Journal

Journals are your character's personal story: a record of what's happened to your character from your own perspective. Journals are not physical in-character journal items, though if you wish you can also keep one of those in parallel. Rather, it's a game system to write things down to remember specific events and highlight important things. While your character is alive, only staff members can view your journal, where they can use what you put there to shape scenes and come up with ideas for player engagement.

The first entry in a character's journal is usually their background. This entry contains the things that you have imagined have happened to your character in the run up to them spawning into the game world and you beginning play. Background are extremely useful for most players, as it gives you a nice firm foundation to begin roleplaying on. Backgrounds can explain and motivate how your character reacts to specific situations once they've begun play, shape their specific motivations, and also explain the life experiences they've already had and how they've contributed to the skills they acquired before arriving on Hyphae.

By typing JOURNAL on your character, you will open up an in-game editor. From here, you can ADD BACKGROUND to add your background if it doesn't exist, or EDIT BACKGROUND if it does. Alternatively, you may ADD ENTRY which will add the next numerical entry in your journal, where you will be able to add a title to the entry and write the body. Entries may be touched up with EDIT ENTRY #, so don't sweat being perfect the first time through. Staff will be able to see a log of your edits, though, so revisionist history will be detected!

It is not mandatory for players to keep their journal up to date or engage with the system at all; only if they find it helpful or amusing to do so. Should your character perish or should you opt to retire them from play, you will have the option to publish their journal to our OOC Journal Repository after a sufficient cooldown period, should you wish. You will be able to edit your character's journals before depositing them to remove anything you deem too sensitive or embarrassing.

The in-game journal system can also be accessed from your character panel on the website if you wish to make and edit entries there instead.