Kintsugi’s Human Lore Deputy Application

[Kintsugi]

Ckey/BYOND Username: Kintsugi

Time in the Aurora community: Six years continuously, beginning in November 2019
Position Being Applied For: (Wiki Maintainer, Lore Developer, Deputy Lore developer): Human Lore Deputy
Have you read the Lore Team Rules and  Regulations wiki page? Yes
Past Experiences/Knowledge: I have collaborated extensively with the human lore team and the lore team more generally over the course of these last six years.
Examples of Past Work: Visegrad and a number of other things. I’m working on a rework of Visegrad right now that I feel would be the best representation of my current writing skills, and I can share that upon request.

 

Why are you applying for the position of human lore deputy writer? Why do you think that you would be good in the position?

 

 

I’ve been a member of Aurora’s community for six years now, and during that time human lore (and the server’s lore more generally) has been a defining part of why I’m still here after all this time. I think Aurora truly has something special with regards to our lore, and during my time in the community I’ve always been eager to contribute and participate in its continued development and the greater overall experience that it provides. I think being a human lore deputy is one of the best ways to further take part in that.

I feel that I would be a good pick for the position due to my deep familiarity with the subject matter, my history of collaboration with members of the human lore team and the greater lore team as a whole, my extensive experience contributing to Aurora’s lore and interactions with the community in that regard, my demonstrated writing and worldbuilding skills, and most importantly the intense passion I feel for human lore as a component of the best SS13 experience I’ve yet experienced - Aurora.

 

What is your favourite part of Human Lore and why? If you submitted something for canonisation that was indeed canonised you may not select that as the answer to this question.

 

This is going to be a very broad answer to this question, but I think my favorite part of human lore has to be the worldbuilding - I think that human lore has a particularly consistent vision for the world it presents, and I’ve long been deeply invested in the narrative interwoven into the lore itself. I think one of the things that makes our server so unique is that we essentially have an ongoing space opera as the backdrop of our setting, and I think human lore is a huge part of why that is and why our lore is so special.

 

I have long loved media wherein the world described feels real enough to be tangible, and I think human lore manages to achieve this owing to the consistent vision that it has been written with for several years now and the breadth of meaningful and thoughtful detail put into the material itself.

 

What do you believe are ways that the Human Lore Team could best implement the phoron scarcity to our various factions and locations throughout the setting that would reflect the gravity of the in-character situation without grossly compromising the out-of-character things that make each faction and location unique and compelling?

 

 

I think something that we don’t pay enough attention to as it is are the more tangible material and economic conditions that the scarcity has imposed upon the people of the spur, and how the various factions and locations within it are experiencing and coping with that crisis. I think that further exploring and building upon this aspect of the scarcity is a perfect opportunity for us to both implement the scarcity in a meaningful and effective way and to provide more material for the playerbase to work with in the course of roleplay. 

Beyond that, foreign relations is a key potential area for attention with regards to implementing the phoron scarcity, as the factions of the setting now have a fairly existential crisis on their hands, and not all of them are as equally impacted by that crisis. That asymmetry presents plenty of opportunity for conflict and interaction both in the macro, setting-focused perspective, and on a more player-facing scale as well, and is something I’d really like to further examine and build upon.

 

What do you believe are the current strengths and weaknesses of human lore? Why? What would you do to improve upon the weaknesses? Please do not mention offworlders in your answer to this question. We know that they are a weak spot and that they require action and would prefer to hear perspectives that do not highlight this area of human lore.

 

I hope this won’t be considered double-dipping on answers, but as far as strengths are concerned, I would like to identify the consistent vision and the quality of the worldbuilding as key strengths for human lore, as I outlined above. 

Another strength of human lore is also one of its most significant weaknesses - the sheer breadth of the material that human lore has to work with means that there’s never a shortage of potential avenues for exploration and further development, but that also means there’s a tremendous amount of ground for a team with limited manpower to cover and maintain. The amount of detail and thought put into much of the lore as it is means that you’ll have plenty of very interesting, very useful things to read - but simultaneously, the sheer amount of material can oftentimes be very intimidating for newer players, or those who don’t have much time for reading  on their hands.

While I have always been of the opinion that this breadth of writing is necessary for our setting to be as enjoyable and fleshed-out as it is, I do think that there’s a lot to be done to address these problems - some ideas I have for doing so that I’d like to float would be “article complexity” and “setting importance” ratings for pages, which could be useful ways for players to determine at a glance how advanced and important to the overall setting an article of lore roughly is. More generally, organizational tweaks of this nature would go a long way with increasing the approachability of human lore to those who might find it intimidating. 

Beyond that, I would really like to explore avenues for increasing player involvement with regards to contributions - I think human lore can be somewhat opaque in what its goals and priorities may be at any given moment, and players who might otherwise be interested in submitting lore canonization applications may end up not doing so out of a desire to not invest time and effort into something that may not be wanted by the team - regardless of how realistic that concern may or may not be, it is one I think we should try to eliminate. I’m not sure how realistic a concept this is, but something like a public “bounty board” where the team posts pages that are in need of work but aren’t high enough of a priority to devote the attention of the team to alongside a general vision for what is desired from those pages might be a good way to drum up contributions and encourage people to lend a helping hand.

 

What are three projects (medium-to-large size additions, arcs, or reworks) that you would like to complete during your tenure as a Human Lore Deputy writer? Please do not mention new locations or factions in this answer.

 

The first project I’d like to mention here is an Elyra rework - it is widely understood to be a faction in dire need of some attention, and has long been in a position of largely ignoring the greater setting at large, along with being perhaps one-note in its writing. With the phoron scarcity and the recent hints of underlying instability in mind, I’d really like to take a crack at increasing the dynamism of Elyra and making it a more attractive option for the playerbase to interact with.

Second, a refactor of the Coalition’s internal politics is something I feel the faction would benefit greatly from. Since KOTW, the Coalition has been experiencing a lot of internal and external strain, but this hasn’t always been adequately reflected in the writing, or at least insufficient attention has been paid to it. Like in Elyra’s case, there’s also a lack of integration with the phoron scarcity that I’d be very keen to address as well.

Lastly, the interstellar relations page is in need of a total rework, with a mind to bringing it up to date with recent developments in-world and, again, especially the phoron scarcity. Collaboration with other species lore teams is a key part of what I have in mind, and I’d really like to further set the stage for how the human factions interact with the alien factions over the matters of phoron and the shifting balance of power in the spur.

 

What is an idea for a future arc that you would like to have a part in writing and organising in the future? If you provided an arc(s) as part of your answer for question 3, you may expand on the ideas for that arc(s) here, or you may provide another idea.

 

As I mentioned in my answer to the last question, Elyra is in a spot of needing urgent attention in order to bring it up to par with the rest of human lore. I think that plunging it into crisis would be the best way to do so - and the foundations for such a crisis are already fairly easy to see: Elyra’s entire society is reliant on a resource that the spur is rapidly running out of, and it relies on the brutal exploitation of its immigrant population in order to maintain access to that resource.

A simultaneous economic and security crisis would be all but disastrous for Elyra, which is increasingly finding itself isolated diplomatically and unstable internally. It could be that the NCP worker population dries up due to declining immigration, the security crackdown, or strikes and labor movements among the workers - it could also be that interdiction of Elyran traffic by pirates and privateers makes it too dangerous for new arrivals to attempt the journey, or a conflict with Dominia or the Hegemony shuts down travel routes and prevents some regions from accessing Elyran space altogether. It could even be that Elyra starts running out of phoron prospects, or the quality of Elyran phoron increasingly declines as the highest quality deposits are exhausted.

The Elyran state is so fragile that the factors that could lead to state failure are rapidly piling up as the spur becomes more dangerous and desperate, and it could plausibly only take a few problems striking to cause such a crisis - and when it does, there are catastrophic potential ramifications for the entire nation.

 

Have you ever been subject to any warnings, strikes, or bans from the Aurora moderation team? If so, how long ago were you and for what actions did you receive moderation action for? Answers for this question should include actions taken on the game server, discord servers, and forums.

 

I’ve been on Aurora for six years now, and few people can be in a community as long as that without getting dinged for a few infractions. I think I have one warning from several years back, and maybe a few strikes over all six of those years. I have never been in any real trouble.

 

OPTIONAL: Do you have any miscellaneous comments or remarks for the Human Lore Team or the community?

 

Sorry about the relative brevity and for taking so long to post this application. I’ve been busy with work and my living situation is a bit dodgy atm (no computer rn for example, so I did this application on my phone) I also took a very long time deciding between applying for this or deputy loremaster, but ultimately decided this was the better choice right now.

Edited November 16 by Kintsugi

[The7thLain]

Hi! Thank you for your application. Please pardon my delay in posting these questions, it's been Thanksgiving week and I've had little time to get to responding to you and the other candidates. I've read it over and I have a few questions for you to answer at your earliest convenience, but preferably by the end of this weekend if you can manage it. If you do not answer by then, I will move forward with making a decision on your application without the information sought by the questions below.
1. You mentioned the material scarcity and economic conditions being something that you would like to expand upon and describe how they impact the lives of humans in the spur. Please name some ways specifically that you might write these impacts into our lore. These can be general or location-specific if you want to get that granular.
2. Elyra seems to be a hot-button issue for many of our applicants this time around. Could you explain some more on what your rework would entail beyond the crisis you mentioned? What would Elyra look like after the crisis has finished?
3. Beyond your ideas of setting importance and article complexity ratings for pages, what other ways would you like to streamline the organization/digestion of human lore pages? We on the team also agree that some of our pages can be somewhat intimidating to newcomers or even longtime players due to their length, complexity, or both, and would like a more thorough explanation of your ideas in addressing this issue.

[Kintsugi]

On 29/11/2025 at 01:56, The7thLain said:

1. You mentioned the material scarcity and economic conditions being something that you would like to expand upon and describe how they impact the lives of humans in the spur. Please name some ways specifically that you might write these impacts into our lore. These can be general or location-specific if you want to get that granular.

Something I’d like to point to as an example of how to illustrate the conditions I described would be to further integrate the scarcity into the planets and states of human lore, and have it more comprehensively impact and shape the lifestyle of humans within the setting as a whole. 

 

Currently, there are a number of planets that do a fairly good job of painting a picture of what life is like there, with Konyang being a great example of such, and further expanding on that information while tying in things like how the scarcity has impacted personal finances and economics, consumer goods and necessities, government services, infrastructure, et cetera, would be both effective from a writing standpoint and a useful and interesting approach for the players to make use of.

 

With regards to the bigger picture of human lore, I think that grand strategy and foreign relations in the spur is increasingly going to be shaped by access to phoron and how the scarcity places pressure on the states of the spur and their economic and social systems. It is fair to say that the phoron crisis is existential for most nations in some shape or form, and their continued access to phoron is going to be a key part of how they act and interact with each other.

On 29/11/2025 at 01:56, The7thLain said:

2. Elyra seems to be a hot-button issue for many of our applicants this time around. Could you explain some more on what your rework would entail beyond the crisis you mentioned? What would Elyra look like after the crisis has finished?

In my opinion, Elyra has continuously made nothing but bad decisions from most perspectives over the course of my being on Aurora - it has alienated most nations in the spur in some form, and now it has to contend with the fact that the phoron scarcity has made it a tremendous target as it now has the largest remaining reserves in the spur that we know of. 

 

Elyran society is fundamentally reliant on phoron in order to function at all - citizens enjoy immense material wellbeing and human comforts as a consequence of their phoron wealth, and they do so without having to do much work themselves thanks to the exploitation of their immigrant population, which keeps coming regardless because of the economic pressure pushing them there.

 

This is ultimately a very fragile system, and all it takes is a little pressure to make it fall apart. Because phoron is so important to the continued function of the Elyran state, supply can never be diminished without it having tremendous consequences in the medium-to-long term. This means that just to keep the current baseline degree of functioning it already has, the NCP population must remain stable and government revenues steady - when the NCP worker population declines, revenues decline, and everything else suffers as a consequence. 

 

So, when the crisis I’ve described hits, the resulting Elyra is one that is materially less prosperous on the whole - the citizens who have lived lives of effective luxury now have to contend with failing infrastructure, rising costs of living which make it harder for average citizens to afford their bills and expenses they might have easily managed prior to the crisis, increasing crime and failing services, along with economic turmoil and lackluster employment prospects. NCPs may be pushed to emigrate as working conditions become harsher and hours longer, increasing the economic disaster spiral, and the government might be increasingly ineffective or forced to take drastic actions in order to survive. 

 

Beyond that, it’s hard to say exactly what the Elyra post-rework would look like because the finer details would need to be hashed out, but on the whole I feel that Elyra has been built upon a deeply flawed system, and the lie that that system is sustainable. I think having that system finally experience some stress would expose just how fundamentally rotten it is to some of its citizens, and add further complexity to the faction and drive more engaging characterization.

 

This also further sets Elyra up to be a less isolationist actor on the spur scale, as it now has to desperately seek ways to ensure its continued safety and security as it experiences internal instability alongside external vulnerability.

On 29/11/2025 at 01:56, The7thLain said:

3. Beyond your ideas of setting importance and article complexity ratings for pages, what other ways would you like to streamline the organization/digestion of human lore pages? We on the team also agree that some of our pages can be somewhat intimidating to newcomers or even longtime players due to their length, complexity, or both, and would like a more thorough explanation of your ideas in addressing this issue.

I think generally the best ways to try and streamline human lore as a whole would be to make organizational changes to break up a lot of the more intimidating material. I think that more than anything else, the act of actually observing that there is a lot of text on a page, and especially having that page appear dense with information, is what turns players off a specific piece of lore and makes things difficult to digest or seem unapproachable. I’d like to make further use of things like dropdown boxes, summaries, and visual or organizational aids designed to indicate to players just how important some specific piece of information actually is to know.

 

Oftentimes, people don’t need to know more than the broad strokes of something to have a baseline understanding of how to roleplay with or around it. It isn’t actually necessary to know everything about the world in order to function in our day-to-day real lives, and it isn’t necessary to know everything about the setting in order to roleplay effectively within it. While you may need to be well-versed in a planet’s lore if you intend on playing a character from it, this isn’t the case for simply having a conversation with a character from another country - and oftentimes you learn plenty about the lore of their background from IC interactions alone.

 

So, with that in mind, I think communicating just enough key information to the playerbase is oftentimes all that one needs for basic roleplay interactions, and I think a further effort to do so would go a long way in making our lore seem a lot less scary and a lot easier to navigate and comes to grips with. We already have things like summary pages for our interstellar nations - a page where every planet is listed with a graphic of some kind and a paragraph summarizing the most important information about that planet could be worth looking into, as it’d be a great way to help players (especially new players) get a feel for things and get their foot in the door with specific backgrounds or material.

[The7thLain]

Hello again. This was not an easy decision for me to make; this round of applications was by far the most competitive I've ever seen in the 5 and a half years I've been the human lore maintainer. Everyone had a very good showing, but, congratulations! You you have got the job. I will reach out to you on discord shortly.