Sessions are in-person 3 hour-long roleplay sessions on Wednesday evenings. For more info, see When and Where.
Players will roleplay their characters attending an Underlings Union meeting. The characters are in the backroom of The Club; their Villains are schmoozing upstairs in their own meeting. It will not usually be possible to enter other areas of The Club but Villains may enter the Underlings' room. The start of session takes place just after arrival of the Underlings at the venue. The end of session is the end of the meeting and time to depart The Club, whether you are being teleported out, miniaturised and put in a wizard's pocket, or left to pay your own taxi fare. And why do we have to pay our own taxi fares, anyway?
Between the GMs calling TIME IN and TIME OUT, the room is continuously an in-character roleplay area. Players will be talking and acting as their characters.
We have no costume requirements, but some people enjoy making a costume for their character. In-character, the dress style is very broad, from modern day civillian clothing, to eccentric costuming (generally whatever you'd expect to fit a particular genre). Please do not wear shoes with heels over 2 inches.
At the beginning of session, we'll give a short OC briefing. For the first session this will include an introduction segment where you'll have a chance to introduce both yourself and your character to everyone (including your and your character's name, pronouns, and character's appearance)1).
During sessions, the Union will submit, and then hold votes on, motions. Each character may either submit a motion, or support another player's motion. Each motion will requires one person to submit, and 2 people to support it. This will be mostly players, but there may be opportunities for NPCs to support a motion.
A motion can be about anything you want, as long as it is about Union business. It could be about how the Union is run (such as creating a new official role) or how the Union wishes to respond to something in the world (e.g. imposing sanctions on a particular villain for something they've done). There will be some things that you won't be able to change with motions for OC logistical reasons, e.g. changing the length of sessions, or changing how many people are needed to submit a motion.
The session timetable will be:
As the people you are serving, your Villains will regularly have tasks for you to complete to further their evil machinations. These will usually be delivered to you around once a session, either by the Villain themself, or by some other means such as a message (depending on what makes most sense for your particular villain, and other constraints).
Most likely this task will be something you need to do before next session (i.e. in your turnsheet). That being said, usually your villain doesn't care all that much about the how, so long as it gets done, so the meetings are a great place to get help from your fellow underlings.
GMs will alternate between playing different NPCs and being out of character. The will be a GM desk where you can come and ask us questions - if everyone is busy you can come and find a GM and ask them a question OC. We will be playing a variety of NPCs in session, but if you want to speak to a particular NPC feel free to ask and we'll accommodate it where we can (though this may not happen for various OC or IC reasons).
There is no combat in these roleplay sessions. This is a hard OOC rule as we have no system for formally adjudicating combat. The IC reason is that physical violence is not permitted by The Club. This is not something that the Union will be able to address and we ask that you do not try! Anything that needs a serious physical involvement to resolve (such as capturing/killing someone you dislike) should be done via turnsheets. Because of the OC limitations of the format, we expect an amount of buy-in for the conceit from you as players. For instance, leaving session an hour early won't get you a headstart on what you're doing in your next turnsheet.
We will take photographs in the first couple of sessions for the character biographies. Please see our Privacy Policy. These portraits will be displayed on your bio page, but will only be visible to logged in users (i.e. players and GMs), and the administrator of the wiki servers. You can opt-out of having your portrait displayed, or provide us with an alternative photo, at any time. On request, we will take down any photographs.
After a session, some of us will adjourn to a nearby pub. The option to roleplay via emails will be available until the turnsheet submission deadline, which is 23:59 on the Monday after the session.