Character names

Your account is not public and never will be — not your email address, not your sign-in name, not what you chose in any week. Only the character. That split is deliberate and it is not going to change.

Choosing one

Name your character the way you would name a person in a story: something you will be happy to see written down two hundred times.

We will show you what names in the Reach tend to look like for the species you have chosen, because Aropria's peoples name themselves in different ways and it is genuinely interesting. That is a suggestion and nothing more. You are not required to pick something that sounds like the setting, and nobody will refuse a name for being too plain, too modern, or not fantasy enough. It is your character.

What is not allowed

A short list, and it is about conduct rather than taste:

• Slurs and hate. Names attacking people for their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, disability, gender or sexuality.
• Real people. Names of real individuals, living or dead, used to impersonate them or to attach them to something they have not agreed to. An ordinary name that happens to be somebody's is fine; being them is not.
• Impersonating the site. Names presenting as staff, as an admin, as a moderator, or as the game itself.
• Sexual content, and graphic violence or cruelty as a name.
• Advertising. Web addresses, product names, and anything that exists to sell something.
• Names built to confuse. Names constructed out of system text, punctuation or invisible characters so they read as part of the page rather than as a person.

That is the whole list. If a name is not on it, it is allowed.

What happens after you choose

You play immediately. Your character is created, the week is yours, and nothing waits on us.

Your name reaches the public roster once somebody has read it. That is usually quick. Until then your character is playing normally and is simply not listed yet.

If a name is not one we can publish, we will not publish it and we will tell you why and ask you to choose another. Your character keeps playing the whole time — the same character, the same week, the same record. Nothing is lost and nothing is paused.

If somebody will not choose another name after being asked, an admin will change it. That is the last step rather than the first, and it has never been the interesting case.

Changing your name later

You can change your character's name from their record, for as long as they live. A name that is not on the roster yet is simply replaced, and the new one is read instead. A name already on the roster stays there until the new one has been read, so the roster never shows a name nobody has looked at.

Renaming does not rewrite your history. The chronicle knows your character rather than your name, so a change carries through every week you have played — you do not end up with a record split between two people, and there is no version of this where a name change costs you your past.