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Hallimonks
Daraius
ShevatThe juror's taco spot
So it's no secret any more that some people are talking about monk stuff in Hallifax, even though we don't have any idea if or when we'll hear a breath about actual monk guilds for Halli and Gaudi. So I'm wondering just how much influence can we expect to have on the features of our guild when it becomes a reality.
Will we have any say on the titles, ethos, skills and weapons, guildhall, etc? Or are these things already part of The Plan?
To what extent can these details even be discussed in character? How do you go about developing lore for a guild that doesn't exist? At what point are we going to need admin involvement/approval?
I played the house leadership game for a long time over in Achaea and we were pretty much completely autonomous in setting the values and structure and direction of the house (until they decided to screw us over with new house membership policies). Our patrons were basically there to give us shinies whenever we came up with something cool to add. But I wasn't around at the beginning of the guild, so I don't know how much was established by players and how much was the work of the admin. And Lusternia's a different animal altogether.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Will we have any say on the titles, ethos, skills and weapons, guildhall, etc? Or are these things already part of The Plan?
To what extent can these details even be discussed in character? How do you go about developing lore for a guild that doesn't exist? At what point are we going to need admin involvement/approval?
I played the house leadership game for a long time over in Achaea and we were pretty much completely autonomous in setting the values and structure and direction of the house (until they decided to screw us over with new house membership policies). Our patrons were basically there to give us shinies whenever we came up with something cool to add. But I wasn't around at the beginning of the guild, so I don't know how much was established by players and how much was the work of the admin. And Lusternia's a different animal altogether.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
I used to make cakes.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
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Comments
If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
To some of those, no, probably not. The Symphonium just kind of...poof, happened! Not saying there weren't volunteers from Hallifax working on things like the guildhall build, it's possible, but the rest was out of our hands. After it opened, however, there was a brief period of time where the Powers That Be were open to minor, -very minor- alterations to the final product, like...well for instance, "Maestro of the Crystal Choir" was initially "Master of the Crystal Choir". Titles of appointment, we were told, could be changed later on with a high cost - that little (logical) fix was free.
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Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
The most important thing is to build a culture of ideas that tie you in to your city. By definition, everything you need to tie to exists right now. All of the things that come later are important, yeah, but they're an island. You need to build a bridge. There's a good chance this will mix weirdly with whatever cards you get handed by the staff, and that's actually a plus. Multiple 'hereditary' sources and complexity will add depth to the guild's lore that takes years to grow if you're starting from a monoculture.
So talk with your friends now, IC and OOC. Speculate. Think about how the things you're pretty certain to have (psychometabolism, tattoos, kata) tie in to Hallifax's agenda, ideals, even the basic city quests This isn't something you're going to be able to sustain at a fever pitch, but kicking ideas around now means more material when it's crunch time.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
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I want them to wield staplers and their instakill should be 'Death by 1000 papercuts.'
PS: Cantors use ALL of that? No wonder most people have no idea what the Cantors are about. That's just too much going on. Should the monk guilds ever be released, keep it simple. Find a focus and hone in on it, and then expand from there. It's easier to expand a simple idea than taking several complicated ones and trying to weave them together. Anchor them to the org with an ideal or principle and unifying belief, and build up from there. If you just smash every imaginable aspect of your org together and try to promote them all, your guild just gets lost in the noise and no one joins because they don't really know what you're about. I've been playing since the Cantors were released and I just know them as the fire bards.
It's great to have a complicated, internal story for the guild, but if outsiders don't understand it the guild isn't going to grow and attract new members. Find a thing, a quantifiable thing with a name, that your guild can anchor itself to. The Supernals, Mother Night, Fire, whatever. It can even be something you make up, like the Dark Heart and the Harbingers. Something that's going to illicit a feeling or idea from people that are reading a blurb about your guild. Then people will identify with it and be drawn to it. When you look at the "new" guilds (bards and monks) the ones that have never really gotten off the ground in the long term are those that never found their anchor.
:-<
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Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
First, don't tie them to a caste. Guilds like the Institute or Symphonium are tied by their identity into being scientists or artists, and I like that for them, but I think the monks should be caste independent.
Instead, make them be all about training themselves to be the perfect exemplars of whatever caste they happen to be in. A scientist should try to free himself from bias and emotional attachment to his work, the artist should try to improve their technique and master many different forms, bureaucrats should try to be better at bureaucrating, whatever that amounts to. These shouldn't be mutually exclusive, either. I think there's a lot of room for the idea that all flaws are linked and that trying to fix one indirectly contributes to fixing the others. The monastic techniques are all viewed mostly as a means to that end.
Pretty standard and kind of dull sort of the standard monasticism there, adapted for Hallifax. It's the baseline, and the parts of this that appeal to me are in the things derived from that.
Let's start with the practices themselves. They can meditate and whatnot, and there's room for that, but there's also room for things that separate them from standard Hallifaxian practice. Let's say that a monk aspires to a state of perfect rationality. Very Hallifax. He meditates, but that's not the only thing he does. He can try to build up a resistance to things that make him less rational. So he exposes himself to things that make him unthinkingly angry, so that he can learn to control that. He drinks to excess for days on end so that he can reach the point where alcohol doesn't do anything to him. He does it as safely as he can, under controlled conditions. But he still does these things that are usually seen as being beneath a civilized Collectivist, and he does them so that he can become more like that ideal.
That puts these monks as a sort of odd subculture in Hallifax. They're unquestionably dedicated to the Collective, but their methods are strange. I think this is a good thing for two reasons. First, it adds some more variety into Hallifax RP, which seems a little homogenized to me, where most people are in a sort of Apollonian high society. Second, it resembles the things that Gaudiguchis do. I don't think I'm the only person who sees a lot of similarities between Gaudiguch and Hallifax, even if they approach those similar things from very different perspectives. I like that aspect, personally, and would love to see it pushed a little more.
We can go further with the subculture thing, too. They are trying to be, as individuals, perfect Collectivists. Let's have them really admire the Paragons. They can view them as people who have become flawless in some way, and have done great things because of it. Not perfect in every way, since nobody is perfect. But they removed a certain subset of flaws that holds other people back from being like them. Everyone could be like the Paragons, if they only removed their flaws.
This appeals to me on a personal level, since I'm all about the Heroes of the Soviet Union Paragons of Collectivism, both the ones in the plinths and the ones that I write biographies about. But I think it also gives a focus for the RP into archetypes, kind of like the Celestines have in the Supernals. It also further pushes them into a being a sort of unorthodox branch of Collectivism. This, and their quest for individual improvement, makes them far more individualistic than most of the Collective. I think that's interesting, since it means that even if at an individual level they are the most devoted people in Hallifax, the less individualistic parts of society might not be entirely comfortable with them. They respect the monks, since they're shining example of what everyone should be, but they aren't entirely part of the normal social group.
This can carry over into castes, too. The monks try to excel at the duties of their caste. But if they're truly dedicated to Hallifax, and if fixing one flaw helps fix the others, shouldn't they try to excel at the duties of every caste? The puts them a little bit outside the social structure in a different and I think less important way, but it contributes to the general theme. They try to be the things like the war poet, who fights for Hallifax and then composes epics about the war in which he fought, or the field researcher who goes out to dangerous places to seek hard to reach knowledge. There's even room for a sort of evangelical Collectivist, who goes out to spread Collectivist doctrine either by oratory or by the sword.
Maybe I shouldn't have said by the "sword" there. Chakrams are good for weapons and they're my second choice, but my super secret hope is that Hallifax monks are really into technology and we can have beam generator gun kata. Not going to happen, but I can dream.