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Entry tags:
SUMMER TEST DRIVE MEME
⚰︎ ⍢ ⌲ ⍚ TEST DRIVE MEME:
Welcome to RUBILYKSKOYE — a dark, horror-smut game where player choices will drive a mod-run storyline about the world and its NPCs. This test drive meme provides a medley of prompts evoking the game's general tone.
THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the coming event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.
CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: nudity, D/S mechanics, public sex, aphro, death, missing persons.
If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.
FAQ ✧ SETTING ✧ CALENDAR ✧ RESERVES ✧ APPLICATIONS
THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the coming event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.
CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: nudity, D/S mechanics, public sex, aphro, death, missing persons.
If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.
IN THE WOODS SOMEWHERE
The chirping of partridges in the treetops rouses you. Light barely filters through the canopy, just enough to suggest daylight. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the light has taken on a sickly green. You lie amongst the frost-covered mosses and ferns, the frozen soil cold and just a little damp on your bare skin. Wherever you were before this moment, whatever you were doing or wearing, when you awaken in this forest, you find yourself naked and helpless as the day you were born. As you sit up and get your bearings, aside from a brief wave of disoriented nausea, you seem to be no worse for wear than you last remember.
You seem to be alone. The gnarled oaks and moss suggest no sign of civilization or sentient life. Just flickers of movement from curious squirrels or brave lizards emerging from a temporary retreat from the wintry weather. With your feet under you, and you'll find the wood is filled with berry bushes and nut trees, though much of the fruit has been picked clean. The freshwater stream that runs north-south, populated by both poisonous toads and delicious crawdads, is running actively again as the weather warms back up from the recent snowstorm.
As you explore, you may run into others with stories just like yours. Some may have already formed clumsy nudist groups, others may still be processing their confusion, with no memory of how they got here. Now is a good time to overcome any hang-ups you have about modesty; it's going to be a long hike, and the weather isn't quite amenable to your lack of.
Turn your back to the darker, shadowy parts of the forest and eventually the glow of manmade lights and the curve of a dirt road may come into view. At the edge of the wood, you'll find a town surrounded by a fifty-foot wall of beige stone. The only entrance is an iron gate positioned on the southern edge. When you arrive, the gate is already open, welcoming people inside.
This quaint, historic town of five-thousand has cobbled street and signs lit by gas lamp. Wooden shutters protect otherwise open-air windows on the buildings, which are all under three stories with gabled roofs. A number of businesses hug the main street — a clockmaker, a cobbler, a grocer — while residential homes sprawl outwards towards the wall. At the far end of the main street, visible about a mile to the north now that the trees and the enormous wall is out of the way, sits a castle with three towers.
When you enter, the streets are full of people, but despite any efforts on your part to hide or make excuses, they don't seem offended by your nakedness. Even families with children don't gawk or look twice. Those determined to find proper clothing regardless will find that modern clothing stores aren't available — the closest this town has is a tailor's shop and a stand in the central marketplace selling scarves and blankets.
breaking and entering
If you intend to have your character break into someone's house or yard to steal some of their clean laundry, please review the info about game laws on the FAQ and give the mods a heads up HERE.
Fortunately, the people of the town are very generous! Anyone who ask the locals will be directed to the boarding house for both clothes and a place to stay. Accessible through an embellished iron garden gate and obscured by hanging plants, trees, and vines, beyond an overgrown yard in the residential sprawl of the town is a bright-red door, which opens to a spacious cottage of several stories. Parts of the house still bear the dust of disuse, gathered on various furnishings — bedding, sofas, curtains, wooden tables. However, it's already full of people! Anyone who's already appeared in the village just as you did today lives here. Once inside, you may notice patchwork repairs have been made, and some scorch marks still linger from a recent fire, and some furniture is still lying around in splinters.
Tonight, a few of the townspeople will help out with the new arrivals. They stock the kitchen and prepare a communal dinner of parsnips, pheasant, and squash. During dinner, they (and those outsiders who've already begun to settle) sit down at the enormous wooden dining room table and help orient the newcomers and answer their questions.
finding roommates
Don't spend too much time in the dining room going for seconds, though. You'll want to claim a bedroom quickly because each one only has two full-size beds, and there aren't enough spaces for everyone. The last people upstairs will need to double up to squeeze in. Roommates will not be mod-assigned; players should coordinate directly with one another to determine their living arrangements.
Get a good night's rest. By the light of day, locals will help get the new arrivals set up on the coal stove with breakfast. You may notice they're dressed in a way you would almost call normal — at least, in a manner befitting 19th century Eastern Europe. As you find your way around town to get your bearings, folks are eager to help you find a place to apply your skills so you can contribute to your new home.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try: naked hiking, acquiring clothing or other inventory items, asking questions at dinner/orientation, or staking your claim on a bedroom!
THE FESTIVAL OF SUMMERTIDE
Summer is in full swing, which means it's time to take advantage of the warm weather! Around the town, various games are being played, some sport-based and some more concerned with creativity, problem-solving, sex, or 'fun'. Each round begins with a prayer to the Duchess. Not bowing your head in prayer may get you a few stares from locals, or worse-- opponents may be extra motivated to defeat someone so disrespectful to her Grace.Each Thursday, buildings are festooned with wreathes of wildflowers, tables are laden with food and drink, and everyone is given colored sashes to wear over their clothes. Festival goers are not allowed to enter the main events unless they wear a sash, and to get a sash they must reveal their curse marks. Those marked with the curse of Wilk receive blue sashes, Diabel get red, Skala receive green and Niez are as ever adorned with grey.
Summertide, the locals are eager to explain, is a festival about adapting to the needs of others, and accepting things as they are. What perhaps isn't explained nearly so well is the expectations placed upon festival goers. Each event has a goal to be achieved, balanced on the point of competition or participation.
Tables overflow with refreshments, especially drinks and chilled fruit to cool the summer heat. Rubeans traditionally spice their foods with aphrodisiacs, something that is so culturally normal to them that they don't feel the need to mention it.
Throughout all of this, some of the implementation of these games may occasionally come across as either overly cruel or overly kind. The common people of Rubilykskoye are of two minds when it comes to the treatment of newcomers: some think you are beneficent, sent to fix their problems and free them of your woes. These people, called Blackguards, will do their best to make sure your participation in the games is not marred by cheating, excessive violence, or pain. But others, called the Zlatniki, think little of the outsiders coming into their lands, and will do their best to twist their native traditions toward cruelty and vindictive unfairness when it comes to the Void-touched.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try participating in events, having your characters go against opponents, be drafted into the games against their will, or watching others perform!
NIGHT OF THE HUNTSMEN
Rumor moves through town quickly: two nights ago, a hunting party went out into the wood, and no one has seen them since. Anyone who wants to prove their worth to the community is encouraged to join the search parties going out to look for them; in Rubilykskoye, those who provide food for the community are highly prized, especially when they brave the woods to do so.You see, the woods aren't entirely safe. Near the town, it's nothing to be alarmed by, and of course the search parties find nothing there. They must delve deeper, and that's where you end up. At the outer edges of the forest, shadows grow long and the air grows thick. Though the sun never grows warm red-gold with sunset, the wood darkens. Birdsong is replaced by the click of mandibles and the skitter of many legs. Anyone who ventures out this way will soon find it difficult to see before them, even in the middle of the day — eventually, even the brightest magical light source or darkvision cannot stretch further than a few inches.
Many peel off, going back to the town proper. The searchers become fewer and fewer. Maybe some of them are going back home, but maybe they're getting lost. Eventually, you walk around a large tree, and you're alone. It's just you and the Void.
The air feels heavy, as if it were not air at all but some more solid mass. Almost like liquid-smoke, it presses down upon you. Slowing your movements. Characters who push too far into the void may stop being able to move at all, and find themselves given over to insanity if they collapse, unable to draw themselves out. This is just one of many dangers.
Monsters thrive this far out. Huge, blood-red spiders the size of hunting dogs drop from the treetops. In addition to their venomous bite, which contains a fast-acting paralytic, these creatures are clever: they attempt to use their webbing to entangle any trespassers, binding limbs together or to trees. If you're unfortunate to become fully cocooned, you don't have long before this forest will be the last thing you see.
Those who seem lucky enough not to run afoul of the monsters here are in for a worse fate. The void can play tricks on your senses. As madness sets in and you lose all sense of direction, you may also lose control of your body — what is that steers your hands to turn against your friends? Why does it sound like your own voice whispering?
Yet the further you go, the more convinced you become that the missing hunters are near by. You're sure you can hear them on the wind, their voices calling out between the trees. Did you just see something out of the corner of your eye? You have to find them. You have to make all this darkness worth it.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try fighting a monster, hallucinating your worst nightmares, and/or attacking a friend or stranger! Feel free to find the bodies of the missing hunting party-- or hallucinate that you did.
RELEASE YOUR INNER BEAST
Something's wrong here.
The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.
Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.
Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.
Early one morning, alarm bells are rung. The people of Rubilykskoye are quick to explain while boarding up their windows and locking their doors: The Szymanskiy brothers have all transformed! Their inner beasts - duchozweirz, the natives call it - take the form of creeping, skeletal horrors. The beasts hunt and to kill, ripping their prey apart, but that's not all they can do.
Those who are lucky enough to escape one of the Szymanskiy triplets will leave feeling... changed. The psychic residue these monsters give off cause the afflicted to seek out danger with reckless abandon; they will run toward the monster, into fights, and refuse safety when offered. They must be restrained in a secure location to wait for the pheromones to wear off.
(There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)
The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.
Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.
Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.
someone else transforms
Early one morning, alarm bells are rung. The people of Rubilykskoye are quick to explain while boarding up their windows and locking their doors: The Szymanskiy brothers have all transformed! Their inner beasts - duchozweirz, the natives call it - take the form of creeping, skeletal horrors. The beasts hunt and to kill, ripping their prey apart, but that's not all they can do. Those who are lucky enough to escape one of the Szymanskiy triplets will leave feeling... changed. The psychic residue these monsters give off cause the afflicted to seek out danger with reckless abandon; they will run toward the monster, into fights, and refuse safety when offered. They must be restrained in a secure location to wait for the pheromones to wear off.
(There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)
you waited too long
At first, as you hide yourself from your darker impulses, a subtle itch develops under your skin. An irritability that makes you snap at the person who bumps into you on the stairs because all those fleeting emotions that you've been repressing bubble to the surface. Every dark thought you've had about being here, all the fears of never getting home, of being surrounded by ticking time bombs, the anxiety of wondering who you might hurt or what relationships you might betray by doing what you have to do. The anger. Oh, the anger.
Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.
As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.
As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
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Nuke it accidentally or intentionally? Yes.
“You don't have to, but it might require being more careful. I haven't stated my affiliation and I don't as of now make a point of associating with one over the other, but I'm acting like I toe the party line so to speak — you know, trying not to start shit, kneel when she asks, blah blah. So far it's working out; we'll see how long I go before my hand's forced.”
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But no one currently present knows her well enough to contradict.
She hums thoughtfully as she considers the rest. She considers herself capable of being careful, thank you, and in some ways she really is. In others... well, we all have our flaws. "Thank you for your insight on that. I have the feeling it will be useful in the future. Not that I was planning to stir shit, but...
"Well, some shits are more easily disturbed than others."
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“I feel like I do more listening than I do talking, and most of the talking is asking questions.” In other words, lots of information gathering has been done in his months here. “It quickly became clear that being a non-magical human dropped in a magical world necessitated doing that.” Figure out how this place's magic works, figure out how other Void-Touched's magic works, figure out the political power workings here, et cetera. Luckily, he's already the kind of person who sticks his nose in everything. “And it's very true some shits are more easily disturbed than others.” Don't get him wrong, he still does it. Just, maybe not as freely as usual or as much as he'd like.
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Which she's clearly joking, it's not entirely insincere. Friends might be a strong words, but she knows exactly one other person here, and Jughead clearly knows a good deal more than that. He's also been here for some time, and while she trusts her brother it doesn't hurt to have alternative sources of information.
There's some light overture there, an invitation to speak again after tonight's adventure ends.
"There's really no magic where you're from? No fairies or elves or tieflings?"
I don't make the rules but I always have to play one character who'd ICly make this roast somehow
“Nope, just average, non-magical humans — not even a witch, wizard, druid, or shapeshifter in sight. Lizard people that secretly control the government are a fringe conspiracy that most everyone makes fun of, and the closest thing, where I'm specifically from, we have to an ancient evil curse that still refuses to die is there was once this elected leader named Ronald Reagan. Otherwise, yeah, we do things the long, slow, and boring way there.”
I wouldn't have it any other way.
"Terrible leaders are everywhere, apparently."
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“Yours too?” Hopefully the leader of her home was an exception, but the 'everywhere' wasn't really doing a great job of potentially implying it.
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Sovereign Uriel had ambitions to make Tal'Dorei ruled by a council. His last act before the dragons attacked Emon, but one which Vex respected. It wasn't an easy choice to make.
"Like this Duchess, I assume."
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“The Duchess, or Zlatka as she also calls herself — hence Zlatniki — is not in fact from here. Not sure where, but she has been here who knows how long and happens to be a person who has a lot of magical-type power in particular, even when she's not asking Void-Touched to gather pieces of it back for her on suicide missions. Which, by the way, never go in the caves here.” She probably doesn't want to know exactly how those two seemingly separate thoughts connect to one another. “So, I'm guessing she's in the 'steal it from others' category, and I don't have any basis for that guess other than my feelings on most leaders in general.” Says Rubilykskoye's favorite (??? [probably not favorite]) favorite pain the ass iconoclast who is not enjoying playing as nice as he about it, negative stars out of ten.
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But it's hard not to have opinions.
"Let me guess. The caves are also full of spiders?"
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“Then a smaller number of people went down a couple months ago for shits and giggles and happened to carry some of those spores back into town with them, and that was also fun to re-experience for those of us who didn't go on the second expedition for that very reason, after being on the first.” Shits and giggles isn't entirely accurate, but that's how he feels about the reasoning of 'because one of the Void-Touched wanted some materials down there for their own personal magic use, safety consequences of anyone else they took with them (or the whole town, as it turned out) be damned'.
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A fact that's likely to turn into the giant unspoken werebeast in the room.
"Splendid." Except, the opposite of that. "I suppose it was too much to hope that tales of people turning into monsters had been exaggerated. I ate it that's happened to you?"
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«It also lets us do this.»
And another one, but this time in telepathic text formatting.
Or this. As well as sending visuals. It doesn't mean people can *read* your mind with it though, so there's that.
And back to actual talking, "But yes, I spent most of that month in the caves in a state of partial transformation. I'm a weird snake, one with horns." In case she was going to ask what. "It's thematically appropriate for something in my life, so this place can have jokes." Mostly a warning that if there's some theme like that in her life, it may just show up here in that form.
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The speech isn't so bad, but the text does give her a little bit of an odd moment. Reading in her mind is a new one, and she's not sure she cares for the mental contact, whether or not it means people would be able to .
It also raises some other, secondary questions. Perhaps things to consider for another time.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," she says aloud. And then, experimentally, «oh for fucks sake»
Her nose wrinkles. How are you supposed to punctuate thoughts?
Also another time.
"I'm not sure if there have been any themes in my life that could be related to monsters." A pause. "Or perhaps I just hope there aren't. Either way, I do hope we'll have a while before we find out."
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Admittedly, it's a lot of trial and error, but .. what isn't, especially in a place like this?
“It could just as easily be random. Maybe you'll get reality altering powers with it and turn this place into a beach vacation. Yes I know that's not how that would work, no I don't care.” They can dream, ok. It would be way better than dark forests and spider dangers and weird spores from caves.
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Of course it will be awful. It's a curse. No one is going to get off easy, and expecting to be somehow special will only end in pain later.
She pinches the bridge of her nose, shaking her head.
"It doesn't seem real yet, I suppose. Hard to picture you in scales."
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This place would also be one hell of a mass hallucination if it weren't real, god, that's more nightmare fuel to think about later at 3 am when you can't sleep. “ha, they're cool scales because they're kind of glowy at the edges. I'm also pretending like that's a positive somehow.” Sure, yes, close enough. Anyway... “Since this place has been firmly established as insane, what's Tal'Dorei like?” You know, hopefully more chill, potentially questionable leaderships aside.
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And until a couple of days ago, she was rather convinced she would die trying to stop that.
"Half the cities I've seen recent were either on fire for one reason or another, or hiding and hoping that the world outside would pass them by."
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But it does make it difficult to settle—and motivate her to pay attention, looking for a way out. Her and her brother, because whatever else happens, there's no way she's leaving him behind, not knowing he's here.
"I'm sorry for all of us."
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"My brother is here," she admits. "And it seems he's been here for some time. So while I would rather neither of us arrived, I can only be too put out about it. It's natural I'd show up sooner or later."
And she'd prefer it if the alternative is that Vax be alone.
For values of alone.
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