The Setup

The time is shortly after Billy for the L.A. crew, and very shortly after Once More With Feeling for the Sunnydale gang.

Fred, more freaked by the events of Billy than her onscreen counterpart, has hightailed it home to Texas. Gunn is offstage at the beginning, helping his gang deal with some of the aftermath and fallout from That Old Gang of Mine.

Cordy is still dealing with ever-more-debilitating vision-reactions, Wes is still reeling from his actions in Billy and Angel is... Angel.

The Sunnydalers are dealing with the fallout from OMWF, including Tara's realization of Willow's spell, Giles' indecision about whether to go or stay, Buffy's general depression.

And something's coming.

~

The Players

L.A.

Angel - thebratqueen
Wesley - thebratqueen
Wesley - wolfling
Cordelia - wesleysgirl
Doyle - wolfling
Gunn - justhuman (jhgames)
Lorne - mpoetess

Sunnydale

Buffy - buffybot
Giles - wolfling
Willow - thebratqueen
Xander - mpoetess
Anya - miss_edith
Spike - stakebait
Dawn - wordsofastory
Tara - wesleysgirl

Unaligned

Drusilla - miss_edith
The Mystery Man - pointybird

Former Players

Some of these players have either stepped out or changed characters during the official run of the game, and you'll see posts for that character from more than one player. Some changed during the practice runs, and the threads they participated in may have been retconned out of the official storyline -- you'll see them if you scroll far enough back in the livejournal, but won't see them on the Readers' Guide.

Wesley - tenebraeli
Buffy - kita0610
Xander/Anne - witchwillow
Anya - catscradle
Gunn/Faith - zortified
Gunn - zyre
Fred - oddcellist
Lindsey - othercat
Lilah/Gavin - byrne
Riley - obssessedmuch

We've got yer het, we've got yer slash. We've got yer spooky-ass plots, and yer flimsy excuses for PWP. ("Wait, you have sex organs? Wow, so do I!") We've got yer NC-17 smut of several flavors, and yer fluffy Summers-family bonding over mac & cheese. We also have donuts.

This page is meant to be a general guide to the order in which to read the various plotlines and posts so that you'll have a decent picture of what's going on. It won't be perfect -- many plots happen simultaneously, and 'simultaneous' sometimes takes on a whole new meaning in terms of how fast one group of characters is moving compared to another. (Wes and Cordy in The Magical SUV Where Time Has No Meaning, for example...)

The Format:

This Role Playing Game takes place in a Livejournal Community (linked at the bottom of the page) -- so the plotlines may be somewhat difficult to follow for people who aren't used to the way livejournal works, and/or haven't been reading the community from the beginning.

Anyway... let's try to muddle through together, shall we?

Each scene is begun with a post to the livejournal community -- the same as someone might make an entry to their blog or journal. The rest of that scene is carried out in the comments section of that post, with a character's actions/dialogue/thoughts left as a comment in response to the previous character.

Each comment is accompanied by a picture of the appropriate character. (Though you'll occasionally see bizarreness of userpictures - Cordy next to an Angel comment, for instance. This comes from *cough* some people *cough* having posted with their default userpicture instead of using a pic with a specific character name. Their default picture was of their character, at the time.... but now it's not. You'll just have to blink at the post and make sure from context who's actually speaking.)

The responses/comments/turns will move down the page, slowly indenting to the right, in a comment thread. When they get too far over, usually the next comment will be shoved all the way back to the left again; sometimes you'll see a note that says 'zinging left' - that's what it means.

Livejournal has an annoying 'collapse' issue. More than 50 comments on a post make some of the comment threads collapse into a series of text links, instead of just being able to scroll down and read all comments at once. We figured out how annoying this was, and how to avoid it, after a while, but many early threads still have collapsed comments. To deal with reading them, you can either click on them all one at a time, or click on the "thread" link below the last full comment displayed, which will take you to a page showing only that now-uncollapsed comment thread. When you hit the end of it, click your back button and move down the page to the next group of comments.

These days, when a post begins nearing 50 comments, we'll start a new post, continuing the same scene, with internal navigation saying "Continued here" and "continued from here." We also use those types of links to show when one scene dovetails with another. (Example: Cordy and Wes are in the car, the Scooby Gang are in the Magic Box. 2 separate posts or series of posts. When Cordy and Wes arrive at the shop, their individual post ends, as they join the main Scooby scene.)

Piece of advice -- when you're reading from the beginning, try to keep coming back here for your next link, instead of using the "Continued here" links on the actual posts -- there are too many simultaneous things going on that you'll miss if you keep following one subplot exclusively. When you get caught up with the current posting (or if you're reading the current posts while trying to catch up on the backstory), then go for the "Continued here" links. At that point they'll be much more helpful.