DUNGEON SIGN-UPS: INCENDIA

[phantasmods]

LET THE SIGN-UPS BEGIN.

INCENDIA

Abandoned for a century, this city, once called Resona Aere ("resonating air" or "echoing air" in the native language), is now exclusively called "Incendia" for its location within a Fissure that turns the city into a blazing inferno at nightfall. Its location on a large lake near the ocean once made it a robust shipping center, a location from which goods spread to the other magic-using towns throughout this part of the continent. Skyscrapers and tall apartment buildings, largely modern with a touch of the magical in their design, attest to the number of people that once lived in this metropolis, once over a million including the surrounding suburbs.

Now, it lies still and empty, home mostly to pigeons and feral dogs adapted to the fire magic that rampages through the city by night. For the most part, however, the city has not decayed - all of the objects within it are restored to their previous state at the passing of the night, and by the time the sun has any height in the sky, it is once more a gleaming, modern city, running via the magic thumming in the streets to support a populace of none.

Your objective in this Fissure isn't merely to stabilize it - indeed, as the largest Fissure the group has yet tackled, it would be very difficult to stabilize the whole thing. Rather, the primary objective is the securing of the secondary research station, Lodestone Station, to the north of the downtown, and the rescue of the two androids, Muon and Tau, who are currently trapped there. For this purpose, three of the androids from Keystone Station - Strange, Charm, and Up - are also accompanying the expedition group, and may tag into your top-levels.

The major regions of Incendia included in the range of the expedition are as follows;

•  Lakefront Shipping and Industrial Zone: A largely flat plain of concrete or some similar substance, right up against the lake and forming a great deal of the shore. Closest to the lake, randomly moving shipping containers, moving according to automated magic, create a dizzying, ever-shifting maze. Further inland, textile and food product factories run without oversight, creating an excess of product that burns at nightfall all the same.
• Hector Wilde Memorial Ritual Park: A green space of nearly a mile on each side, once home to an impressive array of cultural events and magical rituals (as implied by the name). Carefully manicured, the centerpiece of the park is a large magical fountain, a half-sphere of water that hangs, fifteen feet across, some twenty five feet in the air, with water both spilling out of it and bursting up to it from the ground. The park is - or was - currently filled with the tents, food stands, and stages of a music festival in full swing, now gone silent.
•  Retail Downtown: Surrounding the bases of the skyscrapers are any number of shops, restaurants, and even department stores. It's still a wonderful place to spend an afternoon... And, probably to fill your pockets with anything you might find useful.
• The Underground: Once a magical subway system that spanned the whole of the city and then some, the underground is now most notable for being exempt from the Fissure's effects - and thus, a safe place to spend the night without burning to death. However, since the dawn reset of the Fissure also doesn't apply, you'll find that the century of neglect from lack of human residency very much does.
•  Lodestone Station: Situated in a converted park to the north of the downtown, this station has been wrapped within a secondary Fissure effect... Just what kind of wild magic awaits there?

DUNGEON-WIDE EFFECTS

There are no effects on characters in the main Fissure of the city. As for the Sub-Fissure north of downtown, cocooning Lodestone Station... You'll have to wait and see.

LOOT

Characters obtain one piece of loot for signing up for the dungeon and an additional roll per 30 comments on the dungeon log. Please note that this is double the normal requirement - this is due to all the non-rolled loot that is available in this dungeon! Additionally, characters can receive a bonus loot roll for tagging someone new on the Test Drive! Please also note that comment based loot is capped at five rolls, making for a total of up to seven pieces of loot that each character can gain.

Newcomers who participate in the dungeon can also receive loot for comments made to the last two days of the dungeon log, in addition to their entry loot attached to their acceptance notices. This loot can be found under the sign-ups header at the conclusion of the dungeon, in a comment with their journal name as the subject line.

IC LENGTH

The dungeon will last for six days ICly, from July 2nd to 7th. Note that the end-dungeon event will ICly take place on the fourth day (July 5th), with the remaining two days after for establishing camp and to allow characters to continue to collect resources from the city. OOCly, the dungeon will run from July 20th to 29th, with IC intro on the 30th.

END-DUNGEON EVENT

The end-dungeon event is the reclaiming of Lodestone Station and the rescue of the two androids, Muon and Tau, within! It will go up on Wednesday July 25th, rather than that Friday, reflective of the timing within the full length of the expedition.

SIGN-UP FORMS

DUNGEON

<b>Player name:</b><br /><b>Character name + Journal</b>:<br />

EVERYTHING ELSE:

Third time's the charm: Starting this application cycle, you can now play a maximum of three characters at Phantasmal Rift! Congratulations, everyone! Please note that while there is a max of three characters total, you can only apply for a maximum of two any given application cycle (so first+second characters or second+third, but not all three).

And we all glide on all right: In addition to their hard work on the stabilizers, the androids have assembled more gliders for use getting to and from the city. There are now eighteen normal-weight gliders (appropriate for an individual) and six double-weight gliders (appropriate for one pilot and one passenger).

And now, the weather;

6/20-22; Somewhat cloudier but still more sun than not.
6/23-27; Heat wave, somewhat humid but mostly hot, breaking low 90s all days and getting as high as 97F. Some clouds and thunder in the evenings, but no rain.
6/28-29; On the 28th, the heatwave finally breaks, into a nasty rainstorm that lasts until midday on the 29th, with occasional thunder. The 29th is sunny and fairly cool afterwards.
6/30-7/3; Sunny but cooler than the last week or two has been on average.
7/4; Overcast, feels like rain is threatening but rain never comes.
7/5; Misty in the morning; humid but sunny afternoon. Temperatures are back to the summer 'normal.'
7/6; Sunny but a strong wind sets in in the afternoon, bringing with it stormclouds and a brief afternoon rain.
7/7-9; Sunny and warm, with a light breeze.

TEST DRIVE 005

[phantasmods]

Hello and welcome to the fifth test drive for Phantasmal Rift!

Test drive threads are assumed to be game canon for accepted characters unless otherwise noted, so don't feel like you'll have to introduce yourself a second time to everyone you meet! As an added bonus, participation in the test drive comes with the chance to earn up to two items of loot for your trouble! Characters who are accepted can earn one item for having a top level, and one for tagging out to someone else's top level! Your SWEET LOOT will be included with your acceptance notice.

Additionally, characters currently in game can earn themselves a piece of bonus loot for the dungeon by tagging people's top-levels on the test drive! Existing characters get their bonus loot along with the rest of their loot at the conclusion of the dungeon.

This time, the Test Drive takes place in Incendia - a less-ruined-than-expected city that has been abandoned for over a century, due to the magical effects of the Fissure (unstable reality region) that have made it impossible to live in. What effects are these, you ask?

Well...

BY DAY

By day, the city is lovely, if oddly empty. The sun shines down, and magical lights along the sidewalk - the equivalent of power lines - flow energy throughout the city. It's possible to think that the little sparks you sometimes see at the corner of your vision are related. After all, there's a great deal of magic in the air...

But in spite of this, the city lies abandoned, for no immediately apparent reason. You might have found yourself in a wide-open shipping yard, where large metal containers levitate about, moving without any help or oversight from human hands. Be careful; these containers changing positions make it easy to get lost for quite a long time, since few of them have much in the way of identifying traits over than color. Didn't you already pass that arrangement of two red ones on top of a blue one before...?

Or perhaps you're in the massive park in the center of town, with its blatantly magical fountain (a half-dome of water just hanging in the air) and the tents of an abandoned festival. Two stages and a long line of street food booths stand empty - surely no one will mind if you use them for something, right?

Or perhaps you're just suddenly on the streets, among stalled-out taxis and cars that go nowhere and lack the familiar smell of gasoline. There's apartments and shops all around, with little gardens spilling out over balconies... Maybe if you go knock on some doors, you'll find people.

Wherever it is you are, surely there's got to be someone around who can tell you what's going on, right...?

BY DUSK

As night falls, rather than dropping the way you might expect, the temperature begins to rise. And then the sparks in the edges of your vision are very much more than simply at the edges of your vision. They catch first on the plants, the papers stuck to the now-lit magical streetlights, the trash cans... And then, increasingly so, on the buildings proper, the shops, the skyscrapers, the cars in the street.

Within half an hour, an inferno is starting to build, and it's clear that there's not going to be anywhere above ground safe from it. But fortunately, there's safety beneath the level of the streets - if you can make your way fast enough to an underground station.

BY NIGHT

In the remains of these subway tunnels, lit mostly by the dim glow of magical energy lines, you're at least safe from the inferno above. Unlike the aboveground parts of the city, however, the tunnels are in an obvious state of disrepair, with broken concrete, rot, and mildew. The stations might have once been clean, but they quite transparently are not now, and the tunnels themselves are as bad or worse.

Thankfully, no trains run anymore, so you're not at risk of being run down on the broken tracks. There's also not any full-on collapses blocking the way, and the tunnels seem well-enough made that there's probably not risk of a cave-in.

Less pleasantly, you aren't the only thing taking shelter in the tunnels from the firestorm above. And the magic of that flame has touched the feral dogs that rove the tunnels, turning them into barking, howling creatures of as much flame as flesh themselves. And then there's the occasional patch of mold, mildew, and slime in the darkest parts of the tunnels, where even the magical circuits have gone out, that moves to douse any light that comes near it...