
Welcome to the Swiftwater Academy for the Gifted and Talented, where children can truly unlock their full potential. Located in the rugged Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Swiftwater is a private school where children of unusual intelligence and ability can develop their knowledge and skills. The school emphasizes providing a focused environment, a fact aided by the dormitory-style living quarters and beautiful, natural surroundings. Cascading mountain streams and untouched forest surround the Academy, offering opportunities for unique environmental education and physical exploration while serving as an impediment to all the distractions that plague city-based and public schools. The campus itself is a spacious multi-building complex, recently upgraded from coal power to environmentally friendly solar and wind power.
Staff at Swiftwater Academy are professionals carefully selected for alternative teaching styles and long-term educational experience. Some of our staff were even students in the past who enjoyed the school so much that they, after obtaining their masters degrees, came back to teach! Every subject from English to Organic Chemistry can be accessed at Swiftwater, and classes are tailored to the needs and strengths of the students. Please contact Headmaster Montronst if you are interested in having your child attend.
Please note that contact with your child may be limited, in order to preserve the focused study environment of the school and also due to the remoteness of the campus.
Whew! Desire is finally off my frontpage!
And with that, I can get started on my next project, Synchronicity. Synchonicity will be a writing/roleplaying mystery designed for up to 8 people. If you choose to participate, you will be controlling one of the students at
Swiftwater Academy (modern, normal earth setting). Specifically, you will be playing as a member of the
Swiftwater Enigma Club. The purpose of the club is, officially, to research and investigate myths, urban legends, ghost stories, alien sightings and the like, but in reality it basically functions as a social club for kids interested in mysteries.
Why your character decided to join the club, whether they take it seriously, what they are interested in(detective novels? crop circles?): these things are up to you.
Characters should be between 13 and 17 years of age, though younger or older characters are welcome, as long as some kind of explanation is provided. This IS a private highschool for the gifted and talented, after all, so backgrounds can be all over the place.
The thing that I hope will set this little exercise apart from all the rest is this:
Each character will have a secret. It could be a crush on another character, a medical or psychological condition that they don't want to tell anyone about, an abusive childhood, or even a body buried somewhere, but the only people who will know about it will be the player, the character (or maybe not! lol amnesia!), and myself. It will NOT be known to the other characters/writers, and it will not be included in the public character sheet.
Once I have a bunch of characters, the real fun begins. I will spend some time crafting the secrets into a whole and changing them so they interact with each other for maximum complication. I will then integrate all of these secrets into the larger plot that I have planned. (Yes, this means that I may ask you to re-write some of your character to participate, but I'm not going to be a dictator about it. It will be a joint creative process.)
Once everything is blended and set to simmer, the writing will begin. I have yet to figure out exactly what the format will be in - either short story submission or real-time roleplaying - but we will all get together and interact. It will be the job of the
Enigma Club to SOLVE THE MYSTERY! Also, NOT GET KILLED BY THE BAD GUYS! And ALSO NOT GET KILLED BY EACH OTHER, WHEN PEOPLE START DISCOVERING THE SECRETS!
This will not be a PG project, as you may have gathered from the usual stuff I do. I intend to use every ounce of
High Octane Nightmare Fuel that I can.
Because I want these characters highly developed, I will be asking everyone to use the
Cross-Genre Character Profile, though of course with only the human section. You can take out the non-human biology part.
I'll be updating this with more formazlied stuff (i.e. a timeline, more rule and guidelines and stuff) later, but I wanted to give everyone a taste now so you, IF YOU ARE SUPER DUPER INSPIRED, you can start working on it now.
and because we all love this kind of thing, I set up #enigmaclub as the chat HQ for this project. it will be all dolled up with ranks and titles and stuff soon