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Because the playable races usually allow for a broad stroke of variation from the norm, I think it's safe to say established players would not necessarily need to change or discard their background. So long as player and admin tolerance continue that trend then I think the system works just fine. In truth, there's very little stopping players from role-playing how they wish to begin with. Whether they're embraced by the communuty at large though? That's part of the journey and fun in crafting a communal story.
Where we start to disagree I think is with the responsibility of the game. Unless the creators have expressed this purpose, and I don't believe they have, it's not Aetolia's job to try and curb real-life beliefs. Aetolia is an entertainment platform where we've come to craft the stories of people in the Midnight Age of the world IRE's built for us. I think sometimes too many players forget why they're here. But that's a whole different can of worms.
It's the difference between a help file saying:
"Horkval are matriachal and live in a strict caste system"
and saying:
"The Horkval of the Ulangi Hive (yes, I know this doesn't exist anymore) are stictly matriachal and follow a rigid caste system"
One put defining limits on anyone who plays that race, saying they have to be this way if they want to fit in with the lore of the world, the other gives players a starting off point for racial roleplay but doesn't define a cultural aspect as a genetic hardline.
@Jaeger i'd say that's pretty accurate - in fact, i considered giving that exact example. it's v much the difference between "this is how it is" and "here's a possibility, others can or do exist".
@Vyxsis - I hear you. Games don't exist in a vacuum and whatever happens, I'd like us to be careful about playing into that kind of racial/ethnic essentialism because it can help perpetuate real-world attitudes. Our races work differently - they're more along the lines of species - but that's still no reason to say that a member of X race must behave in Y way, or that doing so is predetermined. I 100% share your concerns, and I would hope that beyond strict biological details and potentially the details of a homeland, hometown, or 'hub' area (like Moghedu), nothing else gets laid out as immutable or invariable.
I don't think the admins want to take a dump all over everyone's personal lore. What they're looking at is trying to establish a baseline level of detail so that people don't end up contradicting each other - lore anarchy tends to lead to that in practice, to the point where it's useful to hash some things out and establish them as a standard, even if the standard is "this tends to be true more often than not." Consistency is a good thing, if only because it makes deviations from the norm more interesting.
As for finding player lore, there are not that many admin, and less of them who are directly concerned with lore - a fair number of them are primarily coders, and the rest have to split their time between the game and their projects. The time they spend working on this game is also in conflict with the time they have to spend doing other real-life things. What this adds up to is that they have limited time and attention, and they can't catch everything - so it seems like they're asking here, in order to avoid missing something. It seems like they don't want to overlook anyone and do the same thing that's happened before, but maybe I'm just misreading the thread.
The reason the admins can't guarantee a complete sign-off on player-invented lore - and the reason they give that disclaimer - is probably because they want to avoid canonizing or giving sanction to things like 'Humans have bubblegum pink hair' or 'Imps reproduce by asexual division' or 'all Trolls do booty dancing as a mating ritual' or similar. Sometimes, people do things that are silly or would not work if they were generalized to the entire race. It's the admin's sandbox, and they have the authority to make those calls if they want to.
"Is this okay"
...
"Sure, maybe there could be something down the line , who knows...but be prepared to expect something different if it does"
...
"Cool. I'll create a dynamic backstory with some good holes in it so it can be modified if said lore comes out down the road"
(IE finding out what you know of your history before becoming an adventurer is a lie)
I found its a good way to be unique, if you can expect and roleplay being disappointed or surprised when you find out maybe what you created as a backstory is less cool, and more screwed up than you thought.
There's a lot of room for Moghedu to be fleshed out, right now. I'd love to see more NPCs giving more of a sense of the scope and the feel of the city; I like that there's a lot of stuff to buy, and I like that sometimes you'll see laborers hauling stuff here and there.
(I have a head and a half of headcanons, so if anyone wants to ask me about those I am more than willing to divulge.)
Special things for the Liberation of Moghedu would be cool. It'd be nice to know about the holidays Moghedu celebrates, too.
3 IRL years ago.
The Grook and Horkval, the Atav, the Goblins of Moghedu.
I'd love to see them go through a Mhun-esque comeback.
Cute-Kelli by @Sessizlik.
i enjoyed the achaea website's suggestion that horkval might be From Space but i don't think that's right for aetolia, either.
I developed Bene as a Kelki based on the city of Kelsys and @Phendegwen's portrayal and descriptions of the Kelki about 9 or 10 IRL years ago. Steam power yo!
@Kelliara made an interesting point earlier in the thread about Kelki being created to be beautiful. There's a hint of truth in that Slyphe created the Kelki to be pleasing to Him/Her/It and there's a vague reference about the Kelki having a brother/sister race that exists in the darkness but, to my knowledge, has never been fleshed out.
The Grook were one of Slyphe's earlier attempts until the Kelki were made so I'm not sure if that's supposed to reference them?
Now, I might be wrong and I may not have read something that is actually documented somewhere, but I find there to be some pretty extreme differences between the Kelki that have been and gone (Forgotten Dome/Kelsys), those that exist on the mainland (Mournhold) and those off it (Libec Cay).
I understand that a separated people might evolve in different ways, i.e. those closest to Slyphe remain the truest forms of themselves. However, I've never really seen/read/heard of why/how the Mournhold guys are as they are (no technological tinkering/almost Victorian-esque architecture/very dour (though you would be with that cult and everything else living under your town.)
I'm of the opinion that all the HELP scrolls for the older races could do with an update to include the history up until this point and to provide some direction on the differences between the various Kelki settlements.
As someone mentioned, I think it would also be nice if some villages had dialects, eg the Attican dialect, the Arbothian dialect, the Jaziran dialect, etc etc. I would imagine they'd be easier to pick up than the regular languages.
As also mentioned, I think food is very important to the feel of races. Some areas have a very large variety of terrain and fauna, so I would love to see a great variety of local foods too. Eg Why aren't the Indyuk selling me some Orgyuk heart soup or something like roasted gyrfalcon or faex chops. I could probably go on for hours with the regional food.
I think things like more holidays or festivals would help too. Tainhelm has lots of farmland, do they celebrate the harvest? Trolls in Hubride have very interesting mortuary rituals. Could there occasionally be an echo/program about a dying Troll and the ceremony? Or a holiday for the dead? These are maybe superficial or silly examples, but I think most existing areas have potential to be more lively.
On another matter, I think it could really help the racial help files to mention or briefly describe the current areas occupied by those races. For example, Kelki in Mournhold and Libec, Trolls in Mostyn, Enorian, Stormcallers, Grook and Horkval in Torston, Xorani in Xoral and Xaanhal, etc. As for areas that have disappeared, what's happened to the remaining live? Did they seek refuge in the cities? Are they nomadic? It'd be cool if there were wandering camps or groups randomly strewn about. changing locations, and selling whatever or just for flavor (like the Mitrine bands in the Liruma, or the werewolf packs in Dry plains).
Also, re: heritage, being able to move the 'Race heritage' bit around in your desc as a token would be amazing and less clunky. Kira's desc already said 'Tsol'aa heritage' in it before heritage became a thing, as an example, and it flows better with it in the actual desc instead of in the base line, because with the addition of the heritage line, it makes it clunky as hell.
So like. If you don't use the token, it'd just desc as normal, but you could also describe self and is obviously possessed of $(heritage$).
and it'd plug in Race heritage, for the tag, wherever you want it in the desc?
I want to be able to know what anyone's basic description looks like in the first sentence of LOOK
If I get wall-of-text when I LOOK and I am just trying to very quickly jump into a scene without dedicating that kind of time to reading a description, I want to at least know what sort of species you look like so I can get a brief mental picture and respond before they think I'm ignoring them because it takes me so long to emote back to their NOD. And, if people can move around the token, there's a good chance I won't get that one-sentence-skim answer I am LOOKing for.
Reading is hard.
Valkyrior System
I'd say that about 1/4th the population have descriptions that don't fit their Heritage simply because Heritage never existed when they reached endgame and as their bodies were remade they either created what they wanted or moved beyond the scope of Race with the expectation that they were now endgame, not whatever race they started as.
(Or they just decided to remake themselves anyway, heritage be damned)
That said, is this Heritage swap thing one time only? Or is it just.. whenever you want?
To better explain my point: If you popped into the room and waved at my character as my character was hanging in a shop scoping for some RP and I LOOK at you and you have a ten-sentence description, there is no way in god's green half-acre that I'm going to have time to read that and form a reasonably engaging reply before you think I'm AFK and leave. I want to have a chance to have half-a-clue what you look like before I respond.
But, if all I get in that first sentence is:
"She is an intelligent Azudim with luscious locks that trail down her back in perfect ringlet curls that vary in shade from a light blonde at the top that shift into luscious honey tresses at her shoulders and terminate in a cheery flip near her low back where they have been dyed a striking crimson."
when all I wanted was a general sense of: are you a bug/fish/frog/winged/fuzzy? A huge thing or a tiny thing? Something familiar or something new to me?
I would LOVE it if people just generally had a brief summary of their appearance as the first line of their description and then elaborated from there (therefore making a movable token perfectly fine!), but I know that isn't going to become a 'thing' just because it'd be convenient for me.
It has nothing to do with poo-pooing your level of visual uniqueness, it's a matter of "I'm a slow reader, give me a chance"
I've got Kira, who is still obviously Tsol'aa, kinda, plus antlers and faerie wings. And a few who were originally human that are kind've magic-y human now. And a xoran who is still xorani-like. But mostly, there is very little correlation between heritage and the desc.
And there is absolutely no reason I should have to pay 80 coins per character to make it not show up in my desc. -.- I didn't -take- heritage for anyone that got endgame before it was a thing except for Kira, who again, it made sense for.
As far as moving the token around goes--I'd be okay if it could have a configable colour or something, to make it easily apparent at a glance? It still won't really help you get an idea of a character's appearance 9 times out of 10, but it wouldn't hurt the game to have the option to make that part stand out.
Though. Re: being a slow-reader, I'd totally be okay with an optional quick-desc field we could fill out.
Look Erzsebet Quickdesc
She is humanish.
She has green, tattooed dragon wings.
She has long black hair.
She has serpentine green-gold eyes.
She is pale as fuck.
She has lots of tattoos.
She is covered in excessively shiny baubles.
Valkyrior System
In any case, back on topic: racial flavour. I feel like more holidays would be nifty? But I also feel like you should be able to config them on or off by race, because frankly, not one of my characters has any in-game reason to know it's moghedu liberation month, or w/e. The only centralized culture where everyone lives together we have is the PCs, and very few of them know or care about the RP behind their places of origin, so it isn't like the RL versions of these holidays, where everyone knows it's Canada Day or Black History Month etc etc regardless of their nationality or race, because it's all over social media and people -talk- about it.
Alternatively, I dunno, have the Mhun (as an example) -talk- about it? Have NPC event things (not necessarily god-run, these could be fairly simple progs) where they celebrate and put up colourful decorations all through moghedu and set off fireworks or what have you on certain days of that month?