Spring Cleaning 2025!

[Emily]

Spring Cleaning 2025!

The Sinking Lure has been up and running for 18(ish) months now! Though we spent late 2023 and early 2024 in a bit of a stasis, the last half of 2024 and beginning of 2025 have been a flurry of activity. Across the entire lifespan of the community, we've grown and accomplished a lot. Don't believe me? Check out these stats:

• 13 players with approved characters.
• 30 completed character sheet entries.
• 13 RP threads, including two major events.
• 319 in-character posts!

Last year was a major upswing for us, with the vast majority of the above activity coming over that time. During 2024, we had two major events, Rebuilding Castle Town and The Yuletide Festival. Rebuilding Castle Town had 33 posts despite being up for only a month, and the follow-up thread, The Work Continues, has had an additional 42 posts. Meanwhile, the Yuletide Festival has rocketed to by far the most posts in a single thread on the site, reaching 64 posts as of this announcement.

Where do we go from here? The one major issue facing us at the moment is gaining new members. Zelda RPs are a bit niche, and TSL came into existence through combining two older, dying communities to the best of my ability. In the interest of continuing to grow and thrive, I posed some options to the community earlier, and it seems that we're going with option D: All of the Above. So I'm excited to announce the following changes to TSL.


Alternate RP Options

Surprise! We've added a section to the forum for general RP threads and storylines not tied to Tears of the Kingdom or the main Sinking Lure storyline. This section will work slightly differently to the main forum RP, as the entire world and storyline will take place within one thread. Whether you enter the thread with a completed world and planned storyline, or the goal of collaborative worldbuilding while writing the thread, is entirely up to you! Everyone is free to make threads and everyone is free to join those threads. Furthermore, there will be a subforum where you can post out of character threads for your custom RPs, to assist in keeping things organised. For more information, check out the stickied thread in that forum.

Character Drive

Throughout the month of March, all players on TSL can now create any type of character that could rationally exist within the world of Tears of the Kingdom. Between now and March 31st, you aren't restricted to the same boring race list. Do you want to play a Korok? (I know a lot of you want to play Koroks) Go ahead! Do you want to play a Lizalfos or Lynel? Be my guest! Do you want to make a Subrosian exploring the Depths? That one might be a bit more of a stretch, but you know what? Make the case to me in the server.

If you know people who would be interested in participating in a Zelda RP site, but would have felt stifled to have a character within the restrictions of the site, get them to come on in and make one this month. The lifted restrictions apply even to first characters. It's a perfect time to jump into the game.

Canon Characters

All sages and canon characters have been under the tyrannical rule of just Emily for far too long, that's what I say. But it would also be placing a bit of a burden on people to have you all sign up to solely control these characters and then be forced to play them in event threads. The unanimous outcome of this discussion in the server was to make most of the canon characters communal. So over the next couple days, I will make a new thread in the Character Sheets board where players can post which canon characters they used, where, and when. That way, if you're interested in maintaining continuity between threads, you can easily track those previous uses and continue elements or development that you enjoy.