Happy 5th Anniversary, ORIGIN!

Are you ready for a big wall of text? No? Oh well, here it is!

Celebrating 5 Years!
Wow y'all, it's been five years since we opened in May of 2015—and ORIGIN as a concept has been around longer than that, with its lore spanning in a multitude of different ways. So far you have unlocked all sorts of information pieces about the world—both inside the caves and out—and I hope you have enjoyed it thus far! There is a ton more available and we are excited to continue to share it with you. There is a timeline of events we are loosely following, including the recent visit from Lord Dhracia! RIP Jupiter :( Also, did you know that the stone Dhracia took from Jupiter's satchel was Netil? I wonder what role he plays later!

We have been working on some cool things to implement, which I will detail a little below.


But first, a big THANK YOU to all of you!
We've had our rough spots and typical bumpy road, but we wouldn't have made it this far without our amazing community. I think we've got a pretty good handle on things here and I love and appreciate every single one of you. I like being able to have Game Masters that are just as much a part of the community as everyone else, and I dislike having "staff." It always feels like "staff" hold too much power or try to gain things for themselves, but it isn't like that here at ORIGIN. Everyone has an equal opportunity at all things, and while I might not look for Game Masters very often, I do have applications open right now. See this thread: Game Master Applications are Open!

Game Masters and Mods are here to serve you and progress the game. Right now we have myself, Game Master Madison, Game Master Dark, Game Master Pluto, and Mod oscenavis keeping things running smooth and as they should. As always, if anything ever makes you feel uncomfortable or just doesn't sit right with you, please let any of us know so that it can be brought to the team's attention and taken care of. I really want ORIGIN to be a place that is safe and fun for everyone! But if we don't know about it, we can't take care of it, so please always feel free to shout if something isn't right.

As a final note, I am deeply grateful for the community here and how willing everyone is to include, well, everyone. I feel like it is so hard to find a place that is free of cliques and truly open to all players, new and veteran alike. I am so thankful all of you are here, and I hope some of the things we are coming out with are as exciting to you as they are to the Game Masters x)


55 new spells!
That's right! There are 55 new spells in the shop for you to go look at! Each element got something new, and has a minimum of at least 15 spells each (save for Corrupted). A huge shout out to all of you for always suggesting new spells or the types of things you'd like to see—hopefully you notice some familiar looking ones! Hehe.


Raffles!
That's right, it's ANNIVERSARY RAFFLE TIME! Keep an eye out for daily raffles where you can win Mutation Slots, Rare Character Slots, Magicka, Spells, and more! There will be one raffle every day for five days, and each raffle will have five winners. That's 25 winners at the end of the five days! Hopefully you all win some really cool stuff!!!

— DAY 1: MS PAINT MEMORIES
— DAY 2: 5 LINE RHYMES
— DAY 3: ORIGIN THEME SONG
— DAY 4: MEME DAY
— DAY 5: YOU CHOOSE 5 THINGS
— LAST: NEW! NEW! NEW!


What happened with the feral mites and komodo dragon!?
You might remember Legion's first clutch of eggs being decimated or Varzagosa's eggs also being eaten by strange, feral copies of themselves. There is now a swarm of feral mites and a feral komodo dragon running loose in the caves. These gemless creatures are aggressive and completely feral, meaning that they cannot speak or understand spoken language. They are the same manner of creature that Batcat's spawns, Batcat Jr., are.

This is called fissioning. Gembounds may experience this strange phenomena under great amounts of stress or when their life is severely threatened, but it may not happen often. Perhaps Gembounds will learn of this and study this weird thing, and maybe even figure out what is happening and why :O


Planned Releases
55 new spells is nothing to sneeze at, but what about new stuff for characters that are not following a magic path?

Introducing: Techniques and Tactics
Madison is working on implementing a new feature that Dark has been brewing up called abilities, which are broken into two parts: techniques and tactics. These will be available in the shop for Magicka, but their roll thresholds will cater to Physical and Other trees, with Magic tree users on the low end like Physical and Other trees are right now for Magic spells. Techniques will be abilities usable by the Physical tree and Tactics will be abilities usable by the Other tree. These will replace the typical Physical or Other roll if chosen in the list, but those types of rolls will still be available if you do not possess or do not want to use abilities.

We will release more information about this system soon, once we get it working properly and ready to go! With that in mind, please pardon any weird dust while we get the abilities system working. :3c

Transcendence and Specialties
Bored with just being a Master, Champion, or Genius? Do you feel like you have nowhere to go now that you've reached the top? Well, do I have an answer for you: transcending! This will be like a prestige system, which means that once you've reach the top level of your tree—AND assuming you meet the requirements (which will be detailed later)—you can transcend your skill level and become Transcendent. But what do you get for this!? Characters that Transcend will have access to a Transcendent spell of their element, or ability of their class: this is a super powerful spell/ability they may only be able to use once a day. They will be implemented as a brand new intensity that sits above High.

But wait, there's more! Once your character has reached Transcendent Master, Transcendent Champion, or Transcendent Genius, they will be able to unlock a Specialty. Again, more information about this will be detailed later when it is totally ready to go, but I'll give you a little sneaky peeky of what to expect. So far, the plan is for characters to be able to obtain one Specialty, and not to be able to crit fail spells or abilities in their Specialty.

An example of a Specialty is Stormbringer: a mix of water, electricity, and/or pressure spells including Rainfall, Lightning Storm, Thunderclap, Dust Devil, or Gust. We will have Specialties hopefully catering to all sorts of characters and we look forward to seeing where you all take this new system. We'll have more information available once we get the details settled on our end, so keep an eye out O_O

North-West and North-East Quadrants
We are working to finalize these areas so that they can be discovered and opened by characters. We did have to stall the Raid because of some details pertaining to this, but things will be back up and running toward unlocking these new areas soon!

Ok, but, when?
I'd like to finalize all of these things and have them ready by the end of May (with the exception of the NW/NE Quads which will open in-character), but I also don't want to overwork Madison. Please know that we are looking forward to getting these new systems ready and implemented, and will be working on them this month—so again, if you notice a hiccup here or there, please pardon our dust while we set stuff up. Thanks for your continued support and patience, and I hope you can enjoy these new features soon!

Special Thank You to Dark and Madison
A huge shoutout to Dark who spear-headed the abilities, transcendent, and specialty features and helped flesh them out to what they are today; another huge shoutout to Madison for implementing much of the code we will be using for them. And a small tiny honorary mention to myself for also working hard... (and a big woot-woot to the one person I won't name who voted me Member of the Month lol thank you ;_;!! my first motm vote hehe..).