Frequently Asked Questions

More questions and answers might be added as the game progresses.

What is this?
This is Clock-Face & Looking-Glass, a Horror-Roleplaying Forum. The players make forum posts as characters who live in a fictional world full of paranormal creepiness.
The forum is a spinoff of the RP Mirrorhands and is set in the same universe. The original idea came from its creators.

How does work?
Well, basically, there are two forums in one. The Meta-Forum is where players socialise, post characters for approval by the moderators and discuss plots for the game. The LookAtTheTime.com Forum is completely IC. Here the players post under their character accounts and roleplay.

What's the story?
A few people whose lives were changed drastically by paranormal occurrences started up the original Mirrorhands forum forum to discuss and exchange information about their experiences and help anyone who has similar problems, by informing them of the risks and ways to survive. C&L is the follow-up to that forum, created by someone who found the original and felt the need to start it back up. That's the general gist of it. For the details, read the posts in the ingame forum or find it out through roleplaying.
We might build plots later on. More on that in the Planning forum.

Who created all this?
The idea was originally that of the user "Nichtschwert" in the original forum, and they set it up as well.
The name, the banner and the icon of the forum were nasteh's doing. Nasteh was also very involved in the process of rule-smithing.
The spinoff has been created with official permission of the original creators by me.

Is there a post minimum or limit?
Neither does exist, although it's great to have active users and we might weed out extremely inactive accounts every so often. But by extremely inactive, we are seriously referring to something like hasn't shown any sign of life at all for several months.
There's no minimum of activity necessary to participate in the in-universe events because even in-universe, C&L is a forum. And forum users happen to be inactive sometimes, occasionally for really long amounts of time, occasionally forever. As such, you can also leave the game without leaving any kind of explanation ingame.
If you leave the game or are not avaiable for longer than six months, your character can become public domain though and other players might decide to tie up loose ends by including them in their personal plots and stories.
There is also no limit to what you post in-universe - you may even spam, although of course you should be prepared that the in-universe admins do their job just like any admin would. They might even ban your in-universe account.

How are Plots handled here?
For the most part, you as a player can decide yourself what your character has to put up with. You can read some creepypasta for inspiration. If you have a very high-fantasy idea or want a plot together with other people, go ahead and ask the administration and/or said other players. The concept is supposed to give you quite a lot of freedom in what happens to you and your characters.
You also don't need to have fluff hitting the fan constantly. Creating some entertaining mundane forum drama or social interaction instead is just as much appreciated and part of the game. Be especially careful if several intense things are happening at once to different characters - if you try to start up a personal plot at such a time, you might have to deal with it being a bit neglected.
Your freedom has exactly one big limit: Try not to make your character an anime or action movie hero who smites everything in their path eventually. Surviving might be part of the forum concept, but winning is not. Too much of it simply reduces the horror too much. If you let your character survive - or even win - best do it just barely and don't do it often. Killing off a character sometimes however is encouraged.

Why should I create two accounts?
Having two seperate accounts, one for the Meta-Forum (Player Account) and one for the In-Universe forum (Character Account) is recommended because it keeps some things neater. For once, your character account is always part of the game - which includes PMs you get and send on it. Then, it's easier to part with it when your character dies - which can happen frequently in this game. If your player and character account are the same, there might easily be confusion about PMs you get or send, and you will have to create a new character account anyway when the character dies. We do not allow to create new player accounts without a good reason though.
Furthermore, whenever the administration decides on a plot for the forum altogether, or a storyteller wants to assist you in your story, there are plenty of things we can do with character accounts that would be annoying or a hindrance when done with conjoined accounts. For example messing with your text, colour, post count, etc. - yes, all of that is part of the game as well. Just like birthday, gender information, and everything else on your profile.
With a player account you do not have to worry about us messing with the player account, even if the character account might go rogue. We can even do subplots like your character account posting stuff or changing profile information without the knowledge of the character and then give you ooc info about that (as well as temporary account data we used) on your player account. With conjoined accounts, you'll miss out on plenty of these surprise elements of the different plots. And you will have to sacrifice any player information on your profile for the information of the character.
Basically, with a conjoined account, you're neither having a full character account nor a full player account - you'll only have half of either.