06-22-2012, 02:00 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Godbot.
The Premise:
The Rules:
Rules format slightly pilfered from Ix and Sanzh.
What:
This is The Battle of the Century, the seventh battle in Season Intermission. It’s one of like a million Grand Battles, which are eight-player collaborative roleplays. Everyone can freely write for the other player characters, and every couple of months or so, the player whose writing or storytelling is the weakest is eliminated, their character dies, and the remaining characters are slingshotted off through time and space to another setting.
Despite appearances, this isn’t really focused on fighting, although the ultimate goal of your character will be being the last person standing. So, your goal isn’t necessarily having the most powerful character you can possibly think of – it would actually benefit you more to come up with an interesting character who you’ll be able to tell a bunch of different stories with, even if they’re comparatively weak.
The Battle of the Century is going to work a little differently from typical Grand Battles; as explained in brief in the introduction, instead of going to a different locale each time, you’ll be in the same setting a hundred years later. So, later rounds will be heavily influenced by the actions of your characters and the world-building you do. Try and keep that in mind when designing a character.
Rules:
Generally speaking there's a lot of rules and such you can read from other battles, but these are a few points I would like to emphasize.
Judging:
Writing ability is important, but what really matters is your storytelling. While your technical ability as a writer is as important as it is anywhere else, it's more important that you're able to create and develop interesting characters, interact with other player characters, carry a story, world-build, and things like that. Your level of activity and your interaction with other writers are decently important, too. Historically speaking, keeping to yourself and not interacting with anyone all round is pretty much a sure-fire way to get eliminated in Round One.
Applications:
Applications are open until the end of the month or so, or up to two weeks if I can negotiate for longer. Applications are not first-come, first-serve. Take your time and come up with a good character. Use the following application as a guide. Feel free to put the sections in different orders if someone else would need to understand your character's backstory to make any sense of their abilities or physical description. If you really have to, you can make a non-profile. Remember, besides proving that you can string words together into coherent sentences, you're trying to do two things: Convince me that your character is interesting enough that I'd want to see more of them, and provide a how-to guide for the other players who are ultimately going to be writing your character.
The Premise:
SpoilerShow
“We can bring him back,” announced Brian Rethrick, slamming a stack of papers on the sprawling round table in the middle of the Paragon’s vast conference room. The bustling room fell silent almost at once, leaving only the clicks and whirs of computer parts strewn across the floor and some chatter on the other end of a few phone calls. Representatives of the Council of First Contact Ambassadors (C.O.F.C.A.) wordlessly shut off their phones and ended calls on the computer screens built seamlessly into their obsidian table.
“We can bring back Envoy.”
“That’s impossible!” said no one, for once.
A few people turned from their Very Important Work for once to look up at the high-definition screens lining the walls and ceiling. A sleek crimson robot in an expensive business suit flew through a blackened sky, trailing brilliant flame behind it. Below it, lost souls wandered through an ancient city carved from stone while green acid boiled in channels dug through the earth by another world’s forgotten gods.
It had cost a hell of a lot of money to build a robot equipped with cameras so sophisticated that they could film themselves from a distance, and that wasn’t even impressive compared to the rest of it. The best of the best of the modern world’s technology, made out of materials that most countries could barely afford into existence, built by the brightest minds on the planet into a robot made out of irreplaceable alien “smart” metal from a space probe that the world’s governments assured their people had never crashed to Earth.
But generally speaking, most people who knew about it agreed that the most impressive part of New Voyager was that it was on a mission to make first contact with the Uae, an alien race that didn’t even know we existed. Building and launching Envoy would be the most important thing anyone had ever done, ever.
Until it had been stolen away by a man called The Charlatan to fight a robot, a demigod, and some people in a van.
“What are these?” asked Megasenator Whittenberg from his spot at what he liked to imagine was the head of the round table. He scooped up the stack of papers Brian Rethrick had slammed dramatically onto the table.
“Those are mine,” muttered Rethrick, taking them back. “I just needed to, you know…” he coughed. “Anyway, our researchers were studying what John Smith had called a temporal shift – the way Charlatan had kept us connected to Envoy even while it was years in our future. Our contacts in Round One managed to get it to work in the opposite direction – sending data from the future back to us – and from there, it was easy enough to figure out the mechanics behind it. Now all we’ve got to do is use our connection to Fort Ayers to anchor a teleporter to Envoy’s position in space and time.”
“Wait,” interrupted the Megasenator. “You can make teleporters?”
“We’ve known the theory behind them for a while. Fort Ayers had the technology to make them just lying around.”
“Wonderful!” cried Whittenberg, clapping Rethrick on the shoulder. COFCA erupted into applause. Shareholders jumped out of their seats, while others called their contacts back to laugh at them. Finally, everything was going to
---
“OH MY GOD!” screamed Brian Rethrick through his radiation suit as he and another technician hastily took cover behind a control panel. On the far side of the test chamber, a raging nova of purple light twisted and swirled inside of a towering machine like a giant metal ribcage bristling with cables. Occasionally, the vortex of light belched out a silhouette and threw it against the nearest wall. “What did you do?” Rethrick cried, grabbing the nearest technician, but the roar of the machine drowned him out.
A man across the room pulled a laptop haphazardly down to the floor and began frantically typing on it. “It’s a faulty electromagnetic particle node! I’ve seen this before!” he yelled as the metal scaffolding around the portal twisted and began to cave in. “If I can reroute the power from the main flux coupling to the Paragon’s magnetonic containment accelerator, I should be able to-”
“You’re not making sense!” cried the woman next to him, grabbing him by his radiation suit and shaking him away from the computer.
“I don’t know what to do!” he wailed, bursting into tears.
The emergency sprinklers flicked on, and the red phone on the wall started ringing off its hook. Deciding the a phone call couldn’t possibly make the situation any worse, Rethrick climbed to his feet, yanked off the hood of his protective suit, and picked up the phone. “WHAT,” he demanded. “WHAT THE FU-”
Something clicked, and with a dull, resonating hum, everything around him burst into static, briefly flicked through various color patterns, and settled on the room he’d been standing in, frozen in time. “Please stand by,” said the voice on the other end, and started playing a smooth jazz cover of 4’33”.
“Hello, Brian,” said a man behind him. Rethrick whirled around, lifted the phone to his ear, lowered it, looked at the receiver, raised the phone to his ear again, and muttered “hello” to the man wearing a prison uniform like a business suit, tie and fancy dress shirt and all.
LAST THING STANDING and its various spinoffs were going along swimmingly. Everyone wanted to watch eight men-and-such fight to the death – so much, in fact, that he could basically just broadcast the same show over and over, a million variations on a single premise, and no one was bothered by it. Ratings were higher than ever – and when things started going wrong, they just climbed even higher. It was like reality TV without the script!
And the best part was, no one had ever seen anything like it before.
There was just one problem – in order to gather up a ragtag team of gods who were crazy enough to actually run these things, he had to actually interact with crazy gods. He’d dealt with the embodiment of entropy in a crappy person suit, the head of the multiversal mafia, which was apparently a thing, and worst of all, crazy bitches who were smarter than he was – and he’d been threatened, beaten, and thrown in prison, which, oddly enough, came almost entirely courtesy of the latter.
Actually, maybe it wasn’t that odd.
Anyway, heading a season of Grand Battles sucked almost as much as trying to run a media empire from prison with no budget, no control over his own battle, and technically, no media empire. He was way behind schedule – he still had two battles to start, and in the nine-tenths of the multiverse that still experienced linear time, the season was nearly over.
So when a bunch of stupid humans from some backwater universe accidentally gave him everything he needed to start a seventh one, he jumped on the opportunity like a chance to say he’s not here to make friends.
“And all I need you to do,” he said, “is find a place to put it and film it with those fancy cameras of yours.”
“And you’ll get rid of these – this – ” Rethrick waved his arms helplessly. Out of the corner of his eye, silhouettes kept appearing in the vortex of light, even while time was frozen.
“Yeah, that quantum crane machine you and your men butchered, and everyone it spits out. They’re pretty important.”
Rethrick furrowed his brow. “But isn’t that why we’re here in the first place? This sounds just like the Petty Squab-”
“What? No, no,” Broadcaster quickly interjected, raising his hands defensively. “It’s totally different.”
“No, this works!” said Rethrick, leaning on a lab tech who was frozen in time and basically ignoring the Broadcaster. “We can use this to study how civilizations will react to Envoy and the others appearing out of nowhere. We could even send our people back to the same setting every time!”
“You can’t just - ” the Broadcaster pinched the bridge of his nose. Amateurs. “No one will watch that. Can’t you find some way to add variety?”
“We could… have different people every time.”
“People like patterns, Brian.”
“Well… we could make each round ten years in the future.”
“More.”
“Fifty?”
“Double that.”
“A hundred.”
“Perfect!” exclaimed Broadcaster. “We’ll call it
Rethrick groaned darkly, like the pun had caused him actual physical pain. “All right, I walked into that. So, can we change it to –”
“Nope, too late,” interrupted the Broadcaster, and Rethrick snapped back to reality. Broadcaster was gone, the machine disappeared in a flurry of light, and a stack of papers had neatly appeared in his hand where the phone had been.
He rubbed his temples and took a deep breath. Seemed like it was too late to back out now. As the technicians swarmed him and demanded answers, he peeled back the cover and started reading the entries…
“We can bring back Envoy.”
“That’s impossible!” said no one, for once.
A few people turned from their Very Important Work for once to look up at the high-definition screens lining the walls and ceiling. A sleek crimson robot in an expensive business suit flew through a blackened sky, trailing brilliant flame behind it. Below it, lost souls wandered through an ancient city carved from stone while green acid boiled in channels dug through the earth by another world’s forgotten gods.
It had cost a hell of a lot of money to build a robot equipped with cameras so sophisticated that they could film themselves from a distance, and that wasn’t even impressive compared to the rest of it. The best of the best of the modern world’s technology, made out of materials that most countries could barely afford into existence, built by the brightest minds on the planet into a robot made out of irreplaceable alien “smart” metal from a space probe that the world’s governments assured their people had never crashed to Earth.
But generally speaking, most people who knew about it agreed that the most impressive part of New Voyager was that it was on a mission to make first contact with the Uae, an alien race that didn’t even know we existed. Building and launching Envoy would be the most important thing anyone had ever done, ever.
Until it had been stolen away by a man called The Charlatan to fight a robot, a demigod, and some people in a van.
“What are these?” asked Megasenator Whittenberg from his spot at what he liked to imagine was the head of the round table. He scooped up the stack of papers Brian Rethrick had slammed dramatically onto the table.
“Those are mine,” muttered Rethrick, taking them back. “I just needed to, you know…” he coughed. “Anyway, our researchers were studying what John Smith had called a temporal shift – the way Charlatan had kept us connected to Envoy even while it was years in our future. Our contacts in Round One managed to get it to work in the opposite direction – sending data from the future back to us – and from there, it was easy enough to figure out the mechanics behind it. Now all we’ve got to do is use our connection to Fort Ayers to anchor a teleporter to Envoy’s position in space and time.”
“Wait,” interrupted the Megasenator. “You can make teleporters?”
“We’ve known the theory behind them for a while. Fort Ayers had the technology to make them just lying around.”
“Wonderful!” cried Whittenberg, clapping Rethrick on the shoulder. COFCA erupted into applause. Shareholders jumped out of their seats, while others called their contacts back to laugh at them. Finally, everything was going to
---
“OH MY GOD!” screamed Brian Rethrick through his radiation suit as he and another technician hastily took cover behind a control panel. On the far side of the test chamber, a raging nova of purple light twisted and swirled inside of a towering machine like a giant metal ribcage bristling with cables. Occasionally, the vortex of light belched out a silhouette and threw it against the nearest wall. “What did you do?” Rethrick cried, grabbing the nearest technician, but the roar of the machine drowned him out.
A man across the room pulled a laptop haphazardly down to the floor and began frantically typing on it. “It’s a faulty electromagnetic particle node! I’ve seen this before!” he yelled as the metal scaffolding around the portal twisted and began to cave in. “If I can reroute the power from the main flux coupling to the Paragon’s magnetonic containment accelerator, I should be able to-”
“You’re not making sense!” cried the woman next to him, grabbing him by his radiation suit and shaking him away from the computer.
“I don’t know what to do!” he wailed, bursting into tears.
The emergency sprinklers flicked on, and the red phone on the wall started ringing off its hook. Deciding the a phone call couldn’t possibly make the situation any worse, Rethrick climbed to his feet, yanked off the hood of his protective suit, and picked up the phone. “WHAT,” he demanded. “WHAT THE FU-”
Something clicked, and with a dull, resonating hum, everything around him burst into static, briefly flicked through various color patterns, and settled on the room he’d been standing in, frozen in time. “Please stand by,” said the voice on the other end, and started playing a smooth jazz cover of 4’33”.
“Hello, Brian,” said a man behind him. Rethrick whirled around, lifted the phone to his ear, lowered it, looked at the receiver, raised the phone to his ear again, and muttered “hello” to the man wearing a prison uniform like a business suit, tie and fancy dress shirt and all.
LAST THING STANDING and its various spinoffs were going along swimmingly. Everyone wanted to watch eight men-and-such fight to the death – so much, in fact, that he could basically just broadcast the same show over and over, a million variations on a single premise, and no one was bothered by it. Ratings were higher than ever – and when things started going wrong, they just climbed even higher. It was like reality TV without the script!
And the best part was, no one had ever seen anything like it before.
There was just one problem – in order to gather up a ragtag team of gods who were crazy enough to actually run these things, he had to actually interact with crazy gods. He’d dealt with the embodiment of entropy in a crappy person suit, the head of the multiversal mafia, which was apparently a thing, and worst of all, crazy bitches who were smarter than he was – and he’d been threatened, beaten, and thrown in prison, which, oddly enough, came almost entirely courtesy of the latter.
Actually, maybe it wasn’t that odd.
Anyway, heading a season of Grand Battles sucked almost as much as trying to run a media empire from prison with no budget, no control over his own battle, and technically, no media empire. He was way behind schedule – he still had two battles to start, and in the nine-tenths of the multiverse that still experienced linear time, the season was nearly over.
So when a bunch of stupid humans from some backwater universe accidentally gave him everything he needed to start a seventh one, he jumped on the opportunity like a chance to say he’s not here to make friends.
“And all I need you to do,” he said, “is find a place to put it and film it with those fancy cameras of yours.”
“And you’ll get rid of these – this – ” Rethrick waved his arms helplessly. Out of the corner of his eye, silhouettes kept appearing in the vortex of light, even while time was frozen.
“Yeah, that quantum crane machine you and your men butchered, and everyone it spits out. They’re pretty important.”
Rethrick furrowed his brow. “But isn’t that why we’re here in the first place? This sounds just like the Petty Squab-”
“What? No, no,” Broadcaster quickly interjected, raising his hands defensively. “It’s totally different.”
“No, this works!” said Rethrick, leaning on a lab tech who was frozen in time and basically ignoring the Broadcaster. “We can use this to study how civilizations will react to Envoy and the others appearing out of nowhere. We could even send our people back to the same setting every time!”
“You can’t just - ” the Broadcaster pinched the bridge of his nose. Amateurs. “No one will watch that. Can’t you find some way to add variety?”
“We could… have different people every time.”
“People like patterns, Brian.”
“Well… we could make each round ten years in the future.”
“More.”
“Fifty?”
“Double that.”
“A hundred.”
“Perfect!” exclaimed Broadcaster. “We’ll call it
The BATTLE<font size="6"> of the CENTURY!
</font>Rethrick groaned darkly, like the pun had caused him actual physical pain. “All right, I walked into that. So, can we change it to –”
“Nope, too late,” interrupted the Broadcaster, and Rethrick snapped back to reality. Broadcaster was gone, the machine disappeared in a flurry of light, and a stack of papers had neatly appeared in his hand where the phone had been.
He rubbed his temples and took a deep breath. Seemed like it was too late to back out now. As the technicians swarmed him and demanded answers, he peeled back the cover and started reading the entries…
The Rules:
Rules format slightly pilfered from Ix and Sanzh.
What:
This is The Battle of the Century, the seventh battle in Season Intermission. It’s one of like a million Grand Battles, which are eight-player collaborative roleplays. Everyone can freely write for the other player characters, and every couple of months or so, the player whose writing or storytelling is the weakest is eliminated, their character dies, and the remaining characters are slingshotted off through time and space to another setting.
Despite appearances, this isn’t really focused on fighting, although the ultimate goal of your character will be being the last person standing. So, your goal isn’t necessarily having the most powerful character you can possibly think of – it would actually benefit you more to come up with an interesting character who you’ll be able to tell a bunch of different stories with, even if they’re comparatively weak.
The Battle of the Century is going to work a little differently from typical Grand Battles; as explained in brief in the introduction, instead of going to a different locale each time, you’ll be in the same setting a hundred years later. So, later rounds will be heavily influenced by the actions of your characters and the world-building you do. Try and keep that in mind when designing a character.
Rules:
Generally speaking there's a lot of rules and such you can read from other battles, but these are a few points I would like to emphasize.
- If you plan on posting something that will affect important characters or the plans of other writers - which will likely be most of your posts – you’ll probably want to make a post ahead of time that just says “reserve.” That way, you won’t have to worry about other players making posts with the characters you’re working with, and the other players won’t have to worry about you doing the same. If you do post a reserve, try to follow up on it as soon as possible. Three days is fine, a week is stretching it.
- Try to keep in contact. Co-operation is pretty essential for a collaborative endeavor like Grand Battles, so don't try to go without interacting with others. You will be expected to write for characters other than your own, and clarifying characterization with other authors helps with that a bit. Don't inflict major injuries or character changes on others without asking, don't plan things out too much that other authors are constricted, and for what plans others set in place don't deliberately go out to ruin them. (That doesn't mean you can't try to get in other people's ways, though.) There's an IRC channel for Grand Battle stuff (#grandbattle at irc.esper.net). Using it isn't necessary, but it does help. There might be a planning page on GoogleDocs at some point.
- Don't be a jerk. This includes killing or maiming other characters when you aren't supposed to (which is most of the time), dominating the plot at the expense of others, and mis-characterization of other contestants—stuff like that. A corollary to this is that should you be having problems - with other authors, their writing, the round location, your character and how they aren't fun to write for anymore, or anything like that - you shouldn't hesitate to let me know. Don't feel like you can't speak up. You have just as much of a right to be here as the other players.
Judging:
Writing ability is important, but what really matters is your storytelling. While your technical ability as a writer is as important as it is anywhere else, it's more important that you're able to create and develop interesting characters, interact with other player characters, carry a story, world-build, and things like that. Your level of activity and your interaction with other writers are decently important, too. Historically speaking, keeping to yourself and not interacting with anyone all round is pretty much a sure-fire way to get eliminated in Round One.
Applications:
Applications are open until the end of the month or so, or up to two weeks if I can negotiate for longer. Applications are not first-come, first-serve. Take your time and come up with a good character. Use the following application as a guide. Feel free to put the sections in different orders if someone else would need to understand your character's backstory to make any sense of their abilities or physical description. If you really have to, you can make a non-profile. Remember, besides proving that you can string words together into coherent sentences, you're trying to do two things: Convince me that your character is interesting enough that I'd want to see more of them, and provide a how-to guide for the other players who are ultimately going to be writing your character.
Quote:Username: Your username. Sort of a relic of an older time but still nice to have.Character Roster:
Name: Your character’s name.
Sex: Male, female, or none. Or both, if you want to show off.
Race: Human, ghost, sentient plant, or your very own incredibly specific type of alien. Don’t bother with an intricate description – save it for the description section.
Color: A text color for your character. Backgrounds are allowed, but you’ll probably regret deciding to use them once you meet up with another character and start alternating between text colors every couple of lines. Don’t pick #000000 or white on black, since those are the grandmasters’ colors.
Description: Both the character’s physical appearance and their personality. Remember, other players are going to glance over this section of your profile in particular to get a sense of your character before writing for them, so it’s probably in your best interests to keep this down to a couple of paragraphs.
Items/Abilities: Your character’s abilities, which extends to skills they have, crazy supernatural powers, and whatever weird things their species might be able to do. Also extends to the things that your character just so happened to have on them when they got pulled out of space and time.
Biography: Your character’s backstory. Occasionally, people will substitute this for a short scene featuring their character, which is okay, but only so long as that scene conveys something about their past. This is another part of your profile that other players are going to need to reference. Don’t write a massive essay, but, again, you might want to write a couple of paragraphs to help out the other players.
Other: An optional section. If you wrote an actual backstory but you still want to write that short scene featuring your character, go ahead and put it here. Otherwise, include your character’s theme song.
Actually, do that anyway.
- Pinary as Michael "Mickey" McMillan
- Lord Paradise as Heironymous Fisher
- Sanzh as Csillag
- Ixcaliber as President Vladimir Roth
- TimeothyHour as A butterfly
- Anthano Zasalla as Oth
- XX as The Ragazza Ridente
- Snowyowl as Quino