The Cryptic Muse

Who are we?
We are writers and role players who want to have a good time telling tales without OOC drama getting in the way. We all know that real life is the first priority. We are partners in play and as such work together to weave the tales our characters live. No one person does everything or is responsible for GMing the stories. You get out of it what you put into it.

To have this fun, we have these message boards and our own ad-free chat. They are all linked up so you only have to register once on the boards and you have access to the chat. And if you want to register more than one character you can use the same email. We don't make you have a unique email for each and every character. Pretty cool huh? Yeah, we thought so!

If this sounds like something you want in on, you are in the right place. Welcome!


How to participate?
You can join us by registering and jumping on in with both feet. Just follow the basic settings as they are set up, create a character that fits the setting, put up a character sheet and start playing. If you have questions, let us know.


Message Boards and Forums .. are you kidding me?
Don't worry. Being active on the forums really isn't a mandatory part of being a member of the group. The forums are only a tool to allow for greater flexibility in sharing the stories we weave and they let our chat be extra cool so be sure to at least sign up and give your character an avatar. If you want to post things on the board too, that's cool.


You mentioned ad-free chat. Tell me more!
Another tool that we have is live chat. These chat rooms use the same username and password as you registered on the forum with. I mentioned also that the message boards make the chat extra cool, right? Well, the chat rooms will display your message board avatar next to your text in the room. It makes it cool to see a character image next to the chat. Another cool feature is that you can also set up message notifications for a specific member in chat so if you want to know when that person has posted (helpful in a group play) the room can let you know that.

Also, Chat rooms are logged automatically and are available for review typically the following day. Thanks to Moruta at Addonchat for helping get the chat rooms and message boards all playing nice with each other. He's been really cool with forum layout and themes too.

The chat room page also has a play list. It can be launched and manually started - no blaring music the second you open it up. Right now there is only one. I plan to make more to vary the options. Let me know what kind of music you like and I'll see what I can do.


Other Cool Stuff
I am considering blogs and photo galleries and media options too. It's all a work in progress.

If you have an idea of a setting or a chat room or anything else that you think would be cool to make our community even better, please let me know. This isn't just 'my' community. It is OURS for everyone to have fun.

Thanks!

Just a quick update about images:

For those who would like to showcase some character images, I am planning on doing a gallery. I haven't gotten to this yet. If it proves too troublesome, I will add more fields in the profile for people to add more character images. In the meantime, I think it might be a cool idea to add replies to your character sheets if you have extra images you would like to share for your character.

The message boards will accept images in a post that are either: 400 pixels tall by 300 pixels wide ... or ... 300 pixels tall by 400 pixels wide. There is no limit on image mb size limit and there is no limit as to how many images may be included in a post. You do need to have the images hosted elsewhere and then insert the URL to the image in the post surrounded by the IMG tag (paste in the URL and then highlight it and click the IMG button above). The size requirement is to keep images about the same size so that extra wide images don't screw with the message board layout.

There is also a size limit to images in signatures. The boards would only accept images with the following dimensions: 100 pixels high by 700 pixels wide. Please use only one image of this size in your signature. I made it this way to keep signatures from detracting away from the story threads since extra tall signatures really are very distracting when trying to read a story posted on the boards.

Thank you