OVERVIEW
A paradise genre campaign is a set-end RPG story - a story that has an established timeline of events, that will be finished once the final goal is completed, that is - that’s told typically over Google docs with a roster of characters determined by an audition process. The accepted roster of characters will go through a series of story arcs - typically called trials - with the overarching plot of “reach paradise” tying it all together.
Along the way, the characters will gain magic powers determined by the characterization of their soul, called a Soul Class. These powers are NOT picked by the players but by the admin team based on what information is in the written application. These powers are color-coded, and typically assigned a connecting element. The originals are below:
> Red = fire & electricity
> Blue = water & poison
> Green = air & healing
> Purple = ice & telekinesis
> Black = shadows & invisibility
The other special thing about this Soul Class mechanic - and why this genre exists beyond the original - is the Soul Wheel and Partners. As discovered in the original plot (more details under ORIGINS below!) the characters were all half of one whole. Their soul was incomplete until they found their partner(s), and when they found their other part(s), they had the full access to their powers. The subplot of the story is to find out what your SHADE was on the wheel, and thus who you your partner(s) are!
THE CREDS
Hello! If you’re finding this out of the blue, my name’s Lions. I’ve been a member of the paradise group community since TPT, trial 4 when I found one of the PMVs (five years ago!!) and fell head over heels in love with this form of storytelling. I’ve roleplayed for many, many years on multiple platforms (chatrooms, forums, google docs, etc) and with every genre possible. If you can imagine up a setting, I’ve probably done it.
I am a stage manager by trade, and really enjoy making guides such as these or helping distill information to be accessible by all, long after the source material has passed, because it is such a core element to my work. I don’t claim to be the be-all-end-all reference for any of this, simply an excited player with a love of, as I said, making this genre accessible to all. I hope then, that this is handy to you to explore what all this genre has become and what it can meant to you!
**All examples are pulled from my own campaigns, past and future.
GLOSSARY
Paradise: the eternal land of perceived happiness
Trial: A roughly 2-3 month long event where the characters go through a specific set of challenges that connect to the overarching plot. The characters will be split into smaller teams during this time but there may be finale event within the trial that has the entire roster present.
Checkpoint: An admin-made post within the trials that help move the plot along based on how your characters are reacting to it.
Interim: A break period between trials where there is little to no admin activity. Instead, this is a chance to rest and recharge, do one-on-on/smaller group RPs on your own time and process/theorize what will happen next!
Soul Color/Class: The general color of a cat's soul, what will define the powers that unlock throughout the roleplay events.
- Remember!! The admin chooses what this color is for every character, based on what you submit in your application (both bio and any additional questions on the form). It is ill-advised to try and pressure towards a certain outcome, as you will be disappointed if you don't get it.
Soul Wheel: A wheel where the soul classes are laid out in an easy to read manner, an upgrade from the original game. The one for Paradise Rising, the second season of the first game, is below under ORIGINS.
Soul Wedge: A section of the wheel that includes one of each color, used originally to help determine alignments, with later campaigns, the wedges would also have a specialized power for the cats on them.
Soul Shade: The actual color of a cat's soul. Only 2 or 3 cats ever share the same soul shade, meaning they are soul partners.
Soul Partner: Cats who share the same split soul. Could be up to three cats, to ensure someone always had someone as their partner. As it was from the beginning, these partnerships are NOT solely romantic in origin and the connection can be defined however the partners decide!
Alignments: both an OOC tool for figuring out your shade/partner, this IC mechanic allows you to combine powers with a class other than your own. The closer you are to being on the same wedge, the more powerful these combined attacks will be.
ORIGINS
This genre of RP started with the group - The Paradise Trials. Arty, one of the original members of TPT, made a very good guide for reading through it that I’ll link here: General Guide To Consuming TPT
I also have a very crisp powerpoint I will also link, made by alpen: tpt short powerpoint
> To learn about the second season, please visit the Paradise Rising Deviantart page [here], which will have access to the website, the different trials and more.
Below is the wheel for Paradise Rising, which is now considered the standard form for displaying the soul classes and shades.
OTHER ORIGINS
Some items mentioned in the below section came from other pre-servers as the genre expanded, and I felt it was nice to give them some credit for what has become staples to that initial server space.
Shade Guessing: developed by Elfie for Chasing Paradise: Pieces of Prism
NPC Interaction Questions: developed by Grimm for Blighted Horizons
HOW TO PLAY THE GAME
[DISCLAIMER: Every campaign will have differences from what's below. There may be different powers, different mechanics and even structure! This is intended to cover the basics to make it easy to understand for folks coming into this genre at any level of experience.
PLEASE reference the group’s website/information for THEIR rules. ]
Coming from another type of rp? Here’s some similarities and differences that may help!
Tabletop RPGs Defined as: a structured campaign with a small group of players that progress through a storyline to a defined conclusion. | Warrior Cat/Sandbox-style Rps Defined as: free-form rp with individual threads/events where the RP takes place, no set ending to the entire RP besides what the players themselves decide for their characters |
Similarities: One character the entire time, leveling up mechanics, DM leads the story, same amount of IRL time to tell the story (2-3 years), puzzles & challenges to solve Differences: DM assigned powers instead of player picked classes, larger overall player base, entirely text-based & not real time storytelling | Similarities: Individual character arcs, large groups, basic setting to expand on, activity requirements Differences: one character instead of as many as the player can handle, longer application period/one opening, structured event arcs with DM posts |
Pre-server Time
Welcome to the pre-server! Here, you’ll get to work on your character, interact with other potential players, and even solve some puzzles together. This time is limited, and often the pre-server will be archived after acceptances go out, so make friends and have fun in this liminal space!
- Ask questions, your admins are there to help clarify the world
- Build your character, remember you only get one (1) character to rp through the entire campaign, so be sure they’ll be someone you like. Remember these are long campaigns!
- Enjoy the games!! There may be puzzles to start hinting towards the group lore, either in questions in the questions channel, or in the form of puzzles. Nowadays, there is often a guessing game to learn what the shades are on the wheel too. Like solving a riddle, there will be a vague hint that leads to what the shade’s name is.
PUZZLE
SHADE HINT
So, you’ve made your character, submitted them and now the results are in, what’s next?
Got into the group? | You didn’t get in? |
Congrats! You probably got an invite to the official server, take this time to familiarize yourself with the new space, the familiar/unfamiliar faces. Very shortly the first event will begin, usually some sort of prologue chapter to get everyone used to each other. | Don’t fret! The work you put in isn’t a waste, the time was well-spent. Right now we’re in an absolute boom of group creation. Hold onto your character, and it’s very likely there will be another group out there that fits them. |
How Trials Work
Welcome to the story! Now it’s time to get into the meat of it all. As stated above, the roleplay itself will take place over google docs, usually broken into smaller chunks of the story - trials - that take place over the course of 2-3 months (or as set by the admins of your group!). During this time, you will be separated into smaller teams of people and tasked with solving whatever the first set of mysteries may be! There will be puzzles, in-game challenges, monsters to face perhaps, the sky’s the limit!!
- Within the first few chapters there will be hints towards what your Soul class would be, culminating in a fun guessing game at the end where your color will be revealed!
- Some campaigns have done this reveal in the prologue, others in chapter 1. It all depends on the individual story.
- As said above, the DM chooses your color, and while you can speculate to your hearts content what it could be, I recommend not getting attached to one idea in case you get something else. Sometimes the best surprises are the unexpected choices! The admins never pick maliciously or to hurt anyone, they want the best arc for your character too!
Below is how a typical team doc will be structured. The top will have the introduction to your world, with any additional details you may want to know (such as who you team is, and what your objective is!)
Beneath that introduction, you can make your posts. Each group will have their own specifics for how they like these to be formatted. All of them though will want a few things: a header of some kind that shares who your character is (name, pronouns, a link to their bio) and a footer of some kind that lists a summary of the post, which post this is (for the activity check!) and the actions for that particular post.
Below is a basic template to showcase what I mean. You are free to add more information than what is listed here (and I suggest following your group’s specifics for what info they want to see!) and also make it as pretty as you like. There’s a lot of fun to be had in customizing them.
character name
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ pro/nouns, XX yrs | soul class | biography
The meat of the post goes here. It can be as long as you wish, or as short as you need it to be. Sometimes you might run out of time to post before the checkpoint comes, in which case this section is probably empty and just your footer below has content.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ post one of XX
Summary: a quick summary of the post itself, also useful for copying into the team post notification channel
Action: what you want the DM to respond to within the post
character by lions
Some notes on posts, what you put into the roleplay will be what you get out of it. If you never react to your team members posts, they may not reach out to you in the interim to do 1:1 rps. If you never interact with the story, the DMs may struggle to include you in checkpoints, unsure what you want your character to be doing in the moment - or on the flipside, if you constantly fight the DM’s actions, you may struggle to enjoy the story too. This is a collaborative storytelling venture, so treat it as such!
- With actions, the more specific you can be with your intent, the better the DM can write a response to it, and how you too can be excited with the resulting answer.
- EX: Prying open the door with my water powers vs Opening the door
Without specifying water powers, maybe the DM writes that your character claws open the side of it, and now has a hurt claw, ouch! By being specific, you can get the outcome you’re hoping for.
Once you’ve made your posts, then comes the checkpoints. The mod of your particular team will take what actions you’ve provided and move the story along with those. Here is an example, continuing from the previous screenshot.
- You can see that some of the characters, surprised by the stranger’s appearance, questioned him, while other characters examined the world around them to get clues as to what just happened. The checkpoint ends with a hint given by the stranger: your next step is to search some more, and maybe a clue will pop up.
FINAL WORDS
Overall, google doc rps are slower paced, like a stretched out session of ttrpg, allowing everyone to get their posts in no matter what timezone/activity levels they may have before the next DM post comes. Because of this, they will last longer than a usual ttrpg campaign might, so buckle in for a fun ride! If you find yourself needing a little bit of structure in your sandbox world - as if you find yourself enjoying the events more than the freetime rps - then this may be the right place for you!
Either way, I hope this guide was helpful and that you can leap into the google doc world ready to stretch some muscles and enjoy a really cool story with a fun roster of both old and new players.