Posting guide


 
Kannagara is a game that places a high emphasis on quality writing and narrative in collaborative writing. While we are an RPG, we focus not only on the gameplay, but also the execution. 

Our moderation team is dedicated to the growth and cultivation of players, characters, and storylines, and we hope to foster a positive, creative environment that will encourage players to bring out the best writers within.

This game is ultimately about having fun while sharing in the incredible experience of collaborative writing with writers all around the world! We hope you will be able to grow and have a great experience here at Kannagara!


 
Entry Tags



All posts on the community must be tagged with the location, type of log (is it a dream log or normal log?), and the name of all characters in the log. The top of the post before the narrative begins must contain the following:



Title: [DREAM LOG/MERGED DREAM/LOG/SOLO] (Insert title here.) 

Who: Characters who appear in the log

Status: Open/Closed 

Style: First/Second/Third/Action/Any, Past/Present

Where: Location 

When: Approximate time of day, Week #, Day #
*
Rating: G, PG, PG13, R, NC-17 

Warnings: (Optional. This is only if there is some kind of gore or something we should be prepared for.)

* It is critical that players list the Week#, Day#, in order for us to keep everything organized under our time system.

It is essential that when you reply to a post, you edit the tags to include your character's name. Any untagged activity does not count towards activity checks.

How to do this:
Take a look at the top of any post, and you will see a tiny icon that looks like . If you click on this button, you can easily add your character tag to the post at hand. This allows both us and you to keep track of your posts and further your character's comments!

Posts



Initial posts to the community or the network can be written in first, second, or third person paragraph form or action form (which is commonly known as "first person" in the RP world). The posts can be written in either past or present tense. As we are a game that focuses on more than just RP by placing a very large emphasis on writing, we differentiate between first person and action form due to the fact that we encourage players to be as creative as they would like in artistic expression.

In general, we suggest writing posts in third person, as it will make for easier playing. However, if there is some kind of
style you would like to explore in a log, as long as the player(s) you are writing with can agree on and adapt to the style, you can play in any style you want -- just make sure it's consistent. If you start off an open log and allow any style, and your initial post is in first person, then someone responds to you in third, make sure to respond to that individual in third person and don't change your style unless you know what you are doing.

Also, be mindful of tenses. If someone is writing in third person past tense, it might be better for you to consider staying in past tense. (The only exception to this rule is with action form, which really is more casual and not so important in terms of writing quality.) 



An example of first person: 



I went out, shutting the door upon the ticking. I looked back into the window. He was watching me across the barrier. There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one another. I could hear mine, ticking away inside my pocket, even though nobody could see it, even though it could tell nothing if anyone could. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 



An example of second person: 



You want to believe in him, in the boy with too much fire under his skin. You want to believe that he'll believe in himself and in the bonds
he has with the people who now make up his life. You want to believe he'll cherish the living more than the dead; that he'll hold what's alive closer to him than memories lost and faded with the erosion of time. 



An example of third person:



His voice is choked, and then he sputters when he inhales copper-flavored mud through his nose. A hot hand comes down on the back
of his neck and presses him down into earth to make him understand the magnitude of its silence, the vibration of life and decay all rolled up in the muck underneath him. He doesn't understand the living part so much as he does the decay. That part's the easier half of a formula that never made sense, but he only ever was just a statistic, a number in a sea of numbers with no name, because he's not supposed to exist.



Action Form:



...Oh.



[For a moment, he looks perplexed, then almost sheepish. He grins almost immediately after though, frankly relieved and quite willing to forget the mistake so they can move on to more important things. After all, he's noting Kakashi's apparent annoyance, and assuming there must be business to move on to; why else would he ever be annoyed with his Eternal Rival coming to his rescue?]

Well, then! It's certainly a highly advanced and very sturdily constructed communications device, at any rate. Nothing that I've seen in Konoha's possession before.



Where are we? Have you seen my adorable students or Hinata-chan?




Solos/One-Shots



If you would like to place one-shot solo posts that introspectively explore your character, we encourage you to write these if you feel it
will help with your character's development. We also encourage players to format the posts however they would like -- prosepoetry, shape prose, font and color change -- go wild with it! Feel free to be as traditional or as postmodern as you would like. Feel like adding images or video to accompany the text? Go right ahead! 



Flashbacks/Backplaying



If you feel there are very important incidents that you would like to explore in the relationship between a few characters, we encourage players to have the freedom to do just that -- within limitation. While we would prefer that most playing goes on within the world of Kannagara, we understand if there are important aspects to your character's life that you would like to explore to have a better understanding of him/her. If you feel that playing these scenes out will help with your character's development and/or character relationships or the audience's understanding of your character, we fully encourage you to do this. Please note that these flashbacks must be very important to your character's development and/or relationship with another character. We also do not encourage too many flashbacks. All players interested in writing flashback logs/solos must obtain moderator permission. 

Note: dreams are exempt from this rule. If you would like to explore your character's history in dreams, you can do so as much as you would like. 



Crack



Feel like being totally cracky? No one's stopping you from writing a total crack dream or posting a YouTube video for fun! There's nothing wrong with humor or having fun! We completely encourage crack, sparkles, YouTube, spoofs, parody, etc.
 
Font Size/Formatting
 
As Kannagara is a heavily writing intensive game, we request that players refrain from using tiny text when writing large tags. Tiny text can be used in smaller tags that are only a few lines. However, if you are going to write a tag of considerable length, please try and use a larger font out of consideration for your fellow players who might have difficulty reading tiny text.

Summary Policy
 
Players are required to collaborate on a summary for a log/thread on the network in the event that: 1.) one player may not wish to finish, but the other does; 2.) the contents of the log/thread are important; and/or 3.) players wish to preserve some idea for CR purposes.

The reason for this is because Kannagara is a collaborative writing game. Due to the high volume of intensive writing that occurs here, there are times when logs are not always finished. There are times when comment threads and action threads within network posts are left hanging, and also times when things happen in logs/threads that are important, either to a plot or plots or to a particular character or characters.



We can understand not wanting to finish something. Perhaps players aren't feeling the log/thread anymore, or can't get into the mindset of the character – for whatever reason (Example[s]: “It's been too long...” “So much has happened since then...”) Maybe you're swamped and you want to focus on something else without having to constantly worry about whatever log/thread you aren't feeling.
 
To prevent hanging logs/threads that are not finished and handwaved, if you are not going to finish a log, you must post a summary post either on the log, thread, or as a summary post on the log or network community. Please note: summary posts are allowed if you want to plan CR with another player but do not have time to play the log/thread, or feel it is important enough to be logged. Please try to limit how many summary posts you post to the community -- while it is great to see that players are plotting with each other, we would much more enjoy reading collaborative writing than summaries!

Narrative Chronology 



Here at Kannagara we highly recommend that you respect narrative chronology in your logs. As Kannagara is a game that is not just RP, but also a collaborative writing game, it is important that you acknowledge the passing of time and allow that to reflect in your narrative. 

Every character's post should ideally be taken as though the entire post, and its contents, had completely occurred. So when you are making a new post in response, you are continuing the action of the narrative, not explaining what your character was doing during the previous post.

Regardless of what a character says, or how many questions they ask, or regardless of how many actions they do, it's better if your character does not respond to the previous post by responding to every single action and question. Instead, think about how you would respond if this had all occurred in real life. Usually the easiest thing to do is to take the last part of the post and respond to that, as it allows for narrative linearity and a far more fluid, easier reading.  


Think about how life itself works -- if someone asks you ten questions at once, then launches into a big explanation, and then asks you another three questions, would you really be able to respond to all those questions in perfect chronological order, then respond to the big explanation, and then answer the last three questions perfectly, when that individual hadn't stopped talking to begin with? (You never were given a chance to respond -- so there's no way you could've responded to any of that!)



If you're saying to yourself, "Well, wait a minute, what if my character would've interrupted another character at a certain point in the post?" If that's the case, simply speak to the player and ask them to edit their post if their character would've allowed an interruption at that point. The point is to create a more fluid narrative that makes logical, chronological sense. 

If you would like to reflect on what your character was doing or thinking or feeling during the previous post, you can do so by writing in past perfect tense.

For example:



As Character A spoke, Character B had wondered, the entire time, just when he was going to finish explaining the plan. They had wasted so much time already, and it had taken all of Character B's patience not to grab Character A, throw him over his shoulder, and go running out the door.



If you're wondering if this means you must always have a linear narrative, the answer is absolutely not. If you know how to handle non-linearity in narrative, then you are probably a writer who understands how to avoid the aforementioned issues. We frequently see chronology issues occur, and while it isn't against the rules to RP however you would like, we feel the best collaborative works usually respect some kind of chronology in the narrative. 

We are not saying that parallelism in narrative cannot or should not occur -- only that if it does, the dialogue should at least reflect that. While parallelism can occur where both posts reflect a certain time/action simultaneously, we discourage any kind of parallelism that results in having more than one conversation at any given time in one log. If you are having a conversation with someone, it is one conversation. It is impossible to have ten conversations simultaneously!
 
The only time this will differ is in voice/video/text post threads, as characters can play/read an entire post before responding, and can choose to respond to each point another character makes in their initial post, point-by-point. In voice/video calls, we suggest that narrative chronology is respected.

Action Tagging

Our action tags tend to be a little different from those at other games, so even veteran players may wish to pay attention.

Although most other games use action tags mostly in very short, rapid-fire back and forth tags with very little "meat," at Kannagara we use them in all sorts of situations. All posts on the network will be in action form - so if you have something significant occurring over the Hitomi network, we would prefer if you spend more time on your developing your tags in action form.



Content wise, our action tags really aren't very different from our paragraph tags. There's not much you can do in paragraph that you can't do in action - so basically, you can get just as much serious character development on the network as you can in the log community. For example, take a look at this dream, which is on a pretty serious subject - and take note of the content of some of the comments.

Don't feel the need to rush to get a post out - you should try to be punctual when possible, of course, but when it comes to serious development, we would prefer to wait an hour for a well-written post than two minutes for a couple of sentences, especially when there could be major developmental potential.



We certainly do allow and encourage faster back-and-forth tagging, which is what most games use action tags for. Ultimately, the length of your tags and the amount you put into them should be determined by the significance of the tags to your character's development.

So while you should put a lot of time and effort into tagging and replying to a serious post, it's okay to spam like mad when the situation is more lulz. You can also use shorter tags in pretty much any instance where there isn't a great deal of character development going on, like so, or if the log is not as serious, such as this one.



Another way that we differ from most other games is that we allow and encourage reaction posts. This is specifically for times when your character sees a post, and has some sort of interesting thought or feeling about it, but doesn't actually say something for whatever reason. If there is an instance when your character wouldn't actually turn on the Hitomi and leave a comment (for instance, the person they're reacting to is an enemy that they don't want to contact, or your character is too shy to speak, or whatever), you can use a reaction to show how your character feels about this. These are often important to character development, and they allow other players to know what your character is thinking. Here is good example of when these come in handy- scroll down to the posts that say "Reaction" in the subject line. This is how you should label any reaction posts you make.