nextnightmods | EXPLORATION.

EXPLORATION

ACTIVE EXPLORATION SLOTS: 1/4

Explorations are currently OPEN. They will close again when we run out of active exploration slots.

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The forest engulfing Beacon is dense and uncharted, but that just means there's never a shortage of cool stuff to discover lurking off the beaten path. There's always new locations, plot clues, or extra resources to be found, so although venturing into the woods is always dangerous, the rewards may just outweigh the risks.

Once you come up with a plan, please fill out and submit the form below. We'll respond in one of two ways, depending on the nature of your exploration:

In most cases, we'll respond with a single write-up detailing the outcome of your exploration. For example, characters venturing out into unknown areas may discover a new location! In that case, you'll receive a full description of that new location, along with any other details worth noting, such as forest spirit encounters or difficulties along the way. If your group would then like to react to any of this or explore that location after its discovery, you can then respond with your own write-up of everything your group would investigate, and we'll let you know what happens as a result. And that's it! Then the exploration is wrapped, the location becomes available to the GPSL at large, and you're welcome to thread out any details of the exploration if you like.

In limited cases, an exploration request will open a dialogue between the players and mods to determine the outcome of your exploration. For example, characters attempting to interact with forest spirits may get the chance to play out that encounter, whether it be a pleasant conversation or, uh, the forest spirit trying to kill you, since that happens sometimes. Explorations of this nature will not always result in a response like this, as it'll depend on our availability as mods. If you're interested in doing an exploration like this and don't want to leave it up to chance, PM us! We'll work with you to schedule an encounter.

Regardless of which type of exploration you end up with, what you do during an exploration is entirely up to you, so feel free to get creative! We always try to reward creativity in some way, even if it's not a success in the way that you hoped for.

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Before you embark on your quest, here's everything you need to know about explorations:

Exploring uncharted territory is intended to be dangerous, and there is always a risk of failure, injury, and other setbacks. If you're not on board with these risks, exploration may not be in the cards for you.

That said, the exploration form includes an opt-in for serious injury and death. If you aren't interested in having your character(s) at risk for that stuff at this time, you can let us know upfront. Please keep in mind that opting out of serious injury/death does not mean you're opting out of the above risks of failure, injury, and other setbacks. Those risks are always in play during explorations. In addition, while opting out of serious risks doesn't mean you'll get a watered down exploration, some discoveries lurking out in the forest are reserved for risk-taking characters. For example, opting out of serious risks eliminates the chance of running into the hostile green-eyed spirits, so characters interested in pursuing green-eyed spirit plot threads will have to put themselves on the line to do so.

If you choose to opt into the risks of serious injury and death, your character's safety is forfeit and you give the mods the right to maim accordingly (though, of course, we'll check permissions posts in doing so). This does not mean that groups opting into these risks will always be tormented and killed! It's just helpful for us to know your preferences and expectations upfront. Please keep in mind that opting into the risk of serious injury or death applies to the whole group, not just individual characters.

Explorations into the area of Beacon currently occupied by the Parade will always be extra dangerous. Characters will run the risk of encountering the Parade itself, but besides that, the Parade's presence gets all the forest spirits in the area extra revved up, increasing their hostility. We'll give you the "danger zone warning" at the top of the exploration if you're about to head into Parade-infested territory, as characters may be seriously injured or killed at any point during an exploration within the parade route. You can check the Parade's schedule on the calendar page.

Chance of success will be left up to a mix of mod discretion and RNG. We'll typically use a RNG to determine what you find, if anything, but we'll also take player/character ingenuity into account. In short: If you have a solid, creative plan, you're more likely to be rewarded for that. Aimlessly wandering won't always get you nothing, but it's less likely to earn you something neat for your trouble. (However, please do be encouraged to follow the dumb idea that's in your character's heart. We will reward for IC idiocy, too.)

Having torches from the bonfire with you will also increase your chance of success, though be careful: If you lose the torches while exploring, someone will have to recover them or they're lost forever. Additionally, you must request torches through the item request page in order to take them on explorations. Torches not logged through the item requests page are not considered game canon.

Once you receive a mod response to your exploration, you will have one week to tag us back. If that week timer runs out, we'll consider that exploration closed, and mod responses will stop. You're welcome to handwave your own IC conclusion to the exploration at that point. To be extra clear: the time it takes for us mods to respond to your exploration is not included in that time limit. The timer starts fresh each time we tag you back.

Explorations over two weeks old will be wrapped in the next mod response. This is to prevent explorations from dragging on for too long, which will slow up our system, but more importantly, it'll make for awkward timing issues in the game! We don't want to leave players waiting on exploration outcomes to be able to engage with the rest of the GPSL.

Characters may only embark on one exploration a month. This is to allow all characters to have equal opportunity to make an impact on the setting, as well as to foster more cooperation between characters! With only one explore a month, we implore you to collaborate with other individuals and complete explores as a group when possible.

We will only accept a maximum of 4 active explorations at a time. If those 4 slots fill up, we'll close the queue to new submissions until we're able to wrap some of the active adventures. This number is based on mod availability, and we are looking to get comfortable with the system before we up the number in the future.

Explorations will always be closed during events except under rare special circumstances. Similarly, explorations can't be forward- or back-dated to happen during an event. Go do event things instead!

We have recently moved setting and building updates to the Setting Page. If you're interested in doing that, head on over that way!

To EMBARK ON AN EXPLORATION, please fill out the form below:

player name(s): (please list ALL PLAYERS involved with the exploration!)
character(s): (please list ALL CHARACTERS involved with the exploration!)
area of exploration: (please be as specific as possible! we need to know where your character is/is trying to go.)
date(s) of exploration: (you may forward or back date by up to two weeks from the current date.)
plan: (what, specifically, are you doing? this is the place to detail the plan in full, so be sure to include all of the relevant details so that we can factor it all into our response. consider questions like: what's the goal? are you bringing supplies or torches? does anyone have experience or training that could assist with your plan? is anyone already injured or impaired? tell us what your plan is! AS A REMINDER, EXPLORATIONS WILL TYPICALLY ONLY RECEIVE ONE RESPONSE TO DETAIL THE RESULT, so it's important to be clear about your intentions and plans!)
is your group willing to accept risk of serious injury/death? (a simple yes/no is all we need, and please only give ONE ANSWER for the whole group. a "yes" here doesn't automatically mean you'll all die horribly, and a "no" doesn't mean you won't get anything cool. we'll check permissions posts before injuring/killing characters.)

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They pretty much unanimously decide to head for the turbine hall, following that sound of movement and the direction of all those jury-rigged wires. Best to make sure they're alone, or at least not sharing the building with hostiles. Law winds up going first, being the teleporter and also kind of the buffest of them all, anyway.

The door opens easily enough, though it squeals and screeches on its rusty, sooty hinges. So much for any element of surprise. The three find themselves on a corrugated metal walkway that looks down from the top level into the ruined turbine hall.

Not only does it seem to have suffered the expected amount of decay that these three have seen throughout Beacon, every surface is lined with black soot and the far right side of the room from where they stand is surrounded by warped metal debris, which also lies scattered across the floor. A round wheel-like valve handle rocks side to side, then falls still - it was recently disturbed.

And Law is the first to detect the source of that disturbance through his haki, seconds before it shows itself clearly to the other two. He turns his head toward the aura to their left just as there's a series of clangs and rattles descending through the room, then what looks like a lump of coal rolls across the floor and just misses the valve handle. It's followed by another, which hits the handle straight on, and rather than breaking on impact, it uncurls into a tiny masked form. The other does the same, and both laugh while the victor (?) leaps on top of the handle, tries to balance on it while it rolls, then falls off. Both instantaneously evaporate into black dust and become undetectable in the faint traces of lantern light, now seemingly a part of the floor itself.

In fact, the dust around their feet is moving too, isn't it? And there's coal dust on the door itself, right behind them. The air is suddenly thick with it. Stone gets the worst of it as he's taken by surprise, but Law isn't much better off. Both start coughing, lungs feeling like they're burning, while Stone's eyes feel like they're being sanded raw. Law ends up having to do a sort of panic-shambles just to get the three of them out of there, and they end up on the opposite side of the room, second floor, on a section of corrugated metal flooring that creaks under their weight but holds and is blissfully coal dust free.

From here, Law and Rosinante can see that on the ground floor opposite them (so, two floors directly beneath where they had stood a moment ago) is a door labeled CONTROL ROOM that looks firmly shut. Just to the right of that are a series of enormous batteries all in a row, plugged into a charging array. Stone meanwhile rubs at his eyes, but his vision is currently blurry - and lids open or closed, his eyes are in serious pain.

They may not have much more time before the locals find them again, so quick thinking (and possibly some prioritizing) is in order here. Their lanterns already no longer reach the ceiling, and the layer of darkness grows lower and lower each second.

Law takes charge! He doesn't even ask, he just shambles Stone and those lovely batteries out of the building entirely, to Stone's vast annoyance (he immediately shifts big once out there, the better to protect the batteries and the better to bellow at Rosi and Law once they join him later). Then Law cuts through the door to the control room so he and Rosinante can see what's inside. He's ready to evacuate them both if need be, if there's something dangerous on the other side of that door, or if the locals and their dust catch up to them.

Oh, Law. Enjoy being shouted at by Stone later.

The door is incredibly thick and yet it slices neatly open, revealing an interior that is free of spooky black dust spirits, so the two are safe to book it into there as quickly as they can in order to have a look around. To make sure they're not messed with, Law replaces the chunk of door he'd cut out, fitting it neatly back into place and sealing the two of them inside.

The control panel looks more pristine than the previous rooms, and the air is stale. A few small windows line the back of the room, but all they look out at now is darkness. Several video monitors and a radio sit on top of the control panels in a way that obstructs the buttons beneath them. Those panels must have wound up less important than the monitors, which were clearly added later, with haste, judging by the web of wiring that crawls from their bases and splays across the controls. Rosinante, curious, tries to switch one of the monitors on, and it works - but all that's on screen now is black, accompanied by the slow scroll of bands of sparse static.

Law, meanwhile, has found a subject that suits his own interests. In the corner of the room is a human skeleton, still clothed, lying atop a black stain on the concrete floor. The bones are oddly porous and crumble easily when he goes to inspect one; the teeth are blackened and several are missing.

Just beside, on the floor, is a stained book which lies open, with a few pages crushed beneath the rest. It wasn't set down carefully, but fell and was abandoned to its place. The pages are delicate, but Law carefully leafs through it, scanning the handwritten text from start to finish for anything that stands out as useful. And one thing does: early on, the fellow (Cpt. Bryson Langstrom, it seems) mentions a nuclear launch silo in the mountains just to the west. It had been constructed for the specific purpose of destroying the World Eater, for Beacon previously had no need to try and launch nuclear weapons, but the army poured an incredible amount of resources into the problem as the days grew darker and darker, and as staff began to get sick and stop turning up.

There's a flash of green eyeshine in the woods, just through those windows. Rosinante calls out to Law, who pockets the book, pops them both outside in the direction of Stone and those batteries, and it's time to flee back to town with what they've found before whatever was out there manages to find them.

EXPLORATION.

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