User:Matt

• Urizen look and feel
• Costume - tents and wording
• Rules update 2021

Update Text

We've now removed all the stubs on the new and updated wiki pages for Urizen as well as the costume pages. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback to help us finalize these changes.

The main thing the feedback identified was that we had mistakenly given people the impression that we were trying to remove all Asian influence from the look and feel of Urizen. We wanted to be clear with the update that Urizen is a nation of wizards and philosophers - and the costume is inspired by depictions of high elves in films and games. Whilst those images are themselves influenced by Asian styles, we're trying to focus Urizen on the original inspiration - not purge the costume guide of any Asian influence. The thing to avoid is creating an entire costume that looks unmistakably Asian or East Asian in origin, so real Asian garments are less appropriate than layered robes that have less overt Asian overtones. We've updated the text on the wiki to try to make this goal clearer.

We also had some confusion over the ideal weapons and armour for Sword Scholars. The previous text here was left-over from the original wiki page for sword scholars and implied that sword scholars should look like medival crusaders. In fact the ideal look and feel for a sword scholar is not significantly different from any other Urizen warrior. We've rewritten the text here to provide more useful costume advice that players can use in conjunction with the main Urizen costume page for inspiration.

A few people were concerned that less appropriate costume can't be used at events or must be phased out over time. This not the case - anything classed as inappropriate for Empire, can't be worn at events, so by definition anything that isn't in this category is acceptable for use. Obviously having three different classifications - ideal - less appropriate - inappropriate is more complex than just "acceptable/not acceptable" - but we think it is an important distinction to make and worth perservering with. There is a vast range of costume you can potentially wear for Empire - but we want to be clear on what the *ideal* costume for each nation looks like so people know what to aim for when buying or making new costume.

There are lots of reason to wear less appropriate costume - it might be the costume or armour that fits you best, it might be what you have available or can afford, or it might just be the best garment you have available that complements the ideal costume that you do have. We encourage everyone to develop and improve their costume over time - but how you do that is down to you and your budget.

We saw some concerns that the rules on tents in the in-character area prohibited bell tents with plastic guy ropes. The rules for tents in the IC area weren't changed with the new update, but we did move them to the new costume page to give them more prominence, so some people may have been seeing the written rules for the first time. We've updated the old text to use the new three-term classifications and tried to make clear that although nylon guy ropes are less appropriate than polyhemp ropes the tents are fine for use at events.

Finally we've updated the section on less appropriate costume to remove the reference to tagelmusts for the time being. The original look and feel page has always made clear that red, yellow or orange are preferable to blue, so a blue head scarf is currently marked as less appropriate. However we want to do a lot more research into the cultural significance of tagelmusts in Taureg culture before we issue final guidance on what players can and can't use for events. We don't want players to change their costume until we've done that, so we've removed the reference for now.