COLLABORATIVE WORLDBUILDING MEME

[metamods]

COLLABORATIVE
WORLDBUILDING MEME
While the mods are committed to providing a variety of fun, engaging mod-run events in the context of a mod-guided metaplot, Meta Heroes operated on the ethic that DWRP is at its best when players are given the freedom to run wild and contribute meaningfully to the setting. Given that Meta Heroes offers players a substantial sandbox with lots of freedom, the setting will always grow and evolve with the playerbase.

This collaborative worldbuilding meme will be a recurring spot for players to share the toys they've developed — giving other players more to work with and reference, as well as helping the mods keep track of that information. Over time, the mods intend to add businesses and the like to the LOCATIONS page based on what players develop. The goal behind this is to make all of the information as easy to access as possible.

Below are a list of possible contributions and suggested forms to reply to this meme with. Please feel free to brainstorm ideas that aren't fully developed in the comments of this post! Players can also do this kind of brainstorming at our static OOC DISCUSSION AND PLOTTING post outside of the usual meme hours.

Guidelines

01. Be sensitive to the way players are impacted by real events. Do not reference real people or real events. Do not fictionalize real people or real tragedies. If necessary, the mods will veto any suggestions that cause concern from other players.

02. Collaborate with one another on these ideas.

03. Avoid duplications.

City Locations
Each city in Meta Heroes is designed to reflect its own flavor/subgenre, both in homage to the wide array of comics subgenres and out of respect to the fact that the playerbase loves a wide variety of plot types. To that end, players are invited to develop locations, community practices, and other setting elements to help personalize the cities to your needs. Below is a little reminder of the overall vibe for each of our locations:

LITTLE LOVE is a slow-paced, rural farming town that also features a number of manufacturing plants. Its “supervillains” are largely the products of wayward alien technology or kids who got carried away with their newfound powers. Think Smallville.

CENTRAL CITY is a midwestern city to all things grimdark and urban noir. Organized and violent crime runs rampant. This is where you’d most likely find your Falcone families, your Jokers, and your Kingpins. In addition, this is the most politically active of the cities. You'll also find the people who don't get their own hands dirty, like Lex Luthor, preferring to move behind the scenes.

SUNSET FALLS is a mid-sized suburb in the West, full of magic, mystery, and dimensional weirdness. Think of it as Sunnydale meets Mystic Falls. Hell can't wait to swallow this shithole, err, whole. This is where you’d get your Enchantresses, your Klarion the Witchboys, and your hoards of vampires.

EXCELSIOR CITY is the coastal tech capital of the United States on this Earth! Think Eureka. Disillusioned scientists, angry ex-partners, and technology just plain going wrong! You’d find your Man-Bats, Green Goblins, and Paste Pot Petes here.

For each of these cities, players can contribute things like native NPC businesses, parks, cultural events, and geographic features (think bridges, statues, and art installations). Please use the form below to share setting elements of this kind:

<B>NAME:</b> of the building, park, event, or construction <B>LOCATION:</b> city name, rough area of the city / nearby locations <B>DESCRIPTION:</b> a physical description of what it looks like (and, if an event, what it celebrates). <B>ASSOCIATED NPCS:</b> who (names) or what kind of people (description) own or frequent the area?

Businesses
All players are welcome to have their characters set up IC businesses, charities and organizations, provided they could realistically do so with the resources at their disposal. To start a PC-run business, please fill out a PLOT REQUEST for approval. (Note: this post has been recently updated!)

Already approved businesses and locations can be posted here to share with other players for their use in threads using the form below. Players can also use this form to establish an NPC-run business that characters frequent, including US-based mega-corporations that are antagonistic, friendly, or anywhere in-between.

<b>NAME:</b> Name of the business or location. <b>DESCRIPTION:</b> A description of the submission. If it is a business then please give us a rundown of its goals and purpose. How many staff it has, the general atmosphere, and any additional details you can think of. <b>PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION:</b> Describe the space (concrete details as well as atmosphere) this occupies and/or link a picture. <b>CITY:</b> What city is this located in <b>INFO POST LINK:</b> Optional! Please link to an external information post containing links and other information if this is something you'd like to put together. <b>CONTACT NAMES:</b> Characters to contact to get involved or who hold ownership. <b>HOW CAN CHARACTERS GET INVOLVED:</b> A description about how other characters can engage with the business or setting element. <b>IC INBOX:</b> Points of contact involvement in the business. If the submission is a location such as a park you do not have to provide this.

Minor NPCs
Players are invited to design heroic and villainous NPCs for use in small-scale plots and to populate cities. These can be allies or enemies, developed within or across guilds. The guidelines below are not strict! They’re merely suggestions as to what players can expect for the day to day.

<b>NAME:</b> <b>ALIAS</b> <b>AGE:</b> <b>GENDER:</b> <b>POWERSET:</b> In addition to Confluence-begotten powers, science experiments are known to go wrong and technology allows some people to go toe-to-toe with PCs. Not to mention magic is starting to run rampant. <b>BACKSTORY:</b> What shaped them into the person they are today? <b>MOTIVATION:</b> What drives them? What are they going to be caught doing? Be as silly or as serious as you’d like. <b>ANYTHING ELSE?:</b> Reference images.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THESE MINOR NPCS?
Players can freely use player-created minor NPCs in logs and plots. Please be courteous with other people's toys; it's not a good idea to kill a minor NPC made by or frequently used by someone else without talking to them or pitching an idea in metaooc first. These are intended to flesh out the setting and give superpowered characters something more specific to fight against.

As a reminder, guidelines for what kinds of plots require approval can be found at our newly updated PLOTTING page. Thwarting small schemes, bank robberies, and plots without civilian death or widespread destruction — as well as silly things like everyone suddenly losing their left shoe — don’t require mod approval. Players are free to reference them or run them without running them by the mods. The crux is that if person or property is going to be damaged substantially in a way that other people would notice, players should be communicating with the mod team.

WHAT IF I WANT TO APP A SHORT-TERM VILLAIN CHARACTER?
You sure can! Players have multiple options for how to execute this. One route is to submit an application for the character and include plot plans within the application. Another is to contact the mods at the MOD CONTACT page. Lastly, players could submit short-term villain requests to the PLOTTING page.

Comments

LOCATION: abandoned hideout in excelsior

[tosavethisworld]

NAME: formally the S.D. Ferrell Building, formerly informally known as the Hideout, now known as “that creepy old place”
LOCATION: Excelsior, somewhere on the outskirts
DESCRIPTION: It used to be home to many a start-up business, and so it used to be all shiny and chrome like so many other buildings in Excelsior. However, too many of the start-ups turned out to be fronts for supervillain shenanigans, and the building soon became known as the Hideout, where you could put up an underground lab and hold experiments on test subjects who may or may not have been less than willing to be there. Eventually, however, one too many failed experiments proved to be the building’s doom—what used to be a three-story Art Deco masterpiece now is a one-story (on the surface) semi-Brutalist mess, a testament to what happens if you put one too many disgruntled scientists with few moral qualms and chips on their shoulder in the same building together.

There may, or may not, still be sentient Roombas still roaming around the premises. (There totally still are. Some of them have knives attached. They act kind of like feral cats.) There is also a rather expansive network of underground labs underneath it, all of which have some kind of failed tech experiment still lurking around within.
ASSOCIATED NPCS: Currently owned by a 54yo man named Thaddeus MacDonald, who got stuck with the whole thing when the previous owners absconded and just wants to be rid of it, but the legal kerfuffle the building’s gotten tied up in has gotten very hard to sort out. Other people have been sniffing around and expressing interest in it, especially those from the Society.