Tuluk closure spoiler thread

Muk Utep appears, declares that nobody enters or leaves the city except for those he personally decrees as being able to do so.

Now Tuluki soldies can show up as antagonists for RPTs or whatever, but there are no Tulukis because it would require a rolecall to be allowed to exit the city.

Honestly? I wouldn't have closed it. If I truly believed it was that much of a drag on staff energies, I would have just unstaffed it. ICly, the nobles would have withdrawn -- probably for fear of some illness -- and would be handling their affairs over the Way. If I was really trying to discourage playing up there, I'd actually write an illness script. It'd have a chance of striking whenever you went into Tuluk, but you could build up an immunity/tolerance, so people who genuinely wanted to stay there could.

If I went with a disease, I'd make it spread from NPCs to PCs and back again. Maybe give it a 2 IC day lifetime, so there would be a chance of spreading it to other populations, but it would only respawn in Tuluk. Part of the excuse would be it spreads less easily in the dryer part of the world. I don't know if there's a Cure disease spell, but I'd add one if there wasn't, and I'd put it on a list of spells that could be cast without getting crimflagged in Allanak or Luir's. It'd do wonders for making people distrust those filthy foreign devils.

I might also go with an airborne contaminant, to explain why the disease isn't cured by something the populous are assured isn't magick. That'd also avoid complaints about how the immune system works.

In either situation, I'd have the faithful wearing a wide variety of filtered plague masks.

I would have just closed it ICly with no explanation whatsoever. One day, people log on and there is no Tuluk there. Maybe I'd throw in a Maguffin, like a weird green rock.

Then I'd sit around wait for people to speculate on what happened, and steal the idea I like the best.

First of all, I think a number of people here would have realized that pre-war tuluk wasn't broken. It wasn't as popular as Allanak, and it wasn't everyone's cup of tea but it wasn't completely broken. There were one thing people complained about. One they wanted the mindbending templars to go away, so that they could get away with crimes, so that they could plot, play special apps, etc etc. Keeping the arena would have been nice too, since it allowed people with low numbers in their clan to get together with others to spar but again, had they listens to players, and simply gotten rid of the mindbending templar, i think it would have helped things a lot.

Again tuluk had a small but steady population for many many years. Therefore most people here wouldn't have broken it to the point where the admittedly lazy staff found it too troublesome to fix again. The place used to be as stable as allanak before Nyr came along.

But alright, that is the past, tuluk is now broken. I honestly believe most people here, and even some people currently in staff would have opted to keep on working on it. Improving it over time. Listening to feedback and making small changes until slowly people the population of the place improved. It almost seems like the staff never learned its lesson from Arm 2.0, I still remember sanvean's post about how it would only take six months to get the new game started. HA! The same staff who makes a player work for a RL year just to take 15 mins to make them a mastercraft. This kinda shit takes time, work, effort, and you need to see it through to the end, improving it slowly based on player feedback. However, nope, the lazy way out is to just drop everything and shut the damn thing down after breaking the place.

Well, Kudos for at least admitting you are closing it down because its too much work for you. Out of curiosity I wonder what is going to happen if more people leave the staff, or if the game gets bigger? Close down luirs? Allanak?


Alright fine, now we are now closing tuluk down instead of investing time to fix it and run it. I would do nothing, but shut the gates. You put an ooc post that the place is virtual now, mostly because if left open without clan or templar support, everyone would abandon allanak and live in the northern equivalent of redstorm. You can still make tulukis with the understanding that visiting tuluk would be done virtually. That's it, no ridiculous half-ass plot or high fantasy sci-fi story line. Just close the gates down, and tell everyone oocly nothing has changed ICly, its just oocly virtual. That way should you ever decide to open it up, you can just pick up right where you left off without having to also compensate for the lazy written that was used to close it in the first place.

i wouldn't have closed tuluk. i would have stated that support for it, and the clans within it beyond the essentials (pay, etc), would be stopping and that new character creation in there would be blocked off. ICly nothing would change, OOCly I would emphasize putting the focus on Allanak for now and supporting the pbase there.

bam, no need to create another railroaded plot for the closure and re-opening of the city. if people are fleeing Allanak to go hang out in tuluk, i would evaluate why my playerbase doesn't like me meddling and alter my leadership style to provide them with the content and environment they want.

There's definite rp potential in this, I dont want to say what Ive seen yet. There's a lot of places you can go with this from a player standpoint. How much the staff will support you is the question.

Very tempted to link that Starship Troopers scene again. An unknown psionic power controlling the masses is infinitely more interesting than a literal brain bug. One of the most common amateur writing mistakes in fantasy or sci-fi is to over-explain your unexplainable plot devices. Often, these forces derive a sort of power from being unknown and mysterious. Also bodysnatchers/podpeople are classier than headcrabs.

For all the Tuluki emphasis on subtlety and mind-control via bardic propaganda, psionicists, and North Korean fear tactics, I'll be disappointed if the city's end-all-be-all mind controlling plot comes from a biological mind control chip that causes massive changes to your appearance. The latter is a trope that work best for TV serials, where you have only a handful of meaningful characters. Physical changes symbolize the corruption of your feelings for the character as they cease to become who they once were. In a MUD environment, where the "cast" rivals Game of Thrones and the victims are largely nameless NPCs, it's going to have a very narrow appeal for those who have intimate inside knowledge. It's the sort of thing I would expect to happen because a staffer wanted a tearful scene where they discover their partially-transformed lover who struggles with their parasite conditioning long enough to choke out a goodbye and let the protagonist staffer PC escape.


Like many of the RPTs on Arm, it somehow suffers from the problem of being inaccessible to most players and incredibly unsubtle to everyone. But it is still one of the better RPTs in recent memory, especially compared to some others. The Volcano and spy plot were stupid. As long as Staff has a clear idea of what this will do for the Arm community as a whole, it has potential.