"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: It is the time for home"
- Edith Sitwell
A Bone Hound
"Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.."
- Yoko Ono
Greetings Sykans!
Syka in the Winter is traditionally a season of rest and relaxation. The story tends to go that almost nothing happens in Winter in Syka, especially with Morwen being gone. Days are shorter, nights are longer, and the weather is cooler making it downright easy living for all creatures human.
However, this Winter that is not exactly the case. It has been more than five hundred years since the city of Pavena existed. Pavena fell, not because of the Valterrian, but for mysterious unknown reasons prior to the great earth-wrenching event. The area went from a booming scientific outpost of discovery and research to not even rating a full page in history's book; virtually forgotten.
Why? Very few alive today actually know.
But that is beside the point. Without knowing about djed - its ebb and flow - and the way of landspawning, it's hard to understand what exactly is going to happen this season. Magic has built up around Syka over those hundreds of years, pooling in the ruins of Pavena. The land is used to such magic buildup since Pavena used to be infused with power everywhere. But it has had no outlet for almost a thousand years. Growing... growing.... and growing even more... the djed in the land built over the abandoned years until it peaked this season like a crescendo in some silent symphony. And like other places in Mizahar where this has happened, something had to give.
And finally, the earth itself gives.
The first sign that something was wrong is a series of earthquakes... shallow, close, of light duration where it was obvious the land seemed restless and unsettled. The first earthquake was released on the fifteenth of the season with the first tremor, and the land opened up and spewed forth the first of its excess djed. This event resembled a localized centralized burst of a djed, not unlike a mini djedstorm.
Unfortunately for a slaver captain, his large three-masted slaver The Iron Tiger was passing close to Falyndar - very near Syka. The ship had been damaged during a somewhat serious mid-suvan blow and had been turning into Syka's Bay in hopes of finding a safe harbor to make some repairs on her way to Taloba's closest coastal trading site.
The wave of released djed washed over the bay, struck the ship, and .... merged it with one of the rocks out by Sharktooth Point. The wall of djed slammed into the ship, tossed it up on the massive rock island, and broke it open - freeing some of its inhabitants while turning others into stone. The wood of the ship turned to the same stone of the rock island and formed a lasting monument located at the northern point of Syka's harbor just offshore. During low tide, people can often hike to the site without getting wet. At high tide, waters around the site inundate the area making a boat or swimming necessary to visit the site.
Slavers and slaves alike escaped while others - while others had their lives stolen and were frozen in stone forever. This left survivors washing ashore in Syka's sands bringing new residents.
Some of the slaves were obviously slaves. But the slavers, not knowing Syka other than by its reputation, pretended to be slaves and cried for help along with their former slaves. Only the slaves themselves knew for sure who was truly a slave and who was a slaver... so the influx in Syka this season is a mixture... tense with about twenty-five new people joining the settlement. Some are innocents, fallen or taken into slavery for whatever reason... and some are devious evil hiding among the victims.
Only time will tell who is who and what these newcomers mean to the Settlement. And frankly, they don't have time to worry about it at the moment... for out of the jungle will come to another new threat set... life spawned by the djed boiling over; Landspawns... of which have never been seen before.
Earthquakes happen the: 15th, 20th, 28th, 34th, 35th, 43rd, 48th, 49th, 50th, 51st, 53rd, 54th, 60th, 79th, 82th, and 90th. Bolded dates are particularly bad earthquakes.
"Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Please keep these requirements in mind. Participating in the theme is always voluntary, but in order to get rewarded for your participation, the below list is required. Paying seasonal expenses and the expectation of earning coin is reliant on job threads. Those are not voluntary. They are required game-wide. Syka offers all sorts of employment and Ranger opportunities for income. Talk to Gossamer and the Founders IC to set something up.
If you go inactive in Syka or take a break for a season or two, you lose your free claims (that have been awarded in the past) because you haven't contributed to the community. If you have purchased your property and it's paid in full, you can feel free to go inactive with no penalty. If you are still paying on it, inactivity isn't an option without the loss of your property for missed payments. We will allow you to miss one season openly. At the end of a second season, your property is forfeit and goes up for sale. Please be aware that job threads and placeholders can be no older than a season behind. Nothing will count or be paid for that is older. I do not pay partial wages. It's all or nothing.
The list below is things you need to include in your Winter threading.
❖ Start a post in this thread keeping track of how many requirements you have completed. It's a good idea to cut/paste this list into your own post below that you can work on as the season progresses.
❖ Have a landspawn encounter.
❖ Have interaction with the slaves or slavers of The Iron Tiger.
❖ Create NPC slaves or slavers for Syka.
❖ Get others involved in your storyline.
❖ Complete TWO job threads of at least 2.5K words if you want to be paid.
❖ Pay Seasonal Expenses of Common or higher.
❖ Be active.
❖ Work on one or more recommended Syka Skills (Wilderness Survival, Tradeskill, etc) and increase it by 5 points.
❖ Include one of the NPCs listed in the NPC Masterlist in one of your threads.
❖ Utilize at least 2 storyseeds in a creative way. The storyseeds can be used in whole or part or could even be used as an inspiration for a whole different story arc. Folks will just have to be able to see the connections.
If you complete all these tasks successfully and fulfill the requirements, then you will get an award in the form of Quest Coupons of your choice (minus the Artifact coupon). Incomplete threads do not count. These items must be completed by the end of the season.
Please note. These are Syka's challenges. The threads must be completed in Syka or The Outpost relating to Syka's business.
A Collector
"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Theme: Monster's Arise
With the shaking of the earth, the region of Falyndar burped, releasing the pressure of built-up wild and natural djed within the land. With that 'burping' power expanded and rolled forth a new sort of life... a pair of landspawns. Like with other landspawns, each time the earth shakes, one to two hundred new creatures can be spawned. These creatures spawned in two cycles... the first was by far the most dangerous - The Collectors. The second was the bone hounds.
These 'collector' creatures are something between plants and animals, a mix of both and neither. They are vaguely green humanoids - that have no distinct features other than each and every one of them loves collecting something. Some of them collect skulls, stones, specific vegetation like mushrooms, yet others collect live animals, forming cages of their bodies with growths of plant-like materials that house their collections to prevent them from being lost or escaping. Some collect simple things like flowers, while others want to collect human beings or maybe just their brains. Each collector is different. Once a collector gathers something and decides on what it wants to collect, there's very little to stop them. They are incredibly combative, and sticky, and act almost like human-sized venus fly traps.
The second landspawn is a vaguely canine-like creature that seems to be made of spiked bone. Dubbed Bone Hounds by the Founders, these creatures pack up and are vicious hunters. They are often far larger than domestic dogs and far more intelligent. They cause a multitude of problems in their invasion of the jungle - killing off even some of the jungle's fiercest creatures and taking over their territory. They eat everything in sight, having a voracious appetite and a huge amount of aggression. They are not bound to Caiyha's laws so they are not controlled by Phylonura or other animal-intense gifts.
The storyseeds below are designed to help you with this season's theme.
Please remember, storyseeds are just ideas, hints, and nudges for you to craft a greater plot from. They are a starting place. Feel free to mix, match, and combine storyseeds and knock out more than one in one thread. For example, a survival situation could easily be combined with a deep-seated unbearable pain while hunting whales. Got it? Great!
❖ Aid a slave/slaver from drowning.
❖ Live through an earthquake or multiple earthquakes.
❖ Have an encounter with a bone hound or collector.
❖ Visit the stone ship.
❖ Have a lucid dream.
❖ Have family visit you in Syka.
❖ Seek out new locations - discover someplace new and submit the location.
❖ Visit Stair-Step Falls and go relic hunting.
❖ Make a new friend.
❖ Pray to a new god or goddess.
❖ Start an argument with another PC or NPC.
❖ Research a topic that is new to you.
❖ Learn a new weapon.
❖ Master a skill you've been training for a while.
❖ Find something on the beach washed up after an earthquake.
❖ Start some sort of club or business.
❖ Invent a new tradition for Syka.
❖ Start a new building project.
❖ Share/learn a secret.
❖ Visit the Outpost with intent.
❖ Use the rule of three. Set 3 things in motion for your character's story.
❖ Confess something to someone.
❖ Put yourself in someone else's shoes and try and see their perspective.
❖ Discover an artifact.
"How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!"
- Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Winter in Syka sees ease of the almost constantly oppressive afternoon heat. The humidity tends to drop off and stabilize, and the jungle almost normalizes into the mid-eighties enjoying cooling morning and afternoon breezes. The evenings are cooler relatively speaking, longer, and there's more darkness to the night. The light period is the shortest it will be all year so days are absolutely short, and nights are long. Syka is still incredibly comfortable to live in - no time moreso than Winter.
Take away the earthquakes, mini djedstorm, the landspawn, and Syka would be the perfect place to live.
"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus
I'm always willing to run a personal storyline for anyone who joins Syka for the season. People get such few opportunities to interact with their actual storylines in generic calendar situations within various domains, so in Syka I'd like to change that. I will be willing to run the following:
❖ Personal Quests
❖ Gnosis Threads
❖ Flashbacks & Future Foretellings
❖ Training Threads
Just let me know what I can help you out with. Syka might be small but we have had some really incredible storylines here in the past.
Happy Threading!
Goss
