Rules for Play

Main article: Character Creation Guide

Before you get started, it’s important to keep a few community rules in mind, and to get a sense of what kind of environment — OOC and IC — Thorns is. See also OOC Etiquette.

We lean more toward the collaborative storytelling side of RP than the ‘game’ side, and we’re all about improving and experimenting as writers. We’re laid-back, but very passionate about creating a space where everyone can thrive and feel safe.

We highly recommend hopping on the Discord and saying hello/asking questions/getting a feel for the community! We also recommend reading through some of the active threads, to get a feel for the kind of writers we are and the stories we like — and because we’re proud of our userbase’s awesome work.

IC Rules

Basic Posting Rules

• Be readable. English is tricky even for native writers, and we’re always thrilled to welcome ESL writers into our community. However, we do need you to have a good enough grasp of English grammar and spelling to be consistently readable – if we're struggling to understand you, or have had to ask you to correct your grammar/spelling more than a few times, this might not be the community for you.

• Usually, the writers on Thorns tend to choose the past tense, with a perspective limited to one character. However, we have a few players who favor the present tense, and we even love to see more out-there experiments! The only rule here is to make sure your RP partner is all right with what you're planning on doing.

• We do not have a minimum or a maximum word count. In fact, we don't even keep track of word count. However, if you're looking for rapidfire posting with one or two paragraphs or even sentences, this isn't really the place. We generally go 250-500 words, or a few paragraphs, with longer and shorter writers abound.

• We do have lives, and we understand that you do, too. If you're looking for three or four posts a day from your partners consistently, this is probably not the place for you. Our players range from a couple of posts per day to a post per week. We're pretty relaxed; we just ask that you be relaxed about it, too, however fast or slow you are.

• You control your PC, not anyone else’s. This should go without saying, and there are exceptions — such as if you trust another player to move a scene ahead, describing your PC’s actions — but it’s not a good idea to assume anything with a new RP partner. Don’t write, “Joseph tripped Monica”; write, “Joseph attempted to trip Monica”.

• IC, actions have realistic consequences, and ideally, that’s what makes the game fun. Thorns is low fantasy. While we want you to tell the stories you want to tell, we’d also like it if those stories took the setting seriously. You might know that your character won’t die or get arrested after a certain action, but your character certainly doesn’t!

• Please be considerate with your posting templates. Try to use fonts of a legible size, and use colors that don't make your posts difficult to read or trigger headaches. We have basic templates for you to use, and if you have any formatting questions, please don't hesitate to ask a moderator or ask in the discord.

On the Setting

Thorns’ setting is a nineteenth-century-equivalent other world. While the large volume of writing on the wiki — ten years in the making! — might seem intimidating, we’re confident you’ll get a feel for it. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind right off the bat.

We draw inspiration from the the end of the nineteenth century in terms of technology, culture, and politics — in Anaxas especially, you’ll see influences not only from Victorian (and Edwardian) England, but also heavily from la Belle Époque and even late nineteenth century Russia.

This does not, however, mean that Thorns is not its own, very different world. The existence of magic, the absence of colonialism, and a very different religious landscape have shaped Thorns’ settings in important ways. Please try to keep this in mind when you’re writing: don’t try to reproduce Victorian England, for example, exactly, and make sure to ask questions and listen to staff when they tell you something’s different.

On the flip side, this means we’re very laid back about real-life research. We just ask that you be, too, and that you listen to others and participate productively in the community.

Not even slang can mention things like computers, machine guns, or ferraris (see Technology for what we do have). Using slang like "cool", "awesome", or "sexy" can also be jarring. However, this is fantasy, so use your discretion: we don't expect your character to go around saying "gosh darn it" or "fudge" all the time, or even to use Thorns Slang And Colloquialisms exclusively. Pay attention to the writers around you, and go with what feels right!

Fluid Time

Thorns runs on fluid time, which means you can thread anywhere in the timeline in or prior to the current season. Be mindful of what happened when, and try not to write past character situations with major consequences (like death) that haven’t been mentioned in the present. Still, we’re fairly loose about things like this, and if you want to retcon something to make your player plots work the way you want them to, you’re welcome to figure it out with your RP partner.

Furthermore, try to keep major IC events in mind. Unless you absolutely have permission from a moderator, don’t do anything that would cause a major change in the world in any time, like assassinating a major political figure or causing a major disaster. We’re happy to facilitate that, but we need warning and to make sure it’s lore-friendly, and we need to make note of it so other players can build off of it, too!

If you want to thread prior (at present) to the year 2719, this constitutes a ‘’’Memory’’’ thread. Memory thread titles are preceded by [Memory]. See Thread Prefixes for more details.

On Threading Locations

While Thorns’ Geography includes all of the Ten Kingdoms, most of the action takes place in Anaxas. You’d be well-advised to give your characters at least a reason to be in Anaxas much of the time, or you’ll be hard-pressed to find anybody to thread with!

However, your characters are welcome to go to any of the open Six Kingdoms. There are subforums for threads in those locations, and some of them are even quite busy: characters go on vacation, visit family, explore, and more. Politicians and the like even flock to Mugroba’s capital, Thul Ka, for two months of the year, now that it is the seat of the Symvoulio.

The only limits to this rule are the lost kingdoms of Roannah, Shotha, Vezzea, and Naulanon. The Six Kingdoms have no contact with them. If you’d like to suggest an expedition, on the other hand, that’s a different matter — plenty of plots will converge on “forbidden” places in the future… Just make sure to talk to staff about it.

On Moderation

Thorns is not a heavily-moderated forum. There are a few rules of thumb.

• If you’re uncertain about anything at all, please ask. We prefer asking permission to asking forgiveness. That being said, you have free reign with otherwise-unspecified NPCs within reason, and you certainly don’t have to ask a moderator to cast a spell, buy an object, etc. etc.; this is your narrative, and you (and your RP partner) are the ones writing it. We’re very story-focused.

• Still, again, if your character is going to go on a murderous rampage, please ask permission. That’s a big deal; your narrative doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Besides, you never know who else might want to play off it: what’s a serial killer without a detective?

• With magic especially, get a moderator. New players who aren’t familiar with the lore shouldn’t be writing about “big” or complicated magic until they’re comfortable with what it does and doesn’t do in the story. You’ll get a feel for it, but it’s still best to be on the safe side.

On Godmoding/Powerplaying

Don’t play a non-competitive game as if it’s competitive.

At Thorns, most players are more interested in character relationships and drama, politics, and “slice of life” narratives than they are combat. We might role play physical or magical fights in our stories, but we don’t have “PvP” as such, except for Magical Dueling, which mostly constitutes a fun mini-game to give you writing ideas.

If you’re playing on Thorns as if it’s a game you can win, we’ll figure it out fairly quickly. It doesn’t behoove you to be the “master” of everything, or to have weaknesses with no real consequences; if you’re constantly “winning”, you’re probably not much fun to play with, and staff will probably end up asking you to leave.

A powerful sorcerer is no more rewarding to play than a human urchin, on this forum. In fact, the weakest characters can often be the most interesting.

If you’re going to engage in combat outside of dueling, it is a very good idea to determine the outcome OOC before you even go into it. Get comfortable with the idea that it doesn’t matter who wins or who loses.

On Dice

Again, there’s no real competitive PvP here, and nor are there stats that you can level up in a way that is meaningful.

We do, however, have a Discord channel for dice rolls, and we mostly use it to determine the outcome of unpredictable IC situations, to spice things up and simulate danger. Sometimes you want some randomness as a writing prompt!

This especially goes for Magic, which we do encourage you to roll for. In Thorns lore, magic is governed by the Mona, or sentient, invisible particles that sorcerers speak to and have living relationships with in order to manipulate the world around them. We roll for magic to simulate the mona having minds of their own, and unpredictable minds at that.

• Read more on the Magic FAQ and So You Want to Do Magic pages, too!

Thread Prefixes

If you haven’t yet noticed, most thread titles are prefixed by something (or several somethings) in brackets. For example:

• [Closed, Mature] Dulce et Decorum Est
• [Open] Cat’s Out of the Bag
• [Memory] What the Water Gave Me

These indicate what kind of thread it is. While you’ll occasionally see threads without them, it’s a very good idea to have them, so somebody doesn’t accidentally step into a closed thread. It’s absolutely necessary to tag a Mature (or Mature+) thread.

• Open — Indicates a thread that anybody can join.
• Closed — Indicates a thread that’s been plotted out between two or three players, and isn’t open to anyone else.
• PM to Join — Indicates a thread that you can’t just post in without asking, but that is flexible to new joiners, given permission and plotting.
• Mature — Indicates a thread that might contain mature content, including mentions of or explicit sex. This is subjective; if you’re asked by staff or even by another member to tag a thread mature, even if you don’t think the content constitutes the label, you need to do so.
• Mature+ — A special category of Mature that includes prolonged extreme violence, situations with dubious or no consent, or threads the sole purpose of which is explicit sex. These threads do not show up in Recent Topics, and are locked to new members unless they explicitly request access.

Consequences of Violating Rules

At Thorns, we try to be thoughtful and forgiving of mistakes; everyone makes them, and usually, conflicts spring from misunderstandings. Nobody is permanently banned for one offense, and nobody will jump down your throat for having a bad day and saying something you regret.

However, we do pay attention to patterns of behavior.

If we start getting complaints from multiple sources, or if we notice a pattern of rule violation or poor player behavior, staff will have a chat with you and see if we can figure out what’s up. You’ll be warned, effectively, and we’ll try to work with you, so nothing’s left field. But if the behavior continues after that, or if you refuse to cooperate, you’ll be asked to step back and take a break from the server and the forum for a while.

In particularly egregious cases of trolling or abuse, staff may ban right away, but this is very rare.