Guild of Historians?

General debates and discussion about the Guild of Writers and Age creation

Postby Zander » Sat Apr 01, 2006 6:28 pm

Um, this all looks wonderful, but I can't help feeling the horse is looking at the cart... :)

You can build the prettiest Age ever, with the most intricate and challenging puzzles, but the question no-one seems to be considering is why would anyone go there? Before you build the Age, surely you need to design the story that drives it, the reason for explorers to unravel it. Maybe, if there were a Guild of Historians, there could be a stockpile of storylines that could be "claimed" by builders who feel they could do them justice.

The obvious one that springs to mind is: a D'ni survivor in Releeshahn contacts an explorer and asks her to find his daughter. She is almost certainly trapped on an unexplored Age without a Linking Book to come back, and almost all the Linking Books to that Age have been lost or destroyed, except for one which may still exist on another unexplored Age...

I'm sure people can come up with far more interesting plots than that (at least I hope so) but the point is that you need a plot of some sort. Big revelations about the D'ni are probably out, so the focus would be on small stories about individuals, but with worthwhile and satisfying goals to attain. "Ooh, look at that!" is good, but it'll only take you so far.

Sorry if all this has been discussed somewhere else, but I couldn't see it anywhere so I thought I'd better stick my oar in...
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Postby The Enlightened » Sat Apr 01, 2006 6:40 pm

One of the largest setbacks concerning this is the time and communication involved between folks like us and the cyanists. The reason is that our ages may conflict with the story they are have woven, and will weave. Though it will become much more important to establish some story tellers when our ages are written. But we really just aren't that far at the moment.
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Postby zib_redlektab » Sat Apr 01, 2006 6:41 pm

no actually, I've never heard a proposal like this before.

I think it's a great idea, but how would all the storylines be organized?

*Gets idea*

I can make a Guild of Historians subforum here, and we can post any excess storylines there. :P I'll just run it by the other admins.

edit: Well Galamay has a story, I figured other ages do too. :huh:

Perhaps a system of storyline evaluation would be in order, to make sure any stock stories comply with the canonical story?

status levels:
  • Propsal
  • Evaluating logicity(if thats a word)
  • Logical, evaluating canonicity
  • Approved and free
  • Approved and being used
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Postby Besharen » Sat Apr 01, 2006 9:29 pm

Umm, don't we already have the "Storyline" sub-forum, which basically is what Zander proposes?

EDIT: Oh, I think there may be confusion because the "Storyline" sub-forum is only visible to people who are working on the project, so others don't know about it. Maybe we could have a section of it that the general public can see and then another section for project members.
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Postby Starfyre » Sun Apr 02, 2006 7:42 am

The reason behind why the storyline forum isn't visible to everyone is a throwback to the days of when I started the DRS. And I agree with it still today. One there is the fact that any storyline is not affiliated with Cyan. And we didn't want our people pestered with such questions when they were out of character. Also too me if everyone could read the storyline forum and see what we had planned then people wouldn't follow along with it. It's like reading the last page of the book before you even start the book. You know whats going to happen before it happens. Where is the fun in that?

Now on the subject of the Guild of Historians. I am not against having people help write the storyline. Towards the end of the DRS we had people who helped in the position of Storytellers. They would set down the story.

Now on the subject of doing a storyline that doesn't conflict with Cyans. Well till Live returns I don't see that as a problem. And even then I still don't see a problem.

Now despite what I think should be done. This forum is run by a Council of 5. So far I am outvoted by 3 to 1. 1 member, Myridean, have yet to say anything on this topic in the admin forum or in this thread. So I would say the Guild of Historians now exist. Were going to have discuss though what they will do and all before I think we set up a forum for them. And then comes the who gets to be in this Guild?
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Postby Kirk » Sun Apr 02, 2006 8:53 am

I think it's not too hard to come up with storylines that do not interfere with Cyan. As long as you don't touch Atrus and his family, and the D'ni (history) you should be fine. Of course you want a link of some sort (even though you can opt to sneakily leave that out) but there are many points where and ways to link your storyline to the general storyline. Generally, you want to have a book that someone has written (presumably someone from the Guild of Writers) but there is no exact history on what books were written and by who so you can easily insert/extract your own thing there. If in the really remote case Cyan doesn't like you having thought up some random Writer you can always ask them to provide you with an existing one ;)

There were so many D'ni you can easily add one :P
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Postby Paradox » Sun Apr 02, 2006 9:08 am

You don't necessarily need a link to Aturs' story. There must be hundreds of D'ni survivors in Releeshahn! They all have their own unique stories as well ;)
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Postby zib_redlektab » Sun Apr 02, 2006 11:43 am

I think there is a bit of misunderstanding as to the proposal.

my understanding was that this guild would not be at all related to the New Tree project, but instead would simply be a storyline repository which anyone without a story could take from. I don't know if this is what the proposal was, but I like this idea.

about the topic of members. I think that there should be a few people (perhaps 2 mods there to be guildmasters, plus the council of 5) should run the guild and evaluate storylines. Then anyone who wants to write a storyline can simply post a new topic in the forum, without having to actually join the guild. New storylines can be posted in a Proposal forum, and be locked by a guildmaster. Then, when they are being evaluated, their topic name can be changed to Eval - storyline name, then once they are approved they can be moved to the repository forum and locked. Once they are taken by a writer, the topic title can be changed to storyline name - taken. There would also be a discussion forum for talking about storyline proposals.

yeah. :P
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Postby Kirk » Sun Apr 02, 2006 1:07 pm

[quote="Paradox"] You don't necessarily need a link to Aturs' story. There must be hundreds of D'ni survivors in Releeshahn! They all have their own unique stories as well ;)

That was exactly what I meant :)
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