Subject: Hey, not always!
Author:
Posted on: 2013-03-19 17:27:00 UTC
I know field agents are more fun to write for a lot of people, but I got bored every time I tried to write a mission. Plenty of us have a lot more fun on the sidelines!
Does all characters we make in the PPC has to be Agents? I intend to make Darklordaakmal more of a supplier of stuffs, with a small army of manufacturing orcs, that his only purpose in the PPC continuum is to provide textile or other supplies to interested PPC agents. He lives in World-One-As-The-Seventh-Age universe. He also will interact a lot with agents, or to his own orcs, or other characters. In short, my own fictional world, but bound to PPC.
Has this been done before? Is it seen favourably? Can he be sporked, if he is seen as too Stu-ly? And do I need a Permission to craft this character?
Yep, you do need permission for this! Sounds like a neat idea, though. Would this be a free-use character (such as Makes-Things)?
But first I need to craft the Permission Request and get it. But I think I may have to make this character free-use, just because I can't write every purchase fic every week. How does free-use characters work anyway?
You write the character, or just their description, declare them free-use, and then they're free for anyone to use. So anyone is allowed to write Makes-Things, say, or the Sunflower Official - but you can't go about writing other people's agents without getting their permission.
hS
First of all, yes, you would need Permission for this. That goes for anything intended to be added to the PPC shared universe, whether it's an agent or not. The main point of the Permission process is to make sure that anyone who wants to write about the PPC is a good writer and that their characters aren't Sueish enough to deserve sporking.
Second, no, not every PPC character is an agent. Since you're checking into the wiki, I recommend looking up the "PPC Staff" and "Civilians in HQ" categories for examples. And, like Kitty said, it wouldn't be the first time a more-or-less-freelance operative set up shop in HQ—see particularly "Leto Haven" and "General Store."
Personally, I've always wondered where PPC agents get new clothes when their old ones are glitter-stained and tattered beyond repair, so I would be interested to hear more about your idea. I'm sure some of them steal stuff while on missions, but they can't all do that all the time, or someone would surely notice. Plus, some people (*cough*Nume*cough*) have very particular standards for themselves, and probably can't find what they're looking for in a badfic.
~Neshomeh
Clothing: Jeans, trousers, shirts, T-shirts, jogging pants, sarong, blouse, pants. 70% cotton, 20% ShelobSilk, 10% asbestos.
Armour: Gambesons, Padded trousers, Heavy mittens, maille made from steel, Lorica Segmentata made from plastic pails, and cotton paddings, sarong(made-up), Mongol leather-silk armour made from leather and 100% ShelobSilk. Unless stated, 80% ShelobSilk, 20% cotton. Fireproof version: 70% ShelobSilk, 20% asbestos, 10% cotton.
Crafts: Tablecloth, oven mittens, etc.
Based on order. Specify colour, size, and fireproof or not, or you'll only get whites. Even the leather, heheheh.
On Darklordaakmal:
He was a 17-year-old who stumbled upon an sick Orckid when he was out fishing with his friends. He met the Orc Chieftain, who then asked his help on various things. 5 years later after serving him, the Orc Chieftain, along with three allied chieftains, raised raised him as their Dark Lord, with sworn duties to help the Orcs rise to new prosperity and delay the return of Morgoth, if he could.
Now at the head of 500-odd orcs, Darklordaakmal tries to maintain order, improve their social standing, and generally tries to find other Darklords around Sabah, in order to decide whther to ensure the orcs remain hidden, or to introduce them to society.
So, this guy will be 22 now.
I had listed what he will sell, but since Darklordaakmal is young, he may need feedback. He is working based on the previous Darklord's ideas, who died of old age around 1990. So, he is green in the business world. He's just a normal human, and he works more like a diplomat-manager-treasurer than an Orcus on His Throne, to qoute the Tvtropes. In short, inspired by a feudal lord's duties, if he isn't being an absentee lord.
Anything else?
Haha I'm tempted to say you should make clothing out of 100% asbestos because why not.
I don't know about you needing Permission, or how others view the idea, but I personally think that'd be a very interesting character. Most of what is written about the PPC (which I just accidentally misspelled as PCP XP) is missions about badfics. A look into the mundane parts of the PPC could be fun!
I don't know about most of this - I may not be very shiny anymore, but I am still pretty new. I do know that PPC characters do NOT have to be field agents. There are loads of infrastructure departments that deal with the more 'mundane' aspects of the organization; to quote the Wiki, 'The Infrastructure Departments are those that keep the PPC running.'
Departments from this category include - but aren't limited to - the Department of Dead Author Electricity Generation (which powers the PPC by using the electricity created when dead authors roll in their graves due to badfic) and the Department of Finance (which deals with financial stuff like income, overhead, etc.)
Also, I've encountered a few stories - missions and intermissions - where there were agents or side characters running their own little shops within HQ, so there's that, too.
I wish I could've been more helpful, but that's about the extent of my knowledge here...
Although not quite helpful. I'm looking into the Wiki now, hope i could be enlightened more.
Non-action departments are not my strong suit, sadly...
And I discovered that there are shopowners in PPC universe. One is a weaponsmith, and another is a pharmacist. There isn't an armourer that I found, so Darklordaakmal can be an armourer/boutique. Although there won't be any fashionable clothes there.
I may need to look in deeper. May be there is a need for Permission. If there is, time to fill in the Permission Self-Check.
1/ If you are writing stories in the PPC shared universe, you need permission. So yes, this would (and the Self-Check is a very useful tool for that).
2/ The original shop in PPC HQ was Leto's General Store. I don't know about the weaponsmith or the pharmacist, but I believe you. ;) There is also an armoury, in the sense of supplier of weapons - someone who supplies armour I've not heard of, so you could be onto something. Supplying the stuff agents wear around HQ could also be handy (I'm picturing a shop entirely filled with second-hand jeans...)
3/ One reason most PPC characters are Action agents is that, well, they're more fun to write. Writing a story about John Callahan, Fitter of Jeans - and making it exciting to read and write - would be a pretty difficult task. Most Infrastructure agents (which is the technical term for what you're proposing) who have stories written about them tend to end up drafted into Action work.
(3.5/ That said, I have a burning desire to write a dramatic tale of accountancy in the face of adversity for the Department of Finance. Ah, someday...)
4/ Are you aware that your English use is somewhat, er, off? In this thread you've said things like 'I may need to look in deeper', or 'Does all characters we make in the PPC has to be Agents' - those would more typically be rendered 'I may need to investigate further' and 'Do all characters[...] have to be agents'.
hS
I know field agents are more fun to write for a lot of people, but I got bored every time I tried to write a mission. Plenty of us have a lot more fun on the sidelines!
4/ Which is why I'm joining the PPC in the first place. So that people will correct me if I'm wrong, or alienly speaking, like what you just did. I want to write a novel, which by now is just jottings here and there, and having a community that corrects me freely is quite an asset. I still need to pay attention on what I write though, sometimes old mistakes just keep on resurfacing.
3/ I wanted to write a character that is in the sidelines, hearing awesome tales around him everyday, but having his own set of problems and adventures himself. Which may be pretty boring for those in the thick of action, but still quite entertaining to the reader.
2/ I did had a role-play on the other day. I accepted an order of fireproof gloves, gambesons, sarongs, and other articles of clothing. It was made of spidersilk from the Spawn of Shelob. My orcs were mostly knitters, to support their own measly income from the lack of opportunity to raid the modern world. The adventures could be looking for new spiders, orcs' emergencies, maintaining the lair where the clothes were knit, etc.etc.
1/ After having filled the Permission Self-Check, who am I supposed to deliver it to? I didn't see any email the other day I looked at it.
(The title is messy, phrasing-wise, but I've still not gotten the hang of the character limitations in the titles of the Board's posts.)
I don't know if this comment would be counter-productive for helping you deal with the parts of your speech that genuinely are or could be interpreted as mistakes, but I think that having an, as you said, "alienly" speech pattern could be a good distinguishing characteristic for Aakmal.
It speaks to his history as someone who's a little foreign to his surroundings, which I think is an interesting angle. A lot of PPC recruits spend approximately fifteen minutes taking in "Wow, I guess this place really is nothing like home." and then settle into patterns of speech and behavior similar to the rest of the organization. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, when you consider the way that one's own speech patterns might adapt when immersed in accents, phraseologies, and terms that were formerly never experienced, but I've noticed it in most of the missions I've read, and it might be interesting to see a new take on it.
Someone who was raised in a distinctly different setting from the technologically saturated and dimension-hopping world of HQ, speaking a different language, and behaving and thinking in a way separate from others that he interacts with can be a springboard for an interesting character, and nothing drives home that difference more in a written medium than the way that his dialogue is constructed.
Just a thought. Feel free to discard or accept as much of it as you want. In fact, I think I went on about it for a little longer than I should have as it was.
This next part isn't related to the previous idea, but I was wanting to ask about it. How high and low would the sizes go with the clothing? How many body types would the clothing-maker orcs service?
I ask because general human(oid)-fit shops probably wouldn't work for Agents with unusual physiologies, and those Agents would probably need repairs or replacements after a couple of missions traversing the multitude of worlds and having their clothes ripped up fighting Sues. Add that to the fact that some of the more heavily-built species would more likely have more protection of the biological sort and inadvertently might not take as good care of their clothing and armor as they could, and you'd have steady business supplying them.
But since it is based on orders, there may be some wriggle rooms. I heard about an agent who is a dragon, and Elven body may be bigger than humans, and we may have to fit dragons or minis too. This will be an interesting story to ponder, as Darklordaakmal tries to fulfill his customers' orders. which is why I entertain this idea for some time.
For now, we only cater to human body types, and sizes go from S to XXXL. The culture shock when we enter PPC, and having to cater to weird body types, is part of what I want to tell about when writing this story later.
IV] Good luck, then. But beware, writing a novel takes lots of resources (time and patience being two of them).
III] Eeeh, it can work. See hS and VM's responses.
II] "I did had..." should be "I had..."
I] It's a Self-Check. You don't deliver it to anyone. You just look at how well you could answer these questions.
Should I double-check it with someone else? I believe I should.
There's a Submit button at the end of the form, and that should send it to a place where hS or somebody can look at your answers. I say hS because he's the one who set it up. I don't know who else has access at this point.
The thing is, though, if you aren't confident in your answers, that may be a sign you aren't ready yet. Some of the questions have more than one good answer, or no really good answer, so it's a test of how comfortable you are with the reasons why an answer might be good or bad as much as it is of solid PPC canon and writing knowledge.
~Neshomeh
I'll go find the Self-Check now. I may need to stew over it for some time, before sending the answer. I make my Golden Rule never to be sure of anything, so knowing that it can be sent to Huinesoron is a good thing to know.
...but what's this Self-Check?
I believe it's linked in the Permission article on the wiki. I'd put a direct link here, but my internet's not being very cooperative right now. It's quite easy to find, though. (And if you can't find it, or you're feeling lazy, I'm sure someone with a good internet connection will be happy to link you).
~DF