Rockport City, on the east coast of the United States, is a place of promise and opportunity. For 399 years, it has stood as a testament to America's multicultural nature. However, at the end of the industrial age, the factories closed, the buildings were left to rot, and the people lost their purpose for several years. The only thing remaining of its golden past was Ravencroft Institute, a world-famous school that forms a miniature city within Rockport, and is its main source of income now. In time, modern technology transformed the city thanks to the help of the H+ Prosthetics founder Arthur Price and the rather staggering amounts of technological development that made the newer sections of the city the very image of an ideal first world city. However even boasting a newly stabilized economy and multicultural population, the city holds a secret that is just waiting to creep into the lives of the unsuspecting.
Throughout the city, some people swear they can hear the rattling of chains and the screeching of gears in those scant moments of silence. During the darkest hours of night, something happens. Bodies have been found, bound in chains and mutilated, though the bizarre cause of this is yet unknown. People from the poorest districts, the nobodies without a roof to die under, have been mysteriously dissapearing in mass numbers with the police unable -or unwilling- to do anything. Can you unravel the mystery? Will you face the machine?
Based off the Persona series of video games, Persona: Rising Reverie is a Play-by-Post Game taking place in an original setting.
The RP can be found here.
This roleplay provides examples of the following tropes:
- Aborted Arc: The originally planned initial arc (featuring the Iron Maiden as listed below) was all but averted due to a loss of activity. With the site's recent revival, the hospital event seems to be the new basis for the story.
- Alternate Universe: There's a forum for that, consisting of side-RPs.
- Arc Words: "Forge your fate."
- Anyone Can Die: Downplayed. Ordinarily, only "Hardcore Mode" threads result in character death. NPCs, however, can die at any point in Otherworld threads.
- Art Evolution: Non-visual example. It's clear that the writers have evolved over time just by looking at anyone's first few pages of posts, edit threads, or WIPs/profiles and comparing them with older ones.
- Author Appeal: The Random Character Facts thread reveals certain things about various characters' traits boil down to this.
- Ax-Crazy: The Iron Maiden. A human shaped entity with a metallic mask and iron limbs that is absolutely obsessed with dragging people into the Otherworld and maiming them in horrible ways, leaving the body to be found back in the city. In the Central Hospital event. She is not above getting a bit innapropiately excited about spilling the blood of RPCs.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: After several members expressed discomfort with Umbraflamma's tendency to write gory DM posts, he proceeded to write something comparatively worse involving Shadow goo.
- Bizarrchitecture: Can be found in the Other World.
- Bland-Name Product: Mostly averted, though things like "Perphony 4 Arena", McDolan's, and Orange Inc exist. In the case of the latter two, the real companies still exist in the site's reality.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The school event goes off with a bang. Fireworks are everywhere, students are watching in amazement, and then a dead body is found
- Breakout Character: Obviously a given, as everyone has a favourite character of their active ones that tends to get around a lot more than the others.
- CamelCase: Online handles, both in and out of character, are usually written this way.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The first months of the roleplay were mostly social while the Otherworld section was still locked. Then, the Iron Maiden arc kicked in and people started traveling to the Otherworld and taking names. However, in the Central Hospital event's ending, roughly 3000 people died when theTerminal Maw suddenly devoured the patient and staff's memetic energy and actually materialized in the real world for a brief but defining instant. It then spoke to the players and declared he now craved more lives to fully cross over. Did we mention he was taller than a 40 floor building?
- City of Adventure: Rockport definitely qualifies due to its culturally diverse landscape.
- Continuity Nod: The site began as a
Spiritual Successor to Persona Heaven, and at least one character is explicitly stated to be from Nikawa. - Crippling Overspecialization: Certain character builds can work out to be this way, and "Focused" (two primary stat growths) is an option when building a character.
- Custom Uniform: Only slight modifications can be made to the Ravencroft Uniform, but most characters have their own take on it.
- Darker and Edgier: In comparison to the normal Persona games.
- Depending on the Artist: Character Faceclaims and Personae usually use images as guidelines rather than definitives, so this is a given.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The initial skills and Persona applications were much different than the way they are now, and were based on summons rather than levels. Similarly, this is generally what happens when new characters are made, before the author gets a feel for them.
- Elaborate University High: Ravencroft Institute forms a city within Rockport itself.
- Elemental Powers: Come in a variety of kinds, as the previous games in the Persona series.
- Evolving Weapon: At levels 3, 5, 7, and 9 of both Initial and True Personae, characters' weapons gain additional effects such as more damage, multi-targeting, etc.
-
Follow the Leader: Averted. The site shares similarities to Persona 5 in terms of the emancipation themes, but it was made well before even the first leaks came out. - Jack of All Stats: During creation, players can select this as a stat-growth option, sacrificing growth in one area for moderate growth in four others.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Several users on the Chatbox seem standoffish at first, but are actually very nice people.
- Legacy Character: As the site shared a large number of its initial users with Persona Heaven, this was to be expected. Similarly, returning characters are now considered "legacies" as well, and keep their levels.
- Limit Break: Every character has a breakdown, an attack that is comparable to a Tier 4 skill in power for Initial Personae, or a Tier 5 ability for True Personae.
- Leitmotif: There's a thread for that.
- Put on a Bus: After three months of inactivity, a user's characters are moved into the Cryo forum. Alternatively, the user can request that they be moved there. Similarly, the site itself. Though The Bus Came Back
- Running Gag: "Bullets"Explanation
- "Skeletor" appearing whenever characters fail at fading to black.
- "Magical Girl Milky Rei-Tan!" Explanation
- Rei being 12. Explanation
- Summon Magic: It's Persona, after all.
- Taste of Power: So far, when a character awakens to their persona, they have full access to their persona's full skill list, and can cast two skills in the same turn. After a while, however, things start getting weird. There is a REASON the way to summon Personae involves chains from then on.
- (Un)Limited Wardrobe: Zig-zagged. It's encouraged that player characters' clothes are based on style and colouration rather than specific articles they always wear, but most characters have their preferences and can often be seen wearing certain things most of the time.
- What Could Have Been: Whatever was intended for the Iron Maiden and the initial plot arc. Similarly, as players can only have 3 RPCs but a nearly infinite number of WIPs, it's to be expected that certain concepts would have to be discarded over others.
- Where The Hell Is Rockport?: Rockport itself is never placed in any specific state, it's just "on the USA's East Coast."
- Weapon Specialization: Each character has one in the form of a Persona Weapon, an item summoned to combat Shadows in the Otherworld. Naturally, these range from conventional weapons to much more fantastical means of dealing damage using Elemental Powers. (IE: One or two characters essentially perform Avatar's "Bending" as their weapon.)
