Nightshade

Every roleplaying game thrives on its very own expectations of atmosphere. Each setting usually dictates much of the atmosphere to be expected within it, but natural correspondences are especially blurry within grim realms, ranging from a desire to be satirical to playing it completely straight.

If you're wondering what kind of atmosphere Nightshade has to get a feel for whether or not you would enjoy playing, note that it falls largely (albeit not entirely) into latter category.

However…

Cheshires are not happy with water. If you can't think of at least five ways this can result in hilarity, I daresay you're not trying very hard.

So does that mean that we want you to keep a straight face while your character is bludgeoning a Cheshire over the head with a sack of ice cubes? Goodness gracious, no. You likely wouldn't be very human if you didn't at least chuckle a little at that mental image. The existing players laugh about these things all the time and it's part of what makes the setting fun for us.

So what do we mean when we say Nightshade leans toward 'playing it completely straight'?

Ultimately, Nightshade is about an insurmountable threat to Earth. Little fragments of hope are not misplaced even amongst the characters we torment, but it would make very little realistic sense for them to take the state of the world lightly. For the sake of plausibility and consistency, the narrative tries to reflect this: Characters will often be terrified, and we should be able to, in reading the roleplay posts, appreciate why they are terrified.

By playing it straight, we think the roleplay gives you the maximum power to decide how you want to respond to the story as a player - you can let it spook you, or you can enjoy the tension on an empathetic level, or you can laugh at the situation. You have the facts of the scene there for the taking - how you feel about them is up to you.

That said, you don't have to adhere to the atmosphere for each and every session, as long as you and the people you play with all agree to shift away from the standard we maintain. A satirical session would be just as canonical as one playing it straight as long as the content suits the world.

This page does not exist to press you into a corset, and no one should try to use it as an excuse to strongarm you into anything - it exists to inform new players of the status quo of the game, to prevent a disappointment with how the material presented in this wiki is actually handled.

Above all, everyone is still here to have fun.

(Stolen from Wildcard v4 and tweaked to suit Nightshade.)

We value a character's…

• personality/attitude rendition

…before…

• appearance
• abilities
• usefulness to the plot

We like to torture our own respective characters.

We like losing against impossible odds… and we like having impossible odds to lose against.

We're not afraid off killing characters, be that our own or others, but it will never happen without consent of the involved player(s) (or implied consent - if you've been absent long enough, we assume it's probably okay to kill your character(s)).

We don't do it.

'Combat' in Nightshade primarily takes the form of one-sided maulings and we like our setting that way.

On the human side, you will have much more fun with an 'average Joe' character than with someone particularly well-equipped to handle Cheshires. Characters better equipped to be a threat to Cheshires tend not to live very long, as Cheshires are wholly capable of determining who is a threat or not. Even just for plausibility's sake, you will want to play an average human being.

On the Cheshire side, these concerns don't apply, of course. We would recommend just going for whatever lets you fill a monster niche that other Cheshires have yet to occupy.

Cheshires do not have human motivations. They are not 'evil'.

This may seem like a strange comment, given what they're doing and how gleefully sadistic they are toward human beings, but they're simply predators playing with their prey. Morality doesn't factor into their behaviour. They're not trying to punish mankind in particular, nor do they have a score to settle, nor do they otherwise have a desire to make us suffer that could be expressed in those words. They just want to have some fun while they eat another planet. From their perspective, human beings are about on the level that ants are to humans.

Loner characters are welcome on the human side of the spectrum - Cheshires don't care if you're introverted or extroverted. A Cheshire that doesn't want to interact with the human world, however, is probably not going to be fun to play (though if you think you can pull it off despite the odds, we encourage you to try!).

Nightshade is not about winning the main plot arc.

If you can think of a brilliant way to solve the Cheshire infestation, that is very welcome (no, seriously), but keep in mind that this is a horror game that depends a lot on its monsters being around. Always at least honestly try to come up with some hurdles to your own supposed solutions. Remember to synchronise with the gamemasters!

We encourage OOC communication. We discourage (but do not forbid) secrets.

We assume we're all adults and we know how to separate IC and OOC. Something that is a secret IC does not need to be a secret OOC… and probably shouldn't be. Such 'spoilers' haven't, in our experience, detracted from the enjoyment of the game - we're curious how our characters will find out, and we don't (usually!) like to be blindsided by it OOC.

Also, while the sessions up on the site are intentionally devoid of OOC commentary, most of them have OOC discussion happening on the side, where people speak about their characters thoughts, motivations and issues (sometimes humourously). Aside from being a fun way to pass time between posts, it helps characters pick up on subtleties the post narrative didn't grant them but they likely would have caught (unmentioned body language, facial expression subtleties, and so forth) and lets the RP flow better.

There are two roleplay niches in Nightshade: Horror and Mystery.

Horror is interacting with Cheshires. It's being hunted, trying and failing to hide, or being tortured either physically or mentally. Occasionally, it's also simply contemplating the dismal state of the world.

Mystery is what happens between the horror - when lucid humans (and Thorns) come together and try to puzzle out what's happened and what they can do about it. Cheshires come with alien technology and biology, and perhaps one can figure out enough about these strange creatures to adequately defend oneself from them.