Winterspark

Winterspark Investigations is a private agency that handles anything from detective work involving cheating spouses, missing persons and lost cats to small scale mercenary work such as bodyguard detail, escorts and specialist combat jobs. On an everyday level, the agency is mostly embodied in it's chief investigator Dorath Winterspark (who has made a living on detective work for decades if not centuries) and it's current owner, Dorath's cousin lady Nancia Lightsong (who until she inherited the titles was better known as Nancia Winterspark, adventuress and writer of steamy bodice rippers). Other members of note include senior investigator Kife Emberwing and the agency's young secretary Joliel Redsun.

Hiring Winterspark
Anyone looking for RP can approach the agency with a job. These can be as socially or at game mechanic oriented as you like - the simplest option is "fetch A from B" - pick a quest or an instance and hire us to escort you while you get a book, a magic trinket, a severed head or something from the end. If you want, though, we've also played bodyguard security at other people's events and taken long-term investigative contracts with a more social RP focus. All payments will be emote-money, naturally - we do it for the RP, not the golds. ;)

Since player employers tend to be rare, we also run cases of our own. These are usually something members make up themselves, or play out with whoever gave them the job.

Recruitment
Most new employees are hired via the agency's offices in Silvermoon, in the bazaar district of Silvermoon, directly across the square from the notorious Wayfarer's Tavern. Most are blood elves and a lot of Thalassian gets spoken, but the main criteria is being a good fit for the group as roleplay goes. Basically, this means you as a player should be ok with silly banter and lewd double entendres, and your character needs to be an adult and ok with Winterspark being more dashing misfits than shiny heroes. Think Firefly, not Dragonlance.

Recruits have an IC probationary period and are assigned a mentor to help them settle in - promotion to full membership will happen once they've handled their first IC case, so it depends largely on the player's own activity. There is no level limit, but instance-based mission RP will be limited by whatever the dungeon's entrace limit is.

Once a recruit has been promoted to full membership, the player will be allowed to invite their alts into the guild too (for OOC guild benefits).

On the OOC, we also need guild members to be at least 16 years old - we don't want random parent aggro over the jokes on guild chat. Thanks for understanding - we're still happy to RP with younger players outside the guild, or to recommend guilds that don't have age requirements.

NOTE: To keep the group tight, we only recruit a few people at a time. Recruitment will be closed when we have more than a few probies, and opened again as they settle in to permanent ranks.

Ranks
Probationer: This is an IC rank, and marks a new investigator in the guild who hasn't passed their test case.

Alt: This is an OC rank, and marks alts of guildmembers who are included in the guild but are not IC.

Affiliated: This is an OC rank, and marks individuals in the guild who are IC affiliated in some way, but not members of Winterspark Investigations.

Investigator: This is an IC rank, and marks a full investigator in Winterspark Investigations.

Officer: This is an OC rank, and marks individuals with guild maintenance priviliges. Usually Officers are Investigators, however please check if unsure, Sifalry is not.

Chief Investigator: This is a semi-IC rank, used to denote the current ultimate authority in Winterspark Investigations, currently Nancia as she owns the firm.

NOTE: As a general rule, no new player will be accepted to Alt or Affiliated status. Players known well OOC by a senior guildmember may be accepted directly into these ranks (In general, this would involve knowing them RL, or having been guilded with them elsewhere for a number of years).

Raiding & PvP
Just because we like RP doesn't mean we don't like other stuff too. We've been progression raiding with a guild group once a week since July, and had almost beaten the Lich King when Cataclysm landed. We retroraid IC when plots benefit from it, achievement-hunt at random and some of us run BG's and Arenas as well. None of it is mandatory, but if you want OOC-company for something or other, you can often find it.

Once we get enough people to Cataclysm raid levels, raid days will resume. Till then, we'll be running heroics and the occasional retro raid for achis. Where voicecoms are needed, we use Mumble.

(Some) houserules for RP
We don't have an official ruleset, but certain houserules and practices have evolved:


 * While conflict is fun and not knowing OC makes many plots better, we're allergic to huge in-guild IC conflicts. If it looks like RP's taking your char to where people will become mortal enemies, refuse anything to do with each other, or otherwise end friendly RP prospects between guild chars, you should warn the other player(s) involved in advance, and tone down the drama if they don't agree it'd be fun.


 * We're belfs, we assume magic is trivial enough for portals to be everyday transport (so long as you have a mage to do 'em) and hearthstones are IC (though quite expensive). Same applies to other trivial magical effects. We assume a belf is legally adult at 100+ (though physically adult at less), but generally we avoid ages past the generic hundreds and opt for "acts teenage/twenty-ish/middleaged".


 * The office cat has been polymorphed so much it now morphs spontaneously. Periodically, people may whip out a vanity pet and RP it as the cat trying on a new form.


 * Feel free to invent cases your char is working on at the time or clients they do regular business with. Not everything needs to be a massive guild plot.


 * Most of us have /yell turned off, because that makes Silvermoon much saner.


 * For disconnects and other emergencies, we assume people stepped out for a moment for uninteresting and unavoidable reasons. If this isn't an option (e.g. mission roleplay), we assume they did whatever the majority did, and brief the player after. For RP raids, we assume char death= RP injury, and all other damage is done to gear/wards or avoided.


 * We often use /party or /raid in the background of RP, to pass meta-information related to roleplay but not easily represented IC (stuff like "my char believes this, it's not true on lore of course", "the dragon is whispering to itself, you can't make out the words through the echos in the cave but the sound is impossible to miss", " etc.). Occasionally, when there isn't an appropriate location to stage the RP, we may do it all in /party - when there's limited time and not all detail is needed, we might also just meta-agree that things happened and conversations were had.


 * Characters having sex falls under "sex is had, was it good?" meta-agreement. Agree what you need to in private, RP'ing smut in public channels is likely to be a booting offence.