The idea of Molten Aether has been a thing I've tried to do in various ways since around 2000 since I started a Yahoo Group called Blue_Team. Here is a brief history of the incarnations of the setting and the different ways I've tried to get people to play.
The 90's
The original idea for what later became the Blazing Umbra Setting was just called Blue Team, later the Chronicles of Blue Team. It was about an organization that would regularly save the universe by protecting the timeline. I originally came up with the idea of a time traveller trying to save the past and having to build a life there to do so in around 1988/1989. I was all of 9 or 10 years old, I had a crush on a girl named Candy and being an awkward and overly creative child with a slightly unhealthy desire to be on the bridge of the USS Enterprise I made up a story.
The very first incarnation of the story in any kind of form which is recognizable was about a man then just called "Cyclops" who went back in time and got stuck there trying to prevent "bad guys" from changing the past. During his trip back his girlfriend Candy was stripped away from him and lost in time. He had to both fight the bad guys and try to find the love of his life. This mirrored how upset I was when the real Candy moved away in my 5th grade year before the child I was ever told her he had a crush on her. This initial incarnation of the idea was in about 1991. Prior to that there were a lot of daydreams but no plot other than wish the cute blond girl that I liked would move back so I could stammer awkwardly at her and stare across the room.
Blue Team & Black Team
By around 1995 or so I had a better idea of what was going on. Still having fantasies of really being from some future world and unable to leave the hellish circumstance that was high school, I elaborated that a group called "Black Team" continued to kill agents of the group "Blue Team" (I suck at names) forcing the hero Cyclops to stay hidden at as an average high school student to avoid being killed himself. It's honestly hard for me to visualize being that young anymore, I've read my writings and they were absolutely horrid.
Pre-Angelic Sins
I had discovered the Internet in around 1995 as well and had my first taste of online role play via IRC. A channel called (I think) #vampirehaven on a network called Undernet. It was a World of Darkness / Vampire the Masquerade themed channel that pretty much let anyone play almost anything. I went to play my now Admiral Cyclops head of Blue Team there and was told he was far too powerful and one of the Operators (Moderators) of the server helped me make the character playable.
As a side-note if anyone ever wonders where the Angelic Sins Variant of Lance Thomas came from, by the end of the 15 minute conversation the Operator (LordNicod) helped me come up with a US Navy Admiral who was an extraordinarily powerful Psionic. Thanks Nicod, this character got me banned from at least 12 RP channels back in the day.
New Millenium
During my time on #vampirehaven I started to role play with someone who would end up defining the Angelic Sins Setting pretty much all by herself. The woman went by spook (always lowercase) though her name was Erika and we role played for a long time, I believe I first spoke with her about 2000 or 2001. By this time the RP channel I had been going to did what all of them did and self-destructed. The themes of World of Darkness were often over-sexualized by the mostly teenage boy and girl population (me being one of them) using the RP as an excuse to type like we knew what sex was. Overly dramatic teenagers have a way of exploding things, and this occured.
Jumping from channel to channel I found no one who really wanted to let me role play what I really wanted to role play. I wanted to do more of my Blue Team story. At the time I had the wonderful input of my best friend (then and now) Justin. He was a big Babylon 5 fan and me Star Trek. I would bounce ideas off of him all day long, be at his house discussing how Warp Drive worked and he'd tell me how awesome Star Furies were. We even mapped out how this world of Blue Team could have both Babylon 5 races and Star Trek races in the same universe.
Yahoo Group
The very first incarnation of a role play environment for Blue Team was the Yahoo! Group Blue_Team started in 2000. Thanks to Justin and a few others who joined I got my first taste of how frustrating it was to try to run and get users on a role play setting. We never had more than 5 members, maybe 6. The attempt failed as life moved on. Justin and I attended college and the group went dead.
First Web Forum
I never really liked the live-chat format for role playing. Posts tended to be short and my experience always was that you couldn't ever get the players online at the same time. There was also the demise of all the incarnations of the original "Vampire Haven" idea, the idea wasn't mine but was essentially a bar in Los Angeles where vampires and all manner of supernatural creatures could gather safely. Of course it was run horribly, they all were. Why? As I learned management it hard and managing people that can just leave any time is even harder.
In around 2002 I started a web forum called "Blue Covenant". I do not recall why I used that name, it was a poor choice. I suck at names. I continued to role play on IRC, but mostly with Erika and a friend of hers. Justin and I worked a lot on some of the core ideas that would become Blazing Umbra over the course of 1997 to 2002:
- It was a private organization, so they didn't have to answer to anyone.
- It was military (though I later learned properly would be called paramilitary).
- The main character then had a name, Lance "Cyclops" Thomas was an Admiral and he had formerly been with Starfleet Command. : Thanks to Justin's influence from Babylon 5 I started to like that idea that Starfleet of my beloved Star Trek was corrupt. Section 31 had been invented in the 1998 episode of Deep Space 9, but I didn't watch Deep Space 9 at the time.
- They would travel back in time after receiving the signs of a temporal wave and make sure history did not change.
- Their principle enemy was Black Team who wanted to change the timeline in subtle ways to give themselves a political advantage.
- Again, thanks to Justin's influence. I think that him talking about the Shadow War in Babylon 5 had a lot to do with the addition of political motivations. I had absolutely no knowledge of politics at the time.
- The Admiral pretty much stayed in the field to save agents who were in danger.
- I wasn't so much into the idea of finding a lost love Candy. In the few years after high school I was really into Erika online and later, I got a girlfriend Jen who I later married during this time period as well.
- Candy and The Admiral were something to each other, but were not anymore.
- The Admiral had visited something similar to Star Wars in the past and barely escaped with his life.
- This one wasn't really due to Justin, this was due to a woman named Natalie who I thought was going to be my entire life back in around 1997 or so. I was wrong.
Failures
I was never very good at advertising. Although Justin would always join, even if I had to twist his arm a bit, my incarnations of role play settings most had no success. I started an IRC channel on Undernet that went largely unspoken in. I ran a BBS via telnet that was focused on RP that also went largely unvisited. Blue Covenant shut down for the same reason. Eventually I made a site, Angelic Sins, with Erika circa 2009 or so. I honestly am not entirely sure who had the domain name originally, or if I bought it at some point after someone else left it, the forum was on angelic-sins.net using PHPbb. The pair of us would talk on the phone, talk online, and RP on the forum pretty much exclusively. She would do almost whatever scenario I could imagine and same in reverse. Since my then-wife had no interest in "my kind" of role play, Erika and I kept going.
Angelic Sins
I don't count Angelic Sins as a success because while we amassed a massive 7500 posts or so between us before that forum ended in 2013, it was just the two of us and no one really played there. It was a lot of posts and through Erika I worked out a lot of the other ways I wanted the setting to work. Not only what would become Blazing Umbra but Angelic Sins.
The setting of Angelic Sins was the brainchild of Erika. She loved the dark modern setting, her signature character (spook) was a Vampire of some World of Darkness descent. I had very little interest in playing a modern day horror setting except, Erika liked it and I liked her. Through this the signature characteristics of the Angelic Sins universe came to be:
- Lance Thomas is a US Navy Admiral that is way too powerful, he runs a secret base in Los Angeles where the "last chance" cases of government experimentation on supernaturals were held and used before they were terminated.
- US Government knows about supernaturals (as do they others) and they experiment on them, the US Government is perhaps the worst offender other than China and the former USSR.
- Lance hates vampires.
- Supernaturals have an uneasy peace with "normals" and are present at every level of government pulling strings.
- This conflicts with the experiments, but that conflict was as yet unresolved at the time.
- There are more than one such base as Lance's out there, some run by the CIA and Lance hates the CIA with a passion.
- Lance is a supernatural womanizer, he will try to get with most anything that strikes his fancy but prefers supernatural creatures.
- This is pretty much an effect of being in a really miserable marriage where I had a very hot online "girlfriend" that liked to send me rather provocative images of herself.
- Vampirism is caused by a kind of supernatural virus, as is lycanthropy.
The 10's
In 2013 when Erika and I stopped speaking to each other I had no one to role play with but had built up a lot of history and content. We had really filled out a lot of areas of both Blue Team, civilian life in that universe, and this Angelic Sins idea. Eventually I took the Angelic Sins database and reformed it as Blazing Umbra FFRP and it's corresponding IRC #blazingumbra on KiwiNet. Some friend and I worked on an IRC bot to sync up posts between the forum (running PHPbb) and the IRC channel and provide other functions. I was tired of IRC role play being restricted to the inside of a bar. The birth of Finnegan's tavern was as a place to have IRC role play. Through an IRC bot I tried to have other channels serviced as well. IRC just is not a good format for such things.
The main failure of IRC was that IRC was, and still is, a dying medium. I organized a few events with other IRC channels, poached a few players, and even went back to some RP forums that I used to frequent. In the end I only had perhaps 2-3 people online at a time and they were the same old faces. I started the IRC channels in about 2014 or so, I was doing RP on some other IRC channels but the channels were run so badly and it was all more WoD stuff. Usually some bastardized version so that those who ran the place could play their pet character that had gone far beyond the setting. I can really criticize people for playing pet characters who are too powerful, yup.
This is where we got the idea for inter-reality travel, wormholes that would open and close. Through discussions with some of these players on IRC, we came up with the Derelict, Blazing Umbra Station, and a Splice. At the time, Soteria was just Schatten III and it was a barren wasteland that could not support life. I really wasn't interested on having an explorable planet. I figured it would split the role play too much. I tried various ways to get people to join the forum and the IRC server, but to no avail. IRC was dying and is still in it's long lasting death throes. Web forums require a user base to either be drawn in through advertising or an existing user base to join and spread the word. The role playing forum space (much like IRC and even Discord) is packed solid with thousands of venus.
Discord
Someone I role played with on IRC turned me on to Discord. She wanted to talk on voice but we didn't want to exchange phone numbers. I signed up in 2016 and used DMs exclusively for almost a month. IRC was dead and I got booted out of the channel I had been role playing in. My own channel was dead as a doornail too. On September 28th, 2016 I started the Blazing Umbra server. I had no idea how to advertise it and spent several days getting an IRC to Discord bridge set up.
I brought the initial players who I could contact from IRC. Though I will admit there was almost no RP at the time. Sarah, I believe was her name, who brought me to Discord and I played a bit but she wasn't into the SciFi so much. I talk often on Discord about a player who went by Alice, I think Alice was the 3rd or 4th player on the server. I didn't have a lot of character creation rules because I didn't need them, no one played. Alice was the first person to consistently play. All the player wanted was anime-esque maid ERP, but my setting was getting play. Another pair named Joshi and Kingy really helped me get things off the ground, they wanted nothing to do with Alice of course and were very supportive when finally we had to boot that player out.
The earliest bunch of players who really played and wanted to enhance and add to the setting all joined at around the same time. Red, Cyro, KS, JumpingScript, Tise, Bucket, Winter, t0l, Left4Cake, and Ryū were among the first. I feel I should also mention Jade, Chubby, and Liz as well, who came about a year into the server's existence. I'm sure there were others, but those are the ones I recall the most at the moment. Between those people the server really started to change and evolve.
Around January of 2017 we gained Angelic Sins as a setting on Discord, though it had been present on the forum for a lot longer. Through the efforts of the those initial people the setting of Angelic Sins got really filled out in places. Defined Chicago, which was entirely a creation while on Discord with the people who joined there. February of 2017 saw the addition of Embers of Soteria. Though based on norms found in the D20 SRD, the world has been most defined by those people mentioned above.
In June or July of 2018 we officially became Molten Aether and in 2019 I split the settings into their own servers. That same year I created the Stellar Horizon mission which exists within Blazing Umbra. The move to split servers and perhaps increase the role play was not successful. In May of 2020 I reforged everything back into a single server but also added sections for discussions of writing, role playing, and other things in an attempt to provide content for people who perhaps didn't want to role play but wanted to talk about writing.