BEGINNER'S GUIDE

[damned_info]

BEGINNER'S GUIDE Table of Contents Waking Up in Landel's Institute Posting during Day Shift Posting on the Bulletin Board Posting during Night Shift Moving Place to Place during Night Shift Plotting with Other Players Useful Links and References You've just been accepted into Damned, so the big question is, what now? Well, it can get a little complicated, so here's a quick guide to help you integrate into the game. Waking Up in Landel's Institute The first thing that you need to figure out is when your character is going to wake up. Damned runs on a day/night system, so a character would either wake up at the beginning of Dayshift, at the beginning of Nightshift, or somewhere in between. All of these are possible, though we're fine with a player waiting until the start of dayshift or nightshift to intro their character if they'd rather not come in halfway. So, let's say that your character is waking up at the beginning of Dayshift. The way that we announce the change from night to day (or vice versa) is through posts made to damned_institute, posted by the damned_intercom journal. Posts like these are referred to as shift changes. While a single day is made up of five different shifts, nightshift is one long shift. Anyway, let's look at an example. This is a shift change to denote the change from night to day, which is why the subject line offers the day number and also lists it as "Dawn." While these posts are not used for normal play, they are used for introduction posts! Which is why there is one comment there with a character waking up. (Note: If your character doesn't have a room number yet, you can just post them in room M?? or F?? until we get them a room!) When a character wakes up, they'll have a moment to search their room if they are so inclined. Here is a list of the items and clothing they start with, as well. After that, they're generally greeted by a nurse who would call them by their "real name" and treat them like a mental patient. The nurses are usually very pleasant, if a bit condescending, and you can write out your characters interacting with one without any mod help. The exception to this is if your character becomes violent. If any physical violence is enacted on a nurse by your character, you must request for one of our NPC Mods to come in and play that interaction out with you. How do you get a hold of an NPC mod? The easiest way is to make a post to damned_lounge explaining the situation and requesting a nurse. However, if for some reason that's overlooked (we're generally shorthanded with NPC mods, and sometimes all of us are busy), then you can contact one of the main mods and we'll try to track someone down who can help you. Please don't hesitate to contact any of the main mods (Court, Jansen, or Claire) if you need something! Posting during Day Shift Let's say that your character either goes along willingly with the nurse (or is contained/sedated and then led out of their room that way). What happens next? Provided it's the morning, a post will go up for breakfast. The shift post itself usually describes what the breakfast will be (or whatever else might be going on), so you'll have that information to go on. What happens at the start of a shift change is that one player will put up something we call the "top post," which is the place where everyone plays for that shift. Once again, here is an example of a breakfast post. This is something any player can create -- it's literally a matter of who gets to it first. Then, everyone else responds to it with their character entering the cafeteria for breakfast. In other words, once your character has woken up (something posted to the intercom post), you'd then move them into the main post for that shift (which could be breakfast or something other time/location, depending on when the character wakes up). The next question is, who do you play with? There are three options here: 1) You post your character as free. This means any other player can respond to your post with their character approaching yours, and then you thread. 2) You respond to someone else who has already posted their character as free. Pretty self-explanatory! If you see a post marked "free," you can respond to that person, no questions asked. 3) You post your character out for a pre-arranged thread with another player. Threads can be pre-arranged a few different ways. It can be done casually (asking someone in your OOC intro post, or over plurk or email) or it can be done through the plot posts we put up. (More on that later.) A common problem people express is that their character isn't the type to approach others. There is an easy way around this. You have free reign to have a nurse force your character to talk to someone else. We can't let anti-social characters get away with never chatting with their fellow patients, after all! So, at this point, you'll be threading with someone! Woohoo! From this point on, the rest of Dayshift is pretty self-explanatory. Another shift change/intercom post will go up to mark the next shift starting, someone will make a top post with the next location (sometimes patients are given a choice of a few different places to go, in which case there will be multiple posts), and you rinse and repeat. As mentioned before, Dayshift is five shifts long. The first four are spent in different areas in the institute, with all the patients hanging out in one place, whereas the fifth shift is dinner shift. This one is a little special, because patients are then taken back to their rooms before night begins. Each patient has a roommate (room assignments are listed here, though we also make a post to damned_lounge each time we have an update), and so your character will always thread with his/her roommate at dinner. Dinner is also the only shift where everyone plays in the shift change/intercom post, as you can see here. You post your character with their room number in the subject line, and then your character's roommate will respond (or vice versa). Posting on the Bulletin Board Now, here's a quick side-note about the bulletin. Basically, since Damned is almost completely a prose game, there's only one way to do the more common "comment spam" version of RPing. This is through damned_bulletin. In the Sun Room there is a bulletin board where patients can put up notes for other patients to respond to. It's semi-watched by the nurses, so patients will try to write in a simple code (and they have to watch their language!). This is something that you can post to as soon as your character is awake and around, so long as your character either notices it for themselves or is told about it! Most of the time, people do a bit of time-warping when it comes to bulletin posts. There's no real requirement to designate what time during the day a post was made or responded to -- it's just handwaved. (People will try to adhere on a general level, though. For example, not mentioning in a second shift backthread something they put up on the bulletin during fourth shift.) Also, in reality, patients would probably see other people responding to their notes in person! But once again, we gloss over that to make it more functional. All of these notes are handwritten, so treat them as such! Patients can bold, underline, disguise their handwriting, strike things out, etc. They are generally not treated as action tags, so there usually won't be any notes with your character's thoughts or actions included. (Sometimes exceptions are made if the player really wants to make something clear about the note.) Here is an example of a bulletin post, to give you an idea. One last note about the bulletin is that it is only used during the Dayshift unless your character physically walks over to the Sun Room at night and you write about them posting to it. A final note about the bulletin is that it does not count for activity when it comes to Activity Checks. So that concludes that end of Dayshift! Now there's Nightshift, which is a little more complicated. Posting during Night Shift Just like with Dayshift, there is a shift change that signals the beginning of Nightshift. It's actually two posts, like so. Now, if your character is waking up during nightshift, this is what you do. Since your character likely won't have a room number yet, you can have them wake up in any unoccupied room, titled M?? or F??. This post will be made in response to the Beginning of Night shift change post, as you can see there! Since they won't have a nurse to explain things to them (and they might not have a roommate, either), your character will then be forced to go exploring on their own. Just like Dayshift, Nightshift posts are organized by location, but since characters are given free reign of the institute, there is a lot more top posting going on, and it isn't scheduled by time like Dayshift is. So, how do you do this? Some important resources you'll need to have on hand at this point are the maps and probably also damned_links. Let's explain the maps first. Basically, every room and hallway on the maps counts as its own post, or location. (The only exception to this is the patient rooms -- those would be posted in response to their respective hallway. In other words, if your character was hanging out in M16, that would be posted in response to the M11-M20 Hallway location, normally with a small OOC note to let others know that the character is in their room rather than the hallway.) Moving Place to Place during Night Shift In terms of moving, this means that every time that a character moves into a new hallway or room, they would also move to a new location post. To give you an idea of how this works, open up the first floor map. Once again, let's assume that your character is starting in M16. First, you would post your character to the M11-M20 Hallway (NOTE: All characters must have their first post of Nightshift be in the hallway their room is in. You cannot start them in a different place), then to the M-A Block Hallway, then to West Wing, South Hall 1-A, and so on. Each of these hallways would have a different post, and any character who goes through those areas would be posted to them. This gives you, as a player, an idea of the other characters who are around as well. (However, if you for some reason don't want two characters to see each other even if they happen to passing through in the same area, you can do a time skip and assume they went through at different times.) You can see why the maps are important in this case! It should also be mentioned that there is a more exhaustive set of maps over at damned_maps. The reason that's still on LJ is because the creator is no longer in the game, but it's still a great resource and worth checking out. Now, as for damned_links, this is a player-run resource where they have a whole list of the locations that are put up each nightshift! For an example, look here. These links are filled in and added as the posts themselves are made, so when you are posting into nightshift, a good idea is to check the links list for locations to see if they've already been made by someone else. If a location post doesn't exist yet and you need your character to go there, then it's up to you to make the top post! (damned_links isn't always updated every day, since the players running it might get busy, etc. So always make sure to check the first page of the damned_institute community for location posts before you top post, too.) A lot of people have expressed a fear of top posting for some unknown reason, but we mods would like to let you know that you shouldn't be scared of it! Especially at nightshift, those top posts need to be made, and you shouldn't hesitate if your character reaches a location and the top post doesn't exist yet. Just make that post! Other players will be thankful to you for doing it, too! Anyway, there is a whole lot more to the whole moving process, and certain rules that you need to follow when it comes to moving around at nightshift. There is long, informative post about that over here, so please read it. Plotting with Other Players One other thing to keep in mind about Nightshift is that unlike Dayshift, there are usually not any free posts. What a character does during Nightshift is usually pre-arranged OOCly, even if the character doesn't know about it. While it's definitely possible to spend one half of your nightshift with one character and the second half with another, that's something that generally has to be worked out ahead of time. It's ideal to try and have your character make nightshift plans ICly once they're established, especially if they're not the kind of person to just randomly run into someone else and team up. So, how do you do this? Well, remember how I mentioned those plot posts? Basically, prior to each Dayshift and Nightshift, we make a post to damned_lounge for people to plot and arrange threads with each other OOCly. This is what one for Dayshift looks like, whereas the Nightshift one is split into two parts: one for people who already know that their plans are, and one for people who need to find someone for their character to interact with in the coming Nightshift. If you miss the plot post or don't get a hold of someone in time to ask for a thread, then a last resort is to make a post to damned_lounge asking if anyone can adopt your character. There is even a tag for this! One last note about threading: A general rule of thumb for this game is that you don't do two threads at once during a single shift. In other words, you're usually only threading with one (or two or three, if you're doing a group thread) person at a time. (To be clear, I mean within the constraints of one shift. People end up doing multiple threads all the time, due to backthreads after shift changes.) If you do want to do two threads within one shift, one needs to take place before the other, and you need to have cleared this with the people you're playing with. We understand that sometimes time constraints necessitate this, but it's not the norm. Similarly, during nightshift, it's fine to do this so long as you're aware that one thread takes place before the other, and the person you're threading with first chronologically should know that your character will eventually be hightailing it somewhere else. Anyway, from there on you can have your character explore the institute, you can request a monster attack (we put up a Monster Request Post at the start of each Nightshift for all your creepy crawly needs, here is what it looks like), and so forth! Nightshift lasts three weeks (unless we extend it, which happens often!), so once those three weeks have passed, the intercom post/shift change for Dawn will be posted and it will be Dayshift again! ICly, what happens is that after the End of Night intercom post, suddenly everything goes black and your character wakes up in his/her bed again. Their clothes will be like new, and their wounds will be cleaned and bandaged (and stitched/set, if needed). Then you just rinse and repeat. Just to be clear, the shifts during the day are each four days long, except for dinner, which is three days long. Useful Links and References That covers the basics, but here is a list of useful links and references that you might want to bookmark or keep handy! (There will be some repeats from this overall explanation for extra emphasis!) For playing: • The OOC Schedule. Since Damned runs on a strange schedule, with multiple day shifts and a long night shift, this is a good way to keep track of when the shift change is going to happen so it doesn't take you by surprise. • IC Schedule. This is the schedule of what goes on during the day shift! We try to keep it up to date, but sometimes it falls behind. (We will usually detail what the shift will entail in each shift change post, so you can always fall back on that if this schedule is out of date.) • Maps and Descriptions. Along with having the maps on hand, as they're such a necessity when you're moving your character around during nightshift, this page also contains links to all of the room descriptions. We have detailed descriptions of most of the rooms in the institute, describing how it looks both during the day and at night in most cases, so it's good to refer to when your character is seeing things for the first time or exploring. Once again, damned_maps is another good resource for all your mapping needs. • Patient Room Layout and Supply List. This is basic, but still important! It's where your character wakes up, after all. • Nightshift Moving Guidelines. Going to link this again, because seriously, it's important. One of the rules players most often break, if accidentally, has to do with Nightshift moving. For contact: • Our contact list, which you should have access to now that you're in the game, is very useful for when you have a question for someone you're threading with, or even if you just want to make plans with someone. We have contact preferences for most players, too. • The NPC Mod list has contact info for all of the three main mods and the helper mods, if you're ever in need of an NPC for a thread. • The damnedmods plurk is a great resource if you happen to have a plurk and want to be up to date on things like shift changes, the plot post, activity checks, any mod announcements, etc. We update it whenever we post something of note, so it's a great thing to subscribe to.