Howdy! It's finally mod plot time. Head on over to investigate an odd occurrence in a village on the edge of the Tirashan Forest. Highlights include demons aplenty, rocks where rocks ought not be, a guy in a tree, and the introduction (see rewards, below) of magic for people who have no business doing magic.


Rewards are earned by writing tags in the mod plot. For each thread you complete that has at least five tags from you, up to three total, you unlock a tier and earn a reward. In its most basic form this will look like choosing one Tier 1, one Tier 2, and one Tier 3 reward if you complete three threads. But you can also choose from lower tiers if the higher tiers don't appeal to you – three Tier 1 rewards, for example, or two Tier 1 and one Tier 3.

As you may have noticed, we're currently struggling with some burn-out, so we're not currently creating a bunch of unique rewards for every plot. (We're not saying there will never be any ever again, just that we're going to stop promising them and then not delivering so hopefully you can be pleasantly surprised if they do appear instead of disappointed when they don't.) Instead we've added a "plot-related item" reward at each tier that you can use to create your own if you're so inclined. These items must be themed on the current mod plot in some way (e.g., Nevarran/necromancy related artifacts from a plot set the Necropolis, elven artifacts or odd spontaneously-enchanted items here). If you have an idea and aren't sure which category or tier it would fall under, ask us! For special items unrelated to the plot, use the Enchanted Items reward.

We've also added a new reward: Fade-touched person. This is only available for characters who don't already have magic (or special rifter abilities, which in Thedas are all functionally magic). It may come with potential in-world consequences, such as potential for future plot developments and for being politically lumped in with mages and included in whatever may happen with them in the future, so purchase with caution.

To claim a reward, reply here.

Since we didn't get a rewards post up for the Nevarra plot, you can submit reward requests for that one in this post as well. We have a separate top-level comment here to help us keep track of what's being claimed for what.

Tier 1

• Runes. You can acquire any one canonical runestone to add to your character's weapon or armor so their sword has fire or their armor is imbued with some magical protection.
  
• Rift items, gag/simple variety. Your character can find an item that came through a rift from another world, their own or not. Snack foods, posters of pop idols, underpants with elastic, etc. Things that are fun or sentimental but don't have much in the way of moving parts and won't generally be useful on missions.
  
• Weird pets. Bring home a monkey or a wolf. The pet must be something that can semi-realistically be either permanently contained (sharks in tanks, small rodents, etc.) or trained/tamed out of being dangerous to the general populace. No dragons, nothing rideable (see mounts under Tier 2).
  
• First anchor ability. If your character currently has a vanilla anchor, the anchor can develop either an offensive (shooting small rift-energy projectiles) or defensive (generating a small rift-energy protective barrier, similar in size to a personal shield) capability.
  
• Plot-related item. An item of your choosing, enchanted or not, that your character finds on-site over the course of the plot. For Tier 1, these items can be enchanted for minor quality of life improvements — things like a magically powered fan, enchanted game boards for playing in a bumpy wagon, or other things that are primarily about entertainment, etc. — but cannot not be weapons or otherwise have significant work/plot-related utility.

Tier 2

• Fade-touched materials. Your character can acquire materials that have been touched by the Fade and have them made into a weapon, armor, or other item that has special abilities. There's a list here.
  
• Half of a specialization. To reflect the time and effort it requires to actually learn a new specialization, acquiring a new one requires two rewards spread across two mod plots. You can use one of the canon specializations or create your own. If you create your own, put it in mod contact for us to review and approve.
  
• Mabari. A mabari can imprint on your character. How your character acquires the mabari—getting unwillingly adopted by an old one without a master, intentionally buying a puppy, etc.—is up to you.
  
• Weird mounts. A hart (or equivalent), dracolisk, or nuggalope.
  
• Second anchor ability. If your character has a first anchor ability (see Tier 1), they can now have the second one, too.
  
• Fade-touched person. Available only to characters without powers (i.e. not to native mages or rifters with any special abilities). Your character's prolonged exposure to the energies of the Fade has, you know, touched them. They will permanently acquire one magical ability — for inspiration you can look at this list of Fade-touched materials and their effects, but you're not restricted to what's on the list and welcome to propose your own effect based on Thedosian spells or enchantments. For the foreseeable future, a character's access to this ability will be unpredictable; they may not always (or ever!) be able to do it on command, and when they do it will typically be weak, with unpredictable power spikes, especially under emotional duress.
  
• Plot-related item. An item of your choosing, enchanted or not, that your character finds on-site over the course of the plot. For Tier 2, these items can be weapons with minor effects or other items with minor work/plot-related utility, such as lockpicks that hum at different frequencies to help guide you or griffon-riding goggles that never fog up, or be QOL items with bigger and more useful effects, like a box enchanted to be a deep freezer.

Tier 3

• Enchanted or legendary items. You can use named items from canon, invent your own named item from made-up Thedasosian history, or have an enchanted item of your own invention or discovery that doesn't have a name and/or former owner. These can be items that are useful in combat, like weapons and armor, but they don't have to be. E.g., a self-filling tea pot.
  
• Rift items (magical/useful/complex). Your character can come across an item from another world. This tier is for things more serious and useful than snacks and underwear. As a rule, advanced technology (if it is allowed at all) will be converted into something enchanted.
  
• Griffon tamer. Now that the griffons are breeding freely in the mountains around Kirkwall (and the original griffons are reaching middle age), your character can befriend, tame, and ride a wild griffon that you invent and name yourself.
  
• Anchor upgrade. This reward is only available to characters who have had their anchors for more than nine months. With this upgrade anchor can grow to the size of the Herald’s anchor, allowing them to close rifts alone. They'll also exhibit more powerful versions of the anchor abilities (if they have them).
  
• Plot-related item. An item of your choosing, enchanted or not, that your character finds on-site over the course of the plot. For Tier 3, these items can have significant utility for combat or for other types of work, within the bounds of what is possible with Thedosian magic; the only upper power limit being whether we'd allow it in the game at all.

This activity check is for JANUARY–MARCH 2025. The deadline to reply is APRIL 30. You can review prior AC posts here if needed. Due to our inconsistency in checking this lately and not wanting to catch anyone too off guard, we're allowing people with zero links to take a strike rather than be required to drop. However, a comment with a recap summarizing what your character has been up to, however handwaved, is required to stay in the game. We're leaving the usual write-up intact below for review as needed because these requirements will be in effect for April–June.

To pass AC you should provide a brief recap of what your character has been up to with at least three RP links per character for the relevant time period. These links can be to posts you created, log threads, rookery/crystal threads, inbox threads, or open top-levels within plot posts. You must also link to reports for any war table assignment your character completed during this period. You can do this in the body of your AC comment by sticking "(report)" after your mention of the mission. If you haven't put up a report yet, now is the time to do it.

You can use multiple threads from within the same post, such as three different logs branching from the same open prompt. You can use threads that started prior to the beginning of AC period as long as a substantial portion of tags occurred during this AC period and you didn't already use that thread as proof for a previous AC period. There is no minimum tag count per thread. (But if you're consistently providing only threads you dropped after a couple of tags, last-minute open posts you don't tag after making AC, etc., we may contact you about that.)


Along with your links, you're providing a quick recap of what your character has been up to. The goal for this is to help everyone keep track of what's been happening, both with their own characters and with everyone else's. Riftwatch is a small enough organization that people are probably going to be aware of what everyone else is working on and any obvious interpersonal drama, so this is our OOC cheat sheet!

Recaps can be very brief. E.g., "Over the last three months, Paul went to Tevinter to assassinate a magister (report), had a fight with his best friend Joe, and learned how to use a crossbow." But you're also welcome to include more detail if you want, as long as you keep it to a couple of paragraphs max.

You can—as always—handwave interpersonal interactions with other characters and note those in your recap if you want a record of them. "Paul has continued to avoid Joe since their fight" with no thread showcasing the avoidance, for example. You could also handwave the whole fight! We don't care.

For work- and plot-related recap claims, however, you can only handwave your character's daily performance of their routine work. In between the more significant things you thread, we assume all characters are doing the Typical Work listed on their division wiki page. So you could say "Paul has been diligent about his work for the Diplomacy Division and met with a few minor nobles visiting Kirkwall to talk up Riftwatch," or "Paul has been distracted and struggling with his work for the Forces Division and stumbled through his routine patrols," etc., without proving that in a thread. No one has to RP paperwork or its equivalent.

What you can't purely handwave is anything significant or cool enough that other people would need to remember that it actually happened for future plot purposes—we'd define this as anything for which we normally require a plot request or a report, which we've previously provided some guidance on where those lines are here—or anything that's a significant achievement for your character rather than just daily grind stuff. Basically: if you want your character to do anything cooler than competently attending to their routine work, you've gotta RP about it somehow. That can mean RPing the actual event, or it can mean RPing discussion or planning or fallout around the event–but you have to RP something about it!


NEW CHARACTERS: Characters who were apped during this AC period need to provide one link for each full month they were in the game. For example, for the AC period of January through March, a character apped in January would need two proofs because they were in the game for the full months of February and March (but it doesn't matter which month the two links were started in), a character apped in February would need one, and a character apped in March wouldn't need any links. Obviously you're welcome to include as many links as you have/want.

IC LEADERS: You're required to provide proof of your character using their job in some way. This can be a war table assignment or player plot, if you chose to run one. But it can also just mean making sure that one of your AC proof links includes your character performing their job duties. E.g., the Head Archivist could link to a crystal announcement asking people to please stop dog-earing the books, a log in which they're reorganizing the library, or an inbox thread where they hound a specific person to stop hoarding library books in their bedroom. This requirement doesn't apply to characters who are new to their jobs as of the current quarter.

BACKGROUND CHARACTERS: Everyone has to provide the required three links for at least one character every AC period. But if you play multiple characters, then each period you can choose up to two to mark as background characters. You can rotate which characters you designate as background each AC period if you want, though characters with leadership roles of any kind cannot be backgrounded. You still need to provide a brief, vague-as-you'd-like recap of what they're doing in the background, so everyone else knows whether they're in the Gallows doing their work or on an assignment abroad or whatever else, but you don't have to provide any links.

VOICE TEST CHARACTERS: You are not required to do AC for voice test characters until the deadline for them becoming real characters has passed, but you can fill out the form for them anyway if you want to have a record of what they've done for future reference.


Failing to respond to AC at all will result in the character being swept.

If you fail to post any links at all for a character who isn't backgrounded, you'll have to drop them. If you post more than zero but fewer than three, you'll get a strike but can try again next quarter. If you fail to meet the three-link-per-character requirement for two quarters in a row you'll be required to drop as many characters as you failed with. This does technically mean that you could drag your feet for up to six months before dropping a character you've only written a single tag for in that time. We ask that you be kind to your CR and not do that. Again, if you seem to be abusing the system, we'll contact you to talk about it.


Please post AC for all of your characters in a single comment! You only need to include the Player field once if you have multiple characters. See the note up top regarding link requirements if you have skipped straight down to the forms.

MOST CHARACTERS <b>Player:</b> <b>Character:</b> <b>Background:</b> Y/N <b>Recap & Links:</b> For characters not in the background, minimum three links to RP occurring sometime in the last three months.

NEW CHARACTERS <b>Player:</b> <b>Character:</b> <b>Background:</b> Y/N <b>Month Joined:</b> <b>Have you replied to the taken list?:</b> Y/N <b>Recap & Links:</b> One link for each full month your character has been in the game so far.

LEADER CHARACTERS <b>Player:</b> <b>Character:</b> <b>Leadership Proof:</b> Just evidence of them actually performing their job/you using it in RP in some way. You can also include this as one of the three links required in your recap. <b>Recap & Links:</b> Minimum three links to RP occurring sometime in the last three months.

Notable Dates

• Applications: Open indefinitely
  
• Leadership Applications: Due at the end of the month
  
• Test Drive Meme: Here! As usual we plan to keep this one up long-term, so we highly encourage tracking the post for new top-level comments!
  
• Activity Check for January–March: Soon

IC Leader Updates

Effective immediately, Gela Baynrac will take over the role of Head of the Diplomacy Division! You can assume this has been announced IC and offer congratulations/condolences as appropriate.

Also this month, Ness will be swapping from Quartermaster to Head Archivist!

Quartermaster, Trademaster, and other leadership applications remain open. As always, a list of all available roles is on the wiki and we review any applications we've received at the end of each month. If you have questions, feel free to toss them at the Mod Contact. Applications should be submitted here.

Gallows Survey

Please take a look at this post and help us out by providing some info about your characters' hopes and dreams for their home. First round responses are due by 4/10.


Mod Plot

We'll be running a mod plot event before the end of April, something smaller in scope that will then lead into some War Table missions run by our DH players and other plot opportunities for all before a larger mod event around the end of June. So keep an eye out for that in the next couple weeks!

Veil Effects

As a reminder, the growing instability of the Veil caused by the opening of Gates is causing various strange effects across Thedas (as described in several mod plots), and with the recent opening of the Gate beneath the Grand Necropolis it continues to get worse. In its work across Thedas, Riftwatch will encounter more and more pockets where the boundaries between the Fade, the Crossroads, and the real world bleed together or swap places, disruptions in the normal flow of time or operation of natural forces like gravity, and so on. Feel free to write these types of complications into your threads—unless you want to do something large scale, you don't need mod permission.

This will also continue to affect Riftwatch's sending crystals. The primary side effect is messages being lost or significantly delayed. The further people are from each other, the more likely it is that messages will not transmit or will only do so after a long delay. Messages will also occasionally be misdelivered, but this will only happen when a message is first sent or a connection is first formed, rather than in the middle of an ongoing conversation on an open channel.

You're not obligated to include delayed/lost messages in any thread at any given time, but you can employ it whenever it would make something more interesting—if you want to draw out suspense, cause misunderstandings between characters who don't realize what they said didn't go through, or have characters in the field have to make hard calls without consulting their bosses or resident experts for orders/help.

War Table

We're working on a refresh of war table assignments and a new and improved version of the jobs board, to come after the next mod plot, but in the meantime, the existing war table assignments remain available to claim at any time! You can review available assignments on the wiki and claim them on this post.

Hi everyone, we've got some questions for you! These are outlined in the form below, and should be answered IC for each of your characters—we're looking for characters' hopes and dreams rather than players' OOC wishes. You can respond for any and all of them that you'd like. Participation is totally optional, but obviously we encourage you to opt-in!

If you'd like to be considered for the first round, please respond by end of the day on 4/10. There will be additional rounds after the first one, so if you don't hear from us this month don't fret, and feel free to submit new responses after that date.

Comments are screened.

Player:
Character:

Gallows Wishes: List 1 or 2 things your character would change about the Gallows complex. Think things along the same general lines as the Gallows Rewards (or actual things from that list!).

Living Space Wishes: List 2 or 3 things your character would like to change about their living space. This could range from something small and plausibly achievable by themselves (a different color rug, a mural of the stars on the ceiling) to unrealistic structural changes (another window, a balcony, a tree in the middle of the room).

Personal Possession Wishes: List 2 or 3 objects of personal significance your character does not have with them at the Gallows. These could be possessions that were lost or destroyed long ago, things that were just left elsewhere, that didn't come through a rift with them, etc. These should be relatively simple items that wouldn't require an AC rewards purchase (i.e., nothing of huge material value or significant magical/technological capability).

<b>Player:</b> <b>Character:</b> <b>Gallows Edit:</b> <b>Living Space Edit:</b> <b>Personal Possession:</b>

Who: Everyone who wants in
Open/Closed: Open
Where: The dwarven outpost
When: Mid-April