Return to Whithorn & Local RP

I had returned to my home town of Whithorn (Galloway) hoping to spend a bit of time there, working in my forge and generally concentrating my RP efforts in the town forums.

All went well for a week. I produced another sword in the forge (takes six days to do this) building my stockpile up to four plus the clan sword which I keep for myself. I managed to sell a few pig carcasses on the overstocked market to keep myself in iron for the week, kitted myself out in a new grey hat and black collar (looking quite distinguished), spent evenings in the Frosty Tankard chatting with old friends.

On the town forum, besides kicking my forge site into gear with its apprentices and visitors, I found myself in a more general RP situation on a thread entitled 'The Further Adventures of Raebert' (Raebert is a NPC forum character run by a friend of mine. 'Bert', as he is known, is a 8 year old redheaded michevious lad who lives with his adopted mum and dad (MacTavish player characters) and kicks around with my own NPC apprentice, Angus, when the opportunity presents).

The storyline was fairly typical of the localised RP events which populate the RK town forums, . Because one must physically be in the town concerned to participate on that town's forums, most of these types of RP threads are about local places, personalities and happenings. Common themes include 'permanent' threads for places within the township, courtships, weddings, significant local events.

These local RPs often utilise other 'functional' local threads to help create a shared background. For example, in Whithorn there is a Town Map thread on which are located all of the ingame town 'functions' for those who are interested (eg. townhall, market, various taverns, the beach / forest / orchards, barracks, church, roads, workshops, cottages, hovels) as well as RP forum based locations (eg. local manors and castles, local landmark features (eg. 'The Box' in Whithorns Village Green where people have been coming to say their piece, amongst other things, for the past past year and a half) etc) - generally players contacting the thread's caretaker and asking to be allocated one of the already drawn sites on the map, which is then added in and linked to the relevant thread of the player.

Different towns in Scotland have quite distinct town forums which is hardly surprising considering the different histories and players of which the towns are constituted. Over time, activity on a town's forums can vary quite a deal.