This year, the TSN will celebrate five years since first starting. Over that five years, the TSN RP Community has run a duty shift almost every Saturday - quite an impressive feat! The other evening, I was discussing it with a couple of the officers and looking back through old blog posts. It occurred to me that it has been more than a year since I last posted about the TSN and other developments like the TSN Sandbox, so an aim for this year is to start up this blog again.
Originally, this blog was about documenting my character in the TSN RP Community, and adding in out-of-character posts about the group itself. With the website providing a place to post personal logs in-character, it seems that posting here in-character (unless I create some kind of link across) is fairly redundant. As a result, I think this blog is going to change to being more about the group and what we are up to. That way, anyone reading gets a view of what is going on and how active we are. There has been a lot happen in the group over the past year, and to try and recap it would take time. Instead then, I am going to start fresh and focus on this year. As we are starting a new season in the TSN as well, it makes great sense to cover that and dip back into some key things from the past year or so as they occur.
After standing down for two shifts over the Christmas period, the TSN RP Community is all set to get back to active shifts on the 6th Jan. The two weeks without a shift has given time to be able to tie up all the lose ends for the new Season 9 story arc. This is set to be one of the most well prepared and organised seasons run, with a new mod, updates to the TSN Sandbox and extensive planning of the story arc. Matsiyan, now head of the GM team, has been chief in bringing everything together. He's worked tirelessly and brought together different skills from different officers across the group in order to get everything set for the new season. Matsiyan and I have also worked closely together to plan out the story for the season and the key events. As part of the planning, we have broken down the season into "Episodes", drawing the idea from the way a story is covered in a TV series. Each episode will span a couple of shifts, with all the missions linked to the key events within the episode. By doing this, the aim is to give a clearer path through the season in terms of the story, with the ideas sketched out and key events planned. The episodes still leave a lot of flexibility to adapt and change the story as it progresses, with each episode being tweaked and finalised before it begins, based on new ideas or changes to current ideas. The whole story itself has spun out of ideas proposed by the GM team - a mirror universe story arc which sees the 4th Light Division flung into a parallel universe and trying to figure out how to get home.
Having this approached has really helped to focus building in some key features to the TSN Sandbox too, which is now on version 7. I'll have to do a whole different post about the Sandbox as there has been so many developments with it, particularly over the past month or so. Setting things up for the season has been much easier having an overall plan though. Again, Matsiyan and I spent time looking through the maps and adding or adapting them to link with the story.
Season 9 is set to be brilliant though. At the end of Season 8, the 4th Light Division was tasked with joining ONI (Office of Navel Intelligence) ships on a top secret mission to activate artefacts that had been located throughout Season 8. After they were activated, the Division transited back, but what should have been a routine jump back to USFP space went completely wrong and the Division was thrown across space into a parallel universe.
Now the Division is completely lost. Sensors are offline, navigational systems unavailable, and the ships are severely damaged. During the transit, not only did the space outside change, but everything changed - from the ships themselves to the uniforms the officers are wearing. Adrift and lost, the officers are now working tirelessly to figure out what went wrong, where they are and how to get back.
