I've started reading the thread from the top, but I got bored around page 2. I probably should introduce myself as well, just for recordkeeping convenience.

I'm Yxoque. I was around when the project got started and my major contribution was sorta-leading the worldbuidling on Sertaria. There are also a couple of characters in the archives with my name on them, but they're woefully underdeveloped.

My focus is mainly on worldbuilding and I really like helping people reach the full potential of their ideas. Which is what I mostly do, because I have the attention-span of a rodent, so I get distracted on bigger solo-projects.

I'm currently reworking a prison-plane, but my short-term goal is to catch up with the latest developments of the Expanded Multiverse. I missed quite some things in an long-ish episode of sadness.

@Cateran: That seems like a thread of its own, but I'll try to briefly answer the question.

The color pie is the basis of all of Magic: The Gathering and this includes the plane design. Mana shapes the world, and this needs to come through on your plane. Apart from that, Magic's setting is, as a wise man once said, "all the settings", so there's no hard rule.

Another important factor are planeswalkers, who can give unique perspectives on settings and form the connection between all the other worlds.


I'm gonna go with "maybe." There are some aspects that contribute to the "feel" of Magic, that aren't just those factors. One thing I often think about is the anti-transhuman message present in some cards and storylines, which can be part of that "feel." There are some things that connect Magic planes that I find hard to put into words, but I've sorta got a "feel" for them and I notice when they're not present.

Mm, yeah, I think it might be a little looser than that, though mana is a pretty big deal and should be woven one way or another into the fabric of the settings. But there is sort of a sense you get for what works and what doesn't...

One way I've always found useful in tying otherwise shaky or weird planes into the setting is to use more obscure mechanics of the Multiverse. Like for our wild west plane we used the notion, present in some earlier storyline materials, of a manaless land turning into basically instant-death because everything needs mana to survive.

Welcome to the forums Cateran Hope you stick around and get involved!

Also hey Yxoque Let me know if you need advice on where to start digging back in. We've been... busy. Real busy. Also I need to remember to talk to you about the alternate history setting thing that's being ported to the Wiki right now... it might be relevant to our discussions re: using :EM technology elsewhere experimentally.

Howdy, Cateran! Glad to have you here!



This actually reminds me of something - I've been thinking that it would be great to have a stickied thread, or a wiki space - or, frankly, both - with a kind of "M:EMber Recommended" list of stories, planes, etc. that we really like and recommend. It would be like the Staff Picks shelf at your local bookstore, assuming that local bookstores are still a thing.

I think it would be a great way to give newcomers a point of entry into the Archives. And it would be pretty trivial to just update the selections every so often.

The one obvious downside is that I would hate to draw attention away from the other work in the Archives, since there's so much good stuff. But I think that, if people have a point of entry, they're likely to do a deeper dive afterward. And rotating the picks should keep anything from getting marginalized.

Had a question and didn't know where to ask.

I believe M:EM and canon are mutually exclusive from what I've heard, but in what sense are they mutually exclusive?
Is it only that everything in canon happens in M:EM, just that events in M:EM take place elsewhere?


Since I'm already here I should probably do introductions.

Hi.
It's kind of embarrasing to call myself storyteller among you people who actually do storytelling, so maybe I should go by Kuro while I'm around here.
I don't really do much writing, and what little I write I write in Japanese, is god awful, and has nothing to do with MTG.
I'm not familiar with canon, either, but I do like reading, and the stories here are very well written (even though I've only read Beryl's stories + Two Bullets).

Nice to meet you.

Nice to see you 'round these parts Storyteller

Yeah, everything in canon happens in M:EM but we don't really touch on it much. Sometimes we use canon planes but mostly we keep things separate so that any retcons in the main storyline won't contradict what we're doing.

@OL: Yeah, I was strongly considering just adding the information from the intro post I made on Tumblr to the wiki. It's ten stories in total, I think, and I believe it hits all the story writers that are currently active here. Any feedback on the list would be welcome though. For the record it's here: http://stormingtheivory.tumblr.com/post ... -as-a-good

In general, the rule is "Don't do things that contradict or are decently probable to be contradicted by canon" We've had a few stories get in that involve canon characters and more that are set on or mention canon settings. One even managed to get in (barely) despite depicting the death of Thrun, though frankly trying to go beyond cameo or small story (that doesn't change the status quo) is likely a Bad Idea (I say this as the person responsible for that story).

Keeper, I'm just going to say that I'm disappointed that you ONLY used THREE of my stories. That is technically less than 1/3rd of the list when my submissions could take up easily over half!!!!!!!!!!

...Really though, I'm flattered. I need to go and make sure I liked that post so I can feel the warm glow of pride whenever I'm down.

EDIT: I would also like to personally apologize for what I am going to do later today. You have all been warned. One

@LordLuna: I took a look at your project! I'll be willing to provide more feedback on it whenever it gets ported over here.

I'm really happy that Erik and the Wishmonger made the list! I need to get back to and finish my other story about Erik, and then do a proper writeup for him. I'm out of my PbP games now, and my schedule should be easier to handle in a few weeks, so I might get it done by... September? Yeah, September sounds right.

heh... hearing Ruwin mock-complain there... it kind of reminds me how little I've actually written, for all my time here.

I should probably put up a few more votes, though.

I wanted to make sure to get you on the list Aaarrrgh. And Erik and the Wishmonger is, like Pariah, a good intro to a particular kind of story we do here, so it seemed like a good representative.

You should definitely get in on this crazy collaborative character trading thing so many people have got going on though. It's fun, if a bit dizzying, and there's lots of characters to choose from.

Besides those two, everything else was selected in a way that I felt would give good entry points into longer stories or would introduce key concepts of the Magic setting. That did result in some choices like better introductory stories winning out over more character defining stories (i.e. Planes of the Dual-Walkers was picked over The Cruel Finale).

Right now I'm just trying to read everything on the first page of the forum, so I get a feel for what is currently going on. After that, I'll just check the wiki for stories I haven't read. When I get into a bit of a routine, I'll try and start voting again.

I should have plenty of time tomorrow (unless my mum wants to see Hannibal together), so I'll catch up with you then.

Welcome to our dingy little corner of cyberspace. Don't mind the blood, Barinellos tends to leave a spectral trail, is all.

Anyways, the main thing that makes a Magic plane, as opposed to a Magic story, is the integration of the color pie in some way, shape, or form. This doesn't mean a strict adherence, as you put it, to everything we see from Wizards; everything is flexible to an extent. Creatures can be color-shifted, nations and races don't need a perfect balance of all five colors, lands can be missing some of their normal shape or show influences outside their normal color range -- you can go really crazy and it all really depends on how well you can justify your choices.

Take the plane of Ihn Gallad, for example. It doesn't feature any listed colors, and several of the intelligent races feel like they've been color-shifted, but it feels like a Magic plane for integrating iconic M:tG creatures and making those color connections bleed through the words rather than symbols. Or take Arbagoth, a very varied and rich plane that is totally weighted toward the green end of the spectrum. Every feature of the plane is listed by color, and every place has at least a touch of green, but it feels perfectly at home among the many planes we and Wizards has put out over the years.

There are points that we are less flexible with, of course. Too much color-shifting in one plane can be seen as too far from Magic's baseline; we don't allow too many unique fan-made races; and a plane can get "too busy" -- i.e. having too many unique and interesting features for its own good. Generally, the more you push the boundaries, the more you have to balance it out (with "normal" M:tG planar features) and the more you'll have to justify it (like showing how integrated into the planar history, ecology, economy, culture, etc. it is).




Howdy, storyteller. Nice to see you 'round here.

We generally have to categories of stories: Expanded Canon which explores the official Wizards cards, stories, or settings; and our own Creative Canon which we've developed as a parallel canon with few if any connections to official material.

There have been a number of stories that took a deeper look at a single card (in fact most of the stories in Flavor of the Week and Raven's Rhymes do just that and could easily fit into the M:EM) or, like the Ultimatum series that Barinellos is writing (best link to them is here at the moment), a look at certain characters. We consider those that use prominent official characters with heavy scrutiny; the more prominent the character, the more likely it is that Wizards will be using them in the future, the less likely we will be to accept the story featuring them. (So, don't write a story with the main character being, say, Jace, or the Mirrodin Phyrexians, or other low-hanging fruit like that.)

Using an official plane as a centerpiece can be varying levels of problematic, depending largely on what you're using them for. Barinellos's Legacies uses Ravnica as a staging ground for the story, and doesn't truly feature any canon characters. Ravnica is a very large setting in particular that lets you get away with smaller-scope stories, plus we know that Barinellos, as resident story guru, knows where the lines are for stepping on canon's toes. Using a plane which is currently in a very well-defined and fluid state, like Zendikar or Mirrodin, is more problematic because it's more likely for Wizards to contradict your story when they revisit them.

Saying a planeswalker of yours is from a canon plane is much more problematic because of two things which are already known: 1. the spark is incredibly rare and ignition into a planeswalker is rarer still, so the number of planeswalkers to come from any one plane is very low, even over a long period of time; 2. Wizards like to pack its planes with 'walkers, like how three came from Ravnica and two from Innistrad. With the multiverse supposedly being infinite, it's not a hard thing to imagine your own plane for a character to come from (it doesn't have to be fully developed -- a name and the importance to your character is all that's needed) or just list "unknown" as their home.

As for using canon planeswalkers or story materials, I believe the best we'll accept are cameos, and even then it's iffy. There was a Jakkard story a while back that used Gideon Jura as a cameo (for a pun using "Gideon's Bible") that pretty much got shot down because of what was already known about Gideon. It never even showed the 'walker, just said that he was in Jakkard and that he left a book, but it was stepping on canon's toes too much, and got the Neguru seal of disapproval.

So while the two aren't mutually exclusive, we try to focus on expanding our own parallel fan canon instead of using official canon.




I, uh, don't know what to say to that. You are an absolute tease. At least tell me how bad my GIMP skills are.

Oh, and maybe you think the name should be changed? I think it could work, considering, but I'm also thinking it might be a little too resonant of its origins.

That is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about. Keeper, you're like my Oprah.

The only problem I can see with the list is that I can think of at least five more stories off of the top of my head which it would be great to include. But that's not a problem with this list, it's a problem with trying to narrow-down all the wonderful options to a list of 10. And that's a great problem to have.

Also - NOBODY LAUGH! - what is a Tumblr, exactly? Is it just a kind of blog?

(I'm serious. I am so out of it.)

Sigh.



I am scared.

I am also excited.

I am excared?


* * *

Why did I think going to the GP tomorrow was a good idea?

I don't actually like tournaments very much. I get nervous at FNM, let alone For Serious events with Real Money on the line. Those kinds of events bring out the Not Nice People. And the Not Nice People get especially Not Nice if you Flame Javelin them to death.

Why did I pre-register? Why?

The worst part is, I'm pretty sure I'm doing all this for the playmat.

Bad life choices!

It sure as **** does.

So, in other tumblr related news...
Uhhh, we have over 800 followers now.

Is that a good number? I have no context for this. It does sound like a lot. I mean, it's way, way more than our own number at least

Wow, I didn't even notice o_o Holy cow. We're a freakin' force of nature on there! I gotta get back to posting the content updates more regularly. And yes, that's a good number. That's comparable numbers-wise to popular posts on Storming the Ivory Tower. Not like... super famous, but definitely very respectable.

Yeah Tumblr is basically a lightweight blogging platform that's kind of like if you found a midpoint between Twitter and an actual blogging platform. Tends to be very image-driven and less wordy. The culture is heavily Fandom and Social Justice oriented, which is why I tend to feel more comfortable there than other, crappier social media platforms.

I tried to optimize the list for stuff that was very much new person friendly since I was writing for people who've never read anything Magic related. The post came out of me saying in another post that... well... basically most of the serial fiction I'm really excited about is coming from this fanfiction project. People were intrigued, so I made a list for folks that aren't familiar with magic.

(Also, I just noticed that the only active author not represented there is uh... well... me. >_< Whoops. I don't know that I've written anything that really fits the constraints of what I was setting out to do with that post though.)

For my king:


Also, I would say that once we have a front page for NGA (that isn't the forums), we could easily have regular "editors picks", so to speak, where we of the M:EM showcase some of our favorite works. I'm sure most of us would be eager to write several paragraphs about our favorite piece or two.

Perhaps by that time we can even put together interviews. I even already have a perfect pool of questions,.

So, I'm very nearly done with a piece that would finally put Cara Holis into the archives, but... well, I can't finish it. There's actually not that much left, but unlike with Wild Card where I had to just work through it, I legitimately kind of... just have no idea how to get from point E to point F.

Like I said it's actually nearly complete, but I have a problem with that last bit. Does anyone feel like they have time enough to donate to see if they can polish off that last little bit for me?

Luna, or anyone else in the MEM: do you have examples of fan planes that are too busy and or unique? Also, how do you feel about mechanics from one plane, like imprint or soulshift, appearing on fan made planes?

As far as examples of too busy/unique... I can't particularly think of any at the moment, for the primary reason that they tend to die off early or at least not get voted in.

As far as mechanics go, we're mostly "top down" folks -- but I for one have no problem with it, as long as it fits. If you want to look at the mechanical end, and often we do, returning mechanics are fair game. The key part is where they add into the flavor and story.