Triogenix

This is a question I have asked myself many times over the past ten months - and I will explain why every time I chose to continue. 1. First and foremost, if I had scrapped the scarcity that wouldn't have solved shit - I'd need to come up with something new to replace it. Our setting is one where for the vast majority of the time, justifying conflict is extremely difficult, and justifying the setting not trending towards stagnation is equally difficult. Think about how many times you've heard the question "why?" or "but why would x?" in regards to anything lore-related that shook things up. Therefore, we will always need something that OOC'ly creates narrative potential by making conflict easier to justify in some way, for narratives are fundamentally structured by conflicts. Which leads to my second point...... 2. Coming up with something else would have been just as difficult, if not slightly more so, than reworking the scarcity. Firstly, I'd have to retcon a ton of stuff regarding the past five years of IC articles, developments, and similar, or if assuming I ended it IC'ly as well, again, still set up and start whatever would be replacing it (and also, plan it out and put that in the staff forums as documentation so future LMs won't have to do what I did, and crawl through old discord logs trying to figure out what somebody was cooking). Therefore, I'd have still spent the past ten months on that project, but instead of reworking the scarcity, I'd be replacing it; functionally there's no difference between the two. The reason I'd still have spent ten months on that is......... 3. There is already a ton of stuff done, however, I will not push anything onto the wiki until everything is done; as big reason the scarcity turned out the way it did, IMO, is that it was done piecemeal, as when you have a writing team of 21 writers and two loremasters, you'll get a lot of different conclusions from the same sentence. This is a fact of human communication; it happens, but by not doing a rework piecemeal, there's a significantly lower chance of these errors in communication occurring. No matter if I retconned the scarcity, I'd still have done it this way. Furthermore, I've had to add, rework, replace, or outright delete a ton of stuff to make the scarcity (or any other thing that creates narrative potential) - even before factoring in the changes to phoron - in order to make it work. For example - I'd still probably need to make a page about the economics of the spur, trade, and tourism, and fill that with lore no matter what I chose to replace the scarcity. A ton of this comes down to Issues vs Problems, something I explain in more detail here; Put simply, any spurwide event such as this is much more likely to introduce problems that remain problems forever (especially if it's done piecemeal), which don't introduce any narrative dynamics because the lore they would need to do so either didn't exist, or because the problems were all but hand-waved by lore team members at the time; as an example, you can't have interstellar travel be difficult when we're an interstellar setting - everything would start to break, so therefore much of the effects of bluespace becoming less viable were left vague at best, if mentioned at all (or in a few rare cases, mentioned on a single page for a faction, but then ignored on all the other pages for that faction). Stuff like this only contributes more to the increasing stagnation of the setting, as things become less likely to happen. There are ways to sidestep this, but they aren't easy, (one such way is reworking every wikipage before releasing the update) which is why they weren't done before. 4. Lastly, and potentially most importantly, this is taking so long because I'm determined not to make the same mistakes that were made in the past. You mention that people have been trying to "resuscitate this forsaken Phoron Scarcity topic for literal years now" - which I just fundamentally disagree with. I've been on the team since the spring of 2022, so going on three years at this point; if you asked me what people have been trying to do regarding the scarcity for my entire time on the team, I'd come away with the exact opposite conclusion. Whenever possible writers have tried to write around, mitigate, or otherwise hand wave the scarcity because it fundamentally doesn't work; the reasons why are legion, I could point out the interstellar travel issue again, or how it was done piecemeal, or how the exact effects were very badly put into writing, or how much of the lore that would be where the biggest impacts of the scarcity would be written simply didn't exist, and many, many more. I don't want to repeat those mistakes - so I'm going to take my time with it, make sure I organize everything properly, talk with my team about it, think it through thoroughly, so on so forth. As far as I'm concerned, this is what is necessary to do anything like this in a way that will be successful, and trying to do it any other way is a waste of time. Conclusion: I will be brief since I have already essay posted. At the end of the day, I do not want to do this rework; it's a slog mentally, plus a ton of work, in addition to my regular duties as LM. However, I'm okay with doing it, like legitimately, and I don't resent those who came before me for not doing what I am doing. When I started this project, we were about four years on from KOTW with little done to address the issue of the scarcity, and ignoring a problem - whether outright ignoring or ignoring by writing around - doesn't make it go away. Someone was going to have to deal with this eventually, so I had a choice to make: continue ignoring it (I put a band-aid solution in this category) and let the problem fester, or do something about it. I chose the latter, and that's a choice you're free to disagree with; however, it's a choice I'm going to see through properly. If that means it takes a year and a half (my original estimate) that means it takes a year and a half, that's fine by me; it's better to put in a lot of effort and make sure something is done properly than to not put in that effort and make a half-ass'd attempt that'll probably end up doing more harm in the long term, while leaving the mess for the next guy. Tldr; I'm reworking the scarcity because it plays a critical role in allowing us to have narratives within our setting, and it's the best bad option I had, having the most gain for work ratio. It's taking so long because I'm a) dropping the entire rework all at once and b) needed to add, rework, replace, or delete a ton of stuff that wasn't previously introduced to make anything like this do what it's supposed to do and introduce a narrative dynamic into what is otherwise a setting that continues to exponentially stagnate.

Hi. So I wanted to give a little update on this - I bring up the scarcity pretty frequently in discord, but I wanted to throw this up on the forums for those who aren't around on discord when I am. Basically - a lot has changed. Don't look at the original post and then expect the end result scarcity to match it. Here's a teaser I posted on discord that is somewhat out of date; https://docs.google.com/document/d/15rjI111OpFeofF5X6s1QRRGEGVgxAv7x8cmCmddZQjY/edit?usp=sharing NOTE; THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION FOR FEEDBACK. This is a rework that will take place across the entire wiki. Any feedback I receive from people outside of the lore team who don't have the full context of everything else that is being changed will therefore most likely not be helpful; as they are attempting to give feedback with - at best - partial understanding of the situation. Feedback can wait until the rework is completed. P.S - if anyone has or is currently getting an economics (specifically like macro-economics) degree and would be comfortable helping me out, please reach out. I'm not asking for ghostwriters, or other outside contributors of any form; I already have an very solid "end-point" idea of what I want to do. What I would like is someone who is more knowledgeable than I to help me get to that predetermined "end-point" in a way that makes sense and doesn't make me look like an idiot, nothing more, nothing less. Basically, an expert consultation more than anything.

Thank you for your application! At this time, Kermit and I have decided to go with another applicant. That said, we hope you continue to apply for positions on the lore team in the future!

Kermit and I have decided to accept this application. Congratulations!

Hi. I'm only responding to this because I feel the need to. The topic of images on the wiki - and how we get them - is something that has the potential to get the owner(s) of the server in legitimate and serious legal trouble; this is not a hyperbole or overstatement to my knowledge. It might sound silly, and I may be incorrect, but in cases like this, I've learned it's better to stay on the safe side. Therefore, while I understand people in the community have strong thoughts and opinions on this topic, now that the suggestion has been made, this is something that will be discussed and decided on internally. I don't mean to sound rude or dismissive, but the community isn't the ones at risk of getting into legal trouble or having to deal with similar issues over stuff on the wiki (and how we got it), and I give all the weight to the thoughts of those who are at risk. If I want outside opinions, suggestions, or otherwise, I'll ask for them. Until then, this is the last post I'll make on this thread.

From my perspective, the issue is more the conclusion of four separate things; 1) It's up to the relevant team if they want art/graphics (of some form) for their wiki lore pages - they determine the necessity. 2) Being able to draw/create graphics isn't and should never be a requirement to be on the lore team. 3) It is unfair to expect staff members to spend their own money - in addition to the time they already contribute to Aurora - to commission artists to do stuff for the wiki. 4) EU copyright law (and copyright law in general) is weird, and I don't fully understand it. I don't know what non-AI images/graphics can be taken from the internet outside of ones created for the purpose of the AuroraStation wiki. Therefore, the conclusion I come to is that we can't ban AI art because its one of the only ways for us to get free art/graphics we can use for the wiki, other than creating something ourselves (again, not something that should be a requirement), even if it doesn't look good. If we had an "artist" staff position similar to spriters who just made art, for free, for the wiki, I'd approve a ban like this in a heartbeat. However - this is not a dismissal of the suggestion, merely an explanation as to why this is something that can't be implemented with a snap of my fingers - Kermit and I will discuss this with input and help from the Head-Devs to figure out the best path forward.

Hey so I found more time to come back around to this; fixed up some things based on feedback previously. Will likely merge it soon.

Hi! Thanks for applying a few rapid-fire questions, I wanted to shoot your way. Remember, there are no wrong answers. 1. One of the biggest issues in the past with the lore team as a whole is that when allowed, off-the-beaten-path character backgrounds/archetypes often become the standard character background/archetype for that relevant species and/or faction (the largest example being how almost every Elyran and Eridanian was white, despite the populations of both factions being primarily from the Arab World and Africa respectively, before the ethnic restrictions). Do you think this would be/is a problem with IPCs? Why or why not? 2. In regards to your future plans, should the worst come to pass - to be clear, I think this is very unlikely, but I need to ask the question regardless - and the team doesn't end up in a sound place, with good systems established, and you have a willing/ready candidate to take over consistently; do you think you'd stay in the position until it does, or is there a timeframe at which you'd resign? I can't think of anymore off the top of my head - I'm sure I'll throw a few more questions up at a later date, but for now, that's it. I look forward to seeing your replies.

Hi! And thanks for applying - I have a few questions to ask, as well as some general stuff to say. Remember, there are no wrong answers. General thoughts: As it isn't currently a rule that in order to apply for writer, an applicant must also have the WL for the team they are applying to, that's not something that will be taken into consideration for this application. It is likely I will add this rule after the current round of applications are concluded, because I believe it should be a rule no matter what. Still, I think doing so in the middle of the process is unfair - it'd be like changing the rules in the middle of a sports game. Beyond that, I can't really give more of my general thoughts without getting into the weeds of questions and comments on specific parts of this application, so that's what I'll do. 1. I'd like you to expand more on what you think could be done in regards to the below quote - when synthetic lore is already standing on aspects of lore like shell infiltrators, the entire first invasion of Biesel being the result of the creation of autonomous military drones, the SLF, the exclusionists, and many more that give reason for synthetic distrust; I'm uncertain if the fire needs to be stoked even higher than it already is or what other reasons can be added that are different from all of the previously mentioned ones. 2. Jumping off that first question, IPC lore as a whole has been stuck in the narrative corner of "oppressed species" for years, which significantly limits what lore they can have. Much of this application seems to be based around keeping IPCs in that corner, for better or worse. I'd like a general expansion on your reasons for that from an OOC narrative perspective, ontop of ways you think that IPCs can get out of that corner. 3. Lastly, I really like how you don't just base your thoughts on what's on the wiki, but how that wiki lore translates into the game. So I'd like to ask a broad question - Do you think there's a disconnect between the lore as it's written on the wiki and the game? Why or why not? How would you fix it? That's all for now - again, there are no wrong answers, and I look forward to seeing your responses.

Hi. This application has been accepted.

Hi. This application has been accepted.

I really like that you acknowledge the uncomfortable truth I've found present in a lot of our lore (including my own) that there's not a lot of character resources available, just world-building stuff that can potentially give the idea of character building resources through showing and not telling, but might also be too vague to be effective and similar. I'm curious about how you see effective character-building resources being written into lore though; like how would you go about writing those? Secondarily, I'd like to see your expanded thoughts on how you see this being accomplished; "Hieroaetheria needs trimming and reconsolidation. No retcons(PLEASE GOD), but we need to retool it so that it isn't as demanding as writing an Adhomai or a Moghes, and so it's easier to parse through and conceive of a character from the player's end." That's all for now.

We are looking for applicants to fill the position of synthetic writer. When making your application, please include the Lore Developer Template: Ckey/BYOND Username: Position Being Applied For (Wiki Maintainer, Lore Developer, Deputy Lore developer): Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page?: Past Experiences/Knowledge: Examples of Past Work: Include answers to the following questions in your app as well. 1. What do you think are the primary themes of synthetic lore? If you got this position, how would you develop them? 2. What do you think is the strongest part of synthlore currently and why? 3. What do you think is the weakest part of synthlore currently and why? 4. The Synthetic Team recently got a faction of it's own, with Pactolous/the Golden Deep; what would you plan to do with this faction? 5. What do you think are your strongest and weakest attributes in terms of working on a team, and why? 6. As the writer of synthlore, you will often find yourself required to work with other teams, primarily the human team, consistently to further your lore, and reach compromises as their lore is highly intertwined with other species. Therefore, how do you think you'll deal with not being able to do what you wanted, either in part or in full? 7. The synthetic writer is a position that comes with two deputy writers under them on the team. It is the writer's job to manage their team, in addition to their duties of moderating the WL. Given that, what skills do you have that you think will assist you in this? On the opposite end, what do you believe is your weakest link regarding management and moderation?

Hi all. Around the time I first became Loremaster, I can’t remember exactly when, there was an idea that for headstaff on the development side of things, we write out our general thoughts on our areas of responsibility, explain our reasoning, and give our general thoughts more openly to the community so they can understand the position we’re coming from, as like, an official thing. I don’t remember much else, all I remember clearly is Matt mentioning it in the discord at one point after being appointed head-dev. This is barely related to that, and more to start a discussion than let people know what I think - but I got the idea from it. Recently with the increase in discussion around the current setting as a result of the NBT2 player survey, my negative opinion on our current setting surprising some, and me writing for separate reasons what is basically an essay on the current issues of the setting, I decided to spend an hour editing down a few sections to throw them on the forums, so that people can see my thoughts clearly, fully, and without needing to essay post on discord. Instead I’m just doing it on the forums. You don’t need to take the time to read this, only if you’re curious, or if I linked this topic to you after you asked for my thoughts and reasoning in some discussion. That’s all - here’s Trio Essay posting. Problems with the Current Setting This section is going to be an overview of the problems with the current setting, and how to fix them, broken up into primarily three parts, and ending with my closing thoughts . The first part will be discussing what our narrative is currently missing, and the why/how it’s missing it. The second part will be discussing how we’re still chained to the past more in depth. The third part will be discussing issues, problems, and narratives within our current setting. Lastly, I’ll give my closing thoughts. All these sections will build on each other chronologically, so please read them in order, thank you. The Missing Medium Since switching to a ship setting, Aurora’s narrative has been missing something. Due to how the setting of the Horizon was designed (being chained to the corporations and the SCC), alongside how we did not want to repeat what occurred in the past with the original station - that being everything in the spur revolving around one point - it has left us with narratives within the setting being either too large(general worldbuilding with things like politics, wars, and similar) or too small(character driven stories, something in the hands of individual players who may use lore the team writes, but are not written by the team). What we’re missing is something in the medium, on the level of the ship as a whole, that uniquely affects it/is involved in/is tailored to be around it - which sounds alot like event arcs which we haven’t been missing but isn’t what I mean. Basically what I mean is that right now, all the big general worldbuilding stuff(which the lore team focuses primarily on) is a vast majority of the time brought to the Horizon via character backstories, to play a role not in how the ship functions, or the day to day lives of the entire crew, but to be used in character driven stories - which may have those previous affects, but probably won’t. Why is this even important - why do we need stuff on the level of the ship? Because it’s what makes arcs feel relevant. As I will do later, using many Biesel Arcs as an example, it did not matter to the Horizon whether or not the Peacekeeper Mandate is still ongoing (then we added the Grupo) - it was just something going on in the background, maybe you’d get a TCAF patrol vessel mention it offhandedly, but it didn’t matter to the Horizon, even when it was in the CRZ - so it didn’t feel relevant to the ship. It’s not possible to run an event arc for everything and event arcs are really the only way we currently have to bring these big world building things down to the level of the ship. This is not something we can just “fix” ; it's inherent to the current design of the setting, so therefore we can’t just expand on this one aspect of medium level stuff to solve the problem. I will expand on this later, but for now, this does not mean that we should make everything revolve around our ship, but that the worldbuilding stuff has effects which are at the ship's level and impact how it goes about its daily routine. Additionally - though the Horizon is mobile, we need to present most of the time due to a variety of constraints to feel the effects of a narrative on that medium level. Being present anywhere new takes developer time and energy, a lot of it, so also limits where we can go. This is more an OOC issue than a setting one, but I feel the need to mention it because I can see someone in the replies innocently suggesting we just visit newer places more frequently. Chained to the Past Secondly, I think it needs to be understood that the modern setting did not come to exist in a vacuum. It is the messy result of the last 7-8 years of IC and OOC lore developments, all stacking on top of each other in a sort of communal writing project style, to create it, and can’t really be separated from those previous developments. This is why writers bitch about old-lore so much. In its own right, for the time, on the whole old lore was not bad - despite the egregious examples that would never be allowed today being the most commonly brought up ones. However this early in the development of the Aurora setting ended up becoming it’s foundation, and by 2020 with the introduction of KOTW, the issues it caused were already beginning to show. I do not mean to beat a dead horse even more; while KOTW was my favorite arc as a player, 5 years later as loremaster, it has created more issues that I now have to deal with than any other arc run. That’s all I’ll say here on KOTW; however, those issues stemming from the early developments of Aurora lore continued to grow, and grow, and grow - until today. As many problems as KOTW created, fundamentally, the setting will always be flawed and problematic due to these early developments. I do not blame those creating the lore at the time; nor do I blame those that came after, it is only sitting here now that we can fully understand the ramifications of what seemed like trivial decisions almost a decade ago when it comes to Aurora’s Narrative. Issues, Problems, and Narrative Okay, this section is going to be a little complicated, mainly because I had to cut like half of it. I’m going to be talking about the specifics of how these obstacles in the narrative of the setting occur, why I think they happen, and what we can do about them. For this, we’re putting aside any hope of getting impacts on the ship's level, This is to show how, no matter what we might be able to do, the setting has a fundamental flaw. Also, I will be using the word “obstacle” or “obstacles” to describe the fundamental block we cannot overcome with our current setting, aka, how we'll always stagnate over time. To start, we’ll need some definitions going forward. For this section ONLY when I say issues, I mean something separate from problems; issues as I see it are defined as things or pieces of lore that make a narrative more dynamic, mostly from the perspective of the player characters and the ship - an example of an issue with the SCC is how its members squabble internally - it makes any narrative about the SCC more dynamic because it’s not fully unified (though we struggle to show this on the ship). Issues also do not necessarily have to be problems. An example is that Hephaestus having a monopoly in the Hegemony is an issue, but not necessarily a bad thing for the Hegemony (at least parts of it’s government) - however it still fills the criteria of being an issue because it introduces a narrative dynamic to any story within the Hegemony, and is relevant to Unathi player characters as a whole. Again for this section ONLY I define problems as just, something that is a struggle with/a bad thing, but doesn’t introduce a narrative dynamic in the setting or with the players. An example can be found with both Elyra and Tau Ceti, where both nations certainly have problems, but they don’t introduce a real dynamic to the narrative of the nation currently, or any player characters. This is complicated to put into words but I will try to be as clear and concise as possible; problems are not a bad thing in their own right, and can become issues if narratives are introduced that see those problems make that narrative more dynamic. When this doesn’t happen they become obstacles to a dynamic setting, and cause stagnation. The reasoning is very multifaceted, but the main reasons boil down to that the problems are at too large a scale, ignorable by characters from certain backgrounds, or disconnected from the wider narrative in some way. To give an example of how this can happen - I'll use the recent Biesel Election Arc. The biesel election arc saw the status quo of the republic shift due to issues (that barely fulfilled the criteria of being issues due to being rooted in the Peacekeeper Mandate) within the country that allowed the narrative to become more dynamic. What I didn’t do was replace those issues with more issues that fulfill the criteria of making a narrative more dynamic. Instead those issues were resolved (or some carried over) as the status quo changed, and what all of the newly introduced things were problems that were at a large political level, and while they have the potential to make the worldbuilding narrative more dynamic, as of now they don’t translate down to individual characters or the ship at all.This change was also ignorable by most characters for now, because it doesn’t really matter to the primary setting of the corporations - they’re still the ones with power behind the scenes, so it’s not something that affects the setting’s narrative. It has the potential to, but doesn’t yet. I believe that is something we need to improve upon, but is the result of the setting and narrative overall; as this trend has been going on for close to a decade now, not only in the past five years, let alone my tenure as loremaster. Basically I'm saying I could have run an event every day of the election onboard the Horizon for the biesel election, and that wouldn't matter - it still wouldn't work - it doesn't matter to the Horizon who the president of Biesel is, unless a player chooses to consciously make it matter to their character, for whatever reason. That's not a setting you're playing a character in, that's a setting you're watching the TV of. That doesn't account for actually getting events set up. To be fair - sometimes that's what people want, but there are so many narratives like this, where no matter how fire the writing is, the uncomfortable truth is it's become a vast majority of the teams arcs, including my own. The only arc outside of events I'd say I've written that was important to the Horizon in some way(and even then, not very) was The Titan Rises - everything else fell into this category. So, we need to both know how this obstacle can arise - which was just covered in that example - but also why it happens, which is a much trickier question. This “why” ties back into what I mention in the second section, about how the setting did not come to exist in a vacuum, but is the result of the last 7-8 years of lore developments, something that also applies to the narrative. Aurora has one of the most unique narratives of any SS13 server, as it’s a continuation of the same narrative that was started in 2017 with only minor tweaks/retcons made to past articles over time. It is our biggest strength, but also our biggest weakness as this is the fundamental reason why these obstacles around issues and problems exist. The way the setting was established back then, even with all the changes, set the paths the narrative could take, but due to how the setting was established, there was only one path that was logical and reasonably justifiable to take, where as time passes the narrative moves towards issues being resolved and replaced with problems, resulting in the setting becoming more stagnate. How and Why? Narratives and Storytelling are fundamentally, structured conflicts, but our setting is one where any conflict requires huge amounts of justification to logically and reasonably happen. This is caused by a ton of factors, such as the fact that our entities are split primarily into two groups, large hegemonic powers for whom conflict is almost always unnecessary/unprofitable, and smaller regional powers who are prevented from starting meaningful conflicts directly or indirectly by the larger hegemonic powers; other things include the complete and total power dominance of megacorporations, something that has previously seen attempted fixes that didn’t do much, the Solarian Alliance pre-collapse, completely surrounding the system of Tau Ceti, and much, much more. It can be argued that theoretically we could shift our approach as a team, but practically, this is the logical and justifiable narrative trend, so it will be the one consistently returned to as a narrative trend overall as the team is not one consistent group of people, but changes members overtime, sometimes very rapidly. Therefore, our narratives and storytelling overall are going to drift towards stagnation, even if we have bright spurts of a growing dynamic setting here and there, because they are structured conflicts, and our setting is not conducive towards conflicts happening. To be clear, as of now this is only a theory, I do not have hard evidence other than the general return to stagnation overtime continually despite arcs like the first invasion of Biesel, Frost’s rise to power, and then KOTW, all of which threatened to shatter the status-quo, ended up fizzling out or were resolved eventually for one reason or another, in one way or another. Closing Thoughts Trio note: Back to normal usage of the word issue and problem. Articulating this issue at the heart of our setting is something I always struggle with, especially how it’s basically not something we can fix, now, or again in the future. The problem does not stem from old lore being “bad” on the whole, it stems from oldlore not being prepared, designed, considered, whatever other word you want to use, to be the foundation of an almost decades long narrative, and it’s unreasonable to think that back in 2016 they could have known what they were writing. Seemingly trivial details, like just what type of state the alliance is, something I can’t imagine anyone thought would cause the largest event arc this server has ever hosted, ended up required it to be shattered in KOTW just for a breath of fresh air in the setting, which is now beginning to stagnate again. Every little detail that didn’t matter then, now defines what the setting is and will continue to be so long as it’s our groundwork; and that will always be the case, no matter what we do, even coming up with an entire new setting from scratch in a completely different galaxy would see those tiny details grow in importance again, and again, and again. So then how do we fix it? To be honest….. We don’t. Atleast, not entirely. This is one of those issues that is inherent to any communal writing project - especially a volunteer one like Aurora’s is. While the days of the Lore Team’s Wild West are over, it will always be the case that something someone thought was minor gets added, and ends up being something definitive, especially in the early days of any setting. The lore team has tried a lot over the history of Aurora to fix this problem, massive OOC retcons, IC arcs; Kermit just redid the entire way we process inhouse planet applications so it’s less arbitrarily up to the loremasters with guidelines now, and I’ve been bashing my head against the wall of figuring out a way of doing documentation and longterm planning that isn’t guaranteed to die like the lore diary did since I got this position, but nothing I or anyone else has tried has worked over the past almost decade. So - where does that leave us? Fundamentally, no matter what we do today, as long as we are working with the same flawed foundations, we will have a flawed setting. This isn’t anyone’s “fault” or similar, we just can’t go back in time and tell the 2016 team that this narrative would run continually for what seems an assured decade and that they need to plan for that. What can we do then? Basically, figure out a way to make the foundation of the setting irrelevant to the current lore - fully this time. I really don’t see any other way to fix this problem. Thank you for your time reading this. Trio Note: Hi everyone who made it to the end. I decided on a whim to make this due to the amount of questions I’ve gotten about what my problem with the setting currently is. I won’t be announcing it, and spent an hour quickly cutting down my original writing to be under three thousand words. As a result, this isn’t perfect. I did a poor job at connecting the Missing Medium to the Issues, Problems, and Narrative section, cutting what I had trying to explain the link, because I felt it would come off wrong. Figuring out what words to say to communicate what you want, especially over text, is difficult for me, and I didn’t want to risk miscommunication. So then why not wait until I finished everything? Mainly just what I’ve seen around discussions involving the setting currently. Things don’t just happen randomly, they happen for a reason; sometimes that reason makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t, but I think it’s important that we explore more of the “why” the setting ended up the way it did, and right now when discussions about the setting come up, it’s mostly about it in the present, not how we got to this point. I think the latter is far more important - so I decided to say fuck it and open a discussion specifically on that. I'd rather do something and have it be imperfect but atleast get a discussion started sooner on what, IMO, is important to recognize and learn from. Oh also, last thing - the just changing x argument, where x is some piece of lore in the past, probably an IC thing. Whatever piece of lore it is, given the time, X has probably become foundational and removing it/changing it would fundamentally alter at least one or more factions/species. Trust me, I tried to retcon the antag contests, and found out just how important they were to modern lore and wanted to die. Also there's gonna be like a trillion spelling mistakes, what part of an hour was lost. ALSO I FOROGT; Credit to the lore team as a whole for helping me figure out how to articulate this in any sense of coherency, but specifically NM for pointing out the missing medium way of looking at it, and schwann for pointing out the Hegemonic/Regional power divide and it's effects.

I've barely played odyssey rounds so I won't participate much in the discussion about them specifically, instead just do the thing I always do and bring up experiences running events and how that relates to this situation. So - we've run events with basically uncapped departments and roles, the ones I'm most familiar with being Silicon Nightmares. I generally think they're nice - I won't comment on the ratio of people per department or whatever, since frankly, that's irrelevant; what's more relevant is that people could play the game in the role they wanted to have fun. That's the end goal of the game, and this type of thing works towards that end goal. I think where the issues begin to arise, though, is handling that many people. Not in a technical capacity but on command members. I remember one of the Silicon Nightmares events saw command spend more than the first hour of the event just trying to wrangle and organize everything in-round (though there's no other real way to organize things since you don't know the command roster till the rolls are in but anyway) - I can easily see similar situations developing with odyssey's, where command needs to spend a significant amount of time wrangling kittens before things start, resulting in overall less fun rounds. There's probably a ton of ways to implement this without issue, I just wanted to highlight this specific issue since it's something I remember clearly and had five minutes to type up.

Hi. After careful consideration, myself, Owen, and Max have come to the conclusion to overturn this decision. While we understand the reason Noble initiated this ticket, we do not believe Arlo classifies as a reference name that would warrant a rename. If any of the parties involved wish to contest this decision, please file a staff complaint. This post will be locked and archived in 24 hours, thank you.

Hi! As we currently don't have a skrell writer - this is something the LTA and the remaining skrell deputy will handle. With that said - wanted to throw a few questions your way. 1. In the recent-ish past - the starlight zone has been the site of rioting as a result of tensions between the trinary perfection and resident skrell; did Suioq’tui participate in those riots? What were their thoughts on the riots as a whole? 2. Beyond that - what's their score on the Social Compatability Index? That's it for now!

Article 6 of Trouble in Paradise Zavodskoi and Hephaestus Run Out The Guns; Level Significant Accusations at Each Other, Miranda Steps In(Again) The internal conflict within the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate has reached new heights, as today both Hephaestus Industries and Zavodskoi Interstellar have leveled yet more serious public accusations against each other. Hephaestus Industries announced the conclusion of its investigation into the recent attack on Burzsia early this morning, laying the blame at the feet of Zavodskoi Interstellar, accusing their fellow SCC member of supplying members of the militant terrorist branch of the Trinary Perfection, known as the Exclusionists, with equipment for their raid against Burzsia, and further assisting them by orchestrating the planetary uprising through implanted agents on Burzsia. Publicly, the evidence Hephaestus has presented are the corpses of who they claim to be Zavodskoi employees recovered from an asteroid base that was believed to be used as the staging area for the raid near Burszia, and a number of unregistered weapons found to be in the possession of rebellious positronics on Burszia of Zavodskoi make. Positive identification of the corpses has proved impossible, as no matching DNA and blood identities have been found in any database, and the bodies were thoroughly desecrated by ship to ship munitions during the fight to take the base, as were any documents they might have had on them. Additionally, sources close to the investigation tell that several Hephaestus machinists known to have survived the events on Burzsia have since gone missing, their where-abouts unknown. UPDATE: Since the writing of this article, two of the missing machinists have been found dead in their living quarters, one of suicide and one of drug overdose. Only two hours later, Zavodskoi Interstellar fired back, laying the blame for their shipping disruptions in the Sparring Sea and Badlands regions with Hephaestus Industries, who they accused of supplying and paying anti-Dominian unathi pirates, alongside other pirate groups in both regions, to disrupt their operations. Zavodskoi’s evidence is as slim as the evidence of Hephaestus, with some corpses who are unidentifiable which the corporation claims to be Hephaestus agents, and some Hephaestus weaponry in the hands of dead pirates. A confession was also recorded from a captured pirate who shortly died afterwards, however its authenticity and method of obtaining are currently in question, with Hephaestus Industries leveling accusations that the confession was made under duress of torture before the pirate’s subsequent extrajudicial execution. Into this mess has once again stepped Miranda Trasen, for a second time, with the full weight of NanoTrasen behind her. Publicly all we have is a statement from her office stating: “The accusations made by both Hephaestus Industries and Zavodskoi Interstellar are troubling, and the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate will be working with both corporations to ascertain the truths of these claims, and prevent wild, inaccurate public speculation from spreading further.” Both Hephaestus Industries and Zavodskoi Interstellar have confirmed that this statement was made without consulting either corporation, however – since this statement – neither megacorporation has continued to make or respond to allegations made by one another, going silent towards the media. A Stellar Corporate Conglomerate source reported that there are circulating rumors that Miranda Trasen has reigned both Titanius Aeson and Lyudmilla Zavodskoi in with the promise of using NanoTrasen Corporation’s immense power and the assistance of the rest of the SCC to severely punish both of their respective corporations should this feud publicly continue. It is uncertain where this feud will go from here, but we will be certain to keep our readers updated.

Article 4 of Trouble in Paradise Zavodskoi Interstellar Shipping Disrupted in Sparring Sea and Badlands; Corporation Reports 500% Increase In Known Pirate Activity Sad news for those waiting on Zavodskoi Interstellar products coming out of the Empire of Dominia; the megacorporation reported that their shipping has been severely disrupted within the regions of the Sparring Sea and Badlands, with Zavodskoi Interstellar reporting an almost 500% increase in pirate activity against the corporation’s vessels and a number of presumed missing Zavodskoi Interstellar vessels failing to appear at their destination. Zavodskoi Interstellar has requested the assistance of the Empire of Dominia’s Imperial Fleet, Izweski Hegemony’s Navy, and the Serene Republic of Elyra’s Navy to assist in pacifying trade routes in the Sparring Sea and Badlands Of the three, only the Imperial Navy have released confirmation of a naval response to the reported pirate activity; both the Serene Republic of Elyra and Izweski Hegemony have reported they have seen no indications of increasing pirate activity in the regions. Zavodskoi Interstellar has also redirected a significant amount of their asset protection fleet to the region to aid in pacification efforts. No other megacorporation or nation state has been able to corroborate the reports of surging piracy, reporting “business as usual”, with the exception of the Empire of Dominia whose flag many Zavodskoi Interstellar vessels operate under. Zavodskoi Interstellar spokesperson Riaad Weyers made a statement claiming that the company is being specifically targeted by this rise in piracy,and have confirmed that the megacorporation is closely liaising with the Imperial Navy to investigate the matter and discover if any particular organisation is behind the attacks. No statement has been issued on when the resumption of regular shipping is to continue.. Other News: Burszia Invasion: Source close to investigation reveals Burszia Invaders are in control of technology capable of influencing positronic behaviour and were supplied with information on Hephaestus Industries facility security plans.

With Brotendo’s resignation, the Skrell Lore Writer position is now free. Alongside the standard developer format, please include answers to the following questions: 1. What do you think are the primary themes of skrell lore? If you got this position, how would you develop them? 2. What do you think is the strongest part of skrell lore currently and why? 3. What do you think is the weakest part of skrell lore currently and why? 4. What do you think are your strongest and weakest attributes in terms of working on a team, and why? 5. Skrell have “symbiotic” relationships with both the C’thur and Dionae. How do you plan to continue this relationship an further develop it? 6. The skrell lore writer is a position that comes with two deputy writers under them on the team. It is the writer's job to manage their team, in addition to their duties of moderating the WL. Given that, what skills do you have that you think will assist you in this? On the opposite end, what do you believe is your weakest link regarding management and moderation? 7. What are you thoughts on the Nralakk Federation's current geopolitical situation - eg. Federation isolationism, the Traverse? We look forward to seeing your applications, and wish all applicants the best of luck!

Server Moderator Application Basic Information Byond Account: Triogenix Character Name(s): Claire Saylor, Akhtar Antonov, Valerie Vitell AI Name(s): N/A Discord username + tag: triogenix Age: 23 Timezone: EST/ET When are you on Aurora?: Normally in the afternoon into evening between 1600 EST/ET and 2200 EST/ET. Experience How long have you played SS13?: Since 2017, though it was on and off until 2020. How long have you played on Aurora: Since 2020. How much do you know about SS13 (Baystation build) game mechanics?: Almost all of the basics, and most of the complex ones, but some of the more niche mechanics are beyond me. Do you have any experience moderating for an SS13 server?: Nope. Have you read through the criteria thread; https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=4198 - and believe that you mark off all the criteria?: Yes, and yes. Have you ever been banned, and if so, how long and why?: Never been banned. Personality Why do you play SS13?: I was introduced to the game by a friend who sent me the MandaloreGaming Video on it, and ever since it’s been a game I’ve found myself coming back to it time and time again due to a variety of factors, the biggest of which I think is the sheer amount of possibilities it offers in terms of server variety and playstyles, combined with avenues for community worldbuilding. Why do you play on Aurora?: In 2020 when lockdown was happening, I found myself with nothing to really do - so decided to give HRP on SS13 a try. At first the more established servers daunted me, but eventually I found my way to Aurora and was captivated by the dynamic setting, welcoming community, the stable and reasonable staff, and the general fun of it all, while still maintaining a serious HRP environment. That captivation never left and I'm still here 5 years later, and as the Loremaster no less. What do moderators do?: A moderator's primary duty is OOC moderation, meaning to maintain the standards and expectations of the Aurora community that keep it open and welcoming. This is done through various means, sometimes it means ensuring the rules are followed and correcting community members when they stray outside those rules, or removing them from the community if they refuse to correct their behavior; other times it means helping new players learn the ropes, and ensuring they have the correct knowledge needed to enjoy playing on the server. What does it mean to be a moderator for our server?: It is a commitment to not only do all of the things mentioned above, but do so regularly and at a consistent level. I’d compare it to working at a summer camp with kids; no matter how shitty you might be feeling on a day, you need to do the job, and do so to the same standard as you would on any other day. Additionally, you have the responsibility to be an exemplar of those standards and expectations we have as a community. Why do you want to be a moderator?: This is a complicated question for me, because it’s not a simple surface level reason, but I'll keep this as short as possible. It’s something I’ve always thought about doing, but I’ve said as much in the past, I didn’t think I would be good in the role. However now, mainly due to my IRL work but also due to the responsibilities of being Loremaster, I think I have the skill set and knowledge of myself to where I would be a good fit in the role, and I’m always willing to help out if I can, so I want to give it a shot. What qualities do you possess that would make you a good moderator?: I like to think that I am someone who is easy to engage with first and foremost, and who can go into interactions with an open-mind and consistent approach; which also means openly admitting when I make a mistake or am wrong. Moreover due to my IRL work, I tend to be very level-headed no matter the situation, and logically work through a situation to come to a solution while maintaining my composure. Lastly, I think I have a good game-life separation(for lack of a better term), as while I care deeply about Aurora and it’s community, I view being a volunteer for it in a similar light to a job; it’s something that I enjoy and gives me deep satisfaction, but also something that I’m not so passionate about it affects my judgement or how I interact with members of the community. How well do you handle stress, anger, or insults?: At this point, I’d say very well. Stress is something I handle incredibly well, due to my IRL work, and I’ve had tons of insults thrown at me over the years I’ve been on staff; at this point I’ve gotten used to them. Anger is something that while I think I handle well, I can definitely improve with. I think frustration is where I can have the most improvement, especially when whoever I am having a discussion with is refusing to acknowledge what I’m saying or purposefully being provocative. This doesn’t happen often anymore, as working with kids or just as a leader of groups in general forces you to get better at keeping yourself calm, or take a break and hand something off to someone else if you can’t; however it’s still something I think I can improve upon. Anything Else You Want to Add: I always like to take these sections to discuss my weaknesses, so I will do so here as well. I think my biggest weakness is how long it can take me to convey my point in a discussion. This is mainly an issue over a text-medium, as I have a habit where I want to make sure there’s as little potential miscommunication as possible - therefore when typing I tend to slow myself down significantly, and really think over my words, and heavily expand on my points, something that is not an issue with speech because there’s no opportunity to do so. This can be seen as a benefit some of the time, but I think especially when dealing with tickets, it can be a detriment. Sometimes you just need to send it and not be a perfectionist over how a point is being conveyed to ensure things are handled in a timely manner. If someone doesn’t fully get it, we have the staff complaint forum for a reason.

Readded this - tried to make it easier to see while still keeping it contained in dropdown boxes. If anything I'd drop down how much HTs make from middling to struggling - right now miners and officers make the same, and I think the base values for both of them are reasonable. Let me think about that. The issue with things like Hazard pay is with this system there's no way for me to account for it - I can't cover ever edge case. I've tried to make it clearer that these are general values which can be adjusted based on character and preference, but are still canon. LMK if it's clearer now.

This isn't something the IPC team is interested in either. Voting for Dismissal.

Page has been updated with some new stuff - also messed around with the values a bit.