[ERF] The Road Home: Introduction

JOINING UP
Signing on for The Road Home can happen anywhere, at any time. As part of the campaign's mission statement of being open to everyone, you'll always be able to join in up until the curtains close. This also applies to people who have left at any point in the campaign. Anyone can sign back on whenever they like, with the same characters they might've left off on.

The first step for any prospective roadsters is to study up on Erfbound lore as much as you need to. Get a good grasp of the setting and its potential before getting too far ahead of yourself. The second step is to join Erfbound's Discord server through this invitation, or get in touch with Insano-Man through Discord (Insano-Man#2265) or through private messages on these forums. As soon as you've read up and announced yourself to the world, there are three main avenues to approach The Road Home from.

• The first option is the one most players are interested in; make a character to directly engage with the story. The character creation process is simple and straightforward. The easiest method is to write up a single paragraph detailing your character's most important traits - species, gender, affiliation, equipment, so on - and send it to one of the campaign's hosts. The more advanced way - and most preferred - is to write up a full character post for the forums, based off of Erfbound's character template.
• The second option to get a foot in the door with The Road Home is to write up a story for the party to work through. This will put you in the game master chair as a guest game master, second only to the hosts of the campaign. This is the expert's choice - you'll need to be an established participant in the setting with a cohesive story put together to pull this one off. You'll need to submit the story, with a concrete start and finish, to Insano-Man, as well as any plans to involve other players' characters. With that said, every effort will be made to help you shape, structure, and integrate your storyline into the campaign. That includes everything from early concept work right on up to showtime.
• The last option, and least involved, is to create a location or faction for the campaign's party to get involved with. Per your preference, you may be involved as a low-level game master controlling the people, critters, or environment in the campaign. If you're not feeling confident, you can leave it to the hands of the campaign's hosts to play out on their own. You'll need to get a setting article posted on the forums here, and then send a link along to a game master for review. Once you're all checked out, you'll just need to let us know if you want to be involved with it when it airs, or if you'd prefer to let the hosts handle it themselves.

Once you've got one of these options filled out, all that's left - assuming you're directly participating - is to ask to be added to our schedule planner. We'll need your time zone to see which shift you'll be on. Once that's sorted out, all you'll need to do is keep your ear out and your voice ready for when we start planning sessions. We'll be working with everyone on getting as many people on at once.

REQUIREMENTS FOR PLANNED SESSIONS
The Road Home will be working with a flexible minimum player count, adjusted for the total count of players in the campaign. For planned sessions and major missions, the team will need to meet the minimum player count to get started. In addition, each player will be assigned to a group known as a "shift" based on their available hours. The AM shift is primarily for players outside North America, or for people with topsy-turvy availability. The PM shift is for players in or around the campaign's native EST time zone.

Sessions will be planned based around these shifts to ensure that AM players aren't forced to sleep-walk through PM sessions, or vice versa. Players can defy shift placement if they feel they can meet the demands, but planned sessions won't wait for shift-mismatched players!

DOUBLE SPLIT SYSTEM
At the start of the game, the party will be broken up between two vehicles. The first is the supply van, which is a slower, heavier vehicle that, as per its name, carries most of the party's supplies. The scout car is a smaller, faster vehicle that searches for navigable roads, trails, or points of interest to camp out in. The crew of the supply van will trend towards activities in towns, camps, and the like. The crew of the scout car will more often be put into survival scenarios, outlands exploration, and similar situations. Both vehicles will make camp together, but stories on the road will often take place apart.

In addition, the party's vehicles will follow the same shift split as players. Characters in each vehicle will be broken down into a night watch and a day watch, who will be awake at opposing times to stand guard. Characters will be compelled onto the night watch or day watch depending on their player's shift. Just like planned sessions, watch assignment can be bucked and remoulded depending on player sentiment. Its implementation will be done first and foremost by the story, with scheduling in second place.

CHARACTER MANAGEMENT & MAINTENANCE
Getting onto the team means introducing yourself. New characters or players need to have some kind of introduction in order to join in. This can be as simple as popping out from behind a convenient rock, or as showy as a main-quest mission full of lasers and explosions. Once you're onboard, you must be active at least once every two weeks, or provide some kind of explanation for your absence. If you end up missing for too long, your characters will be peacefully ejected from the party. Players can rejoin at any time and every effort will be made to reintegrate their characters. Please keep in mind that there is a maximum of three concurrent characters per player, with the exception of game masters and hosts. If you can make a good argument for why you need more, you might be able to squeeze past that limit.

Being out in the wilderness means space medicine is hard to come by. Food is something you've got to chew on wisely. Getting shot means a character is going to feel the sting until the injury has time to recover. This might take them out of combat scenarios unless the vehicles themselves are attacked. The same goes for food. If a character hasn't eaten for too long, they'll suffer as a result. Different characters will have different needs. For example, spacers with shoddy immune systems will need clean food to avoid being sick all the time. Aliens usually require species-specific food and medicine. The party will generally have options for most scenarios, but time and restraint are major factors here.

CHRONOLOGICAL LOGISTICS
By default, The Road Home will track time elapsed in the world through a dynamic real-time system. When nothing serious is going on, each day that goes by in reality is a day for the party. When major plot events are going down, time will be paused accordingly to give the team the chance to get things done in a reasonable span of time. The same will happen for unexpected life stuff, when a majority of players have to go on hiatus. Days "missed" while working under paused time will be added to a "time debt" that will be paid up organically by making lazy days end sooner. There's no penalty for accruing a large time debt, but always be wary about letting the campaign go cold too long!

Some elements of survival and resource management will be on a restricted basis depending on how much the team has done in a day. In example, three people can't go on twenty different hunting trips in a single day. Legs don't work like that. In the event the party is active enough to move faster than real-time, or otherwise wants to skip ahead for any reason, time skipped will be added to "saved time". Saved time is the inverse of time debt - days will move slower in the background to try to resynchronize with real-time.