All right, don't panic. You've read the homepage, visited the room, and you still are completely clueless as to what goes on in Silvermoon Forest. Relax. That's what this page is here for, to explain what goes on.

    First off, you may have noticed that Silvermoon is a role-playing room (or been told that). What's roleplaying, you ask? Well its something similar to acting out the part of a character in a book or movie -- except there is no set script or storyline (although there may be a plot or even series of plots, sometimes called a campaign). You interact with other characters, doing what your character would do -- fighting monsters, telling tales, falling in love, and so on. Roleplaying (often called "RPing" for short) isn't just acting like a saturday morning cartoon -- many players fully flesh out their characters, detailing their personalities and backgrounds so well that they are as unique, individual and dynamic as real people.

    If this doesn't sound like fun to you, don't worry -- there are plenty of other chat-rooms on the net and web that you'll like a lot better. If this does sound like fun to you, your first step is to register a handle with WBS (Webchat Broadcasting System, the chat-line where Silvermoon is located). If you've already registered with WBS, you know how easy it is. Just choose a "handle" (the name other players will see on your screen), and a password, and type in your e-mail address. You're allowed 5 handles per e-mail address, but it is possible to get more if you need them. We reccomend that if you're going to also be chatting a lot in normal (ie, non-roleplaying) rooms, you get a seperate handle for your characters (some handles, such as Giggles1284 or CRAZYGIRL
and so on, just aren't appropriate for an RP character). If you've already registered your five handles to an e-mail address, you can try usa.net, hotmail, or rocketmail -- they provide free e-mail accounts that you can use if you need more handles (but you should definitely get the idea of playing a character before you make more than one).

    The next step is to start thinking up a basic idea of who your character is -- actually, you should probably do this before you register a handle. Although in roleplaying you can take on the persona of anything, Silvermoon has a couple of restrictions on what kind of characters we allow -- see the rules for more information on this. What does your character look like? How old is she or he? What was her childhood like? What does he do for a living? In fact, if you really want to make a realistic character (and have more people play to you), you might try answering the character quiz (borrowed slightly from FASA's fabulous Earthdawn game and modified for the Silvermoon setting).

    Once you've got a character set-up, all you have to do is go in and interact. If you aren't greeted by everyone at first, don't worry -- it takes a little time to be noticed and accepted, but very soon you'll be involved in plots. All you need to know is...

The Technical Stuff

    Some of the terms we use to chat in Silvermoon may be a tad intimidating if you've never talked on-line before, or don't know our particular "language" of symbology. Here's a list of them so you can decipher what other people are saying/doing, and make your posts intellegible to others. Remember -- some people do use different symbols, and if you're one of them, please be sure to make that clear. These here are the most commonly used and accepted symbols -- your mileage may vary.

• **/* -- anything surrounded by asteriks is usually interpreted as an action. (like this: **grabs a mug of ale from the bar**). These are probably the most used symbols in RPing. Anything said outside the asteriks is generally taken to be speech (for example: hello *smiles at the newcomer*). Some variant's include ::, ~, and #.
• "" -- although anything said without symbols of any sort is generally interpreted as speech, some players use quotes to denote speech. Nice and avoids confusion, but generally seems to be uneccessary. For example ("Hello, how are you?").
• (()) -- one of the most important symbols (and mosst confusing to newbies). Anything put in double parentheses ((like this)), indicates a comment made OUT OF CHARACTER. That is, the player is saying it, not the character. It is important to note, while a player knows what the character is saying, a character does not know about what's being said inside OOC brackets.