with a horror twist. As such, the weapons that will be issued out by Mr. Grizz will be Splatoon weapons. I'll be opening a thread to recommend weapons to those unfamiliar or who just have no opinion, so feel free to choose your own weapon or have the Splatoon experts assign you one based on your character's skills and personality!

For each thread on the event, regardless of the subject matter, I'll be rolling a D8 to determine how many Golden Eggs were obtained, and I'll double the value for threads that reach AC length, with a final tally being taken right before the September event drops. There'll be communal prizes that can be earned from this including useful gear and permanent upgrades to sending stones, which may even result in Pumpkin Hollow getting network access for the very first time! The domains of demons are funny places. For Mendel, a carnival. For Efrain, a stage. And for Eligos, as most of you know, there was a terrible dungeon.

But for Aster, your brand new King of Hell? Well, it's all fun and games.

Welcome once again to the Black Stag Casino. Many of you have been here once before, gambling for poker chips and dates with skeletons, betting on death matches between your friends and all manner of monsters. But many of you missed out on your first trip.

Like the fairy party, this event is, in part, a luxury getaway with all the amenities a traveller could ever desire, but don't let the similarities comfort you. You are in a den of wolves, and you are not safe here. With his new risks and new rewards, it's time to find out who will eat and who will be eaten.

And of course, it is still Dahlia's birthday, and what kind of father would Aster be if he deprived her of her annual gala?

Because this comes pretty hot off the heels of the fairy party, I wanted to go out of my way to make this one a little different from the standard gala. I'm still getting down the specifics of how I want to set this up, but I'm thinking of taking a page out of Seemingly's Revenge and dropping the main part of the casino and the gala about a week apart, with the gala having an optional mystery minigame similar to the Senate Room that will involve player characters being swapped out by a demonic duplicate, and a race against the clock to find the imposter. There will also be an aesthetic theme--- spooky or gothic attire, with black or blue strongly encouraged. For our Halloween special, we have the long-awaited domains event that's been floating around in the server!

Nyarlathotep has always had a fondness for taking what he has seen elsewhere and twisting it into a new, terrible shape to see what fresh terror can be derived from it. Last year, the fourteen Dread Powers from the universe of The Magnus Archives took over the island in a miniature version of the Watcher's Crown--- an apocalypse where each of the Fears had a piece of the island to warp and morph to their design and use as a torture chamber for their victims. This year, Nyarlathotep thought it would be a grand old time to let a select few residents of Marrow Isle do this themselves. He's placing full control over predetermined chunks of the island to a small group of hand-picked patsies who he has a very good feeling will be happy to exploit their neighbors for power with a little push.

Here's how this will work: a handful of player characters will be assigned the role of domain warden. Wardens will be given a portion of Pumpkin Hollow that is theirs to manipulate, whether unwittingly or deliberately, with their own preferences, desires, and ideas about how the world should work. Whatever the case, the design will be intended to put the wardens in a position of absolute power.

Most of everyone else will be domain prisoners. Prisoners are owned by a domain, body and mind. They will be basically AU'd into the world created by the warden, to put it in simple terms. Their memories will be modified just enough for them to believe that they fully belong there, that this is where they've always been. They may also end up with some temporary physical modifications to assist with the illusion. Their role within the world may be imagined by the warden for them, or it may be whatever suits them best within that space. It is also possible for prisoners to be transferred between domains, either by accident or by the warden deliberately. While they start out fully bought in, they can realize that something isn't right with whatever pace makes sense to the player.

Once the illusion fully breaks, a character may then become a floater. These individuals see through the illusions of the domain and are able to move between them autonomously. Floaters may be able to use their imaginations to create roles for themselves within domains to blend in, or may accidentally lose their wits and become prisoners of a domain that they enter. Some characters will also begin the event as floaters automatically. Please let me know if you'd like your character to start out as an inherent floater. I don't want there to be too many of these so I'm gonna be loosely taking sign-ups for this.

There will not be an automatic opt-out, but there will be a sort of no-man's land that floaters can go to outside of any domain and there will be some tamer domains available that rely less on mind-alteration and pose less risk of potential harm.

Currently, the characters slated to be wardens are:

• John Gaius of The Locked Tomb series
• Marik Ishtar of Yu-Gi-Oh!
• Caine of The Amazing Digital Circus
• Faulkner of The Silt Verses
• Hector/Inspekta and Capochin of Great God Grove
• Mr. Ant Tenna of Deltarune (tentative)
• The Allied Mastercomputer of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (tentative)

We are open to other wardens! Characters given the role of warden should be ones that have an unhealthy relationship with power, whose self-control and CR circles would be complicated (but not wholesale destroyed unless that's what the player wants) by being put into the role. Those volunteering to be wardens will be expected to have a baseline level of activity that is somewhat higher than the minimum required for AC--- prisoner characters should not anticipate being guaranteed a thread with the warden, but wardens should be relatively accessible. Additionally, warden players should be prepared to workshop their domain with me so that I can write a prompt! Things I'll need include visuals for the location, examples of roles or false memories prisoners might receive, activities for them to do independently, and where the warden can be located.

Also, it's worth mentioning that we have some newer players/characters now who don't have many CR ties yet. Over the next few months, please focus on strengthening those ties so that our new cast can get the most out of their first Halloween in Pumpkin Hollow! As of right now, not a ton can be done to advance the plot as we await Dahlia’s chance to end her father's reign of terror once and for all. However, she will not be able to face Nyarlathotep's wrath alone. We'd love for you all to work with the mod team on empowering your characters with useful abilities and items in ways that feel narratively earned over the next handful of months so that when we end up in a barrier-free Pumpkin Hollow, your characters will be prepared to protect each other for what comes next.

Additionally, I'm aware that these next three events will be quite large, so I wanted to tack on that you should expect a really light November! I will, at most, be putting up a very simple event post with an extremely chill Dance of Celestine festival prompt, as well as one for Radar and Dahlia’s wedding. But I want to give you all as much time back for backtagging as I possibly can as well as take the pressure off over the holidays and focus my own efforts on playing Dahlia!

December will also be similarly light, with the usual gamut of holiday prompts. We'll be back to full steam in January with our annual dream event (which is already planned and very tasty), Merrymeet in Feb, and some manner of chaos in March before we spend April and May killing King Aster! But don't worry, even with the death of the King on the horizon, our adventures are far from over. See you in a few months with more details on this wild ride!