Character Approval

We do require that characters be approved before a person can play. Anyone can read the IC channels at any time. However, to be able to post to these channels one will need to have an approved character. To get a character approve for play you must send a character bio to one of the server's staff. The staff member will read through it and determine if the character fits in with play here. Usually this is a resounding yes. We are pretty liberal. However, on occasion a new player will be asked to make modifications to a character or character concept. We appreciate your cooperation and are happy to help you make these adjustments.

Rules of Character Creation

(v1.62 - 12/23/2017)

1. Characters must be original characters.
   • A character may not be an otherwise professional work.
   • Characters can be from the world / universe defined by a professional work as long as they are not in the work.
   • Characters from a world / universe defined by a professional work should not be carbon copies of characters in the work.
2. All characters must be at least 16 years of age.
   • Characters under the age of 16 must be specifically approved by Staff.
   • Players wishing to submit characters under the age of 16 must have an exceeding good reason for the characters age.
   • The terms of an exceedingly good reason are entirely up to the Staff at the time of the request.
3. Characters should not be excessively old (1,000 years, 2,000 years, 200,000 years, etc.)
   • There are some reasons for exceptions to this:
     • Being involved in a time paradox / time travel.
     • Being dormant, hibernating, or otherwise unaware of the passage of time.
     • Having some involvement with past lives (is the incarnation of someone important).
   • Playing a character who has full memory of 200,000 years of life would be nearly impossible.
4. Characters require approval.
   • Characters should have some indication of how powerful they are (see the Leveled Ranking System for details).
   • Characters who have abilities over Category 3 will require special approval.
   • Special approval must be noted in the character's wiki page with the name of the staff member who gave said permission.
   • Character bios containing skills and abilities with Class A or Class B ranking in any category, should have an explanation of how the character obtained that much skill.
   • Staff has the authority to ask players to alter their characters (this includes backstory, personality, attributes, as well as power and skill levels).
   • Players who have achieved the rank of Founder, Accepted, Neophyte, Role Player, or Savant do not require character approval, however staff may still ask for a character to be altered or rule that a character cannot be played after the fact.
5. Players may play characters but not an entire faction.
   • One cannot play the "Northern Alliance" or the "Japanese Fleet".
   • Players may have NPC's, but this should be within reason.
6. Grandfather policy is in effect.
   • Players with characters approved prior to a rule against said characters, are still allowed to play that character.
7. All character bios must be submitted to [hhttps://forum.moltenaether.com/c/characters the web forum].
   • This allows us to easier keep track of them, find them, and get them posted to the wiki.
8. Characters should not be designed to specifically be offensive or inflammatory by their nature.
   • By this we mean that certain archetypes (such as Nazi) are considered too inflammatory to expect people to, out of character, be ok with playing with said character.
   • Similar to how we have rules against having racist or inflammatory names the act of playing such a character without exceptionally good reason is, in and of itself, considered to be akin to trolling.

Banned Character Races and Origins

(v1.23 - 4/25/2018)

• Nazi's (one cannot play a Nazi in game)
• Doctor Who (no Time Lords, Weeping Angels, Cybermen, etc..)
• TV / Movie character clones / copies.
  • Captain Kirk was cloned when he was 16 and the clone goes by Tiberius.
  • Commander Spock was split in 2 by a vulcan mind meld gone wrong and the new Spock goes by Spock2.
  • Starbuck didn't really die, she just ascended and came to the future.
  • Luke Skywalker had a secret half brother, Linus Skywalker, he's just as powerful as Luke.
  • Edward Cullen's best friend from high school is also a vampire and even better looking.
  • So many more...
• Dragon Ball Z characters are banned.
• Video game character clones / copies.
  • This includes (but is not limited to) a lot of your fandom-made copies of:
    • Sonic the Hedgehog
    • Megaman
    • Super Mario Brothers
    • Zelda
    • Jazz the Jackrabbit
    • Commander Keen
    • Metal Gear Series
    • Battle Toads
• Copies or clones of mythological figures.
  • This includes variations on Zeus, Hercules, or any named figure from mythology.
• All Warhammer 30k/40k characters (fantasy is still permitted).

Some Explanation on Banning of Nazi Characters

I do not usually like to get into banning something like a character being a Nazi. However, in this case, the willful act of playing a character who is a Nazi or similar that the player knows will specifically be inflammatory and offensive to others also knows that it will upset, offend, and cause problems for others who want to play. Similar to how we do not allow people to use racial slurs in names or avatars without asking them to change such things because it is considered unreasonable to expect people to not be offended by such given the divisive nature of such things, the willful act of using such imagery and language becomes in and of itself trolling.

As such we regretfully do not allow the play of Nazi's or similarly divisive character types without just cause. Any just cause would have to be discussed with Staff prior to approval.

Character Template

Items in the template marked with a "*" are required, other items are optional but it is strongly suggested that you have a minimum of this information on a character before playing that character in game.

* Player ID:
* Character Name:
* Race:
* Gender:
Height / Weight:
Hair / Eye Color:
Age / DoB:
Place of Birth:
* Universe of Origin:
* Occupation:
* Rank / Skill Level:
* Body Type:
* Personality:
Special Skills:
Special Abilities:
Background:

Definitions

Most of the things on the template are obvious, but here are some bits of information on things people might have questions on.

DoB / PoB

Date of Birth and Place of Birth

Universe of Origin

Many of our players play characters from different universes, such as the Star Wars universe or perhaps Fallout's universe, etc. and as such we'd like to know where your character comes from, so that the moderators have an idea what kind of a universe your character has come from. If you're making a character from the Solas Tempus universe, then just put Solas Tempus.

Rank / Skill Level

For military type characters, this is obvious. Even for characters who are not military in nature though, the characters level of skill at their Occupation is a good thing to know. The standard non-military ranks for Skill Level are; Veteran, Experienced, Professional, Amateur, Novice, and Trainee. These are not hard and fast though, if there is a better adjective to describe a characters skill level, feel free to use it.

Body Type

What kind of figure does your character have. This should also include any unique body features a character has (such as wings, gills, one leg, no arms, etc.).

Personality / Background

Both of these speak to who your character is as a person. Personality is generally for a characters basic outlook on life, themselves, and others. In terms of D&D this is kind of like a characters alignment but with more detail than the class Neutral/Good way of putting it. An actually experienced D&D players can pull a lot of information out of an alignment like that but a lot of people are not D&D players, to just try to have a sentence or two about how your character interacts with others.

For a characters background, a brief history (if you have one). There is a lot that can cross apply between a characters history and their personality so just organize it however you want to. If you don't have a big history, feel free to put it all in personality or vise versa if the personality is telling the story of their history just put it into background and call it good.

Special Skills / Abilities

Special skills are unique skills that the character has had to learn, going to school, learned on the streets, taught themselves. These take refinement and study, time to develop, such as the ability to pilot an aircraft, fire a sniper rifle, or decode cryptography. Special abilities are more like innate abilities, even though they might have taken a lot of time and skill to learn to use. A special ability is like shooting lightening bolts from ones hands, turning invisible, super strength, etc..

Ranking of Skills and Abilities

While it isn't required, a person may be asked to add ranks and skill levels to their sheet for various skills and abilities that describe how powerful the ability is. This is used to help stoyrtellers and staff accurately gauge if a player is going to fit in or not. This also allows people to comparatively understand what they're getting into when one player is interacting with another, and avoids uncertainty when dealing with two characters who have similar abilities. The Leveled Ranking System has a wide degree of latitude. When looking at this, please understand that any character being brought into the game with a power category above 3 will require special approval. In addition, anyone with a Class A or Class B ability should have it noted (any category) how they got so much skill in that ability. Any special allowances will require special notation of the name of the staff member who approved it as part of the sheet in the wiki.