Lago

Go make it! :) It falls completely with the Mechanical Standard lore rules so you don't need any kind of acceptance from LMs or GMs or anyone else. The reason we changed the lore rules is so that you could just go and do it. However, you won't be added to the official subrace list and thus won't get plugin benefits or Cliff Dwarf as a character card option. Subraces can't be "approved". Most groups with subrace potential don't survive the death of the group that created them. The way you become a subrace is to become adopted into the wider community. The Snow Elves, for example, are not. The Snow Elves are all part of or connected to the Princedom of Fenn, and it's looking like the death of the Princedom might kill them off. If we destroyed Haelunor, the High Elf city, High Elves would still be around. They're more than just their nation. When people make characters of your subrace who have nothing to do with your group whatsoever, that's when they're getting there. Once they're no longer "yours" or your group's and are just another bit of the server, then they're getting there. There have been plenty of groups that have been at some point a de facto subrace but not an official one. Dalidriad and the Snow Elves are two examples. Both of these were physically and culturally distinct. They didn't get subrace status because they were only really adopted by one group, the group that made them. When the Dalidriad's "nation" group died, so did they. The Snow Elves are also facing their first test of racial endurance with their nation in strife and on the verge of destruction. If the obliteration of the Princedom kills them off, then we're vindicated in not making them a subrace. If they endure, then that's a sign that they might just make the cut. In brief, nobody can make a physically distinct culture into a subrace. It's a state they have to reach themselves. You become an official subrace when you're one already. Does that make sense?

Forced PKs of any form without the prior agreement on the player are OOC ****storms waiting to happen. They are not worth the cost.

Invitation to unleash the Wood Elf guards right there.

Firstly, where does War Cleric fall short of your needs?

There isn't a lore-approval system any more. The reason RP ideas isn't regularly processed is because it isn't meant to be, like the Tech Ideas and General Ideas it's there for players to leave suggestions for the broader server. It's not the Lore Forum of old. Back when we had Emote default, whatever you emoted happened. If anyone just came up with something fun someone else would call powergaming and demand approved lore. You couldn't just be creative, you had to have your idea hammered out to the last detail and then signed off for balance, lack of contradiction with other things and non-abusability by the LMs. Previously, the LMs had been a writer team. They occasionally helped rittsy (who's been in charge of server lore since forever) pick out nice things from the Lore forum to make official like lore for soulstones, tidied the lore up where it had gotten knotty and most importantly wrote stuff for events and map transitions. They were a small, innocent staff team that only did good things that nobody on the server objected to. With the playerbase demanding lore for anything that was being used against them (and sometimes even things which weren't), the Lore Team's role changed. It became their job to process the Lore Forum, to determine what was fine and what was too powerful, too powergamed or, straying into more dangerous territory, "didn't fit the server". Creative new things had to go through them first, if they didn't, other players would complain about not having lore, and there were LMs who were also GMs that would enforce the removal of lorebreaking things. Naturally, players resented having even their very RP reduced to yet another effective app, and the Lore Masters became the bad guys. This is the time where "Make Fun Not Lore" comes from. When PvP default hit, I created the rules for the Mechanical Standard. This was designed to eliminate the widely resented Lore Approval system in the same way Ski and Cruz's MA removal was meant to do the same for magic. The idea was that the game mechanics would form the baseline for what you can do, like on the Aegis map where their wasn't an official Lore Team (everyone who did lore and story work was also a GM then). With a few clearly specified exceptions if what you did followed the mechanics of the game and wouldn't otherwise be powergaming, you could just go ahead and do it. You were free to be creative then and there. The Lore Team then would go back to its original role of making LotC a more colourful place, in addition to answering player questions and helping players fit things into the mech rules. Of course, this message, despite being publically posted, hasn't quite got around to this day. People still see the Lore Team as either the Fun Police going around lorehammering people's RP (they don't even have the power to do that) or the Lore App Team, hence player indignation at the standstill of the Roleplay Ideas forum the Lore Team isn't actually meant to review. There's also a hefty spanner in Mechanical Standard's works: magic. When Ski_king and Cruz removed the MA, their intention was (correct me if I'm wrong here ski) to do the same thing to magic that mech did to lore, as long as you weren't powergaming, you could do what you liked with magic. No subtypes, cast whatever you want and explain it however you like. This didn't quite happen in practice. People who had fought their way to the top of the MA weren't at all happy at everyone else getting what they got for free and thus fought to maintain the MA structure as much as they could. That, and the problem with doing this with magic is that magic doesn't have a mechanical standard. The baseline then became the existing magic lore and the magic guides. As these were organised into subtypes, so magic stayed subtyped and has to this day. The solution to this is Telanir's magic plugin. When this is completed and put onto the server (I believe the intention is to install it in 4.0 but if it's nearing completion I think it should be released sooner) it'll finally become possible to remove the magic system as the ex-MAT intended, and I greatly hope that's what's going to happen. If you've got that spell, explain it however you want to, it's balanced by the mechanics of the magic plugin. But for the meantime, I'm not entirely sure what to do with magic posts. I can go through this the way I'd have gone through a lore post of old and suggest fixes for every problem I can find, or I can help find an alternative that makes approval unnecessary. Up to you.

Nothing stopping you hunting baddies without healing magic. Just sayin'.

Can't see any loopholes or significant imbalances in it.

Not sure, but I'll find out for you. LT doesn't actually have the power to approve things by itself any more, nowadays it has advisory role rather than an "app team" one. In most cases we help players that come to us to adjust things so that they meet the mechanical standard rules and thus don't need approval in the first place. Given magic doesn't have a mechanical standard (there's no magic plugin) I can't exactly do that.

Pretty much. We're talking the difference between warrior and fighter here.

Based on my knowledge of aenguldaemons: A Patron is a term that tends to be used for any Aengudaemonic creature (aenguls, daemons and everything in between) that hands out magical candy to its minions. That's why you get moral requirements on their magics: they don't give them to people who aren't either their followers or working towards their goals. A Patron isn't actually anything more than a name. As for Aspects and Aenguls, they're two branches of the same tree. They're both what Out of Character are called Aengudaemons. Aenguls, Daemons, Aspects, in effect they're all different groups of the same thing. Call Yuan what you like, although if you call him an Aspect you might spark an IC conflict with the druids.

I believe it's an aengul-type entity. This is more a reskin of clerical than anything interfering with Shamanism.

This is essentially to stop people saying "oh an LM approved it" giving the name of a retired LM or more often no LM at all. It's analogous to when someone says "a GM said I can do this" or "a GM said I could do that," which I'm sure most people have encountered. Not sure I follow. Are you referring to lore that's restricted to a small group for their personal enjoyment or am I misunderstanding?

Looks good to me. Preferences don't have anything to do with it. That's part of the reason why there's a Lore Team rather than just Rittsy. Besides, the Ascended can do healing, druids have it in the form of herbalism and stuff and just about anyone can do it with alchemy. If you see anything being denied based solely on preference then challenge it. Stuff should only be denied when there's a reason its implementation would be detrimental. Lore serves the players, not the other way around. Besides, we don't actually decide what gets implemented any more, we just make sure there isn't anything wrong with it.

It would thus make sense for them to have a resistance (not immunity though) to thanhium's toxic effects. A lot of Snow Elven tech can actually be explained quite well with thanhium too.

They live for almost a thousand years. It's not exactly pressing. Completely possible that they do not. Elves aren't just pointy-eared humans. If you want a human example, there are plenty of things we do that we don't enjoy because we comprehend them to be necessary. It's wholly possible that the elven race doesn't enjoy FTB one bit and just gets on with it when necessary. If 2 is true then 3 is true. I counter your argument here by restating that elves are not humans. In brief, it's possible that elves derive no pleasure from FTB. I personally don't think elven children should be thing given how incompatible the timescales of elven lives are with the timescales of LotC. I think it would be better if the elven race became completely infertile, and elves now look for other ways to ensure the survival of their kind. I'm sure all the elven children and fans of FTB RP would disagree with me on that one though. :P

The problem with explaining it as a wholly genetic affliction is that you could breed it out, and if it's wholly biological it's possible with enough research and magic-based healing to cure it. This isn't the case, the curse remains in full force down the entire bloodline. It's also, come to think of it, probably the origin of the human and High Elven distaste for crossed bloodlines: once the curse is in you can't get it out.

While I can't see this happening as a new source of magic, I could definitely see this integrated into the existing arcane magic lore. It would also be far more compatible with the magic plugin. PM Kalenz, this sounds like something he worked on once.

Short answer, yes. Long answer, post updated.

Some people get it from the Scourge and it can be found in small quantities under dwarven areas.