User:Shaps-cloud/Sandbox-examples

Random entries and information I don't have anywhere else to put

Space 'Nam (Event/Factoid)

Description: Space 'Nam does not exist, and it does not refer to a real conflict or place. Rather, it is a popular expression used in a similar vein to the "School of Hard Knocks" to refer to learning through life experiences.

Example usage:

Assistant A: Wow, George! You may only be a 17 year old high school dropout who spends most of their free time eating random pills and debris they find on the floor, but you sure do seem to know a lot about open heart surgery! What's your secret?

Assistant B: I, err, picked it up during a tour in Space 'Nam. Now quit fidgeting, you really can't afford me nicking anymore veins.

Creationism Corner

Q: How can I submit to this project?

A: For now, I'm using this simple process:

• 1. Come up with a neat idea that you'd like to expand on
• 2. Hit me up (or, later, another lore lead once we're more established) via the forums or discord (Shaps-cloud on the forum) and pitch your idea for an entry. Your pitch will be a short description of the subject of what you want to write about and how it fits into the previously established lore, and can be a few sentences long. We'll chat a bit about your pitch and maybe make a few tweaks together to have it fit in better, and soon you'll have a greenlit pitch.
• 3. Once your pitch is greenlit, get working on your rough draft! Follow the "Writing for the Medium" section below to make sure the form fits what we're looking for right now. In-universe elements like documents and newspapers are supplementary material that should come attached to a primary article it enhances, and will not be accepted on their own.
• 4. Once your rough draft is finished up, send it in for submission and we'll talk about tweaks and edits that may be needed to adhere to established lore and style guidelines. Unless it's a short article, there'll probably be a few revisions that need to be made, so don't kill yourself about getting it perfect on your first submission, quick and dirty skeletal rough drafts are fine!
• 5. Continue revising your entry, and keep submitting it until it's accepted. The submission after the rough draft will probably be fine, but long articles or important topics may require a few back-and-forths to get right.
• 6. Once your submission is accepted, I (or the eventual editing team) will do a final pass of small tweaks to ensure consistent grammar and voice throughout the CC corpus. Then it gets posted! Hooray!

This is, of course, subject to change. Either way, we'll work with you to make sure it's a painless process.

What we are interested in

• Interesting little factoids and quirks of the universe that you never had a chance to expand on IC, and that you think other players would appreciate (see: entry on Space 'Nam as a phrase]).
• Descriptions of events that crewmembers of SS13 may have been affected by or be aware of (By 2557, the Syndicate had even managed to sneak an agent into Nanotrasen's regional Central Command facility. The agent was caught and detained within a week, but the resulting restructuring and purges among the upper echelons of NT opened up many opportunities for new faces with less political baggage to rise...)
• Descriptions of organizations and entities that crewmembers of SS13 may have been affected by or be aware of (Juked Micronics is an electronics manufacturing corporation that helps supply Nanotrasen's Space Stations with circuitry, and often collaborates with NT on engineer training...)

What we are not interested in

There are also a few topics that will likely be intentionally left vague for various reasons, including:

• The nature of death/cloning outside SS13 (including whether Centcom has backups of the crew, and how often SS13 is destroyed)
• Addressing the fact that spacemen often jump between professions

Writing for the Medium (HEAVY WIP)

Some thoughts and tips on what to write for lore.

• Keep your descriptions terse and emphasize why the subject you're writing about is relevant and important. Wikipedia/encyclopedia articles and textbooks are excellent examples of how to do this. The best bits of lore are ones that you begin reading and immediately have sparks fly in your mind for all of the possibilities and connections it opens up, and get you excited for what you can do with it. The object here isn't to show off your cunning wit or beautiful prose, it's to provide context for people to roleplay with in a fast moving game. If a submission doesn't have some kind of hook for players to bring it up in game, or to back up other lore that can be brought up, it's probably bloat.
  • Are you writing about an event or entity that no one alive knows about or is so deeply classified and guarded that no one will ever know about it or be affected by it? It's probably not worth writing about.
• Choose your subjects and angles purposefully, and consider the ratio of new connections you open up with a submission with the possibilities that it extinguishes. Giving a brief description of a small regional government body that NT deals with and some crewmembers hail from adds a lot of new hooks for people to build on and reference without doing much to curb future submissions. Detailing the entire history and timeline of Nanotrasen on the other hand significantly locks down the fluidity and potential for future submissions, and will likely be rejected.
• Don't use in-universe media lightly, especially to hint at things. It can be tempting to use a newspaper article, press release, communication log, personnel file, etc etc, to describe something as X while throwing up a bunch of very obvious red flags that X is very much wrong and that the source is horribly misinformed at best or outright lying at worst. Curb this impulse. Even in professional video games with professional writers, these documents often go far overboard and make no sense in-universe.

Ideas for future contributions :)

• Some kind of space conflict or war that people may have come from
• Nearby planets in SSC territory people may crash at
• Write-ups of the major individual Syndicate groups (Gorlex Marauders, Donk Co., etc etc)
• The beach ball in the Meta corporate showroom has the description "The simple beach ball is one of Nanotrasen's most popular products. 'Why do we make beach balls? Because we can! (TM)' - Nanotrasen", an entry about NT's beach balls that embraces and explains this would be pretty funny. Widespread use of beach ball purchases being a common way of laundering money (ordering hundreds of thousands/millions of beach balls that are actually manufactured, shipped, and delivered, only to immediately be thrown away or shot into the nearest star because the buyer doesn't actually want them), thus representing a significant portion of NT's gross income even though almost none of the balls actually get used is a particularly funny and interesting direction to take it. Omnipresent NT beach balls acting like tumbleweeds across the galaxy because so many have been thrown away into space, constantly popping up where you least expect them...