Alright! As most everyone should know, these are practically a mandatory part of RPGs, and, as most everyone should know, they generally aren't fun - they can get out of hand, they should be common sense, people ignore them anyway, etc. Here at Sun + Shadow, I'd like to think that our players are experienced enough and more than mature enough to not really need someone to tell them how to behave at the board. However, I know that there’s always stupid people out there, and since I can’t put an idiot-repelling spell on this board (sorry, wrong genre – that sounds more Harry Potter than Valdemar *g*), I’ll have to put you all through the pain of reading these. Hopefully it won’t be too bad, for either of us.

• Play nice. Sounds simple enough, right? I’d like to think that everyone would get along, but since I know that people do tend to clash, please just remember to respect one another. That means no flaming, no swearing (at other people), no spamming, etc. If you’ve really got a problem with one of the other players, contact them via PM (politely!) or contact an administrator. Do not bring it onto the board.
  
  On that same note, please remember that there is a big difference between IC and OOC – one’s real and one is not. If someone insults your character IC, or attacks them, or what-have-you, don’t get offended because they didn’t mean it OOC. We like IC conflict here, because it makes life interesting, and it’s a lot of fun if you don’t get offended when your character does.
  
  
• Board Rating. We’re all mature here, which is why the board rating is 18-A/R. This means that we do allow sex, cursing, extreme violence, etc. If you’re not comfortable with that, sorry, but that’s the way it is. This does not mean, however, that it’s alright for your character to use the f-word every three words, or get involved in steamy sex scenes – we’d much prefer it if you faded to black, or went to a different board (as there are boards out there for that sort of thing).
  
  
• Register properly. That means register with your character’s first and last name, with a space between the two; i.e. Peregrine Auberon. Please don’t register with Peregrineauberon, PeregrineAuberon, peregrine001, iamtheking, etc., because I’ll probably end up deleting your username in the near future. On that same note, please create a new account for every character you create – you can register multiple times with the same email, so don’t worry about creating a new one for each character. And yes, you will fall to the dark side of multiple characters – bwahahaha!
  
  As well, please don’t register unless you’ve got the biography completed, or so close to completed that you’ll have it done within the week. I’ll purge the member list once a month or so, but I don’t want to have to delete fifty usernames when I could just delete three.
  
  
• Be realistic in your posts. I know, I know, I just told you to be realistic at a board based off of a fantasy series. But hey, hopefully you know what I mean! But if you don’t, here’s a brief explanation: keep your characters real, and keep your characters in canon as much as possible. I don’t want to see fairies popping up everywhere, or your character hearing voices in his or her head everytime s/he passes the Forest of Sorrows (and, on that note – please remember that Vanyel, Yfandes, and Stefan are no longer in the forest, so if your character is hearing voices near the Forest, he or she should go see the nearest MindHealer).
  
  This also means that there are no Mary-Sue or Gary-Stu type characters allowed; everyone has flaws, and we’d like your characters to have them too. If you scroll up, you’ll see that I wrote that we like character conflict here because that makes life more interesting; ditto for character flaws. It’s boring to read about someone who gets every guy she meets into bed within a half hour, or some guy who is undefeated even by the Weaponsmaster (or, if s/he is the Weaponsmaster, undefeated by every challenger s/he’s faced in Valdemar/Karse/Iftel/Hardorn/etc.). Your character will take hits, your character will make mistakes, and you will have a lot more fun if they do.
  
  
• No Godmodding. Duh.
  
  
• Character creation. As mentioned before, no Mary Sues/Gary Stus. Your application should meet, if not exceed, the minimums – the more the better! We’re an advanced RPG, so if you can’t write three good, solid paragraphs on a regular basis, this is definitely not the RPG for you. General notes for creating your character include:
  
  -No cross-collegium trainee/graduates: this means no mage/healers, healer/bards, bard/heralds (and we’re leery about Bard-turned-Heralds or Healer-turned-Heralds), etc. This includes Herald-Mages because, although they are canon, we don't really see them meshing well with the board.
  
  - Be reasonable with character Gifts: one strong gift and (if you must have more than one) one weak one, or two weak ones, or two average strength ones, or one average strength one, etc. We don’t want any insanely powerful characters here, so be reasonable. Your character’s personality should make them who they are, not their Gift. As well, please check the Needed/Reserved characters thread to see if the Gift you want your character to have is still available. We've limited the number of characters per Gift in order to maintain a balance of rare/common Gifts closer to what is seen in the books - not everyone can be a Firestarting Empath, after all!
  
  -Make sure Herald Trainee applications are open in the year you want before submitting an application, as there are really only a limited number of Heralds (and Herald Trainees), so it isn’t realistic to have twenty Herald Trainees in first year when there’s only ten trainees between the other four Collegia. You can find this information in the needed/reserved characters thread.
  
  -Steer away from twins. In the past, we’ve seen large numbers of characters with twins, so unless it’s absolutely necessary, we’d rather you didn’t. This goes for triplets and other multiple births. They aren’t especially common, remember that!
  
  -If you plan on making a character who was a thief, you better have a very good application, and your character better not be Skif-reborn.
  
  -We've had a huge influx of characters who are either Karsite, or born and raised right on the Karse/Valdemar border. While obviously there are some people who would be from that area, Valdemar is pretty-freaking-big - as such, please consider a different birthplace for your character, if that was what you had originally planned. The only exception to this is if you are making a Holderkin character, because that is obviously the only place in Valdemar that they've really settled - and Hold characters are fun.
  
  -You'll see that there is a "Companion/Bondbird/Pet" section on the application forms. This isn't an invitation to create an 'ordinary' pet with 'extraordinary' abilities. If your character has a pet, it needs to be a normal cat, dog, or maybe horse. They will have normal pet behaviours. Your character will obviously only have a Companion if they're a Herald or Herald Trainee, and if your character has a Bondbird, they need also be Tayledras. We'll let you know if your character's pet is a little too 'out there'.
  
  
• Spellcheck is your friend. We should all be relatively skilled writers, here, but everyone makes mistakes. Read through your posts for mistakes (from spelling errors to factual mistakes) so that you don’t have to edit them later and look like an idiot. And, as a note, all posts should be in Third Person, Past Tense – and if you don’t know what that is, you shouldn’t be at this board.
  
  
• On posting in general. Please don’t change the default font or the colour or anything in your posts (especially your IC ones) because that makes it hard for everyone else to read, and when your character speaks, put the speech between “quotation marks like this,” and don’t do anything else (like change the colour or put it in italics or bold it). You should be reading through everyone’s posts carefully enough to catch all the character’s speech anyway. Speech being taken from the post prior, or said by another character, should be placed in bold to prevent confusion.
  
  Posts should be, at the very minimum, three paragraphs excluding dialogue – and more is better.
  
  Please give your threads a date and time – the IC date is listed at the top of the board, so you can play any day between the first and last date listed, at any time, providing your character isn’t somehow in two places at once (since we all know that that isn’t possible). An example would be, “September 12, 5:00”. This just helps to keep everyone’s timelines straight, and will be important once we get some of the larger boardwide plots active, as those will effect everyone, and will take place over a short span of time.
  
  
• Read everything. This means read all the information when you’re applying, and read the announcements once you’re a member (or, if you’re bored before you’ve been officially accepted, then). They are important, contrary to popular belief, and if I announce something and you miss it, it’s your fault – and I’ll point you right to that announcement when you can’t figure out why something has changed.
  
  
• Save! Save your biography! Save any threads you think are important! Save everything! Remember that these boards may or may not crash, and if they do, I might not be able to recover everything, including character biographies. Write them out in a program like Microsoft Word, and save them, so that if they get lost, you’ve got a copy somewhere.
  
  
• On personal pictures. Keep sig pics and avatars a decent size, please and thank you. Avatars are limited to 200 x 150 (that's a link, just in case you're not sure how large that is) and signature banners are limited to 250 x 400 (again, a picture, so you can see how large that is).
  
  
• Code Word. This is to prove that you’ve read the rules – and if you’ve made it this far, go back to the rule entitled ‘character creation’ and find the part that mentions a certain Herald – put his name at the bottom of your application, below your sample post, and add on ‘is amazing’.

This post has been edited by Isaak Orelsson on Sep 20 2009, 08:00 AM