It’s never easy to say goodbye.

Last month, the player of Jewell Ravenlock announced on both the Mutual Endeavors and Dragon’s Mark forums her decision to retire from online roleplay. The outpouring of farewells, well-wishes and remembrances was nothing short of amazing, and was a perfect indicator of how many lives this writer has touched. In free-form roleplay, every interaction matters: every moment is a chance to let creativity shine, forge lasting friendships, and build something greater than ourselves. In tribute to a writer who personified this idea, and to her character—who became for so many of us an integral part of the map of Rhydin—we at Ubique’s Monthly present the following article, based on an interview with Jewell’s player.

The history of the character Jewell Ravenlock is, according to the writer, “so cliché I cringe to talk about it at times.” The character was an orphaned princess of the planet Aquarius, and was chosen to be its guardian defender—something that the player originally termed a “star fighter.” Along with the soldier-princess angle, her mother was full-blown Sidhe and her father a bastard half-Sidhe son of the former king and a low-blood mistress. For Jewell, the Faerie blood ran true. Her elder brother was the chosen ruler of the planet after her parents were killed by terrorists, so Jewell involved herself with the prince of a neighboring planet, a relationship that turned abusive. Eventually, unable to take any more, she fled to Rhydin.

The player began text-based roleplaying as Sailor Moon. This led her to the creation of a Sailor Moon-type character sometime in 1998, a girl named Jewell with magical powers who was the defender of a whole world. Her only experience writing fiction outside of the free-form roleplaying environment was a creative writing class taken in college. Beyond fiction, her writing has focused on literary analysis. She says, “It's actually my strong point as far as writing goes; fiction and role playing (which go hand-in-hand for me) have always been like my dirty little secret I keep to myself.”

She counts a wide range of authors as major influences of her writing and storytelling style. J.R.R. Tolkien—“I keep saying this to people, but I just want a single hour to sit down with that man and learn how he did it!  The grand scope of his storytelling is what I want to take from him.” Sylvia Plath: “I want to take from her the ability to reveal someone's emotions without saying, ‘she's sad.’ That quiet desperation in The Bell Jar of someone trapped is compelling.” Jane Austen: “I've tried to steal her witty banter and fantastic females; there may be a little Emma Woodhouse in Jewell; and Timothy O'Brien, who “talks a lot about story telling in The Things They Carried. I don't know that it's influenced me yet, but it definitely has me thinking about story telling differently.”

Through Jewell, the player was able to explicate and understand events in her own life. This crosses over into her goals as a writer. She used her writing to explore experiences within the safety of fiction, and it became a means to gain a better understanding of the world around her; she credits Jewell as the character (and persona) that allowed her the freedom to do so. The player’s writing has matured with her; she has delved into deeper and more serious issues that were only written into Jewell’s backstory in a very shallow way. Jewell’s previously mentioned abusive relationship with the neighboring prince was only originally written as a footnote to her history, but within the last few years the writer was able to really dig into it, and in doing so discovered previously unrealized depths to her character.

She notes the transition from AOL to Dragon’s Mark as an event that enabled her to grow as a writer. She had never played anywhere other than AOL, and returning after a hiatus, she discovered it was a “scarier place than I had remembered.” She followed the group she was involved with after her return to AOL to DM. Jewell’s screen name was the fifth created on DM, and the initial small group gave her the chance to get to know players and characters, and provided the opportunity to write above and beyond chat room RP.

“All of the defining moments that took place for Jewell, outside her backstory, were spontaneous,” says the player. “Great stories grow out of spontaneous play if you are open to it. I won't say I never went into live RP without a plan or some goal for Jewell for that night,” but she estimates that the vast majority of her chat room play was just for sheer fun.

She notes a difference between forum posts and room play, and believes the difference reflected Jewell’s nature. As a layered character, at first glance or in casual play one could easily assume she was very shallow, “a socialite or an attention whore,” as the writer puts it. The room play was always more fun, light-hearted, and enjoyable, but the player was eventually drawn to board posts as a vehicle to tell Jewell’s story. The basic ideas presented in off-the-cuff play shaped Jewell, and those ideas were further explored in board posts and journal entries. The forum boards gave the player the chance to show Jewell’s deeper motivations and the reason behind her actions. Posts were not a simple retelling of the character’s background story, but an in-depth continuation of what happened in the chat rooms.

Besides Jewell’s leaving Rhydin, nothing was ever truly planned. The most defining moment, she says, “was probably when I decided she was pregnant for the first time. I can't even fathom what I was thinking back then! I like to imagine it went something like:

Goku: "We should have a kid."
Jewell:  "Like…all right."

And bam! My character is preggers.” She certainly didn't know it would help define Jewell for the next ten plus years, though. Rather than pretending that the pregnancy simply never happened, the player elected to add “unwed teenage mother” to Jewell’s long list of RP clichés, and made it work. Motherhood, she discovered, grounded Jewell and gave her some foundation. The next big defining moment was a bar fight that pitted Jewell against Brian Ravenlock. The player didn’t at the time recognize the importance of the meeting, but it led to the character’s becoming a Ravenlock—which gave her a solid play group—and to Jewell’s meeting and eventually marrying Alex Ravenlock, whom she describes as “Jewell’s first husband, one of my most favorite and longest standing play partners, and now a good friend of mine.” One other moment that deserved mention: the night Jewell met Tara Rynieyn. “It seemed like an average (albeit somewhat zanier) night in the Red Dragon Inn, but nothing changed my character more and me as a player more than meeting Tara.”

When asked for advice to give to someone who was interested in text-based roleplay, but had never tried it before, the player suggested, “Keep all your actions open.  If your character is shy, you have to invite play through the character's actions. Do something that will draw someone in. There is all the difference between:

::Jewell sat on a barstool, placing her bag on top of it and waiting for a bar tender to notice her::

and

::Jewell sat on a barstool. As she went to place her bag on the bartop, she totally missed and spilled its contents everywhere! She turned scarlet as she quickly ducked down, trying to gather the spilt coins, tube of lipstick, etc…::

The second one isn't better because it is longer,” but because it invites another player to interact while remaining true to the idea of the character as being shy. She also recommends not being afraid to react to open actions. “Sure,” she says, “someone comes in bleeding and the character's friends immediately jump to their aid. Doesn't mean your character can't offer to help too.”

Her final advice was to “allow your character to change. You don't need to have every detail of the character's personality ironed out when you bring him or her into the Inn. You learn through interaction. Your character may even surprise you! You may never know that they had an anger problem or were sensitive about a certain subject. Then you can explore it more once it happens. If you go into play with every detail written up already, there is nothing to learn and explore still.”

Jewell exemplified the spirit of light-hearted interaction in live play, while simultaneously revealing remarkable depths in forum posts. Meaningful complexity is one of the hallmarks of a great character, and the ability to juxtapose both the highs and lows of life while acknowledging the worth of both is one of the marks of a great writer.

Bye, Jewell. We’ll miss you. Jewell’s player? We’ll see you around.

 

-- Amy McGraw
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Ubique's Monthly
Mutual Endeavors