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

Rosinante clambers up the rest of the ladder with a lot of wincing and swearing but hey at least his other hand is free now. Apologies to Cao Pi who probably gets blood splattered on his face and clothing, being directly below and all. They're both freaking out a little, understandably, so once they make it into the room Cao Pi and Rosi both find whatever ends of clothing they can spare (shirts, really, nice crop top look going on here) to bandage that massive gaping arm wound since that seems slightly worse off than Kuai's impaled hand, but then Rosi tries to sit back and keep out of the way as this is a very cramped room so that Cao Pi can help out with Kuai's hand as well if he still needs the assistance, but otherwise Kuai is quick to try and listen to that message and then similarly, try to mess with the reception to see if there's more to hear (until yes, they find out it loops).

Cao Pi also is very vocally insistent they record a copy of that message on the tablet once they have clear reception of it, so while Kuai is fiddling with buttons and dials, Rosinante pulls out his tablet and has it recorded to bring back to Beacon much like he did with the one on the walkie talkie.

And then?? Yikes, the nooses aren't a great sign but they all know the sorts of things that happened in the final days of this place. They'll look around a bit in case anything obvious here might be useful, or carry any information about the tower's previous crew or past folks from Beacon who may have made it up here, but this message seems pretty time-sensitive and two of the three desperately would like some painkillers, so unless they find anything else dramatic and worth spending time investigating, they'll likely head back down after a short rest to catch their breaths.

Should they make it to the bottom without further incident, Rosinante will opt to leave the torch inside the ground-level room for anyone who might come back later.

Cao Pi definitely gets blood on his face and clothing but I mean, his face is still on there. That's the good news.

The intrepid tube top boys (crop top boys doesn't sound as cool) manage to get a good recording of the message, though never quite clear enough to fill in the missing words. Absolutely clear enough to understand secondhand though.

There's nothing immediately, obviously useful -- some really faded books on how to run the equipment, all old and weathered and dated but could be helpful to anyone that wants to get into some radio waves.

There's only one thing to note as they hit ground floor again. Slick black blood smatters across the floor, and all the bird bones on the desk have been hastily gathered. There's a few dropped in the wake of something's escape. Something that walks on bloodied handprints. Luckily, they won't see any more of their friend on their way back to Beacon, though it's safe to say the spirit is definitely still alive out there somewhere.

EXPLORATION.

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