Emeras: Downtime

Between active patrols, we assume that the player characters will not be sitting around idly waiting for the next thing to happen, but will instead be doing whatever they can to support the expedition’s goal of establishing and running the Baron’s mining franchise on Emeras Isle. As such, we will split the time between games into downtime periods during which we invite you to tell us in what manner your character is offering their support.

Activities

In each downtime period,you will be able to specify one activity which your character is focusing on.

There are a set of standard options that are likely to be available every time, these are:

• Explore – no one is sure exactly where the dust comes from, we just know that it accumulates in the central bowl of the island and gathering in one area for a long period soon depletes its productivity. Explorers will be needed to seek out new areas to harvest, to investigate where the dust is ultimately coming from and to probe the other mysteries of the island.
• Guard – there are known to be dangerous creatures inhabiting the woods and mountains of Emeras Isle. Past expeditions have lost members to these and other hazards, or simply lost them in the dark and wild places. Whilst camps provide some measure of security, volunteers are always needed to stand sentry, guard against attack on the workforce and ensure that supplies make it through to where they’re needed
• Mine/ Labour – strong backs are every bit as important to the mission as keen eyes and sharp swords. Your character spends their week gathering dust (not like that), building, digging or mending things around camp.

Each of these activities will be coordinated by one of the expedition command team. You can choose to either make your character available to them to send where they wish, make a recommendation to them as to where effort should be directed (if you can provide a good reason, they might provide you with some support if it’s available) or choose to go to a certain location on your own regardless of whether anyone else goes with you

There will also be some special options that come and go from time to time in response to events on a game or things previously discovered in downtime.

Any of the above will not completely monopolise a character’s time. each week a character carrying out one of these actions will have 2 rest days, increasing to 3 if they don’t go on patrol (you don’t play them on a game) in which to carry out personal projects that require IC time (creating or improving holy symbols and mystic talismans, enchanting and consecrating items, researching or re-writing rituals…) if you want to do something that takes more time than this, choose other, below.

Other – anything else that it might cross your character’s mind to attempt to do. Obviously our time to deal with individual special requests is limited, so in general, anything but the simplest actions are more likely to be dealt with if you submit them in the longer downtime slots and not at the last possible moment. You are also more likely to get good outcomes the more characters you involve. This is because IC, risky ventures are better undertaken with support and assistance and OOC we would like to avoid spending disproportionate amounts of time on a few players

Examples of things you might want to use this option for are:

• Tracking down and talking to a specific NPC
• Researching something specific
• Trading – some basic equipment is available from stores or the supply ships that visit the island, anything else will require a boat trip to the mainland.
• Training – there are enough diverse people on the island that you can pick up most of the “common knowledge” skills. For anything that requires specific guild training, you must make a visit to the mainland

Default Actions

If you don’t think you’ll find time each week to tell us what you want your character to do, or just as insurance against Real Life™ getting in your way at some point, we are encouraging everyone to set a default action for their character. This will be the thing that, unless you tell us otherwise, we will assume your character is doing in any given downtime period. you don’t have to commit now for the whole year, we will be happy for you to change your default action at any time (although if you miss a submission deadline, it might not kick in until next time)

Submissions/ Results

Depending on the spacing between games and other things which we are expecting to require our attention in Real Life™some of the downtime periods arg going to be 1 week long and some are going to be 2. The schedule for when the downtimes should be in and when the results will be produced is below.

As most of the default options are collaborative efforts and we assume that the camps are small enough that what people are up to will be fairly obvious, downtime results will be announced by way of a scenery post put on the Emeras Board. There may be an exception if you specifically state that your character is trying to be secretive and you would like your results emailed. In this case the scenery post might include what others can see of your activities but not the actual results. if you’re not being secretive, it will be assumed that via the medium of camp gossip everyone know what you’ve been up to.