Well, as a start, and what seems the most obvious, is that we need cabinet members who are more active, can commit the time required to get this region out of its inactive state and are more willing to put in the work when things slow to a crawl. One shouldn't have to do all the work themselves, but they should be prepared to when it becomes necessary.
I find the Gazette is a rather sad publication to write for because there is nothing happening on the meaningful level culture wise to write about. It is possible to write regional updates, but then the rest is just musings of what Lazarus could be, what is bad about Lazarus, and what is good about Lazarus. That might be interesting for a few issues, but that sort of issue quickly gets boring, and at some point, only foreign ambassadors are reading only it for duties sake.
I don't volunteer for Vice-Minister or Minister roles, as it means taking time away from things I would rather be doing, as I'd much rather invest my efforts on admin stuff, with regional culture and thus regional activity implications.
A lot of admin work is one step forward, and three steps back, as I figure out how to do something only to find a roadblock.
That said, I am at the point I have a way to create passworded rooms, with bot responses, in the new plugin/add on (which can post to sub-forum posts and have a back in forth between the forum posts and the chat area). So, on the RP activities front i.e. the three RP activities I am building, now I just have to painstakingly create images, and write responses for the bot to say.
It is too late at night for me to say it all clearly, though to sum up the key RP culture ideas:
- There will be a near future modern-tech military command organization, which will have two task forces/sub-groups,
- The first task force will be Task Force Argos, which will be for nations that consider themselves more European-ish, Caucasus, Balkan, in RP culture stye.
- The second task force, which I am still thinking of names for, will be Asia-Pacific orientated, so it is going to have naming more focused toward that region.
- Each task force will have its own RP naming structure for its command group, so Argos is going to be named more along the lines of Greek/Byzantine, Turkish, and the Balkans.
- LazCorp will have the purpose of a Reclamation/Reconstruction authority, in this scenario. They will be aid workers, do construction work, and all the things that you'd expect them to do.
I considered alternatives, like some straight up only Greek/Byzantine concept, or reverting to some undead thing, but that is more like hard theming, versus running with a RP concept which can be developed by residents and citizens alike.
Near future modern tech is going to be a lot of fun, as that is really open book as far as what we can RP.
I am thinking already of the first regional scenarios being:
- Some rebellion situations, where we can draw from other games villains like Kane, and so on, and have RP battles,
- Feuds between the two task forces, as they come from different regions within Lazarus, and not all the nations are going to agree with each other on things,
- Terrorist attacks and general civil unrest situations, where the task forces get dragged in to clean up the mess, and LazCorp would be great for a RP in this scenario too, as they could RP the aid workers and the general reconstruction, while the rest of the players battle it out with the "bad guys".
- A war between one or more specific nations, where all the sides (i.e. task forces) are having to come in and try and stop the fighting or dissuade them from fighting.
- If we take from some scenario from Pacific-Rim, we could do an actual fight monsters/space aliens scenario, with mechs and such.
- We could also do a more general alien encounter, where a mysterious ship is discovered, and eventually reverse-engineered.
- We could RP cyber-attacks, or attacks on LazCorp headquarters, and even have sub-plots of rivalries between players, and evil factions working within LazCorp.
- Each Task Force will have its own regional scenarios, where the other task force doesn't get involved, like you wouldn't expect the Task Force Argos to be involved in "Asia", or the Asia-Pacific Task force to be involved in "Europe".
Why I think this will be better than outright replacing themes or whatever, is that this can occur in a progression of us deciding what works best in a RP and taking it further.
Anything we don't like we can just call non-canon and avoid using again, except for some special event or general fun.
I eventually see at the end of this us having a RP military organization, and eventually a political one on top of that, which isn't based on LazCorp, though if we RP near future modern-tech, it doesn't matter whether LazCorp is the only corporation, or one of several.
Once we've decided that I think we could branch out into actually having full-scale RP events with other regions like TSP, TEP, where we've organized a scenario in advance.
Then this is more of a maybe but could be fun, IC interactions in-game, where Lazarus and another region pretend to be at war or annoyed with each other IC, and then it gets resolved RP wise, which is part of my wider thoughts on reviving IC in gameplay, which IMO is all but dead. These would be mutual agreements to RP IC, which are discussed OOC at the high levels of each region, and finalized so there are no issues OOC, when it is announced. It could also be done as a situation where everyone (except at the top of each region) is in the dark, but it is implied to be IC, and for everyone to be required act IC if they want to participate. OOC bad behavior would obviously be punished in their subsequent regions.