Idea Post!

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Hello Aather! In the interests of making Aather the best game it can be, we'd like to toss around some potential ideas for what you'd really like to see in the near future!

Since the game has been running incredibly strong for over 3.5 years now (///), we want to make sure we're keeping things bright and engaging, while still staying true to the game as it is and what's made it what it is.

We've had more open slots recently largely due to a lot of characters moving to Happy End or Legacy after being played for several years, and game turnout is a little lower lately (probably also because some of us have been doing this game thing for longer than we've lived in any one place in real life, I don't know about you); and we've also dropped down to a bit of a quieter pace that's a better fit for the playerbase at the moment—but some of these are fairly big changes functionally! so we want to make sure we can continue adjusting and growing the game to fit that.

The mods have some ideas for things we want to do in the future (and I'll make note of some of them in this post!), but we'd also like to hear:

❥ Game or event ideas you'd like to see! Games that we ran two years ago you really liked, or just "a secrets game" or "a costume game" or anything like that. Things we haven't done in a while you wanna see again, or things we've never done that you have a good idea for.
❥ Plot hooks or directions you'd like to go in. "I want to find out more about why there's always a tree in the Ring" or "I want more helping Personae break roles" etc.
❥ Elements that would help you or your characters be more engaged!
❥ Other things that would be cool—quests? Abilities? Themes? Laser beams for Burupya?

At least for this post, we would really just like to hear ideas and suggestions—nothing will be definitely going to happen and someone might have an idea that you don't think would work for you, but that's okay! We are also not looking at making any changes to activity/game structure & functions at the moment—just gameplay, please!

For now—please help us with suggestions about what you'd like to see and we will do our best to make some things happen! If you have multiple ideas, please feel free to leave them as separate comments if they're about fully different things.

Thank you as always for being such a stellar playerbase, and please do always feel free to come to the mods in private if you have questions or concerns or suggestions or pictures of kitten paws.

Comments

[selfequipped]

Along the same lines as above!

I really did enjoy the plot from before where a bunch of small groups went into other, darkness ravaged worlds to find out things about them. I think we slowed down on that plot a bit as we left Wonderland and entered Camelot—in part, I assume, because Camelot was running two separate personae group plots at the same time—but I really enjoyed the plot there.

More than that, events where characters can go somewhere and find world understanding and advancement stuff would be great. I think at this point, a lot of things in Aather are a little ... I don't want to use the word "stale," but I do think we could shake it up a bit. Plots like these could help. If we introduce factors that shake up the story, that'd be great.

We could always introduce factors that explain why the stories are being shaken up. The darkness is warping the story itself to make it change, so what information we had is now different. Refreshing some things so that current (and future) characters can learn things and spread it out can help. I find that when a game has been around for a while, it hits a point where older characters are left going, "This is happening because of Y, so let's do X." I think that the forward movement of Aather and the evolution over time is super important and a big part of the setting.

But at the same time, offering something new—new story threads, new plot threads, new everything—with logical justification could be great. I see a lot of remarks on this post about impacting the world and actually changing things, and I agree that that's a direction the game can move in. I think coming up with ideas to shake things up would be great. We can still keep the foundation, but utilize that foundation to turn some stuff on its head. Stories evolve, and sometimes stories aren't written "correctly," so what if something comes from that?

I don't think major upheaval is necessary, but plots that challenge the current knowledge and solutions would be a lot of fun. Things that are unique to this era of Aather would be great. A lot of the stuff about the mythology in Marvel (which is partly what I'm inspired by) with the various pantheons is how malleable the stories are, and I think about that a lot in Aather. What if one particularly driven belief changes things, but doesn't make it less hopeful? What if there is a low before another high? I think this sort of thing would be a slow burn, but I think really introducing new information would be a lot of fun.

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I agree that we want to keep the story dynamic! But part of the struggle is that, like, this is a lot of weight and work on the mods. We've been asking Personae players more and more to please come up and pitch and run ideas, because the reason things have been slow is because it's literally not possible for me to plot & run stories all the time. We do have new mods on hand dedicated to pretty much just this, but we'd also really welcome suggestions from players and plotlines that players want to try!