Articles by Eralam

Author's Note: A little over 7 years ago, I started a series of interconnected short stories about me, my friends, and the zombie apocalypse. It was a way of dealing with some issues at the time, namely the collapse of my relationship with the woman who would go on to have my first child...

A few hours later, we were all sitting in the lounge. The house was empty now, except for family. Leigh was still glaring daggers at Corran, who had broken her boyfriend’s nose. To be fair, it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. To hear Stephanie tell it, Leigh’s friends didn’t consider a...

The issue of metagaming as it pertains to Chaos is, in my experience, unique to the site. I've not traveled the RP world as much as some, but I've been around a bit, and it's never been a hot button issue. In most cases, metagaming is, if not outright forbidden, strongly discouraged. Chaos, on...

One of the things that really impressed me about Chaos upon arrival was the fact that the universe is in a constant state of flux. Factions are constantly adding new territory through dominions and taking it from each other through invasions. The fact that there's a formalized system for both is...

For a while, everything was great. Many of the gamer types couldn't cope with the increasingly hostile attitude towards their approach. One particular group insisted on causing trouble and after a series of temporary bans, became the first to be permanently banned. Known forevermore as the...

If you stick around Chaos long enough, you're bound to here about "the clique." Nailing down exactly who or what THE CLIQUE (it feels more ominous when you use caps lock) is can be tricky, since no two rosters will align perfectly, and the influence of THE CLIQUE varies from telling to telling...

So I've been kicking around the idea of doing write-ups for your basic faction archetypes for a while now, and since the Mandalorians are a hot topic at the moment, I decided to start there. Before we dive into Mandalorian factions, it helps to have an understanding of Mandalorian writers. Bear...

This is going to be a hard one. The trouble with analyzing Jedi RPers stems from the source material itself: there are about a dozen different iterations of the Jedi Order in canon, both Legends and current, and each one has at least one different interpretation of what it means to be a Jedi...

Hi. My name's Eralam, and I'm an nerf herder. To those of you that remember me from JvS, this admission comes as no surprise. I've butted heads with most of you at one time or another. The Chaos natives will figure it out soon enough, I promise. Given enough time and the right set of circumstances...

Sith are at once easier and harder to analyze than Jedi. Easier, because Sith factions tend to work in the long run, and harder, because for every Sith writer, there's a new way to write a Sith. Trying to break them down into groups is difficult. Nonetheless, we can still, with great difficulty...

How to call a hit: don't. See? That was easy. There are very few universal rules of forum RP. One of them that stretches across nearly every board, from natural RP like ours to D20 combat systems is that you cannot control whether or not your attacks land or how much damage they do. Period...

Everyone enjoys a good duel. Duels are to Star Wars what the wrecks are to racing. They are the goal in basketball, the home run in baseball. They are going inside for coffee at the end of a date, and more often than not on Chaos, seem to lead to crying and regret at the end. Yeah, I went there...

In honor of the 2017 Downed Dog Kicking Playoffs, I thought it might be prudent to take a look at exactly what kills a faction. As usual, I'm drawing largely from personal experience and observation, and for the sake of casting as wide a net as possible, I'm going to have to rely on...

Imagine for a moment that you're at a bar. A stranger has taken offense to your presence, and has seen fit to show his displeasure by punching you in the face. In doing so, he has left himself open to a kick to the family jewels. Do you A: let him break your face, or B: punt his balls up between...

There's this thing I've seen on Chaos where people don't like to take damage in duels. They think that by stubbornly refusing to take a hit when surrounded by a half-dozen Master level Force Users who are trying their damnedest to kill them, this makes them some kind of badass. No. It does not...

Fourth time's the charm, I guess. If this post gets eaten like the ones that came before it, I'm going to assume that any attempt to analyze Imperial factions is cursed. Which is fitting, when you think about it, because Imperial factions tend to operate under their own sort of curse. See...

Twas the night before Christmas And all through the house Not a creature was stirring Except for the mouse The mouse he was ready So sure and so quick Making ready his plans For jolly old Saint Nick It was a year to the day Since Saint Nick brought a cat The mouse once had a family Santa had...

Okay, so this is something from a project I've been working on for years in one form or another. It's been torn down and rebuilt from the ground up three or four times now, but I think I'm on the final form. If there's one thing you're almost guaranteed to have on a deployment when you're not...

The Force is infinite. You are not. When I first joined Chaos, one of the first things I asked about was dueling. After all, on my old site, I was a top ranked competitive duelist. I enjoy dueling. When everything goes well, it's some of the best fun you can have on a Star Wars RP site. It took...

There is one word above all others that I found more annoying as an admin on my former site on a day to day basis: transparency. In the day to day running of an RP forum, there's a lot that goes on that the general public isn't privy to. Most of it is day to day administrative tasks, like name...