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

Business

[helpdesk_hero]

NAME: Adaptech
DESCRIPTION: Adaptech is an electronics and robotics focused tech-start up with a goal of creating cutting edge technology solutions to disabilities. The company's focus is spread over many forms of assistance, ranging from prosthetics to SmartTech meant to assist independent living like voice-activated doors for cabinets, closets, and even fridges to help people have more control over their lives and living situations. Their Mission statement is a horribly cliche 'Where Technology Meets Functionality'. So far the company has received funding via grants from the government, private investment firms, and even the Guardian Alliance (in hopes of assisting people that become injured in normal heroic and villainous battles).

While their areas of focus are varied, the company has been showing good progress in some prototypes, and enough interest in their work to be slowly trying to seek additional grants that will let them develop their tech, and most importantly make it affordable. The company currently maintains a staff of little over forty people and hopes to expand this staff, including through acquisitions of more back end support like PR specialists, HR, office workers, and even records management. Anyone with experience writing grants is absolutely welcomed, as well as code monkeys and aspiring roboticists. A quieter request for additional employees to help with digital security of their products is going out as well.

The atmosphere of the company is actually what a lot of businesses claim to maintain. There is a sense of community and passion in the employees, and a friendliness is fostered where possible. Of course some internal rivalries have developed because anything else would be impossible. But corporate culture does stress hour long lunch breaks (paid), and there's even one employee whose entire job is to go around and rouse the code and tech monkeys out of programming and creation fugue states so they can get rest and go home. To burn out their most precious resource of the minds that drive the tech is something that the founder, Janelle Rosenburg, abhors the idea of.

Employees are technically forbidden from the grounds on whatever days they declare as their 'weekend' upon signing on with the company, or whatever change they make to it, with their access badges even refusing to open doors unless a higher ranked employee in the building confirms the extra work hours.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: As a still relatively small company, Adaptech doesn't have its own full building. Instead it exists on floors four through six of a larger building in downtown Excelsior. This means that the offices on one side of the building have wonderful windows and views. These are typically reserved for support staff and administrative/management positions. This is mostly because programmers have tended to prefer rooms where they could more easily control lighting levels. Central spaces of the levels are often dedicated to server rooms, offices for programmers, and on the sixth floor, the clean room for prototype chips, and machine and printing rooms for parts creation.

The sixth floor windows on the south side of the building are given over to a conference room, and the north side is the employee cafeteria and lounge. Many rooms with windows have plants in them to try and create a living space, but internal rooms do not tend to have this, instead being decorated by employees when it's office space, and being kept clear in work spaces except of safety notices and walls and board covered with design specs.

Finally, they own an apartment off site where they test their domestic space help solutions, trying to ensure that they work outside of controlled lab settings.

CITY: Excelsior
INFO POST LINK: N/A

CONTACT NAMES: Janelle Rosenburg (Founder and President [Non-Hero/Villain NPC]); David Alleyne (Programmer and Engineer)
HOW CAN CHARACTERS GET INVOLVED: Adaptech is seeking new employees and investors. Also desired as people with current needs for their technology to assist them with testing either at the offices, or in their off-site testing house. Also useful would be people from other worlds who are coming in with adaptive technology from that world who might not mind their tech being studied. With compensation of course.

For the Villainously minded the site, being a tech company, maintains on premises expensive computer parts, and possible code or other computer programs that other companies might want to poach from them, or that villains themselves may want to use. It's an easy jump from things that might serve as robotic arms to things that could possibly be upscaled to full robot armies.