[Kaylee Campbell]

Heaven Aetherius or hell Oblivion, LET'S highROCK:

Welcome to the out of character and sign-up thread for OF PRINCES AND POWER, part of the Shattered Empire Series, now enjoying its second chapter. Of Princes and Power is a mostly political RP set in the entirity of early 4th Era High Rock. We are taking the events of Oblivion as our point of departure, and many writers have filled in all sorts of fantastically imaginative lore in deciding what has happened in the last twenty eight years since that day. Players control everything from the Queens, Kings, Princes, Dukes and Counts who rule High Rock, to people just trying to find their way in this dangerous time.

Your friendly neighbourhood GMs are me, aSaPp!5@ and Broken-Scale. Pester us, or the thread in general, if you have any questions. Happily, this is about the friendliest, warmest RP I've ever had the pleasure to be in, so don't be afraid to bother us as often as you like.

There is lots and lots of great information on this lovely RP In aSaPp's gloriously long OP in the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1456030-of-princes-and-power-chpt2-the-queens-gambit/, for anyone who wants it. My best advice for anyone new is to read all you can stomach of that big post and ask here for help. Even though this is a new alternative timeline, we haven't gotten very far and there is very little you need to learn in order to start RPing here. In fact, if your character is the sort who doesn't really go in for the big political side of things, you yourself may need to learn almost nothing . Although lots of people have been contributing lots of fantastic new lore, everyone who joins is invited to join in at whatever level they feel comfortable with, and to craft as much new lore-fluff as they like, if they end up with a little corner of High Rock to themselves.

WE ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR MORE LOVELY RPERS

Almost all of the information on the RP is stored on our quite spiffing http://theshatteredempireseries.wikia.com/wiki/The_Shattered_Empire_Series_Wiki, and everyone who joins is invited to write up their own back-stories and new pieces of lore to fit into the tapestry we are making here. This RP is all about feudalism and tradition; those who care about it and those who don't. Princes and Power, that sort of thing. For anyone who is genuinely new/confused, I promise that everything you need to know about what little plot we've had so far is contained either in that OP, or this silly post I wrote in the last chapter, http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343716-of-princes-and-power-chapter-i-a-game-of-pawns/page-6#entry22481821.

NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO JOIN AS A NEW PLAYER, it's morning in Castle Evermore, as all the gathered nobles and servants in various states not limited to horrible hangovers. The Festival of Peace is coming to an end, and while most of the characters in the RP are gathered there, some will start to make their way home soon. With plots of revolt in Northpoint and news of the royal murder of Prince Geruld in Wayrest, could now be an any more exciting time to join the story?! Only your new character can make it so! If parties aren't your fancy, most of the characters in the RP are soon to disperse back around High Rock, so you don't have to join the festival now if you don't want to.

CURRENT QUEST FOR RPERS: The wiki is looking really fantastically spiffy right now, so I guess its time to fall back upon the normal quest that we all should be striving for, which is to really try to read and provide feedback on as many posts as we can, because being read is just as important as writing when it comes to RPs. Also, now is the perfect time to really start schemeing as to your character's next big scene, as we really, honestly are very close to starting Chapter III.

[Britney Lopez]

Allow me to christen this good ship new OOC thread with some CSes, finished at last.

A Chief Historian of the Vault of Ledgers for Daggerfall:

Spoiler

Name: Dame Belinda Cavendy
Title: Chief Historian of the Vault of Ledgers

Allegiance: The Kingdom of Daggerfall
Age: 73 (born 3E 388)
Gender: Female
Race: Breton

Appearance: Belinda Cavendy is a small, round, roly-poly sort of woman, at least a head shorter than most people she deals with, even with her thick-soled clogs and flyaway hair adding a good few inches. Every charcoal lock twirls off in its own special way, with little regard for style or comportment. With beady blue eyes, button nose and tiny mouth, her rosy full-moon face can seem almost too large for the features it is charged with holding.

Skills: In her capacity as Chief Historian of the Vault of Ledgers, Belinda is required to know a great many things. She is a librarian, a bookkeeper, an academic, a peerless curator. Polishing, restoring, sorting, accounting and generally defending Daggerfall's countless records and relics is her natural state. In her own right, however, she is also an eminent scholar, maintaining whole shelves of her own scholarly works alongside the countless treasures of the vault.

Equipment: She is not much for personal appearance. Her typical style of dress is patchy at best – plain dresses, either repaired or half-finished, topped with shawls and sashes to no particular effect. Topping it all is a clunky golden necklace of triangles and eyes. She potters about with the aid of a simple ashen walking stick and, when doing fine-detail work, has been known to employ a clunky and exotic Dwemeri spectacle-type device. She retains ownership of the third or fourth-favourite family weapon, the Axe of Leland Cavendy, a two-headed waraxe of fine craftsmanship and dubious use in the hands of a Chief Historian of the Vault of Ledgers.

Background: Dame Cavendy is the daughter of a minor Chevalier family from somewhere in the Ilessan Hills. As such, she was obligated, at least for a time, to enter the family business of riding a horse and swinging a weapon. She was, however, not much cut-out for the job, and was quietly decommissioned by her father in her mid twenties.

Her entrance into academia is somewhat confusing to the observer. In 3E 418, after some time in obscurity, she became a teaching fellow at the prestigious University of Gwylim (contemporaries disagree on the faculty in which she taught), but by 3E 425, accounts tell she was a lowly schoolmistress in an Illessan village. Over the next few decades she appeared in dozens of academic institutions and more banol occupations until, in 4E 21 she emerged, an accomplished polymath, as Daggerfall's new Chief Historian of the Vault of Ledgers.

Personality: Belinda takes her work very seriously, but if a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, her desk is all but out of sight, so heaped it is with tomes and ledgers, scrolls and artifacts. She has chronic difficulty in sticking to her projects or studies – she will pursue them ferociously until something else distracts her. These projects may then lie dormant for months or years, un-thought-of, until the Historian happens upon her notes and is instantly converted back to her forgotten cause.

Perhaps because of this, she treasures every scrap of scribble-filled paper, and in a librarian's manner is incredibly protective of her innumerable intellectual charges. Belinda may not be magically-inclined, but her contacts are numerous, and with a little dabbling and considerable hard work she has acquired a swarm of trained hunting spiders. Her little guard spiders prowl the shelves, pouncing on silverfish, beetles and cockroaches in defence of Dame Cavendy's realm.

But protective as she may be, she does not hide her charges away. Belinda is a dedicated follower of the cause of learning, and enthusiastically promotes proper access to the Vault of Ledgers wherever possible, unless of course you have greasy fingers or bad academic manners.

Character Summary: One of the finest scholars western High Rock, Dame Belinda Cavendy is a fountain of knowledge, albeit a somewhat disorganised one. She lurches from project to project as intellectual fancy takes her, and has done so productively enough to fill a sizeable shelf of her own in Castle Daggerfall's Vault of Ledgers. As Chief Historian she meticulously studies, gathers, and cares for the written substance of the Kingdom, and eagerly if distractedly promotes learning and respect for knowledge throughout the castle.

And a hapless Shornish wizard's apprentice:

Spoiler

Name: Oscar Leopold Mon (called Leopold or Leo by most, Oscar by his mother, Louis or Leonard by his master)
Title: Apprentice to His Potency, Magisterial Arch-Wizard Basador Melberine. “Boy”.

Allegiance: Shornhelm and his master. Technically, at least. Really he isn't sure of any of it.

Born: 3E 414
Age: 47. However, his ageing (and everything else) was paused between 4E 7 and 4E 28, so for all intents and purposes he is 26.
Gender: Male
Race: Breton

Appearance: Leopold is a gangly youth with wild mouse-brown hair and childish features. A flat nose, wide green eyes and thick eyebrows that don't quite match somehow give him an air of permanent confusion or surprise. He has attempted wizardly beard growth, but with minimal success, and so is more or less clean shaven.

He dresses with little care, looking as much like a down-on-his-luck troubadour or travelling merchant as a mage. He wears a patched leather jerkin over an ill-fitting woollen tunic, and stuffs his breeches into his battered boots. Living, as he does, in the mountains of Shornhelm, Leo usually wears a fur lined and slightly singed cloak to ward off the weather.

Skills: In theory, Leo is trained to apprentice level in all schools of magic. That said, Magister Melberine's adherence to modern arcane classification, and indeed to the tenets of proper teaching, is limited at best. What Leopold knows, he knows mostly from observation and exceptionally irresponsible independent study. As such, the spells at his command are an eclectic mix, but he can't be faulted for his general competence in the arcane arts. Other than that, he is quite talented at dodging hurled projectiles and keeping his head down for angry moments. Living with a wizard lord will teach an apprentice a thing or two about tact and sidestepping, both literal and figurative.

It could hardly be called a skill, but as a result of countless hours as a test subject, Leo's body often responds unexpectedly to magic. It is a blessing and a curse – it could be that he will soak up a spell unflinchingly, or that some blessing will scorch his hair off. It makes for considerable inconvenience but endless amusemant for his master.

Equipment: Basador Melberine has a rather unwizardly habit of throwing out dozens of items a year in fits of aggressive boredom, and Leo has gained a reasonably impressive collection of his own simply by skimming the “rubbish” before jettisoning it into Oblivion, incinerating it, hurling it from the balcony, or whatever else his master demands. Most notably, he has a pair of slightly ill-fitting boots that allow him to spring several feet into the air and land safely (assuming he doesn't lose them on the way up or down), a lexicon inscribed with “typical Dwemeri claptrap and perversion” (totally unreadable to Leopold of course), and a dried Clannfear claw. Aside from that, Leopold carries a few useful scrolls and potions and a silver dagger.

Background: Leopold was born in the Shornish port of Penrithian to servants in one of that town's handful of fine houses. It was quite by chance that, rather than growing up into a footman or a kitchen boy, he became a wizard's apprentice. Basador Melberine's former apprentice, ready to bail out of his master's ill-steered ship, made a stop in Penrithian on some queer errand. He found himself spending the night in the servant's quarters of Leo's generous master, where the young boy was fascinated by his magical trinkets and far off eyes. Living in a basemant in Penrithian he had never met anyone who had seen such fantastical things as this wizard's apprentice, or who knew so much about the workings of the world and beyond.

He was then, perfect for the apprentice's needs. When the apprentice left Penrithian, he took the young Leo (happy and bewildered) from his parents (more or less ambivalent) with the false promise of regular visitations). He took his prize as far as Basador Melberine's entry hall, where he was dumped without much ceremony on a barely-aware master. The wizard had only just grasped who this “Oscar Leopold Mon, sir” was when his former apprentice was barrelling down the stairs with a pack on his shoulder.

And that was that. At times Leo wondered why the old apprentice fled so keenly. At others he contemplated doing the same . Sometimes he just wondered why the apprentice had bothered to find a replacement. But he could never flee the tower – magic captivated him. Even when he was being launched through the air, or dunked into Oblivion, or burnt to a crisp, it was worth the suffering to see the mysteries of the universe shake slowly free of their esoteric chains. It was with some trepidation but a fair amount of interest that he submitted to His Potency's latest experiment in chronomancy, the experiment that left him perfectly frozen in time for twenty one years.

Personality: An inquisitive young man hungry not just for knowledge but for understanding, Leopold adores magic and the finer points of metaphysical theory. His isolated life and his unrelatable fixation with the arcane make him less personable than he might otherwise be, as he finds a majority of people to be some combination of dull, confusing, and misguided. He does, however, see them as basically good. To him, “people” (nebulously defined) are the centre of it all (even more nebulously defined). While some are unpleasant, or even turned to evil, they must surely be an unwitting part of the great endeavour, whatever it might be. As a result of this, and of knowing so few people he can count them on one hand, Leo is trusting to a fault and little inclined to look beyond face value, a skill he finds it impossible to carry beyond the metaphysical fields.

Character Summary: An eager and inquisitive apprentice, but more often a guinea pig. Leopold Mon is to be sent off into a world he understands only as a metaphysical conundrum without such basic knowledge as the current decade. He has spent two decades of his life an ageless living statue and may yet be rudely awakened to the passage of time.