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Ereki.

It is time to begin anew.

The borders of our fair valley lay yet unmapped, our personal holdings are vague and undefined, and we – the people of Erekdale, are rather unknown, even to ourselves. So we must tread the farthest corners, build up home and hearth, and take a good look in the mirror.

What is Erekdale? And who are it’s inhabitants?!?

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To allow us a common space in which to further create Erekdale, so that some things at least are decided on for sure, I took the liberty to craft us a bit of an origin-story mythos. If you’ve visited our guild homepage, you’re familiar with it already. I want to publicly credit those (the one?) who submitted the original ideas for our history, because I only put the finishing touches on it. Erekdale is about bringing things together – and the collaborative nature of how our world’s history came to be fits right into that theme. 🙂

[In addition, I think it would be really awesome if everyone read the Journey to Erekdale welcome piece that will be the first comment in this topic. Although it is creative writing, hopefully you’ll begin to get an idea of how Erekdale works, and it’ll get your own creative juices flowing a little bit.]

But first, here’s the hardware version with all the nitty-gritty-details:

Erekdale exists in an alternate dimension that Frank the thunderphoenix lives in, as a feature of his second life. After dying, Frank did not come back to life in the physical world, but in this alternate dimension, and he has special abilities and is overall a pretty magical dude. He is tied, however, to the physical location at which he died, which is the literal valley called Erekdale. You could say he is the valley, or that he indwells it (from an aerial view, one can see how the hills and valleys of Erekdale are in the shape of a thunderphoenix with it’s wings outstretched). But at the end of the day, those are not the most accurate ways to put it.

It’s just your everyday alternate dimension. 😉

So what does this mean for us, and how can this help us build Erekdale?

This alternate dimension does not follow the laws of spacial science that the normal world operates under. Think of it like the Wood Between the Worlds in C S Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew – each pond takes us to a different world. But instead of independent worlds, it’s more like the air-bubbles on a piece of sea-weed – everything is connected back to Frank. Each pond, or air-bubble, depending on how you see it, is the part of Erekdale that you bring in, and you have complete and utter control to make of it whatever you choose. It’s your space, and you don’t have to worry about breaking the ‘canon’ of Erekdale worldbuilding. It’s all yours.

But in the middle of the wood is the biggest pond. Or, at the root of the sea-weed is the biggest air-bubble. However you want to see it. This little world is composed of bits and pieces of each individual Ereki’s world, all jumbled together in randomness. I did say that our theme is uniting things, didn’t I? 😀

It is here that you first arrive, after Frank brings you into the true Erekdale, and from this vantage point, you can look up in the sky and see the other worlds like bubbles in the distance, connected by pulsing, living branches. The night sky here is truly amazing. And it is there in the central bubble that all of our talks, discussions, critiques, assignments, collaborations, and general Ereki-ness happens. Also, the Guildmaster presides over this world-pod (ooh, there’s a shiny word; I think that’s what we’ll call these!), just to make sure everything stays in order.

So. Hopefully this gives us enough of a framework to work on as we continue to develop Erekdale further. I feel like this gives the most freedom to each individual to pursue worldbuilding  in their own way without feeling like they are ignoring or trampling over other people’s opinions about how Erekdale should look. Even I feel a little weird setting this up and saying, “This is how Erekdale is going to be…” …but I guess I’m Guildmaster, so if anyone has the right to do that… O.o

Again, at the end of the day, the goal is diversity that exists in unity. That’s what I designed this system to accommodate, both in structure and thematically as well. Hopefully, this guild will outlive each of the present-day members – and still remain the same good old Erekdale. As the years go on, new world-pods will be added to the cluster, some will pop and fade away, some will simply lie dormant, and some will flower brilliantly. But at the heart of it all, Erekdale will still be Erekdale.

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Now that we have a better idea of what Erekdale is like, we need to figure out who lives there. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about further developing our role-play characters! (This idea is fully credited to the dear departed, Morrea Firebird, the spark who lit the fire of Erekdale.) Your role-play character is the alter-ego/persona that you take up when entering Erekdale. Mine is Karthmin Aretani, Wyrmsbane. I haven’t fully developed him as a character, but he’s not the one writing absurdly long posts on the forums. XD I can say that much. He’s his own thing.

There are a couple goals for this:

1. So that we can regularly use role-play characters as guinea pigs for our long-term discussions and writing projects. In fact, this seems like the perfect time to start this, because our talks about character development should really help us build our role-play characters quickly. If we have developed characters that we can easily use as guinea pigs, it’ll help us keep more involved instead of having to create someone new every time.

2. So that we can build a character persona to interact with people on the forum??? Lol, does there have to be a better reason?! To this end, I will create a topic called Character-Building Role-Play, and we *must* remain in character within that thread. This will help us begin to think like our characters, and also help us understand how our characters react in different social environments. I know a forum isn’t the *most* convenient format for this kind of thing (chat-software is much more conducive), but we’ll make do with what we have. To start off with, we’ll just use our Erekdale personas, and not introduce other characters from our WIPs. Eventually, if you feel that role-play helps you build characters, we can start a different topic/thread for any and all characters to socialize and figure themselves out.

Just as a reminder, we have a collective worldbuilding document already made up, and you can add more details to your character bio (or create one, if you haven’t). If you would like to create a section that describes your world-pod, you are more than welcome to do that as well!

Here’s the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BLs0jZNUamn7j3pEw1Fx-l2sfZuHFcaibeElP11sId0/edit

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So! With all that said, let’s get building!

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