[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.

[attr="class","poam-text"]Thanks for the interest folks!! I am back for info dump number 2. Which I guess I will keep doing until the site goes up or I've literally written the whole guidebook here.

[attr="class","poam-title"]CANONS

[attr="class","poam-text"]There are two types of canons on PoaM: Readers and holders of the 13 Month Series of relics.

Readers are a special type of guest because-unlike the vast majority of their peers-they have already won a previous cycle. They have had their wish fulfilled and for whatever reason have gained another strong enough to pull them back into the Library. It could be entirely external or perhaps one related to the trials of their last cycle; seeing someone from another universe again, or bringing back someone who didn't make it last time. In exchange for being allowed to return, Readers can guide their peers through content but cannot divulge specific truths about the setting or that they are previous winners. ICly discussing this will cause an IC and OOC punishment by the Administrators.

This type of canon has an informational advantage and such characters usually become leaders or advisors of the current cohort. Not only are they ICly in the know, but OOCly these players are given access to a special discord channel where they receive lore and hints on all upcoming content such as raid weaknesses and scenario requirements. How they handle this information ICly and OOCly is entirely up to them with no oversight by staff so long as they follow the rules.

The second type of canon are those who have one of the 13 Month Series of relics. These canons have a mechanical advantage, with each relic being able to break different absolute rules of combat that everyone else must abide by. Naturally, these folks are invaluable in hard content.

[attr="class","poam-title"]Currencies

[attr="class","poam-text"]PoaM has two currencies: experience and money. Experience dictates the maximum power of an individual and is gained by participating in the three site activities (Events, Scenarios, and Raids). As a result, members who keep up with the site will generally be around the same level, and the site maximum and minimum increases over time as you go deeper into the library. Experience is the measure of vertical progression.

Money is gained from activity (posts). To accommodate all writing styles, members are not incentivized to post rapidly to gain power. Instead, money is the measure of horizontal progression. With more money characters can obtain more weapons, abilities, and perks, but all of it is capped by their level. So active members have much more flexibility and options, but are not necessarily stronger than their slower counterparts who have participated in all the same site activities.

[attr="class","poam-title"]Death and Danger

[attr="class","poam-text"]All guests have a Stability level, which starts at 20% when they are first created. Stability is the measure of one's hold on their sanity, mental state, and identity. Stability increases by doing everything that isn't a site event i.e. fluffy social threads. Hanging out with your buds at the pool, having sleepovers, exploring different parts of the Library/ship, food fights in the cafeteria, whatever: all of this builds stability.

This is important because death is a very real possibility in the Library. Killing blows reduce your stability greatly, but if you have enough leftover to not hit 0% you will be able to reform with the weight of your bonds and memories. Nakama power cheats death after all. If you didn't have enough stability, you will true die and become a book that is kept by the Library forever.

This is another example of horizontal progression that benefits active posters.

Final note: The first time you are struck down by a specific mechanic but live to tell the tale, you gain a minor resistance to whatever killed you. Try not to collect them all!

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[attr="class","poam-title"]Poems of a Machine

[attr="class","poam-text"]Inspirations: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, Tower of God, Danganronpa, Fate, Library of Ruina, and too many others

Poems of a Machine (or “POAM”) is an upcoming Jcink roleplay site with themes of chaotic comedy and just a touch of tragedy. It uses stats for combat with an emphasis on the community coming together to clear obstacles.

The premise is simple: all the heroes, inventors, and famous people of your world did not come into greatness by themselves. They had help.

Enter the Library - an enigmatic facility that has no location in neither time nor space - and the human-passing machines that curate it. These beings, called Administrators, send out invitations across the multiverse to individuals who have an intense desire or wish and makes them an offer: venture into the Library and survive everything that we throw at you. If you do, we’ll make that wish of yours come true.

They’ve done this twenty-two times now. The site opens on the twenty-third cycle.

[attr="class","poam-title"]CHARACTERS AND SETTING

[attr="class","poam-text"]POAM is a heavily plot-centric roleplay with a very small locale. It allows for ANY CHARACTER, using ANY FACECLAIM, from ANY SETTING - similar to panfandoms however no canons are allowed. Your characters must strictly be original but can originate anywhere from D&D to modern true earth, to Fire Emblem or to Pokemon. This includes OCs that need to be rehomed. We’d love to have them.

All roleplay takes place in the Library, though it takes different forms per cycle. Thankfully, the Administrators have learned from previous iterations that settings like underground vaults and science facilities have damaging effects on the mental state of their guests, so this time the Library looks like a cruise ship. All characters are basically stuck in close quarters on a fancy cruise ship.

[attr="class","poam-title"]COMMUNITY-BASED PROGRESS

[attr="class","poam-text"]The Administrators generate the energy required to grant wishes by putting guests through emotionally turbulent situations: that is, the Library is literally powered by character development. Therefore many of the events and scenarios that characters (guests) are subjected to will place them in bizarre, funny, or stressful situations that would never ordinarily happen in their universe.

This is true even at the basics. Aside from the two Administrators that oversee this cycle, there are no NPCs aboard the ship. You are provided with replenishing groceries, working bathrooms, and nice personal rooms, but guests need to adapt to life in the Library. If no one can cook, you will all eat canned beans. If no one is handy, you’ll all suffer from the lack of heat/AC. And god forbid no one wants to clean the bathrooms; in these small moments come the true slice of life.

Few obstacles set by the Administrators can be cleared alone. Some of the most notorious are Scenarios and Raid Bosses: the former are month-long objectives that will require everyone to chip in, and the latter are difficult encounters that will require site members to carefully strategize their approach. Resources will be limited and it’s up to the community to divy them up in an optimal way. Progress in the overall plot is halted until the community clears these specific challenges.

After all, the Administrators want to know: can you work together, or will you fail?

[attr="class","poam-title"]SYSTEMS

[attr="class","poam-text"]POAM has a foundational stat system that offers no classes or prebuilt paths. Instead, members create their character and their relic (umbrella term for what grants them abilities - could take the form of weapons, armor, familiars, transformations, etc.) by picking from elements, ability types (damage, shielding, and healing), and adding or removing traits from their abilities by using a point system (beneficial effects cost points, but adding negative effects gives you more points to spend). In this way, anyone can build anything - damage dealers, supports, tanks, debuffers and buffers. Diversity is encouraged, and required, because many obstacles have specific niches and many Raid Bosses have highly specialized fighting styles.

Growth and levels are linear, and the site levels up as a whole. As progress is made in the Library, a minimum level is established so that new characters are never too far from the action.

The site has no system that dictates what your abilities flavor like. Instead, you decide based on the nature of your character and their relic(s); doing [Water] [Damage] could be roleplayed as water whips, or fish-shaped projectiles; doing [Dark] [Heal] could be flesh stitching back together; doing [Cosmic] [Shield] could be briefly rewinding time to avoid a hit. It’s up to you.

[attr="class","poam-title"]MEMBER-SUBMITTED CONTENT

[attr="class","poam-text"]The Administrators are not possessed of originality. They only know what they have observed through countless worlds. Many of the concepts and systems they create in the Library are directly derived from those settings, and members will always be able to suggest ideas of events, objects and scenarios from different existing media. After all, there’s only so many times guests can be forced to go pod-racing, or be tempted with the reward of the Triforce.

[attr="class","poam-title"]THE END AND THE BEGINNING

[attr="class","poam-text"]POAM is a site with a definitive end. Power does not grow endlessly; once you have cleared all the challenges of the Administrators, your stay as a guest will end and you will return from whence you came from, never to see the people who endured it with you again.

Unless, of course, you return. Because after it is over, the cycle starts once more - and you can either bring back returning characters or create new ones for the next gauntlet.

…

There’s a lot more. Tons more. But I’ll leave these key concepts for now.