applications

[groundrules]

APPLICATIONS

Eastbound is primarily an invite-only game — each existing player can currently invite up to one person per month, or get in touch about further invites. Existing players can hold two characters in game. A third character can be applied, if players can prove they have met activity requirements for two consecutive months with their existing two characters and have stayed engaged with the game. If you don't have an invite, somehow stumbled upon this neck of the woods, and you’d like to stay, drop the mod journal a line — we'll try to figure it out.

As of Oct. 1, cast/game caps are off. Please note, as of Dec. 1, Eastbound only has 3-4 months of gameplay left.

WHAT CHARACTERS CAN BE APPLIED?

YES: canon and original characters, if they have a solid and consistent personality and background. Characters brought in after they've died are a-okay. For characters taken from a time point just as they're in the process of dying, please read below on meeting medical requirements.

NO (at this time): real people, original characters set in a canon environment, characters from canons or canon instalments that have been released for less than one month, characters with imported development from other games (CRAU), alternate universe, or gender-swapped versions of canon characters.

Children or characters with very specific medical/magical/environment needs: appable, but please make a note of how your character will ICly meet their requirements and stay alive. Likewise, if you are applying for a character taken just as they're dying, provide a suggestion for how they can be kept alive on arrival (this might be easier in some app cycles than others). You can bend the world a little to make miracles happen (ex: a substitute for the medication your character needs to survive can be found for a high price at certain apothecaries, etc.)

Characters that were dropped or swept by activity checks: yes, but they’ll come back without their previous memories, if they are applied in by a different player.

APPLICATION FORM & INSTRUCTIONS

EXISTING / RETURNING PLAYERS

<b><Small>PLAYER NAME</small>:</b> <b><small>CONTACT</small>:</b> <b><small>CHARACTER</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON POINT</small>:</b> <b><small>BACKGROUND</small>:</b> link out or write no more than two-three paragraphs...! <b><small>PERSONALITY</small>:</b> bullet points a-okay, or written out. You can also link out to it, if you agree to what's on your wikia. <b><small>SAMPLE</small>:</b> a written sample or one or more threads to show your character's personality. <b><small>NOTES</small>:</b> you know the ropes, jot down if your character has any world-breaking powers or accommodations you need for them!

NEW PLAYERS

<b><Small>PLAYER NAME</small>:</b> <b><small>CONTACT</small>:</b> <b><small>REFERRED BY</small>:</b> Who invited you, please? c: <b><small>CHARACTER</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON POINT</small>:</b> <b><small>BACKGROUND</small>:</b> written or linked history both fine. Bullet points also a-okay. If no information is available in English, please write this out in short. <b><small>ABILITIES | POWERS</small>:</b> Include any relevant power restrictions, so you don’t break our playground. <b><small>PERSONALITY</small>:</b> make sure this ties back to the character’s time point and background. <b><small>SAMPLE</small>:</b> one or more samples to showcase the nuances of your character’s personality. Submit at least one prose sample of five comments or more. You can link memes, PSL or other game threads, provided they took place within the last 12 months. You can also write a single prose sample in the game or character canon setting, if you think you can cover good introspective ground that way, or a top level with enough variety to show how the character engages in various scenarios. <b><small>INVENTORY</small>:</b> No world-breaking items. For living or magical beings, or anything colossal (think... Gundams...) please let's talk beforehand! <b><small>SUITABILITY</small>:</b> Eastbound is a plot-heavy game that typically features sleuthing, action and the undead. How is your character likely to deal with all that (and the game bear)? <b><small>NOTES</small>:</b> Are there any particular accommodations your character will need? How do you propose to handle that?

APPLICATIONS CLOSED


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Comments

cole | dragon age: inquisition

[misdirected]

PLAYER NAME: kieran
CONTACT: tieflings
REFERRED BY: ruxi! ♥

CHARACTER: Cole
CANON: Dragon Age: Inquisition
CANON POINT: Just before Act 3/What Pride Had Wrought

BACKGROUND: Wiki is here!

ABILITIES | POWERS:

• Mind-reading: As a spirit, Cole can dip into others' memories and thoughts - and often has no qualms with voicing them out loud. Breaking the fourth wall like this is a bit OP, so it'll be tempered with an opt-out post where folks can either ask not to be read, or pass on the best ways to mess with their character!


• Ghostly qualities? Cole is…. a ghost. So he can disappear and reappear at will, often in a different spot from where he last was. It's unknown if he walks through walls, but considering that he's possessing a real person's corpse, presumably he can't do that. He can't possess anyone, since he's already in a body, but he does get a little bit creepier when he's in the Fade and panics about having to go back. He also has a tendency to be forgotten when people turn away from him. Becoming more human means this happens less often, but it still happens.

PERSONALITY: FYI, there are spoilers here!

Quite simply put, Cole is A Good Boy who just wants to make everyone feel better.

Being a spirit of Compassion, Cole is highly empathetic and wants only to comfort those who are in pain and free them of said pain. In the prequel novel Dragon Age: Asunder, the spirit primarily accomplishes this goal by haunting the dungeons of the White Spire, a mage circle known for its cruelty. The pain of the mages trapped in the dungeons calls to the spirit, and one of them was a boy named Cole.

Cole as a human was a hedge witch, sent to the dungeons of the White Spire after killing his father for murdering his and his sister's mother. He was a terrified, abused teenage boy, who was incorrectly signed into the dungeons and subsequently forgotten in the dark and the shadow. His pain in particular called out to the spirit, and when he finally died of starvation and neglect, the spirit was there to comfort and keep him company. Becoming him was… probably not entirely intentional, but here he is, and he doesn't want to go back. Becoming Cole also meant that the spirit now had a physical body, and he realized that now he could enact a different sort of compassion: killing frightened mages before the templars could execute them or turn them Tranquil (aka sealing their magic and destroying their minds to make them obedient and harmless).

It's…. definitely a flawed sort of compassion, but compassion all the same in his eyes. Killing them also meant that they remembered who he was, for however long it would take them to bleed out, instead of being entirely ignored or forgotten as soon as one took their eyes off him. All he wanted was to be seen and remembered, and if mercy killings helping mages escape an even worse fate accomplished that, then he would willingly do it. It took a respected mage named Rhys remembering and befriending him for Cole to realize that no, killing people is bad no matter what, and only those who deserve it should be killed. It's a lesson he's taken to heart; after that, the only people he kills are those who try to hurt his friends and the Templar Lord Seeker responsible for covering up human-Cole's neglect.

Despite now having a corporeal form, the spirit of compassion that became Cole is still primarily driven by that compassion: his introduction in Inquisition, no matter which route you pick between siding with mages or templars, involves trying to help and save people. His approval ratings skew toward helping the helpless and punishing those who hurt others, such as disbanding the templars for their abuses of their power and currying a truce between three warring parties in Orlais instead of letting them kill each other. He likes it when people are made to atone for their crimes and are put to use instead of wasting away in prison or killed - though he's not above death as punishment, in the case of a Templar Knight Commander who murdered and corrupted his own.

The primary difference is that unlike in Dragon Age: Asunder, he understands that he's a spirit and believes that no one is meant to remember him. So he's happy to help - he helps lift a healer's guilt when one of their patients dies after the Inquisition gets to Skyhold - and now doesn't mind it when people forget him. In fact, it's better that they forget, so that if he messes up and makes the hurt he's trying to heal greater, then he can try again after they forget him.

He's also eager to learn all he can from his friends, and wants to do what he can to make them happy - for Cassandra, he finds a locket she lost, and he finds solace in Solas as the two of them talk about the Fade and other spirits. He shows the Iron Bull that not all spirits are evil demons, and helps Varric talk out story points. The Inquisitor can also overhear NPCs talking about weird things that have happened around them; when asked, Cole confesses to them, saying that he was doing things to make people smile or keep them from hurting each other.

I'm going to be playing him as though his personal quest hasn't been completed - in it, he has the choice to forgive or confront the templar that caused human-Cole's death. Forgiving the man makes Cole more ghostly, and confronting him means people remember him more often, but I think it's a lot of fun when he's a weird little ghosty boy :>

SAMPLE:

It isn't Skyhold.

It isn't anywhere, really, at least anywhere that he knows. The thoughts are all different, the ghosts all new, none of them singing in quite the same tune that resonates through all of Thedas. He can't feel any demons, any other spirits like Justice or Faith - there are ghosts here, but not any that he knows. None that he knows how to comfort, either. It's as though the song itself is different here, a piano piece being played on a flute, in all the wrong key.

He can't hear or feel the Fade at all, and Cole doesn't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's… harder to tell, when his is the only opinion he has to rely on. It would be easier if Rhys or the Inquisitor were here, but he can't feel or hear them at all, either, and the thought of it scares him. This isn't Thedas; how is he supposed to know what the rules are, if no one he trusts is here to tell him?

Cole picks himself up, dusts off his leathers and pulls his wide-brimmed hat lower over his face. A few stray thoughts rattle into his ears, different voices from around him quietly questioning his manner of dress, his purpose, his intention. He doesn't know how to explain that he doesn't have one, not here, not while there are still Fade Rifts to be closed and an angry, ancient, almost-unstoppable almost-god to try to stop. He doesn't know how to explain that he's lost, nor whether or not any of those questioning him will want to stop and help him.

He misses his friends. He misses the comfort they brought him, with their acceptance of… what does the Iron Bull call it? His 'weird shit.' It's been about five minutes and he already wants to go home.

"Home: a place for a hat, a heart, a hearth, a haven and a hell at the same time," Cole mutters to himself. "It's where the knick knacks and dishes live, as well as the mice in the grain sacks. Cassandra likes to read dirty novels there. She doesn't know that Leliana reads them too."

No one comments on his idle thoughts, no one scolds him for revealing any secrets, and Cole finds himself frowning down at his hands for it. He doesn't know if he's allowed to call Skyhold his home, but he wants to - and he wants to go back. He takes a step forward, watches the grains of sand shift and reshape around his feet—

—and turns his head at the sound of a cry. Not a sound. A song. Silent, shivering, clutched close to someone's chest as something hurts them deep inside. His feet draw him in that sideways direction instead of the straightforward path he intended to take, and he follows the song to try to find what's hurting and how to help.

He wants to go home. But maybe, maybe, he can heal someone's hurts first.

INVENTORY: Not a lot, honestly! He no longer needs to eat or drink, being a spirit-ghost-demon-what have you, so those won't be concerns for him - instead, he'll have a couple of (unenchanted) daggers, a few sprigs of mint, his leather armor and hat, and an amulet that is supposed to keep others from being able to control or manipulate him. He doesn't know whether or not the amulet will work, but he's keeping it just in case.

SUITABILITY: While subtlety and sleuthing may not come easily to him, Cole is all about doing the action, and as a spirit possessing a corpse, he himself is undead! He won't be terribly fazed, and honestly may even strive to put some undead souls to rest like they should have been.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

APPROVED

[groundrules]

Thank you for your application in the game’s last cycle! You’re completely, sparklingly new to the game, so here are the tenets:

— don’t hesitate to PM if you ever have questions or need a bit of steering!

— you’ll get a fair bit of detail in event write-ups for mod-led plots, but you can always pursue or pitch your own, take the existing plot in a new direction or hit up the NPC inbox (when a new one goes up) to glean more from NPCs.

— anything goes, sincerely.

ADMIN

Join eastbound, lostcompass, westwhere and comment to the TAKEN LIST within 72 hours of your acceptance note.

A game-wide OOC intro / CR meme and plotting post goes up on 6 December.

All game updates are posted on lostcompass, but you can also follow eastbound. You’ll get a private message with an invite to the informal game discord server, once you comment to the Taken List.

Take a look at our optional custom codes to help you set up a character inbox or permissions post.

NOTES

Since Cole is regrettably deceased, he counts as death-touched in eastbound: meaning, depending on the event (and outlined in the relevant write-up), he might have certain advantages or vulnerabilities in the presence of the undead or of undead lords.

Your character receives a shiny new pocket watch pendant with a mirror inside, which serves as a translator and communication device for written, video and audio interaction. It can read out translations of messages written out in native tongues.

Cole’s username should, by any right, be either booberry or cole shoulder.

INTRO

Your character arrives during the party’s botched attempt to leave the lavish city of Ephes, wrenched from home just as the citadel’s beacon collapses. The party’s witch Karsa supplies a translation and communication device and explains that your character has arrived in Akhuras — a world sundered by ongoing war between the lords of the undead Brotherhood and their contenders.

Your character joins several other otherworlders, whom Karsa’s collaborator, the Merchant, seeks to return to their own worlds through transport beacons, before the undead can weaponise them in battle. For months, this travelling party has been traversing Akhuras, un/intentionally defying the Brotherhood at every step — and chasing the trail of the mysterious Matthias, a scientist of the formidable collapsed citadel of Ellethia, who may have created the undead and the elusive ‘dark water’ that powers them. Matthias has been leaving behind severed parts of his own body to seed or strengthen ‘dark water’ in several territories and summon the undead locally.

The hour of the party’s inevitable confrontation with Matthias draws near.

[misdirected]

booberry I'm dying

thank you, I'm so excited ;v;