[attr="class","poam-text"]Round 3! Things are proceeding quite nicely and the site will be open soon^TM. I'll open up a beta group when that happens, and beta should last for about two weeks. In the mean time, more info:

[attr="class","poam-title"]RELICS & RESOURCES

[attr="class","poam-text"]The Administrators are highly interested in the trading, economy, and goodwill of organics. As a result they have devised their system to rely on the community working together to become powerful, as well as a simplified form of crafting and gathering. The only thing you can gather are pages, and the only thing you can craft are upgrades to people's relics. No inventories filled with cookies and shovels and random plants.

Upgrading your relics and relic abilities up to your overall level is how you maintain progress on PoaM. However, in order to upgrade a relic you need to find pages of the same element as your relic ability, and then you need to find a crafter in the community who works with that element. It's very expensive to level up crafting, but without them, characters simply won't be strong enough to overcome trials.

Ultimately, the community will have to decide who to invest in as crafters, as you will need at least one of every element. Everyone else will have to do their best to gather pages so that there's enough resources to go around. Thankfully you don't have to write threads of yourself trying to gather things. Just roleplay as you normally do, and it's assumed that you encounter pages along your journey - you can roll for pages every x number of posts you make. You also receive pages of your choice as rewards from site activities.

This all serves as a natural counterbalance mechanic. If a large portion of the community want to use [Fire] relics, they'll quickly be starved of [Fire] pages and will struggle to level their abilities. Diversity is key, and so is being helpful to your neighbors.

[attr="class","poam-title"]A STUDY ON THE ADMINISTRATORS

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While PoaM lore is fairly limited and you can jump in straight away, there's plenty of things under the façade of the battle royale-esque Library:

The Administrators are the only NPCs on site, and they are both your best friends and your visceral enemies. The Administrators use concepts and ideas from pre-established universes to communicate as they are far removed from humanoid desires and thought processes. They describe their home as a library, they explain the processes of wish-granting by using the tree of life concept, and they structure their trial as a video game. They have evolved through various forms throughout the cycles but usually present themselves as youthful, attractive, angelic figures layered in futuristic armor and fashion to hint at their virtual precognizant nature.

Each Administrator adopts a specific personality and stereotype e.g. the manic mecha girl, the sagely princeling, the brolic musclehead. They do this so that they are more relatable to guests.

They can be directly messaged by any character at any time, though naturally they don't have to respond if they don't want to.

While the main plot of PoaM is to survive the Library, there are always hints of a deeper plot relating to their origins, creators, and counter forces that can only be achieved by becoming friendly with them over time. But that process can take multiple cycles, and this 'true ending' to PoaM may never be achieved.