Hello everyone. My name is Mike and I am a 39 year old man from Minnesota. I go by the name of Targath (my main Out-Of-Character persona) on the MMOSG Furcadia and have been playing there off and on for a few years now.

I recently ordered a PDF copy of the Shard Compendium after Talzhemir, one of the creators of Furcadia, posted a message about it with link on the game's forum. I read over most of the intro booklet first and decided to grab a copy and check it out after liking what I read.

Now, although I have been on Furcadia for a few years, I do not consider myself a furry like some other players there do. (Furcadia has a rep for all furries on the game and that just is not the case at all. We're not all perverts either, despite the rumors. :P) I also have not really engaged in much roleplay there and I will get to that in a minute. Basically, Furcadia to me has been a great place to socialize and exercise some creative talent by making dreams. For those who are unfamiliar, a dream on Furcadia is a user created world where players can go to socialize, RP, or do other things. Any player can make and upload them. Funny how it is sort of similar to Dream Walking in Dárdünah that way.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I have not really been engaged in too much RP on Furcadia up to this point and there is a reason for that. My own pen & paper RP experience is limited to a long D&D campaign and some short sessions of Star Wars while in the army back in the early 90s. Well, on Furcadia, there is no real "official" set of rules or campaign setting for roleplay to take place in public places. The closest that they have is a loose set of rules and background material called "The Dragonlands" which uses some simplified rules taken from "Pocket Universe." Many players choose not to use them and either make up their own home rules, or simply engage in persona (freeform) RP in their own private dreams.

Although I have fooled around with some persona play with others at times, I have not found a guild or group on Furcadia yet that runs a strict (rules based) game that seemed inviting to me. Either they have too many rules about things like character colors, post lengths in the chat, and other unimportant things, or their setting is just not appealing to me. Some groups also claim to be about RP but then sit around AFK or chatting in their OOC areas with little real RP happening in them. I think many other players on Furcadia feel the same way as posts on the forum often complain about a lack of RP on the game, despite one whole main map being full of supposed RP dreams.

The Shard RPG seems almost tailor made for being played on Furcadia. The different Zoics could easily be represented by the current default avatars, or easily patched into a dream if need be. Free 3rd Party Patches are a major resource for many dreams. The DragonSpeak/PhoenixSpeak coding that runs dreams and is easy to learn can easily be used to generate and store the Characteristics, Advantages, and Drawbacks for characters. The chat client can handle the die-rolling and private messages between GM and players, and dream weavers could easily create small settings to help visually represent areas within a campaign. Not that visual aids are needed in a pen & paper game, though sometimes they help when figuring out the lay of the land during combat. This can actually be done "live" now, btw. Used to all have to be done offline.

So now I am feeling a little more stoked about getting an actual RP campaign started once I become a little more familiar with the Shard rules and setting. A couple of friends of mine and I were attempting to come up with our own setting and rules on magic, since the Dragonlands rules don't really have them... but the other players seemed to have lost interest after their initial excitement. Perhaps using the Shard rules to launch them into actually playing sooner, rather than help make the setting first, would help stir them back up. I look forward to trying it anyway.

Now, I don't work for Dragons Eye Productions, and I don't mean to plug another game and detract from Shard. However, if you have not tried out Furcadia yet and seen the potential for using it to host an online campaign, please do. It is free to play. We could definitely use some more creative and talented GMs over there and I really do think that if other players were exposed to Shard on Furcadia, that many would happily embrace it. After all, we already run around as animal people on that game even if some of us are not furries.

Thanks for a great game. I really look forward to diving into it soon.

I figured the similarities were just a coincidence and may have come from some shared influence or other. I simply mentioned them on the Furcadia forum because at the time it seemed funny that so many could be found between the games.

The one big difference between Shard and the current Furre! rules that Talzhemir has done is that with her system she was aiming for something that would not require a GM, while Shard seems to be a more traditional RPG. I think if nothing else, players who blend in her "Orical" system of decision making or something similar (Mythic comes to mind) with Shard could still enjoy a game without the traditional role of GM having to be filled.

I prefer having a GM in charge myself, which is probably why I never did get into the RP that is most popular on Furcadia. I'm just not so sure that I am ready to take on that role. I guess that I will find out soon enough.

In the end, I really do hope that others on Furcadia take the time to look over the introduction booklet and then decide to purchase Shard. I wasn't sure about buying it at the time of my post simply because I already have several systems sitting unused on my PC, but now that I did buy it, I am pretty sure that I will be using this one simply because it can easily be implemented on Furcadia where I spend a lot of my free time and targets the same audience of roleplayers.