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Imagine a world where empires that have ruled for centuries share borders with republics younger than the people running them.

Welcome to Avium, Talonia's collaborative roleplay, set in a fictional early 20th-century world in the Ignis system. Years of writing have produced over two hundred episodes and close to thirty story arcs, half a dozen of them still unfolding, written by people spread across most of the time zones we could find.

Avium's continents never drifted apart. A modified version of Pangaea forces almost everyone onto shared land borders, stranding countries that'd sit safely behind oceans among neighbors they cannot avoid. The Talonian Office of Enumeration and Statistics, a series of spreadsheets running underneath all the action, tracks every nation's population, economy, industry, and military strength, and those figures get argued over in the open until they hold. No fleet in Avium appears overnight, no economy triples between episodes, and no borders move overnight either. Military conflict for the sake of conquest between players is discouraged, though not banned outright, since a map that redraws itself every few months cannot carry decades of history. Nations can still grow, but only through effort and merit: players can choose to purchase land with TaloCoins, which are earned through activity and recruitment.

The narrative follows people instead of governments. Ministers and spies, journalists and soldiers, exiled dictators, civilians who showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Writers develop them over months and sometimes years, long enough for them to fall in love, defect, get promoted well past their competence, and occasionally die badly. Because so many of them hold office or stand close to someone who does, what happens to a character happens to their country. Nothing is undone. Everything written stays written, and all of it lives on the Talopedia, our collaborative wiki hosted on Google Docs, where players maintain Wikipedia-style articles on their nations, their histories, and their characters. In-universe time runs on its own clock, and we control the dial: busy stretches slow down enough for everything to be written properly, and quiet ones get skipped past so the story can pick up somewhere new.

Nations in Avium are also known for their nuanced sporting scenes, and two countries that cannot say something across a negotiating table will happily say it across a pitch. Football carries the most weight by a distance: clubs and national sides keep records going back seasons, a few rivalries have outlived the countries that started them. Every match runs through an engine we built ourselves, so nobody has ever talked their way to a title.

The scale of it scares people off more than it should. Turn up on our Discord server with your vision of a nation, and we'll help you build the rest, from its founding history to its first episode. There's plenty of unclaimed territory on our map, and we'd love to know what you'd do with it.

Every nation in Avium began as somebody's idea and an empty stretch of coastline. What follows is roughly the order in which you'd do things.

Found a nation. Pick a stretch of land on the map and start building. You decide what the country is: its history, its government, how it ended up where it is, and who it can't stand. We'll help you fit it against what's already there, since your neighbors are somebody else's work and the two histories have to agree. Once it settles, the nation enters TOES with its population, economy, and military on the record.

Get it on the record. A nation isn't real until it's written down. Your portal on the Talopedia is where that happens: start with a country-specific front page (overview) and an index of everything you've produced (nation portal), then add in more articles that fill in your history, politics, economy, and culture as the nation develops.

Write. Episodic stories are what carry the long-form work. A character's origin, a coup told from inside the room, or a war written from the losing side. They run as long as they need to and often stretch across several installments. This is where most of Avium's weight sits, and it's the part people stay for.

Live it live. Plenty of roleplay happens in real time on Discord, one post at a time, with every writer speaking only for their own characters. For example, summits, interrogations, and negotiations that fall apart in the third hour. Governments exchange telegrams between capitals, and the national press publishes whatever the rest of the world needs to hear, accurate or otherwise.

Not to mention the banter. Most of the OOC traffic consists of players ragging on each other's governments, disputing whose sports team is more "fraudulent", and workshopping crises at two in the morning. It gets much worse on match day, where football can be watched, minute by minute, sh*thousery escalating with every goal. TaloCoins can be wagered on the result, which is how a few people have funded their territorial expansion and how a few others have set it back a year. Somebody's national side goes out on penalties to a weaker squad, and they'll hear about it for the rest of the year.

1. Join the World Assembly and endorse WA delegates Moukden and Kirin and The Horkish People, or obtain Honorary Citizenship.

2. Join the Discord server. All in-character activity (stories, news posts, telegraphs, meetings, conferences, wars, etc.) happens here, as well as out-of-character planning and communications for roleplay and worldbuilding.

3. Ensure that you meet or are willing to work towards meeting the following prerequisites:

   • You can produce clear, manual prose and maintain a coherent narrative without the assistance of large language models.

   • You possess a working knowledge of politics, economics, and international relations, allowing you to build and maintain an internally consistent, realistic nation.

   • You prioritize the shared canon and "boundaries of realism" over individual impulses, showing respect for roleplay etiquette and other participants' storylines.

   • You can engage thoughtfully in complex political or historical themes and handle diplomatic friction with a level-headed, adult perspective.

   • You are committed to remaining active, responding to diplomatic cables in a timely manner, and communicating any necessary absences to the community.

4. Ensure that you have read the Roleplay Guidelines and have an understanding of how Avium operates.

5. Follow the steps outlined in this document to become a member of Avium!