I’ve been waiting for a futuristic urban fantasy roleplay inspired by Arknights ^^
I am super excited to see more on this.

So I'm taking it that it would be an OC-driven Counter Side RP? Just asking, because it taking place in the 23rd Century AD puts it WAAAY past the canon events of Counter Side's plots (which AFAIK take place in the 2040's, which is like, well over a century before The Covenant's premise)

Then again, with the concept of Exiles I suppose there's nothing stopping players from applying canon characters from the game either. Over all, a pretty cool concept.

It's CounterSide inspired in the same way that it's Arknights inspired insofar as I'm taking large bits of worldbuilding and setting and adapting it into a roleplaying forum. This doesn't mean that Silverash and Hilde are running around or have ever ran around, this is me mashing together a few concepts in to make an "original" forum roleplay so I'm not tied down by any canon. If you're very familiar with Counter:Side, Arknights, or Girls Frontline lore you'll see exactly what pieces I ripped off of and changed names if I thought the translation was a bit wonky on -- but being able to pick and choose means you don't see what I dumped in terms of what those settings have.

It's several hundred years in the future of Counter:Side because I don't want to square why 2040 tech levels have airships that shoot laser beams strong enough to tear apart planet surfaces and in 2021 my flashlight can barely light up a room. I made a conscious decision to not go canon because while I really like the big picture of Counter:Side there are HUGE parts of the setting I'm throwing out wholesale (Demon Lords, Qliphoth Game, etc.) because we have next to no information about them and I'm not shackling myself to lore I don't like when the payoff to that lore might be in 2025 or something when we're ten chapters down the line. I'm sure someone eventually will take on that challenge and be like -- I can make that work and I have a great idea of where the storyline is going and good for them! I genuinely have no idea what any of the payoff is going to be so I'm treating that stuff like it's radioactive.

For Exiles, the intent is to make it OCs that came from another world. This is not a panfandom concept (there are a LOT of those around if you're interested in that) and Ichigo and Goku running around is not what I intended the concept for. The impetus for the Exile concept is largely that I'm consciously trying to take some inspiration from Kazimierz in Arknights and I really like Arknights Face Claims. If everyone is just human no changes then nobody can use Arknights FCs, and why the hell would I want to make a site where I can't use Arknights FCs?

I've built from established settings before and tried to transfer that to a forum game, but this time I'm intentionally not doing that. I'm deciding what to import and what to discard from a variety of settings I really like the vibe of based first around whether I think it works as part of a forum game.

For example, rigid teams where members stay until they die or retire due to mutual bonds or loyalty or custom or whatever is super neat in fiction. I love that concept, it's neat! But it's absolutely horrendous for a roleplaying forum. People come and go without warning all the time, it's a fact of the medium. You cannot have super rigid teams where one person leaving can basically paralyze everyone else and put them in an extremely awkward position. Either that or have the eternal want ad for 1 person that's canonically on a team but has never had a player and probably will never have a player that those sorts of rigid systems encourage. It's awkward to have to write around it all the time and it's awkward to advertise something so specific and niche.

How do we solve this while still having teams in general? Treat it like a job. People come and go from jobs all the time, and sometimes stay in one for a very short period of time. Sometimes they tell absolutely nobody that they're leaving, and sometimes it's a big parade and recognition ceremony depending on tenure and how they're leaving the job. For canon factions this ensures that they're not paralyzed for weeks due to a design flaw, and for member based factions it ensures that if it dies due to leader leaving or something that people aren't trapped there and can either continue it with those remaining or go off and get another job.

At this point, I don't have anything really substantial to share that could be condensed well. I've mostly focused on writing Guidebook sort of information and workshopping site board structure/app structure. The former is just adjusting drafts at this point until system is done and I can get to work on the progression/system overviews. I hope to have something more substantive by the end of the month for sure and am targeting a site soft opening at least by the end of March.

February Update is less than I had hoped in terms of stuff I can share.

Not comfy sharing skin previews before payment is done, but that is expected late Feb/early March. Lots of information got done but it still needs another pass when I've had some time away from it and can word things a bit better for a second draft.

At current rate, I'm confident that a soft launch will be able to be done in March. I do not anticipate that the systems will be finished by then. The goal is for the event system part to function and be beta tested by then so it's good enough for public play testing. PvP will likely not be supported at soft launch by systems, but progression/etc. should at least have a public play test version out.

The current plan is to turn the development discord public about two weeks out from release with every document public and able to be viewed alongside application templates/etc. so people have a bit to see if the execution of the concept vibes with them and open up some space for prewriting / plotting for anyone who wants to do that.

The reason I think two weeks out is a good spot is because I think it's about where the sweet spot I want is. Ultimately, I'm making a site that I want to have a longer life than my last one -- my last one survived three years. In order to do that, I need a concept that I am excited about enough and like enough at all levels to still have motivation to write and do work for three years from now.

If the vision is chocolate cake, but people are brought in too early to know that and for that to be obvious they might get attached to a pet rock concept and get frustrated when chocolate cake comes out and not a pet rock. Without a solid foundation and vision, someone could to use more role playing terms envision this project as a panfandom slice of life, system-less roleplay and be sorely disappointed. They could envision this as a fandom setting for any number of different influences from Counter:Side to Arknights to Girls Frontline and be sorely disappointed. I want to present what is clearly the type of game that I want, something that is clearly an attempt at chocolate cake.

By two weeks out almost everything will be done. It's literally just final touches, aside from systems, and then plan to ship. It's late enough in the process that the vision is made clear, but early enough that there's a bit of overlap time between development and public open. It's clear at that point that it's supposed to be chocolate cake, but maybe someone has a better idea than I did about the execution of the chocolate cake. Maybe the glazing would be cooler another way, or the decorations better if they were a different theme. It's too late in the process to make something that's not a chocolate cake, but tweaks to how it can be the best chocolate cake possible can still be made and still be ongoing throughout the life cycle.

For the parts that are unfinished by soft open, I'm going to have a public sort of roadmap that lays out progress and potential ways it could move forward. I have a lot of functional but uninspiring stuff I could pull from last site and put through an update cycle to work in a pinch, but instead of doing that I think it's worth the risk of trying something innovative that could be a significantly better way of approaching a problem because the beginning of site life is where that experimentation is much easier to do so long as the progression gained is kept throughout any iteration -- and that is accomplished by keeping the means of progression the same regardless of what we end up going with -- event participation + word count OR posts depending on RPer preference, likely changeable per thread.

Hopefully that made some sort of sense. It's a crazy time of year for me and my mind is kind of scrambled at this point, which is why I'm happy to have some time to do another draft of everything I've written up thus far.

After the last post a reasonable question is – okay, so what does that cake look like? What’s in the cake, what’s on the cake, what flavor of chocolate is it? If you make it too specific and niche by drenching it with hot sauce and even people who like chocolate cake will be disgusted but make it too generic and boring and the baker will get bored before the cake is finished and close down the shop before anyone eats any cake.

To the question asking what the game will look like, I’m going to answer that from a narrative perspective, because writing an awesome story is why I think people gravitate towards roleplaying as a hobby in general. People choose collaborative roleplay because they want to make an awesome story with friends and choose play by post because they want to focus very deeply onto their specific characters in ways that other mediums aren’t as well suited for.

A successful narrative, following this train of thought, would allow for stories that could be told by player characters in a narrative meaty enough to grab hold of and run with. One way you do this is to design the setting around a central tension – the main conflict inherent in the setting. Even better if there’s not a specific right or wrong answer, and a ton of possible interpretations and ways people in the universe have run with it and ways characters can run with it themselves.

I’m going to present the central tension, explain how it came about from the current world state, and offer four examples of answers to that question that make four distinct groups within the setting. The first two will be very macro perspectives that looks at society from the top down, and the last two will be very self-centered and micro perspectives that focus on a singular issue or group or people. I believe that one way to create an awesome story is to have characters that have the ability to stand for something greater than themselves – some higher purpose and ideology that drives them on and others can interact with. This viewpoint makes sense if you knew that for the past two years I’ve used lyrics from Senator Armstrong’s theme in Metal Gear Revengeance as part of my posting template. Some people feel like that stuff is insufferable and they hate it in their games, but I think that clash of ideals makes for very compelling stories and want to introduce that far more intentionally into this concept.

The central tension of the world of the Covenant is Change vs. Stasis. Every ideology and faction with its own ideas will have an answer to the question of where society goes from its current state – what they would do if they were given the power to enact their vision of how the world should be. This answer may be from the big picture or very selfish and personal to the group, but every group with its own ideas will have an answer.

It is very hard to write narratives for groups that stand for nothing and lone wolves with no ideology whatsoever and frankly it’s not even worth the effort in my view – so I need to give writers something to latch onto and make it very public what sort of conflict I’m designing the world around so they can put their groups and characters somewhere on this scale at some point during the roleplay. Every game has a buy-in, where if you’re excited with the core idea you will very easily find other things to latch onto as you learn more about the setting, its characters, and the characters of other people. The central conflict is that buy-in for the narrative, because each group will advance its own vision for the future and the player characters will ultimately decide who is successful over the course of the roleplay.

The world as it stands has the eight members of the Federation as the mostly stable centers of civilizations in the ruins of the parts of the world that remain. Each of these members is one major disaster away from annihilation, as the Fall of Corsica almost thirty years ago and the attempted materialization of the first Category 6 – the new, existential threat to humanity classification -- Corrupted Object over Kerch over a decade ago. Day to day stability is there, but who is to say that another bad turn couldn't destroy one of the remaining eight centers of civilization? There's no current way to rebuild and make another, so is the world just on a slow path to human extinction as an inevitability or were those just once in a thousand-year unlikely events that happened to happen so close together? If it was just a coincidence, wouldn't changing the course drastically at this point when everything is mostly stabilized only serve to make the world more dangerous and unstable out of a knee jerk, fearful reaction to the unknown?

For factions like the City of Kerch led by the mayor who exemplifies this the idea of maintaining the course, the status quo has allowed them to survive and become one of the last bastions of humanity. It has allowed them to be one of the vaunted points of light in a post-apocalyptic world and keep the human race from extinction. Technological advancement is inevitable and a general good but must be measured and deliberate lest unintended consequences destroy everything that our forefathers have given their lives to build. A vision of never-ending short-term gains in profit and advancement without considering the long-term consequences are what led to fall of Corsica and the loss of millions of human lives.

For groups such as the Church of St. John the Precursor led by the Metropolitan who exemplifies this idea, the status quo is a corrupt system designed to keep those in power at the time of its creation in power in perpetuity for as long as it exists. Those who advocate for its survival are those who benefit from it, and do not see that despite their denials the social ladder still exists, and that the mathematical solution of human needs being provided to sustain the population is no substitute for the ability to live a genuine human life with purpose and meaning. People must have access to the levers of power in a real and meaningful way, or the status quo will collapse under the weight of its own systematic inequality.

For organizations like the Union of Counters, which include the board of many Counter Companies who feel this way, modern society is built on the sacrifices of Counters both past and present who put their lives on the line to protect humanity and humanity has not done enough to allow a voice to the warrior caste. Barriers to Counters participating in politics even after their retirement are not written down, but there is a very real unspoken agreement and tradition that it is simply not done. If society is going to toss them into the meat grinder for their entire careers, those that survive the ordeal should have a voice more comparable with their accomplishments and sacrifices in shaping the society they poured their blood, sweat, and tears to protect.

For criminal coalitions such as the Underground, kept in check by the mysterious Council, modern society has made it impossible for some Counters who legitimately wished to pursue legitimate work to get that work if they could not pass arbitrary and outdated testing mechanisms that heavily favored the physically strong. For those who were unable to get the grade required to get looks from legitimate Counter Companies, the more rational decision was to use those skills was to turn to the criminal underworld to make money. Unburdened by regulation or ethics, advancement in technology and tactics are tested in the crucible of natural selection every day and the most successful and widespread of these advancements are simply copied by the more legitimate parts of the city and presented as their own research and development. People will do what is best for themselves, many in this group would argue, and currently crime is the only way for someone who is not a generational talent at something to make a substantial move up the social ladder within one lifetime.

And that doesn’t even get into the extreme parts of the spectrum. A group could easily decide that the way of the future isn’t really in the future but in the past, and it’s a return to good old feudalist society that will solve all of humanity’s problems – with their leader as king, of course. That goes without saying. Another group could decide that the only way to move forward is through rapid, unprecedented technological advancement to science our way out of our current issues, and human rights should be postponed for a generation while they use any means necessary to advance the tech level to the point needed to solve the current issues. They’ll give back all the power afterwards, though, pinky promise.

Drawing from this sliding scale, new groups can pop up whenever wanted. Alliances could be formed, and villain groups created by issues that just kind of fell through the cracks as the physical embodiment of those failures. Like yeah, sure, on a roleplaying forum a lot of debates are going to be resolved by beating the living hell out of each other but it’s nice when you can be an active part of the setting without having to beat up everyone who disagrees with you.

In the same way that nobody really cares about two drunk frat boys from Nebraska having a bar fight in some hole in the wall over whether the dress was black and blue or red and gold, but they will pay big bucks to see a fight like Conor McGregor vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov. After Conor’s repeated slurs, the Brooklyn bus attack that caused injuries to the heads and eyes of bystanders from the shattered glass, and verbally attacking anyone close to Khabib the entire ordeal made it much more than a bar room brawl. It was a battle of a professional fighter against by all accounts someone who had deteriorated into a deranged psychopath by that point but was still allowed to compete because reasons. Two guys duking it out can either be so boring and mundane that it is forgotten about the next morning or so impactful and publicized that it can be remembered decades or even centuries later – how many of you heard about Musashi’s duel against Kojiro over 400 years ago?

I want to create building blocks that make the site events feature antagonists that make the players feel something – even if that feeling is intense hatred of the antagonist. I want events to be memorable, and part of creating that consistently I think is introducing characters who stand for something. I want events to create moments and characters that people remember and reference months or years later as well as making it easy for me to create new concepts down the line as needed without having to jigsaw them into a giant tapestry of random shapes and purposes – every major group will have some relation to the central tension and thus each other so I just need to pick a different spot on that continuum for conflict. Will this be successful all the time? Probably not, but I want to have a plan in place to make it be successful much more than I have been in the past with less throwaway antagonists that exist to fulfill a quota for events more than anything.

In terms of locations and boards, I've decided to let the members create most of the individual places and just add them over time. What I think are more important for the feeling of a place and plots are themes and conflicts. Initial direction is hard, and leaving open some doors for writers to have their characters open and change the status quo if they wish is something that I think is important. Some areas are going to be harder to change than others, and each will have different problems requiring different solutions.

Kerch: A thinning veneer of civility hides a growing corruption in the ranks. Counters are being kept from the levers of power by the entrenched elite. Tensions are rising between normal humans and the abnormal concentration of Counters. An age old revolving door of the most powerful egos of the city clashing and threatening to tear the city asunder.

Large friction between the aristocracy and the Counter Company leadership, with the former enabling and encouraging infighting among the latter so their own power remains secure. The last vestiges of the working class cling onto their properties in an increasingly gentrified island that no longer wants them there. Unruly Counters must be thrown out and policed by Counters, but no Counters capable of doing much against Company Counters will take a bouncer or police officer job.

Yalta: A budding social movement fights enemies at all sides wishing for its annihilation. A modern blend of religion and magic fighting a losing battle against the criminal underground. Middle class on the east kicking out the social ladder from underneath themselves to prevent slipping further. Deaths of despair in the west as common as the rising crime that becomes the only option for the ambitious.

Head of Church leads fight against corruption, hiring journalists who risk their lives to expose corruption and weathering repeated acts of violence to present an opposition to the status quo. Organized crime begins to creep into the blind spots caused by incompetence or corruption, and has already secured a foothold in many areas. Eastern part of island tries to make sure they're not next and vigorously oppose what they see as encroachment by undesirables in their own backyards. Police are over-represented in the east side, who demand protection from the riff raff to the west. Every yearly budget is an all-out brawl as every credit spent on said tends to mysteriously disappear, courtesy of the growing group of local crime bosses which only lead to increased resentment and distrust.

Liberty Hills: Calls for help and assistance fall on deaf ears. Neighbors ignoring the screams in the night because it's not their responsibility. Lack of universal sanitation, clean water, and health care causing a resurgence of diseases thought long dead. A lone sheriff with no working vehicle tries to maintain peace.

The People's Militia started off marketed as a paradise for the rugged individualist and receiving massive crowd funding on that dream, able to survive without government theft and corruption. Over the years, gunfights became common until the Administration fully pulled out of even sending patrols in the area and the Counter Academy was the only outside force outside of hired mercenaries willing to clear out the occasional Corrupted Object or drifter who threatened residents. Public opinion shifted over the years, however, and donations have slowed considerably due to the multiple news stories of Counter Academy students in lethal confrontations with residents of the Liberty Hills. The first of these confrontations had heated debate, but as the corruption and violence continue to increase public opinion shifts more and more against the frontier.

While I think we're not quite at 2 weeks out, I also basically have rough drafts of every document up and public at this point so it's very clear what is trying to be made. As a result, I'm opening up the planning discord to the general public to take a look to see if those first drafts are something you'd enjoy being a part of as they get proofread and edited down.

The Covenant is an upcoming Jcink Premium 18+ original animanga corporate urban fantasy site set in the year 2209 that offers two DMed site events every three months, site systems built around the concept of forming a team and chasing fame on a Company Leaderboard, a long-term progression system for your character and team, and an experienced admin whose last site ran for three consecutive years. OneNote is public with all site development first drafts up and able to be read by prospective members.