[Caymen Greener]

Taskforce Phoenix
2021 ARES HANDBOOK

Welcome to Taskforce Phoenix, our multi-ship roleplay part of Ares Roleplay Project. We encourage you to take a look at this guide before you move on. As usual in Ares, just contact the CO or Sim Officers with any questions.

Overview
Each member who wishes to participate will take on the role of a ship. Yes, an entire ship. Now your ship may have a key figurehead (such as the Commanding Officer or your Chief Engineer or a Medic or Diplomat). And that character will be the face of your ship in most interactions.

Ships will have a specifications and roster thread, which will also contain major updates along the way. "Activity" including captains logs, mission posts, and more will have a unique template in a subforum to keep things clean. Members will also interact in either self-driven or Ares team-provided missions using a shared thread to conduct that mission (this last part would look more like "forum roleplay" you see on other sites).

So while you will all be on your own ship, there will be ample opportunity to interact at the character level via joint ship missions, individual joint crew missions, and side plot stories.

Timeline and Setting

Current Year: 2381 (same as USS Ares), will turn to 2382 on Jan 1, 2022
Stardate Calculator: http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/sternenzeit.htm

Folks can play Federation, Romulan, or Klingon, or in fact any other faction as long as they can formulate a good backstory and way to get involved with the other members. Technology should be limited to the ~2380s/ but images and inspiration can of course be drawn from STO and other avenues.

We will tackle other timelines and eras in the future, but for now we should stick to the prime universe for simplicity sake.

Member Basics
Members of Phoenix start out by creating a ship and crew. A ship template has been provided so you can easily put up the basics of your ship (name, class, registry, basic specs, image, senior crew roster, etc).

The commanding officer of each ship should start at an in-character rank of "Commander", and then be promoted to "Captain", but this is not a hard set rule any long. But it allows for some character growth, and some built-in promotions on the ship as well. Each member controls the ranks downstream on his/her ship.

Ships should follow standards from Memory Alpha or Memory Beta, and not necessarily from STO. Remember that we're about 20 years behind STO. Feel free to use imagery and inspiration from STO, but keep the specs to the ~2380s.

Multi-Ship Roleplay Basics
As described above, each member is taking on an entire ship. You will have characters that make up your command staff, or key positions, and then you will likely have a main character that serves as your "star". This person becomes the voice of your ship and could be anyone from the CO to the Chief Engineer to the Bartender to a Medic. These key characters would have opportunities to tell stories on their ship of course, but then they would have ample time to spend interacting with other ships.

For example, if you were dying to roleplay a Security officer, make that your "key player". You might write announcements and captain's logs from your CO's perspective, but then any interactions with other ships on missions would be with your security officer. So if a few ships go together for a mission, one ship may bring their CO, another their key player who is a medic, and then your security officer as key player. This would thus be a diverse team, and yet theoretically involving three entire crews.

As mentioned above, most stories and missions will come from you. However, to spur things on, the Ares team will release "mission packs" that can be claimed by one or more ships. For example, a mission might be released entitled "The Gulf of Cardassia" where 3 ships must engage an area near Cardassian space that appears to be rich in resources and yet unclaimed territory as of yet. Three ships in Ares could sign up for that and then start a thread to get the mission started. As long as those ships are active on that thread every month, they would eventually complete that mission within a month or so.

A mission template has been provided for the ease of establishing a mission thread, including the setting image and mission basics.

Another dimention to this is being able to run what we call "operational logs". You can have your own thread for each ship in Mission Logs where you provide more narrative details about what's going on with your ship. These could be Captain's Logs or other entries. We've provided a template for these as well.

Activity Expectations
The expectation is that members are active in posting for their ship. This should be a minimum of 3 "updates" per month. An update could be a basic captains log, a mission post to your ship thread, or contributions to a joint mission. This should be easy to maintain for most members.

Multi-ship missions and stories should agree upon a response rate. The normal response rate should be 72 hours (3 days), so that if Ship/Member 1 starts a mission thread, member 2 replies within 3 days and then member 3 replies within 3 days of that last response, and so on.