Website Maintenance Underway

Good evening,

Welcome to Lithoterria. Be you new companion seeking adventure, or an old curious friend returning, I am happy you have decided to visit.

The fact that you are here means that I have reason for excitement, that I will soon get to meet your character and experience them exploring the world I have spent many years of my life creating for adventurers, heroes, and villains like yourself. It has been nothing short of an honor for me to have been entrusted with building the world so many have come to love over the years and hosting the community of people drawn to it. The craft of weaving stories, people, and their characters together is an immense passion of mine.

Like any world that has continued to grow and mature over time, Lithoterria itself has continued to evolve. With the growth of recent chapters, it has given me a clearer understanding of the experience I hope to create, and this period of maintenance is dedicated to strengthening those foundations.

I believe meaningful stories make for the best adventures through their whimsy, misfortunes, antics, and genuine conflict that your character must overcome using the means available to them. Truly great stories cannot exist without a level of conflict balanced with structure, and the same can be said about weaving this world together and selecting the elements that it shall be fashioned from.

Over the last year, I have continued developing and testing Lithoterria and its various parts, and I have become increasingly clear about the experience I want the world to offer to those who enter this realm. The structure I wish to provide is to be as light as possible and woven into the very fabric of the writing of each scene and passage. My systems are intended not to limit the player, but to ensure that those who spend time honing their character's skills are rewarded for their effort and time in the world. Its second main purpose is to prevent any needless out of character conflicts surrounding the legitimacy of scenes or actions. For personal scenes and plots entirely consented to, I have no desire to meddle in the creative energy of two or more people, so long as all stay peachy and polite out of character while the scenes are in play.

So, it is with these newly refined principles that I continue to mark the way for Lithoterria to lead it into an immersive, elaborate, and sustainable future that you and many others can dive into and be led into a new dimension with as few interruptions as possible. I am taking the time to ensure that the mechanics that remain enhance the experience, many of which resemble the model of the popular lighter format from days of yore, secured by simple structures that will prevent ability or plot manipulation and abuse. While I cannot build it all in one day, you can rest assured that I am taking the time to do it correctly and do my best to balance the experience with a clinical precision so you may focus on your whimsy and mischief.

For now, I am working on the following: Prime Lore A book that will allow a quick, condensed overview of the world to allow players to be acquainted with all major forces in play, species, and other basic knowledge of note. The goal is to ensure all players will have the same basis of knowledge in a single book.

Muse Debut Sheet

We are reconfiguring the Muse Debut Sheet to resemble more flavor than numbers, and offering more clarity to when, how, and why numbers plug into the sheet for combative sections. Remember when we encouraged theme songs and quotes for our characters? You can expect the same flavor. How to Create a Muse

Reconfiguring the Muse Debut Sheet means reconfiguring the guide on how to go about it. This will take you step by step in each section, explain what can be creatively done, what isn't allowed, and guide you through general ability creation. This will include examples and links to relevant information for quick reference.

How to Play Guide

Most of us jump into a scene like a fish to water, but for those that need a little help understanding what they can and cannot do, we will have a simple How To guide. This will explain what you can generally do in a turn out of combat, and how combat may affect your character. Most of it should be fairly intuitive, but put into words for clarity. Currently, we plan to include our new, more simple, but dynamic combat system within the same guide to ensure a seamless experience for our players.

Crafting & Gathering Edits

We have lightly reformatted how we go about the crafting and gathering of items. We have included a simple quality of life fix in which we will go through each existing recipe and their respective cards and give them a new, total proving check they must succeed in to perform their action successfully. This will eliminate the need to figure out relevance and cross reference with the rolling and difficulty level.

Tenets of Talent

While these will stay largely the same, we have recalibrated them to ensure they are familiar to what has been used in the past, but removes the potential for abuse without hard limiting or preventing players from using the action chained. Barring special circumstances, cool downs will be less of a thing so much as a growing debuff on related roles if you spam the same abilities.

Property, Inventory, and NPCs

We will be easing up some of the restrictions for NPCs, or side characters people use alongside their character to express their sides of the story. It should be easier and feel more natural to use them in scenes when one wants to. We will also have new rules surrounding property, what goes into the Discord threads vs are permanent fixtures, and we will be a little more liberal in what we allow in inventory provided it is reasonable enough. Open Cities, Nature Routes, Travel Routes

As the final step, we will begin opening cities, nature routes, and travel routes. We intend to begin by releasing a batch of animals and plants that can effectively be found anywhere in the world and then diversifying from there on out to allow us to open more explorable locations and focus on content based on player interaction with the world. While certain cities may be in an unusual or dysfunctional state as a result of the Mist's influences, we intend to start this stage by opening one city from each nation and diversifying from there. The current belief in the world is that the Mists have limited contact from other cities and nations, leaving the characters in a state of grim uncertainty. This will be represented, and additional nations and cities will be open in accordance to active player interest. What to Expect Until Then

While it is unfortunate that these things take time and require the majority of my attention functionally until they have been completed, I will continue releasing at least one lore story each week for your reading pleasure. These, and other tales from the Library, may be referenced by your character, and potentially lead to interactive Lithoterria hosted events in the future.

Story events in character hosted by Lithoterria are currently postponed until the completion of the project above. Updates will occur on this page, or within an updated Featured page. However, with this pause comes the allowance of our active players to be given permission to control guards and other noteworthy side characters for the completion of their scenes. You may also get permission to host your own event if that is of interest to you, but quest rewards must be given prior approval.

Thank you for taking the time to read this far in. This is so much more than a passion project to me and my continued work on it will be released in the months to come, portion by portion. I sincerely appreciate your interest in the world of Lithoterria, my writing as a creator, and I hope that we get the opportunity to write scenes together sometime in the near future. Thank you again. -Liana