Just happened to notice on the Atlas forums index. We now have 1445 posts in this forum. That places us at #5 out of 12 active Ars campaigns. If you include the "retired" campaigns, that puts us at 7th out of 23.
We rock!
Very much agreed. I tried some of that when introducing hiems, with people signing themselves and all, and his covenfolks doing most of the talking, but not only am I a less gifted writer than some of you guys (thus my tentative may not have been apparent at all 
), it gets easy to forget 
I noticed.
And I like your writing style. So quit yer grumbling and let yourself have fun with it! 
Thank you very much.
Despite all my efforts to avoid knowing what this whole Pink Dot of Sword Death debate with wards was about, I have now read enough to know what all the fuss is about. I found the post quoted for a proposed solution, and it seems to be mechanically functional and thematically appropriate.
I would still prefer to play games where players do not try to perform thematically inappropriate magics, rather than have to resort to these rules, but I can see why magi would want the spells.
Does this matter to anyone?
There are 2 issues there: Pink Dot defenses and Personnal Wards.
For pink dots, OTOH, I'm all for avoiding it by consensual agreement and only perform "appropriate magics".
For personnal wards, this matters to me, and I use mostly a similar method. I hate "absolute" wards, like the magus with a ReTe ward against metal being utterly protected against it, even in the theoretical case of a 8-miles sword striking him.
So, for personnal wards, I'm all for the "soak" option, although I use the base level of the guidelines as the "+5 soak" level, with each subsequent magnitude granting +5.
Note to Chicoazian and everybody:
Chico, the fun you've been having coming up with NPC personalities is completely encouraged! You've given me several story seed ideas already, which players may or may not come across.
This puts me in a weird position, though, of having to police the wiki so that those plot hooks don't get edited out. And THEN I want to start tweaking other character descriptions for further plot hooks, only I can't remember who is playing who, or what is stat'd out or paid for.
To combat this, I've added the following line to the "Grog List" pages:
If people could go through and indicate which characters they are playing, or otherwise lay claim to, I would really appreciate it.
Ideally, every character that's stat-ed out should have their own page on the wiki, right?
And I have no problem with people playing/putting words in the mouths of characters I've created, as long as they don't go 180º from their "established" personality/goals (e.g., if someone posted that Celestria grabs a sword and slaughters everyone in the room, unless she'd been massively ReMe or something).
Due to a fair number of at least Pious +03 people for all the religions and the lack of single men ,
Celestria would not wish to earn the Reputation , Adultress.
Under English customary law , afaik , she would simply be fined for any sexual activity outside marriage.
With Sharia Law , she could get stoned to death , though i need to check circumstances for actual punishment.
I did of course read ReMe as Ream , as in , she was massively Rego Mentemed , again.
According to the Quran, it is a sin to kill an unmarried (virgin) woman. So the common practice, at least in modern ages, is to torture the woman into confessing her adultery, and then marrying her to one of the guards, who then spends the night sanctifying the marriage (against her will) before her stoning. In Saudia Arabia, you are partially buried for the stoning, the depth based on your crime. If you get free before being knocked unconscious, you are considered to be absolved of guilt by god. A man committing adultery is buried to the knees. A woman is buried to the neck.
I have a friend of mine who is a professional researcher that specializes in historical Islamic practices, but getting her to answer specific questions about 13th century Islamic legal/religious practices is hard. She either answers in more detail than I can digest, or she becomes suspect about my motives.
I actually happen to have a copy of [i]Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe[/i] standing about eight feet away. It's been a few years since I've last read it, but I can probably track down what penalty (if any) a woman incurred for the sin or crime of adultery in the thirteenth century.
Oh, right, and as this is Castille and not England, Celestria would be tried under Civil Law, not English.
It's good to know the specific sort of geeks I'm playing with =D
Agreed with Peregrine.
AFAIK, I've put every character I stated on the wiki, but have no problem with people using the grogs, especially raoudha, given her position.
Just wondering how many weeks this whole introduction thing will take?
No idea. This is my first time running a pbp. How long would you guys like it to last?
Yeah, that's the downside to pbp/pbem. It takes a lot longer than tabletop gaming does. Sometimes, I can be rather impatient, sitting there going "Post, dang ya!" (the up and the down side to being underemployed). My Champions pbem has been going on since 7 December 2009 and we just finished the first adventure for the main group, and the first adventure for the third-tier group finished about a month, month and a half ago.
eta: However, that game did have a three-turn-long combat sequence (each turn is 12 rounds, and most of the characters have speeds 5 or 6, which means they went five or six times a turn...about five pc's, and about five or six npc's, so ten people going five or six times a turn, and that reaaaaaly dragged things down.
If I'm being pressed to put a timetable, I'd say I'd like to be done by Labor Day. On the other hand, though, I don't want it to be rushed and lost the quality.
Tl;dr: I think it should take as long as it takes.
I did a little research on the whole Celestria question. Somewhat surprisingly, my copy of Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe had nothing on penalties for single women committing adultery with married men: all the penalties described applied either to married women committing adultery, or married men.
So, a-googling I did go. And, as I always do when I venture forth into these dark woods, I found lots of cool stuff on tangents. For example, if a woman lost her virginity, she had to wear a hood (toca) just like married women, while virgins had long hair without a hood. But, as near as I can tell, in Castile, there were no real penalties (at least, not under the law) until later, in the mid 13th century. (primary source: Genesis of Chastity-Honour Code and its Evolution: a Cast Study of Gender Construction, which opens up as a pdf)
I couldn't find anything about how English law punished adultery in this time frame – anything I found was from either much earlier (which was apparently no big deal) or much later (when things got pretty harsh).
One thing I did notice was that the penalties were almost universally more severe for women who committed adultery than for men, and the consensus was that it was more a matter of ensuring the legitimacy of the children than any moral concerns. Also, penalties for women were almost always for married women committing adultery; single women were either an afterthought or ignored altogether in this regard.
Under Church law, it would be “simply” a matter of doing penance...which would be basically fasting for a time (granted, the Church definition of “fasting” is pretty lenient). The time was usually, as far as I could tell, at least a year or two. As an aside: why the penance was fasting as opposed to something harsher or more obvious was to protect the offended husband or wife; fasting is not an obvious type of penance, so people wouldn't know by looking that she was doing penance for adultery.
Did a quick search for al-Andalus, didn't find anything.
Of course, all this doesn't mean that the locals won't have their own law to dispense if/when the situation arises.
That's excellent
Though, now that I think about it, that's sensible. I'm reminded of those afghan girls who were killed by their family after a rape because the family honor had been tarnished.
This is waaaaay off topic (kinda), but it seems they've re-located Atlantis. Now, they think it's on the coast of Spain, north of Cadiz and west of the Straits of Gibraltar.
Apparently only about 175 miles/280 km SSW of the covenant. You know, just in case we ever get bored and decide to check it out or something 
Awesome!