CoPaP officially launches to the public!

[Orleron]

We would like to present The Confederation of Planes & Planets, or CoPaP for short. Picture this. You've made your home on PW A, and one day, you find a portal. Instead of that portal leading to another server on your PW's network, it leads to an entirely other WORLD, or PLANE, which exists as another PW. Now picture that there are not just two PW's connected, but hundreds, forming a super multiverse of PW's, each representing a portion of a planet, wildspace, or plane. You now understand the idea of CoPaP. We are a collection of linked PW's, four currently, that aims to reproduce the ENTIRE D&D setting, and give players the ability to travel between them all. But here's the kicker. These PW's are all servervault servers that do not share servervaults over the network! All this is being done without fear of character file corruption or any of the other problems that plague other PW's who have done similar connections. See our new website at http://www.copap.org for more info!

Besides the way we connect our PW's together (using the VaultSTER plugin for NWNX, which is only accessible to CoPaP members right now), there is a lot more to CoPaP than that. In a nutshell, we are a low magic, heavy RP, low experience, application-required, servervault server organization. CoPaP lays down a set of guidelines for PW builders to follow when making a world. These can be found on our website. We also provide a template, called the AvlisZero module, upon request. This is basically a blank module that runs exactly like the PW called Avlis. It is a well-known and proven PW system that is constantly being worked on and improved. The advantage of using this zero module is that it gives new PW's a huge codebase to start with so they don't have to spend a year developing one of their own. They can start NOW, and modify an already existing code.

For those who want to play on CoPaP, come on in! We currently have four worlds to choose from, each of them at different stages of development, and with different stories and feels, but all linked, if you can find the way. Make your home on one of these PW's, or become a planet-jumping, planewalking adventurer. Your choice.

For those who want to look into getting their PW to be a part of CoPaP, we are looking for the following things:


Objective: To recreate the entire D&D setting. This means making every plane, every chunk of Wildspace, every independent campaign world, as well as Toril, Oerth, Krynn, Mystara and all the other official campaign planets and settings.

Any world that furthers the above objective is needed! Worlds can be broken down into categories: Homemade planets, Official Campaign settings, Outer Planes, Inner Planes, Transient Planes, Homemade Demiplanes, Official Demiplanes, and Spelljammer Wildspace/Phlogiston servers.



Homemade planets

This will be the bread and butter of CoPaP, most likely. A homemade planet is a campaign setting that you made on your own. It's not Forgotten Realms, or Krynn... it's your own world. Avlis is an example of this. It was used as a campaign setting by me for about 15+ years before NWN came out.

We can always use these in CoPaP, and there is no limit to the number we can have.


Official planets

Toril, Krynn, Oerth, Mystara, and any other officially released campaign setting by Wizards of The Coast or another third party gaming company. Some of these, like Toril even have subdivisions... Kara Tur, Maztica, Al Qadim, etc.

Anyone who does these is also welcome in CoPaP, but there are some catches. First of all, re-creating any one of these things is going to be a TON of work and require a LOT of server space. If you think about the PW called ALFA, they are ONLY trying to recreate the Forgotten Realms, and it is proving to be a monumental task that will take years and years. The CoPaP version of Forgotten Realms will be a tiny tiny piece of entire whole, yet it alone will likely be as large as ALFA at its peak, if this succeeds, and ALFA will need well over 50 servers to do what it needs to do.

So, no one person will be doing a whole campaign setting to themselves. We WILL however most likely have a single coordinator for all the servers that fall under that world. So in the future we would like to get a FR coordinator, a Greyhawk coordinator, etc.

**Coordinator positions will only be given to seasoned veterans of successful PW's only. They are not recommended for people who are just learning to do the toolset or play NWN. A person with superb organizational skills and a LOT of people working under them will probably do fine though, if they aren't proficient at building directly.

**There can only be ONE.... CoPaP will not have 5 Baldur's Gates and 3 Candlekeeps. It will have one. These servers are important and petitions to do them will be accepted only by those who can prove they know how to build a PW well. That's the other catch.

Currently, CoPaP only has a coordinator for the Mystara campaign setting, Ferus. We do not have any others and are looking for such individuals willing to do this.



Outer Planes

One of the things that excites me the most is servers that do only one outer plane. There is so much potential in these servers because they can be linked to MANY other CoPaP servers with very little effort of plot.

If you want to do one of these kinds of servers, we really want your company. Ideas include doing a layer of hell, or the Abyss, or the Seven Heavens. Making a whole PW for a single outer plane or a single layer of an outer plane is a kickass concept, IMHO, and it's a good way to get our attention.


Inner Planes

Almost equally exciting, these would present quite a challenge. The NWN engine is not too good at representing underwater areas, or other kinds of elemental environments. Whoever did a server like this could make it an elemental pocket in another elemental plane. For example, their world could be an earth pocket or ball in the Plane of Air, or an earth ball in the Plane of Fire. Almost all of them will need earth involved somehow so people can walk around. NWN does not do the 3-dimensional travel needed in pure elemental areas.

The other problem with these would be the harsh nature of the plane. A fire plane better have a script that burns all players who are not wearing fire protection. That kind of thing. If you made a server like that, it might be too harsh and you might have trouble getting players, so you'd have to think of ways around it.

But nonetheless, these would be welcome additions to CoPaP.


Transient Planes

There are 3 transient planes: Astral, Ethereal, and Shadow

Anything that does one of these would be very welcome AND cool. There are some GREAT haks coming out that give renditions of the Shadow Plane. Ethereal would be easy with the right fog effects. Astral would need earth pockets, like the plane of Air example above... and it would need some kind of funky umbilical cord hak.

One idea for Shadow and Ethereal is to take an already existing PW and remake some of its areas in a shadowy or ethereal version. For example, do a Shadow Rockhome, so PC's on Rockhome could jump into the shadow plane, travel a few areas, and come out at a great distance away on the real Rockhome, just like in the spell Shadow Walk.


Homemade Demiplanes

This is exactly like homemade worlds. They are your own creation. They just aren't a planet in space, but rather a pocket plane in another plane.

Best examples of these would be pocket planes in the Ethereal or Shadow or Astral. Transient planes are the most common places to have pocket planes. These will probably be secondarily the bread and butter of CoPaP, as I said above.


Official Demiplanes

Ravenloft is the most well known example of these. We would recommend a coordinator for these if someone is doing an officially documented area, like Straad's palace for example, or Lord Soth's realm. But places like Ravenloft are build so that any kind of plane can be made up, or even created and owned by a PC if done right.

If there are any other official demiplanes, they are welcome too.


Spelljammer Wildspace/Phlogiston

These servers will be the most highly novel and coolest of them all in some respects. They will also be HIGHLY important in getting from planet to planet.

The details of spelljammers are too long to go into, but in a nutshell Spelljammers is D&D space travel. Getting in a magically powered boat that can take you into space, and going to other planets. Flying from Krynn to Toril would be something you could do with spelljammers. All the planets in CoPaP are assumed to exist in their own Crystal Spheres of space floating in a sea of phlogiston ether. Making space servers to connect these planets is something we REALLY need, and would be more than happy about if one applied to join.


Currently, CoPaP has two planes, Ysgard and Abyss, being worked on. We have one FR server, one Mystara server, and a host of homemade worlds. So as you can see, there is plenty of room!



Novel Ideas

Novel ideas can be presented too, but we'll need to give careful consideration.

One novel idea is to make CoPaP not only exist in all space and reality, but also in time. Being able to time travel to a modern server would be very damn cool, but it would present many issues that we have not looked at yet.... such as the fact that our minimum hakpak size would triple, or how we would handle people bringing back laser guns into the past. But I would still consider it if it came to that, just because it's a really cool idea.


Once again, we love to entertain questions on our website. See ya there!

[DaShark]

All this sounds very very nice, except the time travel part. First of it has too many paradoxes, and secondly laser guns in the D&D/NWN world just sounds too far out.
I'm just so happy I chose this server to play on, it's gonna be damn great.

[Reinstag]

Dibs on a Pulse Rifle!!!!

[Orleron]

hehe... It was only an idea I threw out there to display a point. There are no plans to ever do a modern server.

[Actually]

I don't think it'd be all that hard, really... Especially after HotU gives us OnEquip handlers.

It would be relatively easy to assign weapons different "time period" variables (or even a specific naming convention for their tags), with a check on each OnEquip to determine if you are on a server where a given weapon will function.

No reason why blackpowder, or better, weapons would have to migrate servers at all. At least no functional ones.

Hmmmmmm....

Bye Now,
Jerry Cornelius - *wanders off to brainstorm*

[ave]

Move my post if you wish to the correspondent forum
but,
I have serious problem activating an account in all the other CoPap sites. Also to the COPAP Federation page. I went and typed my name and password as well as my mail adress but no activation mail came yet. I went back try it to do it all over but i was informed that my mail adress and name are already in use by some other (probably me). I can't either log in since i haven't activated it via mail (since no activation mail ever reached me). So what can i do? Why the activation mail never comes?

[Orleron]

Fixed

[Arete']

WOW, you people are doing a great job here. I am currently playing in Avlis and am enjoying it alot. I have recently downloaded a public PW that I am running for friends and have become incresingly intrested in world building. My friends and I, about 8 of us total, would love to begin makeing a compatable world with Avlis. I would love to recieve the "starter pak* so to speak.


Darin G.

[Orleron]

Send me a PM with your world's background and concept and a detailed explanation of why you would like to join, and how much time you could spend doing it. Running your own PW is a daunting task and makes a big impact on your daily life!

[DaShark]

IMO timetravel is impossible, as I see every part of the time seamlessly bound together, so if something happens in the past it happens in the future. Our present has a past and a future, the action in every time period has influence on the other. If a guy in the future decides to take a time trip back to the past, his future self would already have done it, and the changes that was his intentions to make are already made. So if timetravel is possible, either you wouldn't be able to change anything with it, because it has already happened, or the change would happen the instant you even think about travelling and changing it. So if I thought about travelling back to my past self, and gave my past self a good tip on the horsetracks, I would instantly become a millionaire or nothing would happen, as something or someone has intervened in some way.

That's just my opinion on the subject.

[Brick]

Clearly you know nothing about time travel. Haven't you ever seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure?

[j5hale3]

clearly, He know little about the current "story-telling" theories about time travel. Go see "Timeline" for one example.

Best regards,

[DaShark]

Sure I've seen Bill and Ted, they are kewl.

And I would like to quote myself: "That's just my opinion on the subject. "

[Reinstag]

Screw you all, I still called dibs on the Pulse Rifle.

"Game over man, game over!!"

[Vroshgrak]

"this is my boom stick"

Trapped in time
surrounded by evil
low on gas.

Army of Darkness
(best time travel movie ever)

anyway back to the subject at hand before this hijacking.

the copap website is looking good, ill start reading the forums if i have time.

[Olorin]

I wonder if there are any plans to add a Sigil PW, using CODI's haks and scripts? I realize it would be a very large undertaking, and would probably be impossible until CoPaP's got a larger, stable set of member PWs, but I can't help being excited by the possibility. I hope anyone out there who's played Planescape: Torment will agree with me.[/url]

[Orleron]

As with all of the settings, we are waiting for people to come forward with offers of building such places, Sigil included.

I have not approached CODI, but it would be neat if they went in with us on this. Only problem I forsee is that they have an incredible amount of haks to their stuff, and I'm not certain how compatible they would be, or what their philosiphy on game balance is.

[Olorin]

As with all of the settings, we are waiting for people to come forward with offers of building such places, Sigil included.

I have not approached CODI, but it would be neat if they went in with us on this. Only problem I forsee is that they have an incredible amount of haks to their stuff, and I'm not certain how compatible they would be, or what their philosiphy on game balance is.

Ask a stupid question, I guess...I should've realized the answer would be "if someone wants to build one and link it up." I'd volunteer myself, but I don't have the expertise or resources to run a PW. CODI themselves are not likely to be directly involved in such an endeavor, I think, since they seem to be focusing on providing the tools and materials to build Planscape modules, and not on producing the modules themselves.

Here's hoping someone else had the same idea as me, and can actually put it into motion!