A quick note that everyone who reached out has gotten a message to preview the site! If you would like a discord invitation in the meantime, give me a head's up and I would be happy to private message you.

Thanks again to anyone intrigued by the premise and please look forward to the opening!

AFTER MUCH TO DO . . .

I am back with an update. ❤❤❤ And my excitement is high, so y'know that is also a thing!

Our progress is about 99%, meaning that we are going to be sending out our preview tomorrow and allowing anybody interested to join our discord! Although we are getting our reserves ready ourselves and still tweaking a couple o' minor things, we'd be happy to see you there if you want to settle in, take a look, or ask questions.

A lot of what's left is helping out my staff team to get them all ready to go and organizing last minute stuff. Everyone's been lovely and brought a ton of enthusiasm to the site so far! I'm personally very proud of what we've got in store, along with what's been put together, and psyched to share our creativity with folkx that are curious!

WALKER STREET has a tentative (soft, since we are treating it as a beta period) site opening date in the next 7 days!!! A lil later than I guessed, but: stay tuned.

I did say SMT, yup~! i also love SMT and its bajillions of spinoffs so

Anywho, thank you again to anyone else who has since reached out or expressed interest! ❤❤❤ I figured, since I'm chilling here already, why not give :druuuuuuumroll:

an update!


1. Site Progress - we're doin' good! I've roped in what looks like it might be 3 other staff minions to assist me in my horrifying work! Send your gratitude out into the universe if this is something you may be thinking about joining.

Right now, I'd place everything at around 96% done.


2. I've decided to move the 1st event out either a month or two, to give folkx time to settle in and get their plots rollin' first. But! I'll aim to make the final product real cool in the meantime.

We will be running a thread starter/dev prompt contest out of the gate tho! These will always be horror themed and you can get ~*~shiny images~*~. (And, for those who win, a character featured in our header!)


3. Having sat around and had a good thought about my own interests as an admin, I've split the site more evenly to 50% storyline and 50% "horror-murder-and-mystery sandbox." Both sides were always present, but everything's finessed now and fits together better in our lore. The hope is to give both sides something to enjoy as they write with us, so cheers!

For those of you into storyline beats, here's a preview of some cool alignment stuff and a lead NPC:





Whew, there we are! As another note, I was asked to give a preview of the site.

I've decided this is a great idea, and will be extending the opportunity to anyone who might wanna take a 1st look! (They'll have to wait a littttttle bit longer, but I'll get that preview to 'em! It'll be Soon:tm:. . .)

You can like this post or send me a pm if you're curious, and I will waitlist you for it. Our discord will be public in the coming week or so too!


That's all for now! Stay tuned!

Awww, to all those kind enough to like in this thread and/or reach out: appreciate u, thanks. ❤ Friendly encouragement is nice since horror is a niche genre!


ace.: not exactly! To keep things flexible and fresh, aesthetic images are allowed (either photography or illustrated), but we do have a credit custom field that players need to fill out. We encourage everyone to be responsible and respectful to the artists, too! So: let’s say that you really love vacuum and want her work to represent your profile image. To use it, you would need to be able to source her AND couldn’t edit the art, as per her request for the use of her artwork. The same goes for photography that isn't free use stock. If the artist says, “don’t do this to use,” then we expect our players to acknowledge that.

There are also some limitations on the type of artwork. A member would be totally good if using surrealist imagery but couldn’t use explicit body horror. People’s mileage varies visually, and I feel it’s not good practice to be insensitive to this since visual images are something guests/members can’t avoiding looking at as part of browsing. 



Speaking of not-so-subtly pimping artists! As a gift, have a preview of some central design elements + visual aesthetic! These images were drawn by the lovely Choo, whose retro-manga art is found on twitter and features heavily in the site!


Stay tuned!

Walker Street is an upcoming supernatural urban horror roleplay. It draws heavy inspiration from the Shin Megami Tensei and Golden Playhouse franchise(s), Silent Hill, Control, and episodic anthology stories in the vein of Welcome to Night Vale or the Twilight Zone, as well as horror media more generally.

Players have the option to play characters that manifest psychic powers and are attuned to psychic phenomena, dark entities inspired by mythology and urban legends, and time traveling agents in the style of the Umbrella Academy, Life is Strange, or Stephen King's 11/22/63, with a stronger bend towards traditionalist horror tropes or staples. The game will be Jcink Premium, 18+, rated M, and feature full content exploration, apart from certain off-limit topics that are explicitly outlined by staff.

The site is roughly 90% complete and coming together nicely, with a tentative opening for early May. This is a passion project so it is opening no matter what, but I'd love to gauge any questions or early interest! If this sounds like something that you might like to take a look at, drop me a line in this thread or over private message!

Also note that I am looking for 2 additional staff folkx, if that's your thing! I'd love to chat if you might want to assist with moderation. ❤



SPECIAL MENTIONS:

- An original setting that features semi-realistic occult magic, psychedelic mind-body powers, feuds with the gods, and time travel!

- Animanga, videogame, illustrated, or no faceclaims! Do what you want.

- No activity checks or wordcount!

- It is death enabled! But your character can come back to life through revival mechanics, as well as continue in-play as a ghost for a cooldown period! And with all their weird, trippy memories of dying fully intact!

- A series of 20 major apocalyptic event scenarios to play through – watch your characters sink or swim as the apocalypse unfolds! 4 of these are fully in development and pre-planned, and all events would in theory last 3 months with a 1 month cool-off.

- Demon or "dark entity" characters can form Faustian contracts with other in-game groups, acting as (occasionally impish) servants and benefactors!

- A freeform app! Once accepted, members can continue to update their applications throughout the game with new developments and make edits as they wish! We also offer a personal timeline that doubles as a thread tracker on a character-by-character basis.

- A wide variety of customized templates to pick and choose from, including for development threads!

- In-game consequences provided through RNGs! Messing with psychic powers, bending the timestream, and interacting with the Unknown that serves as the origin point for demons and other dark creatures results in multiple potential outcomes. This includes abilities backfiring, being attacked by the environment, becoming a different entity over time, losing and gaining powers, breakdowns with reality, the risk of encountering undead hordes, and being (temporarily) stuck as a ghost after dying!



PLOT OVERVIEW:

While it has no conventional overarching plot, functioning as a sandbox game with optional mystery elements, Walker Street revolves around three major pillars:


1. A government conspiracy, the accident that destroyed its head research facility in 1981, and time travel shenanigans put in play by a mysterious entity called THEM.

2. The primordial divine war of the Law and the Un-Law, otherwise known as Law and Chaos.

3. Twenty apocalyptic events that herald the end of the known universe and the 3rd dimension, cryptically referred to in government files as "World's End." 


But one warning – much of the narrative happened long ago, in the Gastin of 1981 and earlier. Emphatically a mystery and survival horror roleplay, players will be key to unraveling these past events by participating in those scenarios that supposedly will lead to World's End ... or they can enjoy building their own stories surrounding the forces of law and chaos. Sitewide storyline participation is fully optional!

The storyline will involve characters impacting and experiencing the apocalypse multiple times. While dying is part of this, every apocalyptic scenario will be unique and reveal new, non-essential details about Gastin's universe. To clean up the loose ends, each is treated as an alternate dimension, so your characters just reset back to creepy normalcy afterwards! Nobody knows why, it's better to not ask.

Currently slated for our opening: an alien invasion styled with inspiration from Neon Genesis Evangelion and War of the Worlds! And nuclear fallout references! How delightful.



THE SETTING:

Walker Street takes place in the fictional city of Gastin, Arkansas. A scenic landscape settled nicely between the Southern and the Midwestern United States, it draws heavily from Jackson, Chicago, and Saint Louis as inspiration. Altogether a pleasant place on the surface, when you get past its moniker of Murder Town – for all the people who disappeared on Historic Route 67.

Oh, and its reputation for strange things; cryptid sightings, inexplicable accidents, bloody incidents, a plethora of ghost stories, and a collapsed 1950s government research facility entombed underground.

Oh, and! The fact that sometimes it warps into a Hell Gate dimension. Can't forget to mention that minor detail.

minuet pompon thanks a ton to you both! this was very helpful! provided a good opportunity to outline in more depth and proved me wrong that this is like a dead-in-the-water thing. (plus! i do not know psycho-pass and ended up reading the summary like, “BUT. WHAT IF. I ALSO ADDED DIABOLICAL EX-CRIMINAL MASTERMINDS . . . TO THE MIX . . .”)



i have modded plot-heavy rps in the past, which means i'm not going in blind. the post-by-post player storyline approach was done well on an excellent, lurkable old site called blood red, snow white too. i am also drawing inspiration from them. in all fairness, not everyone will be as active or invested, which is fine in my book. it’s more about the journey than the destination.

anyhow, to answer you both: this would be primarily player driven and closer to everyone being their own dm. i want to give people enough freedom to feel confident taking the reins. i am aiming for a playerbase that, as pompon said, is interested in a proactive role and honestly wants intrigue, in-game politics, and espionage. the world is intentionally and purposefully open to enable creative freedom. as for game storyline knowledge, how can I put this ... while I’ve got a couple of things up my sleeve, i don’t want characters to feel dependent on it; it’s intended to add intrigue and depth to a mysterious, sometimes warped take on a futuristic earth. i’d love to see other people’s interpretations of what this "earth" feels like and, eventually, entwine the story with what people have contributed as the site gels.



@modding stuff!cut


@player plotline!groups + member groups!cut

SO, THIS IS A LONG SHOT bc i am not blind to the reality that i have eclectic interests . . . but y’know . . .

the game would be about political mind games conducted in the same manner as inception, with a focus on espionage and spying aided by virtual reality. dream theft, implanting thoughts or cognitions to influence future actions, paranoid fears about reality (or your own fellow agents changing your perception of reality), government intrigue, betrayals, double agents, buy-offs, conspiracies and similar plots. characters can't remember at least the last ten years prior to a political catastrophe dubbed zero-day. outside of memory loss, some could have more averse neurological effects.

in order to orchestrate intelligence operations, agents (either rogue or government-based) act in partnerships where one designs the virtual simulation and the other infiltrates. can include more than two agents, but operations are typically small to avoid compromising sensitive information or the infiltrator’s current status. by association, this creates opportunities to explore plots with anyone your character might be paired with.

i am specifically trying to gauge if anyone would find this interesting? does it seem too complex? what strikes your fancy about this kind of storyline? constructive criticism or brainstorming? i’ve toyed with it for about five years so it’s something i really love, but then: i am a huge super-ass nerd who is captivated by tech stuff. it’d be good to know if it doesn’t have any traction before i put the effort in.






setting: all major cities in the world featuring a sci-fi, heavily technological, and ai-enabled spin similar to black mirror. most threads will be event threads OR there will always be at least one active major mission thread.

quirky fantasy – a run-of-the-mill fantasy setting with an especially whimsical flair. the game took place on a moving island largely unexplored beyond a majora’s mask-esque clock tower governed by a drunk, amicable wizard deity of time. surly, foul-mouthed post bunnies dive-bombed from the sky to deliver mail, phantom trains (in the literal sense of being a ghost) chugged away happily throughout all corners of the town and its homes, and characters came at the behest of the kingdom in a fantasy-style gold rush to, idk, find legendary treasure. there was an explorer!element as a whole in that, while the areas were designed into the forum already, the intention was to use events as a method for characters to discover and open new boards over time. very rune-factory inspired but had a mix of little witch academy and grim grimoire in that magic books dictated physics and occasionally went haywire to funny, wacky effects like the entire island blipping out of one existence into another or time loops. since this was common, everyone who was a town NPC canonically pretended it either didn't happen or was over, so why think too much about it.
cognitive spies – a sci-fi setting where all characters developed complete retrograde amnesia for a plot reason which goes unexplained to everyone in the game. the intelligence agency followed was a global initiative exploring the use of hacking. there were two factions: white hackers (government) versus black hackers (rogue), and players within these groups were attempting to find out what exactly happened to the leader of a major terrorist group who went quiet roughly around the same time as the amnesia started. drew heavily from the animatrix, paprika, eden of the east, inception, and black mirror as influences. generally played with this idea of “how would you write a character whose history was unknown to them beyond a certain point?” was a combo of political espionage, artificial intelligence mumbo jumbo, and mystery since players were encouraged to write their character's story in more depth as they discovered new plot points.

"how's that call going?"
"oh, yeah, i transferred him over to i.t., but sloth never bothers to actually forward the call anywhere. i think they're hoping he'll sell his soul to get off the phone with us."
"aren't you worried?"
"haha, nah. i didn't tell 'em he was a priest!" bada bing bada boom great idea, Sharp i like you sir you are a funny well dressed shark guy

but no more spam, i apologize for my lack of control. this is a very important thread with a goal and i am merely an intrepid fool who happened to champion this interpretation; please carry on with your regular sites-you-want-to-see business, all.

#1. neon genesis evangelion. i have always wanted to write a hormonal teenager piloting a death trap that 100% will break in the middle of their existential crisis as their horrified guardian yells at them to keep going forward. yeaaaaaaah. it's like learning to drive all over again.


#2. catherine-inspired/golden playhouse!verse. what better premise than "if you fall in a dream, they say you'll die in real life." please give me psychological horrors about the monotony of adult concerns. even better if it retained some outside smt influences, like devil detectives/exorcists, freedom to play gods causing trouble in the human mind, and events based around the nightmares and other manifested psychological concepts. ♡



. . . may or may not be the dynamic between aziraphale and crowley from good omens except as an rp, which coincidentally allows for a zany-but-dramatic antichrist story plotline! would this game ever happen? no. do i still want to see it? oh hell yeah.

gonna echo mizo. but! friendly reminder that a site is simply another minuscule dust speck in the vast expanse and if you are over-complicating it with unnecessary expectations, it's gonna be hard to enjoy yourself despite getting interested folks. there's no harm in having fun even if you put in a lot of work and things don't go the way you wanted! sometimes they do not and that's okay.

plus, what's your definition of success here? are you shooting for having chill times with five members that you like? not too tough, that. wanting it to stay open for the next three years? different level of commitment. things happen, which can make your big plans moot sometimes, and honestly? what brings in other people is outside of your control and occasionally very superficial.

so be a little kinder to yourself. having a realistic expectation is healthier than stewing in your anxiety about binary ideas on what an outcome oughta be. you've tried hard while doing setup, so take some delight in your accomplishment! you're beating yourself up before anything's happened yet! even if only you like it, so what? then you have an original setting or cast for a story instead. just enjoy being creative; you aren’t failing anyone or anything no matter what happens, and the effort you put in has to run full circle and be for yourself too!