Here
. A memory-loss game, where characters are reborn into the world of "Edensphere", which just happens to be a giant tree, with no memories and no clue of who they are save what was in their birth dream.
It ran from 2008 to 2011. The setting was kept open as a sandbox afterwards, although activity there has largely petered out. Although the game ended before the mass-migration to Dreamwidth, the players decided to archive the game there anyway just in case. (Individual character journals vary wildly on whether or not they were ported.)
This game provides examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: Look at the core members of the Spamily. We have Genius, Youth, Bell, Fred, and Derrick. Auxiliary members include Gene-1, Lotus, Rogue (Leader), and, arguably, Boss.
- All Just a Dream: The entire game was a hallucination in the 23 seconds between the time Remmy stabbed Renée and her death.
- Amnesiac Dissonance: Fairly common. Characters show up wiped of their histories, with only whatever happened in the birth dream and any inherent personality traits and Character Tics.
- Ax-Crazy: There have been several of these, unfortunately. A disproportionate number of them seem to find work at the butcher's shop, to the point where the shop now offers a substantial monthly bonus for not killing anyone in hopes of attracting some employees who aren't dangerously insane.
- Badass Normal: Several
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The CPA.
- Butt-Monkey: Any of the characters can have a nasty streak of misfortune when their mundane decides to take advantage of various "events", the state of the Wilderness, and player plots.
- Paladin's mun has, in June 2010, had him participate in Dudesels In Distress and end up tied naked to a rock, wake up in someone's bed during Masters-Apprentices, aaand he's going to the Silent Hill wilderness. Twice.
- Cast Herd: There are several "families" or "harems". And the butcher's.
- The Chains of Commanding: Bastet (Yoruichi Shihohen) eventually one of the Sphere's de facto leaders through her natural assertiveness and just being around a long time. She only let her guard down around a very few people.
- Character Development: Loads. Several players took the opportunity explicitly to develop their characters down paths left open but unexplored by canon, or to figure out how a loss of memory and driving purpose would alter that character's trajectory.
- Chivalrous Pervert: Most of the Hedonism Brigade is this type of pervert, or the Lovable Sex Maniac variety.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Fugue/Remmy. His inability to accept that his twin sister was living a separate life from him is what started the whole game.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Probably the only character who gives a first impression of any kind of idiocy who isn't is Boss.
Probably. - Curiosity Killed the Cast: There's a metaplot. Learning too much about it tends to result in the curious character dying, either because of the tree itself or an attack of the giant wildlife.
- Death Is Cheap: In most cases - the exceptions are when players drop a character and have them die rather than vanish - after at least three days the character is reborn with a new birth dream, possibly losing some prior memories as well.
- Subverted these days. A loss of some kind is required after most player-initiated deaths, be it memories or a body part.
- Dynamic Entry: A good way to impress Handmaiden.
- Dysfunction Junction: Most events in Edensphere are opt-in and can largely be ignored if a player so chooses. Ironically, a few opt-in events have caused far more drama/trauma game-wide (through multiple player-driven plots) than the single biggest event in the game that could not go unnoticed (The Great Sphereferno, see Moment of Awesome).
- These events are: Evil Twins (original flavor or redux), Revolving Reveries (Sir No Longer Appearing In This Game), and Radio Memories (January 2011).
- While There Are No Therapists, the reason these clustered player-run plots usually affect the whole game is that if you aren't in direct line of the drama/trauma, you're probably a friend of someone who was.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: By building their own lives and becoming members of the "collective unconscious," Edensphere's characters made themselves and their world real enough to survive the Remmy's awakening.
- Epileptic Trees: In-universe Characters tend to come up with these to explain various goings-on. The idea that everyone is a clone was pretty popular for a while.
- Eyepatch of Power: Brianna / Handmaiden after her death. Veda after an encounter with Fred's evil twin.
- Four-Star Badass: All of the current captains of combat-heavy jobs: Bastet (Guard), Stoneface (Watch), Kiba (Adventurers), Locket (Adventurers), and Target (Adventurers).
- First-Name Basis: A few characters who learned their real name only used it in private, with close friends.
- Gender-Blender Name: Fred. Leading to some very amusing moments.
- Genre Savvy: During any Zombie Invasion, characters from a Near Earth universe generally pipe up with specialized Zombie Survival Tactics they learned via modern media. In 2010, this was primarily Above and Genius.
- I'm a Humanitarian: A previous butcher, an OC named Fenrir, killed people, chopped them up, and sold the pieces as meat. Discovering this drove bacon-lover Stoneface (Sam Vimes) to be sick. These days, while it's run by a total Dysfunction Junction and it's lucky everyone can heal, it is better.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Although due to the nature of the Tree, it's more like "incurable cough of indefinite non-lethality."
- Heterosexual Life-Partner: Sky and Bridge, Castor and Pollux, Eyepatch and Zombie, Genius and Derrick... there are more of these than actual pairings. Some, though not all, are either between canonmates or people who were "born" at the same time, therefore are twins
- Ho Yay: Of course! Notably, there was a Wright and an Edgeworth who managed to keep up the UST for ages without ever actually doing anything.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Everyone. People remember how to speak and function, they may remember things like the name of their homeworld and, say, that Disneyland exists, but they don't remember who they are, what they did, who their friends were, or anything of the sort. Memories of single scenes can be regained through memory crystals.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Characters name themselves, often based off of something they saw in the dream, sometimes from something shouted in it. Lampshaded when a shapeshifting OC, Grift, turned into a surfer who called himself Board.
- Meaningful Rename: Characters can get their old names back via memory crystals, and many of them start calling themselves these.
- Naked on Arrival: New characters break out of cocoons Covered in Gunge.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Just look at this from when Paladin and Stoneface visited Silent Hill.
- Platonic Life-Partners:
- Otaku: Fugue/Remmy. He populated Edensphere with the characters he'd absorbed from fiction.
-
The Other Darrin: Sort of. If a character is canon updated or dropped and taken by someone else they are born with no memories of their life in the Sphere. They have a different dream and usually name themselves differently, too. The others very much do notice, though.- The big example is poor Neil Dylandy/Lockon Stratos. He's been born as Sniper, Range, and now Aim, and in every incarnation he's worked in the weapons stall. In two incarnations he's been involved with Bastet, but in the third she's decided not to bother.
- Official Couple(s): Sky and Inara, Youth and Bell, Kiba and Kazahana.
- Only One Name: Most characters, at least until they recover their old ones.
- Papa Wolf:
- You don't mess with Koi's family, adopted or not.
- Stoneface/Sam Vimes. Things that hurt a Watchman—or Krile—did not get a good ending.
- Rage Breaking Point: Yoruichi flipped out and gave a long, public "Reason You Suck" Speech to Fugue (essentially a death sentence) after she found out that he was directly responsible for disappearing her lovers and people he thought might become her lovers.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: A few of the characters who were dropped eventually had their disappearances worked into the plot.
- Sanity Slippage: Grift (original) dramatically lost his sense of self-preservation after two years, especially having an hourglass clamped around his neck.
- Smoking Is Cool: So cool, it's the name of the local hang-out (a bar). Also applies to every smoker ever in the game.
- Split-Personality Takeover: P/Raise and Zombie both had highly evil split personalities who did this.
- Stalker with a Crush: Lin to the point she's become an in-character joke - and not just by stalking Bastet, but Castor as well!
- Team Pet: For a while, Derrick lent couch space to Boss while telling his roommate that Boss was this. He wasn't sure if Boss was either that stupid or an epic Troll. After a line was crossed, he kicked Boss out.
- Translator Microbes: The language geas means that everyone's primary language is English. Much funtimes laughing resulted when the geas malfunctioned in an event.
- Troperrific: That, or some of the players are tropers.
- Well, someone has to edit this page.
- Tyke Bomb: Daitou is one, and arguably so was Blood.
- When Trees Attack: Getting Treeshanked, should your character cross a particular line against The Powers That Be.
- Who's on First?: Not uncommon. Of special interest was Nobody.
- World Tree: The Great Oak.
- Your Universe or Mine?: In the end, characters were able to choose between staying in the Sphere, returning home, or exploring different worlds. (None of them mutually exclusive except for characters who died in their home universe—they mostly decided not to risk going home in case they couldn't come back.)
