Boggle08's Dionae Lore Writer Application

[Boggle08]

Ckey/BYOND Username: Boggle08
Position Being Applied For: (Wiki Maintainer, Lore Developer, Deputy Lore developer): Lore Developer
Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page?: Yes
Past Experiences/Knowledge: Three years as a Dionae Lore Deputy. Prior to that, I contributed several lore canonization applications, notably the first iteration of Burzsia. I have an informal history with computer science and am capable of using GitHub.
Examples of Past Work: I pitched and wrote the Initial draft for the Underhive Collective, assembled the first iteration of the Mohresian Dionae page, I helped write Hieroaetheria, particularly the history sections. I pitched and helped write the new consolidated voidtamer confluence faction we now have. I also worked on overhauling the Rueltab incident, and its consequences.

 

I'm just going to get right into it.

 

The Questions

1. What is a particular section of Diona lore that you think should be expanded upon or removed?

I'll save my thoughts on Hieroaetheria for the second question. The Voidtamer Confluence is something I'm rather satisfied in how it turned out: It consolidates a lot of the concepts we've had with previous iterations of voidic/spaceborn dionae and voidtamer groups. They make an excellent face for the species, they exemplify their most alien qualities, they have a lot of potential as a foil to Hieroaetheria, and I'd like to see them expand as a major faction in the Dionae sphere of influence.

 

2. What are your thoughts on Hieroaetheria as the new focal point for the Diona species - be it direction, points you like, or points you dislike?

I've always had mixed feelings about Hieroaetheria. It was one of the first things I worked on, back when it was still called the CT-EUM, and helped it through its second rework into Hieroaetheria proper. The intent behind it was to give Dionae a planet modelled after Moghes or Adhomai, in the sense that it would concentrate on depth of worldbuilding and intra-planetary species developments. 

In a lot of ways, it's become a ball and chain for us. Hieroaetheria is colossal, and so is the supplementary material for its subfactions. Most of that material is dry world building that doesn't give players much to work with when designing characters, and in some ways, they are far too comparable to humans in how they operate. Governments are a good example of this.

As time as worn on, we've consolidated and expanded upon Dionae outside of Hieroaetheria. Rather than putting our eggs in one basket, we have the potential to organize and distribute our world building in a similar way to human lore, which does smaller developments focused on multiple planets or cultures.

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. 

 

3. What are your thoughts on the physiology of dionae, first in connection to lore and secondly to game mechanics?

There is a vast discrepancy between what dionae are capable of in lore and what they are capable of in game. In-lore, they are flesh mages. Their biology is comparable to a magic system. In a lot of ways they remind me of the magic systems and concepts I've engaged with playing old WoD campaigns, especially vampire. Ingame, they must adhere to balance considerations set by the maintainers, and of course, they have to actually be programmed in. What is important is that what we eventually establish as possible in lore has to be consistent with what you can do in game. Right now, there are no rules, there are no upper bounds, and it's the way it is because there's no mechanical implementation of what they can do, besides print walls, doors, and glow bulbs.

With all this in mind, I have design documentation for a mechanical overhaul of the species. I'm going to source as much of the actual work implementing it as I can on my end, because I know that it isn't realistic to expect anything substantial from the dev team at this point. Not unless someone wants to help and has time for it. It is what it is.

 

4. What are your thoughts on the prevalence of the Eternal religion among dionae and their factions?

In some ways the prevalence of the Eternal religion is contrived, think Moghresian Dionae and Hieroaetheria. The paradigm has always been to incorporate it into every single Dionae faction, but I think there are more interesting directions we can take with the Eternal besides doing just that. Despite me saying all this, I think the Eternal is solid as a concept, and it will help serve as an indicator of the cultural divisions I want to instill into Dionae lore as themes.

We discussed this as a team shortly before Cael left, but the thematic direction I'd like to take Dionae lore into is one where there is a dichotomy of two opposing worldviews or philosophies among Dionae as a whole: One side sees the world as cyclical, mysterious, and an extension of a divine being that they are in service to, and a part of. These guys worship the eternal and are generally Voidtamer aligned. The other side sees the world as chaotic, evil, and senseless. They are materialists, and seek to create their own gods while rejecting any notion of natural order or service to an existing cosmic godhead. These guys will practice a different kind of philosophy religion that will emerge inside of Hieroaetheria. Two halves that oppose each other, no more, no less.

 

5. On the Diona team, you will occasionally coordinate projects with both the Skrell and Unathi teams. How confident are you in your knowledge of the lore of those species?

My understanding of Unathi lore is solid, and the writing on our end with them is in a great place, I just need to catch up a little on their recent developments. Skrell lore has never been my strong suit. I know enough about it to write for my own species, but If I'm accepted as lore writer, I'm gonna have to spend an evening ripping through the wiki and touch bases with the Skrell team. Being rusty on Skrell lore is something I am more than capable of correcting.

 

6. What do you see as a cause for the low number of diona players compared to other whitelisted species, and is there anything you would do to solve this?

There's a lot to get into with this question. When it comes to problems that antagonize player character retention for Dionae, there's two categories: problems that the writing team can actually fix by writing, and problems that require code and other assets that can't be fixed by writing, yet are extremely critical to the species' success.

 

Category #1: What can be fixed via lore additions.

Dionae lore concerning individual cultures is often written from a very top-down perspective (i.e. it reads like world building notes rather than character resources). Considering how de-familiarized Dionae lore often is, special emphasis needs to be placed on what the setting looks like from an individual character's perspective, in our wiki resources. What it means to have a place in their societies, what they see in their day to day life, what motivates them, their values, their wants, desires, and concerns. Why they would leave their societies for the Horizon. This is more than possible to implement, Vaurca and Skrell lore already have it.

The other thing we need to continue to establish them as active participants in the setting. Dionae lore has suffered from a ton of hard resets over the course of its development (all of this was mostly before 2019); this has meant that it has lagged behind trying to reestablish itself while the other species' departments have had time to work off their foundations and establish a reputation for their factions in the setting. This isn't as simple as creating a wiki entry that describes their reputation, the player base has to recognize this information and incorporate it into RP situations when it is appropriate. This isn't a process you can really fast track, but it can be nurtured, and the least resource intensive way to do it is through article arcs. This is where most of our cross-species team collaboration efforts are going to be concentrated in. These don't have to be long or complicated arcs either, I'm more interested in the plurality of each of our factions doing stuff. 

Lastly, we neeeeeed to revisit Dionae in Biesel. We've touched on many things since I've joined the team, but this is something that fills a much-needed vacancy in our character concept roster: Dionae that are integrated into a human-dominated setting. If we flesh this out and give it that individual character perspective writing I talked about two paragraphs above this one, we will fulfill a vacancy in our character origin roster that I think a lot of people will appreciate.

 

Category #2: What can't be fixed via lore additions.

For this category, I'll start with what's easiest and work down to what's hardest.

Loadout items, Sprite-work. This is easiest to do, Yonni and I are capable of making our own loadout items and uploading them to the Github, and we've already been doing this. The bigger challenge is redesigning the actual character sprite for Dionae, which I believe is necessary. The current one has a terrible, lumpy, asymmetrical silhouette that makes anything form fitting look terrible. Most of the loadout accessories that look good on them deliberately break up their outlines, like dresses, ponchos, robes, and hoods. The way I'm thinking of doing it is finding something to port and modify, to reduce the workload. Whatever we choose to do, the customization options for dionae will likely need to be completely remade. Drip is a fundamental part of designing a character, as trivial as it sounds. People are willing to pay commission money for their characters here its important. It's also the primary way of conveying faction aesthetics on this server.

Once the sprite is fixed, gonna probably have an internal roadmap for loadout stuff we need to make.

The next thing is art. Pictures specifically for the wiki. Most of the ones we have are flags, and most the ones that aren't are half a decade old and all come from SleepyWolf. Pictures on the wiki break up the massive walls of text we write and help players establish in their mind's eye what a culture, species, or place is like more efficiently. I've got some artistic chops, but I'm not that good. I'd be able to make some pictures on the wiki happen but it'll look like the Big Lez Show. Most of the other art you see on the wiki is sourced internally by their respective teams, and we don't really have that kind of capability right now. 

The final thing is mechanics, features, mapping, code. Medical overhauls to the species, new mechanics, bugfixes, biomass abilities, blood learning, you get the idea. Gameplay QoL goes under here too.

The quality of life for this species is by far the worst in the game compared to any other species. Objectively. This isn't something I'm technically supposed to worry about, being on the writing team and all, but the way Dionae handle ingame right now is such a mechanically handicapped experience that It actively hurts player retention. And it shows, most of our players choose extremely sedentary roles when they play as Gera Dionae. There's more flexibility with Coeus, I've seen them in medical and engineering, but there's kind of a soft ban on them doing anything involving combat, or otherwise getting themselves into situations where they need to defend themselves. Gera Dionae can play as officers and can get themselves into trouble in the same way as everyone else can, in a sense, but the speed they move at, man. Could you imagine us trying to run a High intensity event with Gera Dionae in the state they're in now? G2 Industrials are capable of outrunning them.

It's a problem that's persisted ever since the species rightfully earned a bunch of nerfs, and the only solution I can think of to remedy it is to try to take all the experience I have with programming and attempt to fix things myself, via a complete and total overhaul of how they work. It's going to cut into the time I could use to write, and I'll probably turn into just an editor for my deputies when I finally choose to work through the hard part of this, but the way I see it it's the only way to fulfil my obligations with respect to improving Dionae character retention. I've got the design document and everything.

 

7. What do you think are your strongest and weakest attributes in terms of working on and managing a team, and why?

Not gonna lie, this is the first time I'll be stepping into a leadership role like this. I have a fairly good understanding what I want to do and how I want to run my own department. Cael, Yonni and I were on a roll with the direction of Dionae lore we wanted going forward. What I have the least amount of experience in, and where I'm going to be cautious with myself, is working inter-species team projects, and coordinating with other departments outside of lore. This does not mean I am going to avoid those things, because I will have to do those things. It just means there's gonna be a learning period on my end. 

Also, it should be said, I am strapped for time just as everyone else seems to be right now. Manual labor job, College, Career building, Winds from the east, mist coming in and all that. I want to make sure Dionae lore is ready and able to capitalize on the launch of the NBT2 as much as it can, no loose ends. After that, I'm out. 

 

Closing Thoughts

Despite the problems and shortcomings I've described, Dionae lore has never been in a stronger position than it is now. It has identity, it has direction, it has interest, it has a thematic center that is strong and waiting to be fully realized. We are so close.

 

Edited April 10 by Boggle08

[Triogenix]

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.

[Boggle08]

7 hours ago, Triogenix said:

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?

I think the solutions I'll use will depend on whatever we're working on, but the bottom line is that they need to bring a level of relatability to our material. Our species houses writing and concepts that place us at the far end of de-familiarization in terms of xeno-fiction. We have a number of backgrounds that exemplify these alien qualities, but because our species is so sociologically malleable, we can account for a whole range of characterizations for them, besides just one extreme.

There are already three categories our backgrounds fall into: 

1. Societies that are heavily influenced by or reliant on other alien cultures (Narrows, Biesel, Moghes, etc).

2. Societies that develop on their own, on a terrestrial planet (Mictlan, Hieroaetheria)

3. Societies that develop totally on their own, without reference to terrestrial or planetary concepts (Voidtamer Confluence).

Other departments rely on existing cultures, history, or other forms of media as a reference heuristic for their worldbuilding. They're able to get away with sparser character creation materials because you can supplement it with your IRL understanding of the parallels. For Dionae lore, I actually want to base a lot of their aesthetics and culture around pre-classical cultures, such as late bronze age civilizations or Sumerian city-states, as well as the nomadic chariot tribes that existed around that period too. Dionae technology is mostly the product of their biological capabilities, rather than the exclusive outcome of centuries of technological or cultural development. Imagine if the ancient Egyptians actually did have access to latent powers that allowed them to fly around and contact aliens.

I should briefly go over the character resource material we currently already have: Much of it relates to mindtypes, biology, and the overall psychological profile of Dionae. All of it has proven to be very useful and necessary to understand the species, but most of the definitions and concepts described on the wiki aren't written as concepts that are a product of culture. Most of them are written in a clinical author voice, and describe phenomena across the species, independent of cultures. I think that his has led to a lot of confusion from our whitelistees, as this material tends to get directly referenced during IC dialogue exchanges in a way that doesn't feel natural. We are going to have to solidify the intent behind these character materials and offer culturally specific ways to interact with that part of Dionae lore.

7 hours ago, Triogenix said:

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."

Managing three separate factions simultaneously on this one planet is too much. Ideally, I'd like to get full team consensus before we commit to any major changes, but the one thing that is certain is we need to reduce the number of polities operating inside of Hieroaetheria to just one and have that interact with the rest of the setting. The actual reduction in factions is something I think we can do through organic developments, rather than outright retcons.

Otherwise, we definitely need to rework the individual faction pages. I'm not sure how to put it, they sort of read like Dionae-themed human countries on the wiki. Those are likely to go through drastic changes, we might cut down on the size of at least one of them. I don't want our faction pages to get any fatter than they currently are in this process. The wordcount on the page is gonna be the word limit when we start changing things. Hopefully it's the last "big" pass-over we'll need to do.

 

 

Edited April 15 by Boggle08
grammar