Adventurer's Guild [AGSA] Adventurer's Guild Sky Archipelago - OOC Room

ArcadiaBlade

I'm a Lazy Writer, So What?
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Okay. Now that I downed a cup of coffee which should last me a day without sleeping, I might start my writing with gusto. If I don't post a chap or write any post, either the coffee ran out of gas or I'm too busy watching minecraft videos.
 

The_Everdistant_Utopia

Mapmaker | Writer | Lorekeeper
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*makes a custom quest*
*realises that it might be better if the fulfiller of the custom quest was an NPC*
Alright, time to do my own custom quest.
 

AliceShiki

Magical Girl of Love and Justice
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Okay. Now that I downed a cup of coffee which should last me a day without sleeping, I might start my writing with gusto. If I don't post a chap or write any post, either the coffee ran out of gas or I'm too busy watching minecraft videos.
You should sleep properly! >.<
So the quests that have their location set as Sky Archipelago, does that mean it can be anywhere and it's up to the player to choose?
Pretty much! ^^)/
 

Way

Well-known member
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@ohko
An important question that came up from a post by @Tessa_Renalds:

What range do the butterflies have in terms of connection to ButterflyCh? Because if they work like unlimited range satellite phones, communications are a bit too powerful.

Hell, even by modern standards communications with unlimited range and no need for infrastructure, which is near-ubiquitous (since every adventurer gets a butterfly) is revolutionary. Some of them are changes that work well in giving the society and culture of the Archipelago more modern characteristics, which isn't necessarily bad, though others could impact the RP experience.

It's too large a topic to broach in its entirety, so here is an extreme but relevant example to illustrate this point: Why even explore when you can send butterflies as drones?

I would suggest that some sort of infrastructure be needed to maintain a connection to ButterflyCh, much like telephone lines. Within the archipelago, the connection would be great, but in the new world messaging should be unreliable at best. There should also be known ways to disrupt the connection, even within the archipelago, so in times of danger, intel could be unreliable if connections have been jammed or even taken down.

Hell, we can apply that on the archipelago right now- imagine if communications went dark in some of the outer islands, forcing adventurers to go there manually and check on what has happened with the...I don't know, the...Nexus Flowers?

Perhaps a dimensionally-induced quake ripped apart the town, a hostile being was awakened/sent there by the Worldshift and jammed connections to maintain secrecy for whatever nefarious plot they have, and so on.

Also, perhaps have ButterflyCh be a more recent innovation? Mind you, the internet itself hasn't existed for very long, yet it has practically dictated society and culture the moment it started spreading. Any society that has had ButterflyCh (which again is very common since every adventurer gets one) for more than a brief period of time would have lightspeed innovation speed with intellectuals pooling together in forums, and a very well-educated populace due to the flow of information. Entertainment would form a strong industry as bards reach out to massive audiences from the comforts of their radios-masquerading-as-buttleflies, who gain avarious apetites for quality and quantity entertainment the way modern media encourages...

In short, radios cause renaissances. Thank you for attending my ted talk.

Jokes aside, sorry that this became a rant halfway, but this was criminally underaddressed. Even after this rant there is a lot I have not addressed, like politics and warfare- that's how deep this goes.

I like it, though- a society guaranteed to be on the fast track of a renaissance is great fun, whatnot with the societal and cultural upheaval. I'm already thinking about means of self-education facilitated by butterflyCh (though people with a monopoly over their secrets would be a fierce opponent) and the craze that would happen once someone starts a podcast.
 

ArcadiaBlade

I'm a Lazy Writer, So What?
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You should sleep properly! >.<
I'll be honest with you. Coffee is too potent for me to sleep as even though I could sleep at anytime. Its too strong that I could still be awake for a day and don't feel tired at all. Which is kinda why I rarely drink coffee if I want to procrastinate but because I need one to stay awake for today, I just downed one just now.
 

ohko

tilda~ me~ home~ ♪
Joined
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@ohko
An important question that came up from a post by @Tessa_Renalds:

What range do the butterflies have in terms of connection to ButterflyCh? Because if they work like unlimited range satellite phones, communications are a bit too powerful.

Hell, even by modern standards communications with unlimited range and no need for infrastructure, which is near-ubiquitous (since every adventurer gets a butterfly) is revolutionary. Some of them are changes that work well in giving the society and culture of the Archipelago more modern characteristics, which isn't necessarily bad, though others could impact the RP experience.

It's too large a topic to broach in its entirety, so here is an extreme but relevant example to illustrate this point: Why even explore when you can send butterflies as drones?

I would suggest that some sort of infrastructure be needed to maintain a connection to ButterflyCh, much like telephone lines. Within the archipelago, the connection would be great, but in the new world messaging should be unreliable at best. There should also be known ways to disrupt the connection, even within the archipelago, so in times of danger, intel could be unreliable if connections have been jammed or even taken down.

Hell, we can apply that on the archipelago right now- imagine if communications went dark in some of the outer islands, forcing adventurers to go there manually and check on what has happened with the...I don't know, the...Nexus Flowers?

Perhaps a dimensionally-induced quake ripped apart the town, a hostile being was awakened/sent there by the Worldshift and jammed connections to maintain secrecy for whatever nefarious plot they have, and so on.

Also, perhaps have ButterflyCh be a more recent innovation? Mind you, the internet itself hasn't existed for very long, yet it has practically dictated society and culture the moment it started spreading. Any society that has had ButterflyCh (which again is very common since every adventurer gets one) for more than a brief period of time would have lightspeed innovation speed with intellectuals pooling together in forums, and a very well-educated populace due to the flow of information. Entertainment would form a strong industry as bards reach out to massive audiences from the comforts of their radios-masquerading-as-buttleflies, who gain avarious apetites for quality and quantity entertainment the way modern media encourages...

In short, radios cause renaissances. Thank you for attending my ted talk.

Jokes aside, sorry that this became a rant halfway, but this was criminally underaddressed. Even after this rant there is a lot I have not addressed, like politics and warfare- that's how deep this goes.

I like it, though- a society guaranteed to be on the fast track of a renaissance is great fun, whatnot with the societal and cultural upheaval. I'm already thinking about means of self-education facilitated by butterflyCh (though people with a monopoly over their secrets would be a fierce opponent) and the craze that would happen once someone starts a podcast.
Sure! Stick it in a quest report somewhere and we can make it canon.

I like the idea of "butterflies have a notoriously poor connection" and the further out you get, the less reliable it becomes and gets increasingly garbled. Perhaps 50% of the things that you say in the butterfly simply doesn't transmit (EDIT: or maybe it sometimes transmits at unpredictable speeds, ranging from minutes to days for a message to transmit, so not guaranteed to be real-time), and so essentially there's a lot of dropped packets and a lot of things that each individual might have missed. I'm also fascinated by the idea that butterflies <-> dreams, and perhaps inaccurate things get spewed by butterflies on occasion. For instance, the butterfly may occasionally "mistranslate" red as blue, and butterflies are known to occasionally spew gibberish words/phrases even when no one is talking into them.

Example:
  • Person A (speaking into their butterfly) says: "Hello, dear friend. Isn't the weather absolutely gorgeous today?"
  • Person B (listening to their butterfly) might hear: "Good morning my friend. Is today's weather particularly good?"

In other words, it's similar, but not perfectly identical!

From a lore perspective, wouldn't it be creepy if butterflies really were dead spirits (like @Bochi mentioned), and frankly everyone was just talking through ghosts... :blob_blank:

Anyways! I'm okay with whichever direction you want to take it!

I'm not as fond of clear cut mechanical explanations for butterflies, in part because this would definitively put them in the "machine" category (which introduces the social/political issues you mentioned if they are as reliable as computers). Personally, I sort of favor the idea that everyone's butterfly can be different (meaning that manifests in different ways and doesn't have strict rules), but simultaneously functions as erratically and inconsistently as a form of supernatural phenomena.

In computer science terms, I guess I'm proposing that butterflies could be non-deterministic. Sometimes, a butterfly might say 1+1=2, but on another day it might say 1+1=14, meaning you can't rely on a butterfly to always produce the same output with a given input, which would drastically limit their functional utility.

I had also headcanoned that the butterflies were strictly connected to the Queen in some unique way, so it wouldn't be easy to replicate. Furthermore, for some reason only guild members have them (but not all the citizens of the Archipelago), meaning they are most likely quantity limited. Perhaps the Queen can only maintain a certain number of connections, or maybe the butterflies really are dead souls, and the guild only has a limited number to give out.
 
Last edited:

AliceShiki

Magical Girl of Love and Justice
Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
3,530
Points
183
@ohko
An important question that came up from a post by @Tessa_Renalds:

What range do the butterflies have in terms of connection to ButterflyCh? Because if they work like unlimited range satellite phones, communications are a bit too powerful.

Hell, even by modern standards communications with unlimited range and no need for infrastructure, which is near-ubiquitous (since every adventurer gets a butterfly) is revolutionary. Some of them are changes that work well in giving the society and culture of the Archipelago more modern characteristics, which isn't necessarily bad, though others could impact the RP experience.

It's too large a topic to broach in its entirety, so here is an extreme but relevant example to illustrate this point: Why even explore when you can send butterflies as drones?

I would suggest that some sort of infrastructure be needed to maintain a connection to ButterflyCh, much like telephone lines. Within the archipelago, the connection would be great, but in the new world messaging should be unreliable at best. There should also be known ways to disrupt the connection, even within the archipelago, so in times of danger, intel could be unreliable if connections have been jammed or even taken down.

Hell, we can apply that on the archipelago right now- imagine if communications went dark in some of the outer islands, forcing adventurers to go there manually and check on what has happened with the...I don't know, the...Nexus Flowers?

Perhaps a dimensionally-induced quake ripped apart the town, a hostile being was awakened/sent there by the Worldshift and jammed connections to maintain secrecy for whatever nefarious plot they have, and so on.

Also, perhaps have ButterflyCh be a more recent innovation? Mind you, the internet itself hasn't existed for very long, yet it has practically dictated society and culture the moment it started spreading. Any society that has had ButterflyCh (which again is very common since every adventurer gets one) for more than a brief period of time would have lightspeed innovation speed with intellectuals pooling together in forums, and a very well-educated populace due to the flow of information. Entertainment would form a strong industry as bards reach out to massive audiences from the comforts of their radios-masquerading-as-buttleflies, who gain avarious apetites for quality and quantity entertainment the way modern media encourages...

In short, radios cause renaissances. Thank you for attending my ted talk.

Jokes aside, sorry that this became a rant halfway, but this was criminally underaddressed. Even after this rant there is a lot I have not addressed, like politics and warfare- that's how deep this goes.

I like it, though- a society guaranteed to be on the fast track of a renaissance is great fun, whatnot with the societal and cultural upheaval. I'm already thinking about means of self-education facilitated by butterflyCh (though people with a monopoly over their secrets would be a fierce opponent) and the craze that would happen once someone starts a podcast.
You're overthinking it, geez... >.>

The butterflies can't be used as drones because they can't see AFAIK... Like... Just communication devices.

And well, they depend on Queen's Magic and stuff, so it's probably only widespread between adventurers, not everyone in the world.

And lastly... Remember that you shouldn't make major structural changes to the game, so no sudden renaissance... >.>

*feels like this post is kinda pointless now that Ohko already replied, but figured I'd give my 2 cents anyways*
 

ArcadiaBlade

I'm a Lazy Writer, So What?
Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
880
Points
133
Sure! Stick it in a quest report somewhere and we can make it canon.

I like the idea of "butterflies have a notoriously poor connection" and the further out you get, the less reliable it becomes and gets increasingly garbled. Perhaps 50% of the things that you say in the butterfly simply doesn't transmit (EDIT: or maybe it sometimes transmits at unpredictable speeds, ranging from minutes to days for a message to transmit, so not guaranteed to be real-time), and so essentially there's a lot of dropped packets and a lot of things that each individual might have missed. I'm also fascinated by the idea that butterflies <-> dreams, and perhaps inaccurate things get spewed by butterflies on occasion. For instance, the butterfly may occasionally "mistranslate" red as blue, and butterflies are known to occasionally spew gibberish words/phrases even when no one is talking into them.

Example:
  • Person A (speaking into their butterfly) says: "Hello, dear friend. Isn't the weather absolutely gorgeous today?"
  • Person B (listening to their butterfly) might hear: "Good morning my friend. Is today's weather particularly good?"

In other words, it's similar, but not perfectly identical!

From a lore perspective, wouldn't it be creepy if butterflies really were dead spirits (like @Bochi mentioned), and frankly everyone was just talking through ghosts... :blob_blank:

Anyways! I'm okay with whichever direction you want to take it!

I'm not as fond of clear cut mechanical explanations for butterflies, in part because this would definitively put them in the "machine" category (which introduces the social/political issues you mentioned if they are as reliable as computers). Personally, I sort of favor the idea that everyone's butterfly can be different (meaning that manifests in different ways and doesn't have strict rules), but simultaneously functions as erratically and inconsistently as a form of supernatural phenomena.

In computer science terms, I guess I'm proposing that butterflies could be non-deterministic. Sometimes, a butterfly might say 1+1=2, but on another day it might say 1+1=14, meaning you can't rely on a butterfly to always produce the same output with a given input, which would drastically limit their functional utility.

I had also headcanoned that the butterflies were strictly connected to the Queen in some unique way, so it wouldn't be easy to replicate. Furthermore, for some reason only guild members have them (but not all the citizens of the Archipelago), meaning they are most likely quantity limited. Perhaps the Queen can only maintain a certain number of connections, or maybe the butterflies really are dead souls, and the guild only has a limited number to give out.
My take since I am an inventor character is that the butterflies act like a colony and each butterfly connects to a certain queen in each location. The farther you are to the queen, the harder the communication is transmitted and if you far enough, you'll likely get disconnected to the queen and unable to communicate with others.

On the pic, I think we can base the connection of the butterfly and the queen by differentiate them based on how they light up. The more brighter the butterfly is, the stronger connection it has with a queen butterfly(or in your case, the queen) and each butterfly is connected through a certain channel which she can access and able to transmit the message through a connection of some sorts. I mean it kinda works like a phone line that needs to connect to something and able to communicate with others but since the ch. is somehow global, we can based it around that in every guild, there's a queen in each guild branches that able to connect the members through it.

It could also make a quest that we could maybe create a new connection with a
new city simpler by bringing a queen butterfly(or a device that amplifies the queen's signal on the butterflies if you want) if we want to make a new connection to other places.

This is only my take though and its fine to ignore it. I also got some ideas but depending on how an inventor shouldn't revolutionize the world, I'll keep my limits to this for now.
 

ohko

tilda~ me~ home~ ♪
Joined
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Messages
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My take since I am an inventor character is that the butterflies act like a colony and each butterfly connects to a certain queen in each location. The farther you are to the queen, the harder the communication is transmitted and if you far enough, you'll likely get disconnected to the queen and unable to communicate with others.

On the pic, I think we can base the connection of the butterfly and the queen by differentiate them based on how they light up. The more brighter the butterfly is, the stronger connection it has with a queen butterfly(or in your case, the queen) and each butterfly is connected through a certain channel which she can access and able to transmit the message through a connection of some sorts. I mean it kinda works like a phone line that needs to connect to something and able to communicate with others but since the ch. is somehow global, we can based it around that in every guild, there's a queen in each guild branches that able to connect the members through it.

It could also make a quest that we could maybe create a new connection with a
new city simpler by bringing a queen butterfly(or a device that amplifies the queen's signal on the butterflies if you want) if we want to make a new connection to other places.

This is only my take though and its fine to ignore it. I also got some ideas but depending on how an inventor shouldn't revolutionize the world, I'll keep my limits to this for now.
I think this idea is cool too!

Part this depends on how widespread you want the butterflies to be. Would many of the new places in the world also use butterflies? Personally, I would be inclined to say that every civilization might have its own preferred communication method. Many different systems of magic co-exist in this universe (so there's no "superior" magic system), which intrinsically makes the setting complicated -- and each method might have its advantages and disadvantages.

I think lore wise, there should probably be a reasonable explanation why not everyone on the Archipelago has a butterfly. Only adventurers who are part of the guild have one (civilians aren't given one), so my natural inference would be that there's only a limited number of butterflies that Sky Archipelago can employ at a time.
 
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