Frequently Asked Questions

[morrowmods]

frequently asked questions

applications and baselines | plot and setting | game mechanics

Applications & Baselines

What characters can I bring?

Good Morrow welcomes canon characters and canon AUs from published fiction. This includes canon multiples or alternate versions from different iterations of a particular canon. Original characters are also welcome. We do not currently accept malleable protagonists (Persona MCs, MMORPG heroes, etc), canon OCs, or fan-made AUs. We also do not accept CRAUs, as part of the tension in this game requires that it be everyone's first noncanonical interdimensional kidnapping. It would spoil some things to have characters with 3+ games' worth of experience explaining DWRP mechanics to everyone.

How many characters can I bring?

Players can have up to four characters at a time and may submit one application per round.

Is there a minimum age?

Players can apply characters ages 12 and up, but we must stress that it is the player's responsibility to consider the suitability of the setting for the character they plan to bring. Many players are uncomfortable roleplaying interactions that involve large age gaps. Please do your best to maintain OOC transparency about your motivations and thread goals. While this is a setting that is generative toward a number of mini-adventures and gen stories, it is also a setting where other folks might wish to play some occasional NSFW content. This game does not condone pedophilia and we hope that the players of our youngest characters will keep their kids' activities age-appropriate.

Is there a rule about new canons?

We will accept applications and canon updates for media after it has been available for two weeks. We ask that players remain respectful and mark for all plot-related spoilers until the six week mark.

My character isn't human. Can I still apply?

Inhuman characters that still retain a humanoid shape (vampires, mutants) will be welcome without difficulty. Characters that are different species (ponies, robots) can retain their original shapes provided they can fit in human-sized accommodations. If this proves an issue, they will simply arrive in a human body instead. They're welcome to consider it to be a form of body horror in and of itself. It probably won't be the last time.

Can I bring my character's pet?

Sadly, no. Pets likely wouldn't survive some of the harsher events. There are farm animals, but they are bred to be food or beasts of burden. The locals wouldn't take kindly to someone running off with Sunday's chicken dinner.

What are the activity requirements?

Good Morrow utilizes a monthly check-in system for activity. Every month, we ask players to submit a few sentences describing what their characters have done over the course of the month, who they've done it with, and what setting resources may have been involved. It is our hope to generate a monthly snapshot of the setting as a living organism rather than shackle anyone to arbitrary metrics. Replies are encouraged in this AC format, which allows it to double as a CR meme and OOC plotting space.

Plot & Setting

What is this game about?

You can check out the game premise and the setting information to see more details, but in short Good Morrow is a jamjar-style game based out of a seventeenth-century village inhabited by a community of eldritch cultists. Players can expect a variety of events, which might be tied to metaplot, miscellaneous holidays and distractions, player submission, or a combination of the three. Physical transformations might be part of some events, but are unlikely to be permanent unless tied to someone succumbing to madness.

What does arrival entail?

It's painful. Characters feel an uncomfortable pulling sensation, like their skin is being tugged into their organs somehow. It's a debilitating pain, until they can't manage to think of anything other than their own personal suffering. Only then does it subside, leaving them settled in a novitiate's robes with nothing from their home worlds. They come aware in the Cathedral, seated in clean rows listening to church officials explain that they were summoned by a ritual intended to bring the Old Ones into the village. Since they received these characters instead, it is assumed that they are destined to help the village achieve its goals someday. If not these characters, certainly the children they'll bear someday. The expectation is that there is no reverse of the summoning ritual. It can be assumed that most elements found on the setting pages will be covered during this arrival ceremony.

How does my character buy things? Do they have to work?

The village mostly works on a system that assumes everyone has an interest in keeping the community alive. Everyone needs to eat, so the cooks and bakers set out to feed everyone. They need raw materials, so the farmers and ranchers dedicate their lives to making sure the community has enough to stay afloat. None of them expect the newcomers to take on jobs, but many will be disdainful about novitiates who've lived here for months without advancing their rank or taking on a trade. If you refuse to use your mind, there's no reason not to put your body to work. Your character doesn't need to work if they choose not to, but the garments from the seamstresses might become terribly ill-fitting, and the cooks might start leaving you unappetizing gruel most evenings.

My character needs a special diet. Is it available?

Characters with special dietary needs, from vampirism to celiac disease, will retain their afflictions even in human form. They will be able to find options to sustain them, but there's no guarantee that every villager will be familiar enough to provide options suitable to them. They might have to put in some extra work to make friends with the folks who can best tend to their needs.

My character needs medicine to keep living their life! How will they get access?

Depends entirely on the ailment. If the disease is magically induced or otherwise supernatural in origin, it will be eradicated by the power cap. (In this case, it might recur as a slowly redeveloping dilemma as the character moves up the ranks and gains more access to their abilities, so that might be something else to plot around.)

For people with more mundane ailments, there are a number of skilled herbalists and apothecaries who may be able to create approximations of the medicines the character needs. They may involve a lot more beds of hot coals and the occasional leech therapy, but they'll do their best to keep you as comfortable as they can in a premodern way.

But this might not be suitable for certain conditions. In those cases, it might be necessary to seek out the aid of the Old Ones through a ritual. Surely whatever you lose in the transaction won't be more important than what you gain in return.

Game Mechanics

What kind of network is there?

Presently, there is none. There are no magic devices or texting apparati. However, each home comes equipped with inkhorns, substantial pounce pots, and a number of quills. It's there to facilitate novitiates' note-taking and scholarly work, but surely no one will notice a paper airplane or two flying between neighbors' windows.

Some folks who've been here for a long time have conspiracy theories about those creepy eyes being connected to other houses, but so far nobody's managed to figure it out.

Can my character keep keep their powers?

Nope, not upon apping. This is broken down in more detail on the Death & Rebirth page. In short, you'll be able to acquire more power in exchange for memories of home. Hopefully once your character is back at full power, they'll remember what was so important about having their abilities. It was to act in service of the Old Ones, right? Maybe they'll be able to think of some other reason.

What happens if my character is seriously injured or dies?

Injuries will mostly be left to the town healers. They will do the best help that 17th century medicine can offer. The faithful might be given over to the clerics of the church, who sometimes have been touched enough by the Old Ones to help with more substantial wounds to those who've reached the second rank and above.

But sometimes people die. In the case of death, they will be brought to the Old Ones and submitted for judgment. If they are deemed worthy, they will be revived, if left a little different from the experience. See the Death & Rebirth page for more detail about this.

How do canon updates work?

When a character is being updated, they will be informed that they've been chosen to embark on a spiritual journey. They will be kept in solitary confinement in a horrible little room in the chirch basement. They're left alone with no light, no sound, and no food, trapped with rodents and insects they can feel but not see, until the fatigue, lack of nourishment, and confinement send their mind fleeing elsewhere. They will experience an out of body experience that feels like returning home in a dream. The visions are scattered, almost episodic, but also like they're happening on autopilot. Even if a character would want to tell people about their dimensional imprisonment, their dreamstate won't allow it. They live out the events as they were destined to be lived, until eventually characters return to their bodies and wake, comfortably in a peaceful room scented by burning insence and surrounded by stained glass images of the multi-eyed tentacled creatures they worship. The Old Ones will always bring you home safely, and let you wake in the body you'll expect to have after whatever journey your spirit has taken.

We do ask that canon updates be reported on the Taken page, so that we can keep our information up to date.

What happens when someone goes on hiatus?

Players can decide to leave their characters on autopilot, send them off into a heavy pattern of working at the farm or being dragged in for mandatory church education. Players can also choose to send their characters over the breaking point and succumb to madness in a way that will render them incapacitated for the duration of your time away.

What happens when someone drops?

That depends on what decisions they make on the drop page. There are two primary ways this setting understands character departure.

In the first, more favorable option, characters simply vanish. The local rumors are that they are summoned away by the Old Ones to spread the word elsewhere to dimensions who need them more. Newcomers tend to hope that people are sent back home to the places from which they were ripped, but there's really nothing to support this theory.

In the second option, characters disappear in the night. The following day, a fresh tombstone with their name appears in the graveyard, with the understanding that they've somehow displeased the Old Ones and failed them. They don't get to meet the glorious end of the Unknown. They're simply dead corpses in the dirt now, with shame strewn upon them. Some whispers around town imply that the elders sent assassins to kill them in the night and denied them access to be reborn, but the theory is largely regarded as silly and meritless.
Characters dropped in this way cannot be reapped without resetting them to their canonpoint. The version that lived in Revelbrooke died there.

Can I re-apply a character I've already dropped?

Of course! Depending on how the drop was processed, your options will vary. A character who simply vanished will return with their memories of the game intact, but still having lost whatever losses occurred during their prior stay. When asked where they've been, they'll feel disoriented and confused, and occasionally reply in a series of odd guttural slurping noises that don't sound anything like sensible human language. These effects will pass, with time. Characters who were sent to the graveyard will be re-apped freshly from canon, with no memories of their prior time in game. It will be up to their friends and acquaintances to remind them of the times they used to have together.

A re-app will not require much additional information. If you've changed your canonpoint, please amend your app to reflect whatever's different about them. If you have fresher roleplay samples, we're happy to look at them! But otherwise, just let us know you're ready to come back.

Please note that characters who idled out will not be able to re-app the following month. There is a single-cycle cooldown before we will review a new app from someone who skipped AC. We don't ask for much in the way of AC and hope that the system will not be abused.

What are the policies on triggering topics?

Revelbrooke is an ostensibly moral town, at least on the outside. But behind closed doors, any number of depraved rituals and ceremonies are held. The masques of Devotion help residents still be able to look one another in the eye when the haze of euphoria has worn down. It's natural to think that things might become extreme at times. It is up to the players to remain mindful of one another and warn for triggering material in the subject lines of relevant tags.

Are there rules about smut and adult content?

As noted above, this is a setting that is likely to involve behavior that leads toward adult situations. If you give people the option to engage with eldritch gods, it's natural to assume that at some point, someone's going to want to have tentacle smut. Good Morrow, while not categorized as a sex game, is fully sex-friendly. Players are allowed to engage in sexual content in the game and will not be asked to fade to black or move threads to their IC inboxes. Entries may be locked to community members if players prefer to keep their threads out of the public eye. Smut will count for AC as much as any other rp does. Players will not be shamed or judged for their play choices. However, we do ask that players stay mindful that smut is not what everyone wants to play. This is not the sort of setting that would take kindly to instances of public masturbation, or ejaculating in a public fountain. There are children in this village. Keep the worst of it behind closed doors like normal folks.

In short, context matters. If anyone feels like the setting is being abused in a way that creates an uncomfortable environment, they are welcome to contact the mods for help with mediation. Please do take care to apply appropriate content warnings as needed.

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Comments

[icanfixer]

hi mods!!! two questions, one is more canon specific so i'll do my best to lay it out for you

1. for characters without powers, would they be able to gain any throughout the game at the same or an equivalent price?
2. this the canon specific one. while characters from the project moon franchise don't have technical magic powers and the like, what they can do is manifest "ego" in different forms. for example, don quixote here can manifest wolfish features and emit electricity as part of her attacks! this has the side effect of corroding her mind if she makes use of it too much, but i can play with the madness already present in game for that. other times, "ego" can be manifested as a weapon that's simply more powerful than the average weapon and may have some special ability. the same applies to "ego armor"! these last two don't apply as much since they don't bring what they had for home, but i wanted to cover the whole topic of it.

for all this, i was curious if this would go under the same power regain as the others since it isn't technically theirs by birth but something they can still do!!

[morrowmods]

Hello!

1. It's not currently planned to give characters access to brand new powersets, no. The current process is closer to slowly unlocking what they already had, rather than injecting them with something new. However, there is always room for the arcane arts to evolve with time. While we wouldn't count it out completely, it's not something that we'd currently like to focus upon. Powers in general will likely be low-level and far-between until characters start developing over time.

2. This took some googling! If we're understanding the mechanic correctly, tapping into Ego involves using a resource common to people who come from that same world, right? It makes sense that the ability would translate to this setting. It should be all right to consider it a "gainable" ability by degrees.

Thanks for checking in!

[soursweet]

So I have two tabletop characters who also have tag-alongs and wanted to know in what circumstances the tag-alongs can also come.

I gather that being able to summon a familiar is an ability that a new arrival would have restricted, but would a character who’s apped as an older arrival be able to summon? Here is the relevant spell.

I also have a character attached to a symbiotic being of the “ride-along intrusive thought” variety. It can’t interact with anyone aside from my character and is basically a living “ooh what does this button do” impulse rather than a personality with drives beyond sensation seeking. Here is the relevant powers info. I would be open to only having the negative effects at game start and regaining the positives as power regains.

[morrowmods]

These are interesting questions!

I think that Find Familiar would be an appropriate spell for someone apping in at the second rank. They wouldn't be able to summon a familiar from their home dimension, but Revelbrooke is lousy with the dead. We could say that the character "borrows" a spirit from the graveyard. They'll probably be "forever"-dismissed rather than something temporary, though, just because spirits can be slippery like that and the barrier would prevent access to the pocket dimension where those things usually hang out.

The symbiote is a tougher call! I'm understanding this power as something similar to Venom/Carnage in Spider-man, where it's technically a separate entity but functionally more of a plot device. I think your plan to keep the benefits to the realm of "powers to be regained" is a good approach, and I'd be comfortable letting the symbiote ride along for an interdimensional kidnapping.

Thanks for checking in!

[soursweet]

the wizard is gonna love this town despite no longer being able to summon her manul familiar

the sorcerer and her chaos spirit ridealong are gonna hate it, she’s already trying to dodge the Inquisition and this is the kind of place that would get letters about it like once a week

[dancethroughthedanger]

Hi mods, so I'm thinking of joining this game, and right now I'm bouncing between several different characters to test drive or possibly app in the game. I have some questions regarding some of them, and I apologize in advance for a lot of questions that might be silly to ask.

1. Shantae here has canonically lost her powers/magic once before in one of the games, with the only thing she was still able to do is whip her hair to attack enemies since it wasn't tied to any magic. But what about here? Would she keep the ability to whip her ponytail, or nah and it'd just do nothing?

2. Another question regarding power loss. Would pre-existing curses on characters count as a power? Because another character I'm considering has a curse that makes him involuntary switch genders when doused with water, with cold water making him turn into a girl, and hot water changing him back. Would this count as a power and be removed/force him to be mode-locked as one or the other, or would he keep it?

3. About robotic characters. The character I'm considering, in canon, runs on a limited battery and has to stop and recharge every so often. Would that fall under some special diet (if you can call it that?), or would that be removed? If above all else, I am fine with him being made human for this because that in of itself sounds like a hilarious disaster to come.

4. I don't know if I missed this, but are characters allowed to bring weapons with them, or simply the clothes off their back and whatever they have on them?

Once again, I apologize for a lot of questions, and thank you in advance for your answers!

[morrowmods]

Hello! Thanks for taking an interest!

1. I think a hair-whip could be considered a melee attack that would survive a power cap. There's a WWE wrestler who does something similar as part of her moveset, and that's hardly a supernatural ability.

2) I think a curse would count under the umbrella of magical ailments, yes. The character would arrive uncursed in an instance like the one you describe.

3) There is no electricity in this setting, so recharging would be difficult! It might be easier to consider that character in a human body.

4) Characters do not arrive with any canon materials, including the clothes that were previously on their back. Novitiates will be issued standard robes and will have to barter with the local seamstresses to acquire anything else. It'll be fine to assume that all they have to do is agree to do some ambiguous village labor to get hold of decent pants.

[dancethroughthedanger]

Thanks for answering! I'm sorry to ask one more thing but I wanted to wait whether or not you confirmed the second question. With how power regains work, I imagine the same would be true for the curse in that it'd return should the character ever try to get his powers back?

[morrowmods]

I think in the case you describe, you might want to put some thought into how you would want to play that out. The notion of genderswapping-as-a-curse was once popular in fiction, but many elements of it are currently considered offensive. If you plan to go ahead and app that character, I would appreciate reading your app to see how you plan to engage with it in a tasteful manner. It's certainly something that would need a conversation rather than a blanket ruling.

[dancethroughthedanger]

Got it, thanks for answering!

[preybeforemeals]

Okay, so. As noted in the app, Tsukiyama is a creature that requires consuming human flesh in order to survive. He can survive for quite a while without doing it, but he'll need to do it eventually. It was mentioned that food sources would be provided even in cases like vampirism, apparently, but I'm wondering how this is managed if at all and/or if he's just going to have to take Jedidiah out into the fields and deal with it himself.

(I am fine with the answer being Alas Poor Jedidiah! I just sort of want to know what I'm planning for here because I realized I didn't know.)

[morrowmods]

Thanks for checking in! I think that how he gets what he needs could swing either way, depending on how you wanted to play it. If Tsukiyama tries to keep clandestine and steals the occasional meal in the thick of the night, the other townsfolk would probably be dismayed at the loss of dear Jedidiah, but assume that it is the will of the Old Ones to take good people without warning every now and again. It's best not to assume things about what cannot be understood, after all.

If Tsukiyama is more open about his needs when folks come around delivering stews and meals, he might find a sympathetic ear around the supply chain. There's seemingly no shortage of people who are on the dark side of the gossip chain and would be missed far less. Jedidiah is such a wholesome, hardworking fellow! But that Cuthbert was overheard condemning the community's isolation. If he doesn't learn to hold his tongue, he'll have to face the elders about it soon... And maybe there'll be a more palatable protein in the next round of Tsukiyama's meal delivery.

tl;dr, people go missing sometimes and most NPCs are pretty determined to not ask questions about certain things. Tsukiyama can hunt for himself if he likes, or he can arrange to have his cannibalism prepackaged like a Hello Fresh box, provided he also does not ask questions.