Shiver My Timber

Hey guys,

I'm posting here to let you guys know about something that may be affecting the game for a while.

There was a serious fire at the camp where I work last Friday. We lost one of our buildings, which housed a lot of our supplies and all of our snakes and other animals, and it spread to the surrounding brush. Our staff had to evacuate over 100 people, and although no one was hurt, it was pretty traumatic for all of us. I also had a family member pass away this week.

As a result, game administration stuff is going to be pretty slow for a while. I may or may not be on the board, so if you guys have any questions, please refer them to Divine Providence or just to tea. If there's something that needs my personal attention, please PM it directly to Divine Providence and just tag it as such, and I will get back to you to answer questions when I am able. I'd prefer not to be asked game stuff over AIM right now.

Applications, storyline questions, and other things may also be left hanging for a while. Obviously, my priority is going to be dealing with real life stuff, not anything on the internet, so please be patient if it takes us a few weeks to get back to character applications for the new storyline. It will all happen in due time.

Thanks,
-- Sara

Hey guys!

It's that time of year again!

It has become an annual tradition in Shiver to host a gift art exchange for Halloween. If you're interested in participating, we encourage you to sign up below.

( The RulesCollapse )

( The Sign-up FormCollapse )

And as an addition this time around, we are really asking people not to sign up unless they intend to complete the gift exchange. In the past, we've had lots of people get screwed over because they spent a really long time on someone else, only to get nothing in return because someone flaked. If you sign up for this exchange and don't carry through, you will not be allowed to participate in the big Secret Non-Denominational Present Giver Exchange for the Winter Holiday of Your Choice or Lack Thereof.

In honor of ljsecret and postsecret, I thought it might be cool if we did something similar for the game.

If you guys haven't seen any of the secret communities before, people submit graphics with secrets written on them, and then they're posted anonymously in a mass post. You can check out either place for examples.

The Rules:

1. You can submit as many secrets as you like. Post them as a comment to this post (all comments will be screened). I will upload them to therogue.net and put them in a mass post together later this week so people can try and guess where each secret came from.

2. All secrets must be actual character secrets in the game, and they must be for a character that you yourself play.

3. As always, everything must be PG-13 and game appropriate.

Edit: 4. Please don't mention other characters by name. Just like in the real ljsecret, it makes it less secret and more obvious, so it will not be as cool to guess.

Questions can be asked here as well -- I'll unscreen those comments.

Board's back up.

The on-hold Vicarage scene will get finished tonight or Friday.

Everybody say thank you to teaberryblue for spending the past few days on the phone with our host to fix everything.

Hey guys.

So, in the capping off of a wonderful week, somebody hacked the board last night and uploaded a virus through the software. If you accessed it in Internet Explorer, it automatically downloaded a cvirus to your computer called xpladv771[1].wmf. No other files in the domain were affected but the /timber directory.

If you guys think there's a chance you could have gotten the virus, you should probably run a standard virus scan on your computer.

Our webhost is currently trying to figure out a way to fix the problem, but they said it could take a few business days. We've changed the board directory for now so nobody else accidently downloads the virus. We'll let you guys know when the message board is fixed and back up -- it should hopefully all be working by this weekend.

Observe, and be amazed!

http://www.captjackspiratehats.com/

For me, this is nirvana.

Hey, guys!

So, we haven't really been getting a ton of applications for the whaleship, which is too bad, but we're trying to decide whether it makes sense to set up a different ship that might appeal more to new applicants and that our current players would have fun with, too.

This is very preliminary, since we just started discussing this, but we wanted to see where your interest is before we make any new plans to bring in another ship. For people in the game, which of the following options appeal to you?

--Continue the whaleship? (which we can probably do regardless if there is enough in-game interest)
--Start a new pirate or smuggling ship?
--Start a new privateering vessel with a different assignment than the Hunt's?
--Start a merchant ship?
--Something else!

If you have any ideas whatsoever, we would love to hear them. We're going to wait and see what kind of apps we're getting in the next week or two before deciding what makes sense to give the new players a space to play, but any ideas-- for type of ship, for storyline tie-in, for ship's motivation to be in St. Erasmus, whatever-- would be great right now!

Comment back to this post or let me or haruspexy know what you're thinking!

Hey guys!

As was posted recently, we're looking to finish up the Western storyline in the next week or two. We've got the storylines for the summer sketched out, so we wanted to give everyone a head's up as to available places for new characters.

( I must to the sea again...Collapse )

As always, if anyone has any questions or would like help getting back into things after an absence, please let us know!

Howdy Y'all!

In approximately the next month, we're going to be wrapping up the Western storyline and jumping back to St. Erasmus and the 1600s.

If there are any storylines that you need to wrap up, please do so within the next few weeks. If you need help setting anything up, please contact us ahead of time and let us know. We can usually set something up with a few days' notice, but please don't wait until an hour or so before you want to play and hope we'll be able to do it, because we might not.

If you created a character after we jumped to the Wild West, we will be setting up a forum on the board where you can submit a new profile for your character that is suitable to the 1600s. We'll be putting up some guidelines there to make it easier for you.

We are also looking for storyline ideas for the summer. We have our major storyline in mind, but we'd love to get your suggestions as well! These can be for just your character or a small group, or for everyone in the game. We don't need to hear about general personal relationships (character Y is getting into a fight with character Z), but if you have something more plotty in mind (character Y is being haunted by the ghost of her dead terrier), be sure and let us know so we can see if it fits.

If you've been in the game for a while and are looking to pick up a second or third character, or if you would like a one-shot NPC for the storyline, PM us with any ideas you might have. We're going to be setting up a plot that will be heavily sailing-oriented, and we'll be introducing a whaling ship to the island, so new sailors will be welcome.

This will also be a really good time for any of you to get back into things if you haven't played in a while. Please feel free to contact us, and we'll be happy to fill you in on what we have planned so far if you'd like to try to intro a new character or bring your old character back in.

We'll set up the planning forum for new characters as soon as we can. If you have any questions about anything, please don't hesitate to ask.

1) You've had a custom avatar made especially for you.
2) You have bugged the mods about "when are you going to kill off my NPC?"
3) You've read/reread an entire series of fantasy novels just to figure out what the hell's going on in any given storyline.
4) When Divine Providence appears on the online users list, your palms begin to sweat.
5) You giggle uncontrollably whenever you hear the word "eggplant".
6) Your favourite OTP contains at least one non-human.
7) You've used Google to cheat at Latin.
8) Your character has ever died more than once on the same day.
9) You know why socks are funny.
10) Your character has not only ironed his houseguest's laundry, but also his houseguest.
11) The night before a governor's ball, your characters make out their wills.
12) Your character remembers when there were actually pirates in this part of the Caribbean.
13) On more than one occasion, you've found yourself unable to start a new thread because you've run out of song-lyrics.
14) You've mentally corrected someone else's historical anachronisms . . .
15) . . . or gone back through your early posts and winced at your own anachronisms.
16) You sigh in relief that, no matter how weird things have gotten, at least your character never married a chicken.
17) You use "groceress" as a euphemism for "hooker".
18) You know why the rum is gone.
19) You have ever purchased any book solely for the purpose of researching something one of your characters would need to know.
20) You've been shocked to realise that any two characters are played by the same person.
21) Your character has formed a relationship with an NPC, even though you knew that the NPC was going to be offed by the end of the storyline.
22) Your character has ever been in a situation that was caused by, or can only be resolved by, summoning the devil.
24) A member of your character's immediate family can be added or replaced without arousing suspicion.
25) There are whole hour-long conversations that you can only have with other Shiver players because no one else will "get it".