WHAT KIND OF GAME IS THIS?
Musou Tensei is based on the Megami Tensei videogame franchise.
If you're not familiar,
Megami Tensei started in the 80s with the question "what if you could summon demons through computers" and evolved from there. Each game is different, but they share a common stable of monsters from myth, religion, urban legend, and occult tradition, which in most cases can be fought, bargained with, made into party members, and fused together to produce new, stronger party members. All of these entities are known as "demons", whether their origin story pegs them as evil, divine, angelic, or mundane.
MegaTen games are also known for their apocalyptic, usually urban settings, 90s cyberpunk aesthetic, and dire situations that test characters' morality.
Musou Tensei is a jamjar-style game. Characters awaken in the game world after having died in their own, and will be confronted with a city of warring factions and myriad possibilities. Do they want to return to life? Change their own world? Create a new one? Anything is said to be possible in Mu, if you have the wits and the power to achieve it.
DO I NEED TO HAVE PLAYED MEGATEN GAMES TO KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON?
Not necessarily - Musou Tensei takes place in a completely original universe, with no connection to any
Megami Tensei canons. The combat/magic system of the games will only be present in a very loose sense, demon fusion has been simplified, and anything else that needs knowing should be outlined in the game info.
It
is recommended that, if you don't know anything about MegaTen, you read or watch a little bit of any LP, if only to get a handle on demon abilities and negotiation. The demon information pages make heavy use of the MegaTen Wiki, which will be an easier reference if you've seen a couple of battles, and the temperament and conversational style of MegaTen's demon characters can be explained but is better experienced.
WHAT CAN I EXPECT PLAYING HERE TO BE LIKE?
Musou Tensei is planned to be a traditional jamjar-style game with no overarching linear metaplot. Some events may be tied to NPC plots that players can influence and participate in, but the game is written to stay open for as long as characters continue to be played in it, and player characters are free to influence goings-on in the setting.
There will be many setting elements that offer characters their own "endings", happy or otherwise, if players want to play out a character arc with a beginning and end. Characters will be able to gain power and achieve goals within the city of Mu itself, or chase various "solutions" to their arrival in Mu, which will allow them to escape the city. Character actions may affect the setting in drastic ways, altering the landscape, shifting the balance of power between ideological factions
The activity requirements and rewards will be geared towards encouraging and rewarding both long threads and frequent tagging-out. The most basic moderated feature of the game, demon negotiation (which gives characters new demon allies), is available to all players on a simple number-per-month basis. Activity rewards pay out tokens that players can use to request altered negotiations, custom plots or quests for their characters, or privileges in mod-run events. IC "rewards", like character powers, privileges with IC factions, and powerful demons, will generally be the result of IC actions taken by characters.
The MegaTen series is rife with mature content and morbid humor, and events in Musou Tensei may try to replicate that tone. That in mind, Musou Tensei carries a preemptive content warning for: people being killed/mauled/dismembered/eaten by monsters, heavy occult and religious themes, cannibalism, general body horror, transformation horror, existential horror, children being the victims of any of the above, medical abuse, characters having distasteful political/religious/moral opinions, and sexual content.
The content warned for won't be constant and unrelenting; it's just a list of possible things that may crop up or be implied in the setting or in events.
WHAT CAN I EXPECT TO HAPPEN TO MY CHARACTER IN THIS GAME?
---
WHAT ARE THE RULES?
Here.
WHAT KIND OF CHARACTERS CAN BE APPED?
Any character from a standing work of fiction is fair game. This includes fictionalized versions of historical/legendary characters as portrayed in canons like Fate/ and MegaTen itself. This does not include online personas, such as LPers or reviewers.
Headcanon and interpretations are allowed in apps to flesh out minor characters or those with chunks of backstory missing, but apps must be able to demonstrate that the character works as a character in their own right. Silent and customizable protagonists are permitted as long as the app presents sound reasoning for their characterization.
OCs and fandom OCs may be apped. MMO player characters may be apped as OCs as long as their app explains how they can be reconciled with other potential player characters from the same game.
THERE'S SOMETHING UNUSUAL ABOUT MY CHARACTER.
Ask a mod via a comment to this page. The answer to situations like shared/borrowed bodies, incorporeal characters, robots, etc is likely to be yes, but may require some conditions on a case-by-case basis.
WHAT SECTIONS DOES THE APP HAVE?
Besides the usual administrative sections, you must specify a
point of death for your character. This may require altering or extending canon events.
The standard History section can't be linked,
but it's simplified to a bullet point list of events. For canon characters, this history should be as simplified as possible, listing only events that shape who the character currently is and pushing explanation or analysis down to the Personality section. For OCs, this section should be a bit more detailed, since it is the only reference for the character's backstory.
The Personality section can reference or explain events in the character's history, but it should not rehash the history. Explain who the character is at their canonpoint; don't spend large amounts of the section explaining their personality before character development. This section should prove to the mods that you have a solid, nuanced grasp on the character's current personality, and that the character themselves is a complex, interesting person who will face conflict in the game.
The RP sample needs to be a link to a thread of at least five comments from your character; once this requirement is cleared, you may link as many additional threads as you like. The purpose of the sample is to check whether you understand DWRP etiquette and can write engaging tags, so put your best foot forward! Musou Tensei will hold regular test drive memes to help players accrue samples for new characters, though samples can be linked from anywhere you've played the character before.
WHY DO I HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT MY CHARACTER'S DEATH?
The people that arrive in Mu do so for a specific reason; they must have died/been destroyed, and when their existence ended, they felt fear for the state of the world as they knew it.
This feeling usually coincides with some kind of world- or civilization-ending disaster, but it can also be taken non-literally; the "world as they know it" could be something valuable that the character fears for the safety of, like their family, or they could have failed to achieve a personal goal and felt deep insecurity over that at their death.
The character's death may be a canon event, but there is no appropriate canon event to use (or if you just don't
want to use that one), you'll have to come up with a death for your character. There's a section on the app for this.
WHAT ARE THE ACTIVITY REQUIREMENTS?
--------
ARE THERE BONUS ACTIVITY REWARDS?
-----
STRIKES AND HIATUSES?
-----
WHEN ARE APPS OPEN?
---
Detailed information on the locations within Mu can be found on its own page; this section covers general information on arriving and living in Mu.
WHAT IS MU?
Mu is a vast city, encompassing about a thousand square miles (2600 square kilometers) and built up densely in the style of modern cities, with concrete, skyscrapers, traffic lights, and all. The architecture is varied, evoking memories of different cities, countries, and even worlds on different streets, as though a thousand different images of cities were stitched together to create Mu. (It is, however, overwhelmingly made up of architecture that would be considered "modern" in reality - characters from more archaic settings may not find anything familiar in their new surroundings.)
But where cities should be densely populated, Mu is practically deserted, pavement cracked, windows dusty, streets empty - except for the demons. Creatures from myth, rumor, and nightmare fill Mu's streets and buildings, some buying and selling goods in mimicry of human lifestyles, others roaming the city like beasts in a place abandoned.
The daytime sky shines a wrathful
orange, and the nighttime sky a sickly
green. Under these unearthly colors, and surrounded by demons, the dead eke out an afterlife...
HOW DOES MY CHARACTER ARRIVE IN MU?
They wake up. Where they wake up is entirely up to you; in safety, in danger, in a box, on a bed, on a roof, it's your call. They will remember having died (unless they were unconscious or similar at the time), and will understand instinctively that they're not human anymore (or, if they were never human, that they're not whatever they used to be). This knowledge may be unsettling or upsetting.
What they'll have to learn by talking to NPCs is what exactly they
are now: a
memory.
WHAT DOES BEING A MEMORY MEAN FOR MY CHARACTER?
Memories are characters' projected images of themselves, formed at the moment of their death and cast into Mu to make up somehow for their last regrets. Since they were made as projections and not physically, bodily transported to Mu, they may differ from their real, dead selves. They may not have the injuries that led to their death, if they don't include those injuries in their concept of what their body should be like. If they've recently undergone a major physical change, such as gaining or losing a power, or aging, and they haven't yet settled into that change, it might not be reflected in their
memory form.
Essentially, the character's in-game form reflects what they understand themselves to be, in a very literal sense - no symbolic transformations, just them in the physical condition, clothing, etc they feel most like themselves in.
WHAT CAN THEY BRING WITH THEM?
Anything they're carrying on their person. Objects characters could consider a "part of" themselves - tools, wearable accessories, objects they're very attached to - are more likely to come along with them.
Large objects, like vehicles, cannot be brought along.
DO THEY HAVE THEIR ORIGINAL POWERS/ABILITIES?
For the most part, yes. Some powers will be disabled or nerfed:
- "Reality-breaking" powers will be nulled or reduced to a very depowered version of themselves (ex., range of time travel cut down to minutes or seconds).
- Any location-dependent powers (i.e., those that require a power source specific to a character's world) will not work properly upon arriving in Mu. The nature of the malfunction is up to the player - it can be present in very weak form, or its source can change to something present in Mu.
- Summoning powers involving other dimensions are disabled or severely weakened - if weakened, the summoned entity will be only a projection, like the character themselves, and not the original entity. Summoning powers that draw entities from a hammerspace or from within the summoner are allowed, but above restrictions apply to summons' powers.
"Companion" entities that are physically present and not "summoned" (ex., Pokemon, magic cats, whatever) count as items and can accompany the character as long as they were present at canonpoint, and as long as they're unlikely to be appable characters on their own.
Any immortality/invulnerability powers remain as they are in relation to other canon characters' powers, but
there will be demons in Mu whose magic outclasses all canon characters' abilities, and immortals are no exception. Powers are kept for the sake of fun, but
all characters will be reliant to some extent on demon alliances to protect them from other demons.
ELABORATE ON DEMONS A LITTLE.
The problem characters are going to run into as soon as they get up and moving is that
demons are very powerful. A character that already fights superhuman monsters for a living will still, generally, be able to go toe-to-toe with lesser demons, but there are bigger fish out there, and they are nothing to screw with.
AND WHY IS THAT A PROBLEM?
Because the demons of Mu find
memories delicious at worst and fascinating at best. And for demons, "fascinating" doesn't necessarily mean they want to coddle it and keep it safe. A lot of the time, it means they just want to...poke it, and see what happens, before anyone else can.
On top of demons' innate fascination with
memories, which is already a massive problem to contend with, Mu just...isn't a peaceful place. It's no eternal, stagnant afterlife - this city is said to be full of possibilities, riddled with wellsprings of power that can turn demons into gods and
memories back into living beings. Such rumors attract conflict. There are several factions at work in Mu, vying for control, victory, enlightenment, salvation. Some wield demons; others are demons themselves. To stay out of the world of demon summoning is to cast your fate to the wind.
HOW DO CHARACTERS SUMMON DEMONS?
Some time after arriving (the exact interval and circumstance is up to the player), characters will be approached by the demon Caduceus (picture link here eventually). The demon will present them with a COMP - a computerized device with several functions. Caduceus will not attack characters or speak to them, except to tell them that it means no harm and has brought them a vital tool. It may come to their aid if they're being attacked when it arrives. If the COMP it brings is destroyed, it will reappear later to give the character another, even if Caduceus was attacked or killed the first time.
The primary function of the COMP is to help its user summon demons. When the COMP is first booted up, it will offer a tutorial on its functions, available in both text and audio. The tutorial prioritizes the Demon Summoning Program, and is designed to quickly instruct its user on the basic of summoning demon allies, even if its user is unfamiliar with modern technology.
During the tutorial, the COMP will summon a single Rank 1 demon of the player's choice for its user to negotiate a contract with. This demon will be very agreeable and will agree to serve the character almost immediately, out of kindness, amusement, intrigue, pity, or another appropriate motivation.
Tutorials on the COMP's other features can be accessed at leisure. Information on these features is on the [[COMP infopage]].
