Please Do Not Solve Grimwych Before Christmas

You can sometimes know what happens without knowing why

There is a difference between an observable fact and an answer about the nature of Grimwych itself.

Your character might discover that:

• they cannot cross a particular boundary;
• an animal may or may not appear somewhere they cannot reach;
• magic behaves strangely around a certain object;
• the weather appears to function normally;
• something reacts differently to one person than another;
• a door is being suspicious in a way doors really ought not to be;
• they cannot see beyond a certain point where they reasonably should, while somewhere else distant mountains are perfectly visible.

Those are things you can investigate. But they do not automatically tell you whether Grimwych is a pocket dimension, another world, a prison, a crossroads, somebody's dream, a cosmic accident, an elaborate tax avoidance scheme, or something else entirely.

Sometimes you will discover what happens long before you discover why. Sometimes that is intentional.

Sometimes the admins genuinely don't know

Please feel free to ask questions. But if you ask an admin how some tiny part of Grimwych works, you may very well get: “I don't know.”

This does not mean the admin team will immediately assemble an emergency lore council to determine the eating habits of Grimwych squirrels.

Not every unanswered question requires a ruling. If something affects fairness, another player's agency, or a major plot point, we will establish what needs establishing — though that may take us time.

But some things can simply remain undefined. Maybe it becomes important later. Maybe RP gives us a reason to decide. Maybe it never matters again.

Not every unanswered question is a hole waiting to be filled. Sometimes leaving the hole there gives us far more interesting routes to take later.

Not everything has been predetermined

There is no master document somewhere containing the definitive answer to every mystery. There are plans, ideas, themes, directions and things we know we want to explore, but Grimwych is deliberately being built with plenty of room to move.

Even though we might have a vague idea of how to get from A to B, we don't want to commit ourselves completely to the route because we genuinely want players to help shape the world.

Think of it like this: we aren't giving you a recipe to make a cake. We are giving you ingredients.

Maybe you make a cake. Maybe pancakes. Maybe bread. Maybe you have a big ol' food fight with it.

You may come up with a theory we never considered. You may make an observation that connects two things in a way we hadn't thought of. You may put something on the Wiki that makes an admin stare at the screen for a moment and think: …actually.

And we may decide that idea is worth exploring and quietly adjust the very, very, very loose pencil plan.

Sometimes a player may accidentally come up with a better answer than the one we had. Sometimes there may have been no answer at all until somebody provides the spark.

We reserve the right to steer in the direction of your brilliance.

Not everything needs an admin meeting

Grimwych is a game for the admins too. We love building it, plotting things, answering questions and seeing what everybody does with the world. But not every question is going to become an admin discussion.

Something may be really important to your character, your current RP, or a theory you are excited about. We completely understand that.

But something that matters enormously to one person may not matter particularly much to another player, to the wider game, or to the current plot.

Please do not think that makes the question silly. It doesn't mean it is unimportant to you.

It simply means we have to choose which things genuinely need staff time and a game-wide answer.

If something affects fairness, player agency, a major piece of plot, game rules, or something significant that genuinely needs consistency across Grimwych, then yes, we will discuss it and establish what needs establishing.

But if the question is essentially:

“Exactly what happens if my character tries this very specific thing under these very specific circumstances?”

You may get:

“Whatever makes sense for the RP.”

“We don't know.”

Or even:

“We don't think we need to decide that.”

Those are not brush-offs. They are permission for the game to remain flexible.

We don't want the admin team spending three evenings debating the metaphysical properties of a spoon when we could be building areas, running events, creating plot, RPing with you, or doing literally anything else with our finite mortal lives.

There will always be more possible questions than there is admin time. So we will prioritise the ones that actually need an answer.

Something can be important to your character without requiring a game-wide ruling.

Also, admins are people

This probably shouldn't need saying, but it is worth saying anyway.

The admins are people.

With jobs, families, responsibilities, good days, bad days, limited free time, occasional exhaustion and the irritating biological requirement to sleep. The time they give to the game is valuable but limited.

Nobody is sitting behind the Grimwych curtain as a full-time Department of Lore, waiting for the next metaphysical query to arrive in the inbox.

Sometimes an admin may not have the energy to get into a long discussion. Sometimes somebody may read a question and need to think about it — and maybe accidentally forget about it. Sometimes another admin may have a completely different view.

And, to be honest, sometimes we may decide that something simply is not important enough to spend our limited time resolving.

And sometimes we may just want to log into the game and play our characters.

Please allow the admins the same patience, generosity and good faith that we hope everybody gives to one another as players.

A delayed answer is not necessarily avoidance. A short answer is not necessarily dismissal. An “I don't know” is not necessarily a problem requiring correction.

And an admin deciding not to turn something into a larger discussion does not mean they don't care about your RP.

It means they are a person making choices about where to spend their time. That is allowed too.

So please make things up

Seriously!!!

You are creative writers playing unusual characters in a strange place. You should have room to improvise.

You do not need to stop every scene to ask whether your spell can make blue sparks, whether your character recognises an obscure plant, or whether a supernatural effect can behave slightly oddly today.

Use common sense. Respect other players' agency. Do not casually rewrite the entire setting on behalf of everybody else.

Beyond that?

Play.

What you write could very well shape the game.

A thing happening once does not automatically make it a universal law of Grimwych.

Perhaps it was an anomaly. Perhaps your character caused it. Perhaps Grimwych caused it. Perhaps magic was being difficult. Or perhaps it was Tuesday.

Let's face it, Tuesdays are always the worst day of the week.

Magic may work differently for different characters

Grimwych contains characters from different worlds, traditions and realities. Their magic does not need to obey one universal rulebook.

You do not need to reconcile every supernatural difference into the Grand Unified Theory of Grimwych Magic.

If somebody else's magic works differently from yours, it does not automatically mean one of you is wrong. It may simply work differently.

Feel free to bring the logic of your character's world with you. Accept that somebody else's world may have completely different logic.

And remember that Grimwych itself may interfere with both.

RP is not automatically universal canon

There is a difference between:

“This happened.”

and:

“This is now an immutable law of the setting.”

If your spell produces green sparks tonight, congrats on your green sparks!

That does not mean we now need to update the Grimwych Constitution to state that all spells of that type must produce green sparks forever.

Likewise, something written on the Wiki may reflect:

• what characters currently believe;
• what has been observed so far;
• an incomplete theory;
• an unusual one-off event;
• or something that later develops into a larger part of the setting.

The Wiki records the world.

Sometimes it may also help inspire it.

Please investigate things. (Or don't.)

We absolutely want you testing Grimwych.

But if your character would rather sit in a field making daisy chains, that's cool too.

There is no requirement to become an amateur metaphysicist simply because you woke up beside a suspicious lake.

If you do want to investigate, then investigate.

Where something is reasonably observable, we will try to give you something your character can actually observe.

That observation often creates more questions rather than fewer.

Some of those questions may have answers we already know. Some may have answers we are deliberately not ready to give you — and those answers are unlikely to be handed over OOC simply because somebody asks.

And some may be questions we don't know the answer to either.

We are not necessarily going to gather the admins together to manufacture an agreed answer simply because the question exists.

It may remain unanswered. It may become relevant later. It may grow out of RP. It may never need an answer at all.

This is intentional. We are terribly sorry.

OOC questions do not unlock the dungeon

You can always ask.

But asking the perfect OOC question does not automatically reveal the answer to a larger mystery.

If you ask:

“Is Grimwych actually inside another dimension?”

We may very well smile politely and refuse to tell you.

Coming up with a very plausible theory does not automatically make it canon either.

You are welcome to theorise, welcome to be right and not know it, welcome to be spectacularly wrong.

We sincerely hope everybody is spectacularly wrong about something at least once. You might also be right.

Maybe because you followed the clues. Maybe because we planned it months ago. Maybe because you said something so good that we quietly changed direction.

You will not necessarily be informed which.

We will deliberately slow things down sometimes

Grimwych is a collaborative game, not a speedrun.

Our players have different jobs, time zones, responsibilities and amounts of time available to RP.

Not everybody can be online when a clue first appears. Not everybody can follow it up immediately.

We do not want five very active characters to solve the central mysteries over a weekend while everybody else logs in on Monday to discover that all the answers have already come to light.

So information will sometimes be slow-released. Events will be staged.

Meetings may happen at deliberate points in the timeline. A discovery may sit for a while before the next piece appears.

We may know perfectly well what happens next and still decide:

Not yet.

That is not because your character failed to ask the correct question.

It is because moving the plot too quickly can exclude people just as effectively as not moving it at all.

Sometimes the delay is there to give everybody else room to catch up, contribute, argue, investigate, make plans and get involved.

Meetings and events are part of the game's rhythm

Village meetings and other shared events are not happening solely because Grimwych has developed a worrying enthusiasm for local government.

They help give the game a rhythm, create opportunities for characters to interact, and allow information gathered by different people at different times to come together.

They give players with different availability a chance to influence larger developments.

And they stop major pieces of the plot disappearing into one private RP at 2am.

So sometimes there will be space between finding something and what happens next.

That space is not wasted time. It is RP space.

Tell people or don't. Investigate. Scheme. Make alliances. Get the wrong end of the stick with extraordinary confidence.

Or, I don't know, teach your character to tap dance and throw a party.

All valid options.

Grimwych is being built while you live in it

The game is still young. Not every inch of its metaphysics has been carved into an ancient tablet and hidden beneath an admin's desk.

Flexibility is valuable.

Where we need firm rules for fairness and consistency, we will make them.

Where we don't, we would rather leave ourselves some breathing room.

The important bit

Grimwych is full of creative writers and brilliant minds.

We genuinely respect that.

And it is one of the biggest reasons we have not predetermined everything.

If we decided now exactly what Grimwych is, exactly how every mystery ends, exactly how every type of magic works, exactly where every portal leads and exactly what will happen twelve months from now, we could create a very detailed plan.

We would also close a lot of doors.

Someone playing six months from now may come up with an idea none of us would ever have thought of.

A tiny detail in one RP might unexpectedly connect several larger pieces of the setting. A theory might be completely different from what we imagined and also much better.

Something added to the Wiki may contain one small spark that eventually grows into part of Grimwych itself.

We want room for that.

That does not mean every theory will become canon. It does not mean players are expected to write the world for us.

It simply means we do not want the setting so tightly planned that nobody else can leave fingerprints on it.

Grimwych should be able to surprise the admins too.

The admins are players as well.

We have characters here. We write here. We want to come along for the ride on the stories you create in Grimwych too.

We do not want to stand outside the world already knowing every turn, every answer and every destination while everybody else discovers it.

There is something much more fun about watching a piece of RP unfold and realising we genuinely did not expect it to go there.

We want players to surprise each other. We want characters to surprise us. And, occasionally, we want Grimwych itself to surprise everybody.

Because Grimwych should remain fun for the people running it and the people playing it.

Sometimes admin time will be spent discussing an important game-wide question. Sometimes it will be spent building the next area. Sometimes it will be spent plotting an event — although events are absolutely not exclusive to admins. Sometimes it will be spent fixing something that has unexpectedly caught fire.

And sometimes an admin should be able to log in, become their character for a few hours and simply play.

We'll keep some doors locked. We'll leave some rooms unfinished.

And we absolutely do not intend to decide what is behind every door before you have had the chance to knock on it.

That is not a lack of a plan.

That is space for all of us to make Grimwych better.

Build the world with us.