Star Army's website front page.
Star Army is a play-by-post online roleplaying community founded in 2002 and hosted at stararmy.com. It features a user-created original science fiction setting that has served to home to over 100 roleplaying campaigns. Since 2007, Star Army's shared universe has hosted on a wiki that has grown to over 9.200 articles. In 2013, Star Army was awarded the "Squiddie" Award by Ongoing Worlds as the best Roleplaying Club. Star Army has also had its RPs represented in the Tournament of Simulations in 2012 and 2013 and hosted 2 panels at the 2009 SciWorld online convention.
Setting[]
Inspired by classic anime and sci-fi series, Star Army is set in a small cluster of stars in an unknown galaxy inhabited by various human, transhuman and alien species. Originally a background site for the multiverse-roaming Yamatai Star Empire, the setting went on to become its own setting with dozens of players and thousands of pages of user-created content.
Since 2007, Star Army has used a wiki to track and document the shared setting. Since the start of the community, over 100 roleplays (sims) have taken place in the setting and the events in them have become part of the lore and history.
Role-playing method[]
The basic unit of roleplay is the plot, which consists of a group of 3-10 players and a game master (storyteller). Plots are usually often set on a starship. There are usually 12 to 16 plots running on Star Army at any given time, with some in military factions and others being independent. Each has a roleplay forum and a wiki page which includes all the essential information and a list of openings.
Typically the action happens at the character level where player characters start off as a member of a starship crew and can work their way up, over many missions, towards becoming a ship captain (and become a storyteller for members). It is possible to work outside of this format, but joining a crew is popular because players are assured a group of roleplayers to interact with.
Actual roleplay can take place either on the forums directly (single posting), or as writing a group in a secondary medium and then posted to the roleplay forums (joint posting). Joint posting venues used by Star Army plots have included IRC channels, Yahoo chat, and Etherpad.