Feral Heart

Feral heart groups have gotten too complicated. The best way to make a group that is successful in my opinion:


Have common sense. Don't create a "scout" rank if the scouting rank is for other packs. I personally think scouting should be the process of a few wolves who share information between packs. However, when you have no alliances- why are you making the rank in the first place? The same goes for "guard" and "warrior." If you mix them together, call them "guardian" you have a force of soldiers who protect and fight in wars- and actually have a job. Maybe they are assigned to a young litter of pups and their mother? Maybe there is a weak or pregnant wolf in the pack? Maybe the medic needs someone to watch their back when they search for materials? There is so many opportunities. You also don't need to make new names for every new ranking in that class. Maybe the lead should be called "Lead Guardian" to suggest his upmost ranking, but that's it. Just use numbers, or maybe a points system on what they do? Hmm.. So many ways to go about it.


Rules. Rules, rules, rules. There is a beautiful balance between too restrictive- crazy restrictive- and too relaxed. You should, yes, have control of your members- but not to the point you're putting a collar on each of them and watching them carefully. Have trust in them. If they want to succeed in the pack, and stay in it- they'll be active, and respect the people around them. If they don't, they'll either go inactive or other members will report them to you.


Have people who have your back. Maybe it's two others, maybe one. But you should have someone around who you'll know will be active at a certain time, will roleplay in their activity, and engage members for you. Taking hold of a pack on your own with no friends is three times harder to gain and maintain members than with them.


Literacy! LITERACY! It sucks, it sucks some major things. There is so many opportunities for a person who doesn't have the most beautiful grammar or sentence structure to spice up your roleplay with their character. You need to let go of some things, and that includes a literacy requirement. People get turned off when your pack is only literate- where's the fun in that? That's way too restrictive in my book.


Plottings. I know have background information may sound beautiful- but is it interesting enough? is it too far out there? Does it engage people WHILE they are role playing? I've been thinking about making a pack with five people in total about their journey through creating a pack through their wolves. Having people join, having their characters struggle and fight and /learn./ Does that not sound engaging to you? It would follow through and would make more of the "rogue joining a random pack" spicier.


Resolve. You /need/ to put yourself fully out there when making a pack. No, you don't need to sit there recruiting for 6 hours. Maybe a half hour every few days? You need to show that you /care/ about the role play and that others care about it with you. When you recruit, sit there- and sit there for a while. Engage in local about your story, post videos on /youtube/ (i've never seen people do this but it's something that draws in members! remember the benevolent pack?). Create a post on this site. You need to go /all in/ or not at all- because your group will fail without it.


Sites. You don't need a site where members will have to join to even join your pack. Make a discord server, and make sure non-members can't see into stuff other members don't want them to see. If they have a discord server, they can leave it at any time and it makes not a lot of difference in joining. They can post links to their bios if they want something more detailed than feral-hearts, and it /creates/ such a /good/ place to role play when they can't get on.


Might add more on later.

This is why I keep a very subtle display of illnesses with my characters back in the day and even now. Sure, Bacchus does showcase repressed memories and amnesia, but that's not the only problems he has and I keep private small notes on how exactly he would act/react with many, many situations so that I display the illnesses he has in my role-play correctly via sciences and experiences told by some of my friends whom have been diagnosed by mental health doctors.


Mental illnesses should not be a reason that your character is "good" or "bad", and serious actions your character does while not being mentally well shouldn't be excused because of those illnesses. Also, considering how in wolf-role plays we do not have mental health medics (a goal I'm striving to create.) we can't exactly display more serious mental health illnesses that may need medication to be contained properly, in the correct format. In groups- a mental illness like depression or schizophrenia, or hallucinations is something that would run rampant without correct diagnoses and applicants.


I don't think it's exactly right to role-play more serious mental health illnesses in time periods where mental health specialists are not available. Because, without them, we do not exactly know how to describe how it would be without doctors to control it. If there was a medic specialized in keeping the sanity of their members stable, then I think it would be reasonable. However, it would be even harder to role-play a mental health specialist than a body medic because mental illnesses are still being developed treatment-wise and the body has more history behind its' research and because of having more research better diagnoses can be made about body illnesses rather than mental ones.


Without proper research, a character can snap from morally grey (some things are okay compared to morally whites' opinions) to morally black (everything is okay to do, including murder and other things) in an instant. These kinds of characters' personalities are unstable, and always shifting depending on whom they are talking to (since we subtly add a bit of our own favoritism when interacting with another characters' person.). If you aren't careful and don't /heavily/ research into the topics you want your character to suffer from, you're going to do them wrong and then it will be a huge mess to fix with everyone involved- or you'll have to give up on the character.


Also, "spicing up" and adding depth to characters isn't how you should mess with mental illnesses. They're used because something went wrong in a characters' life, not because you simply want to make your character more interesting. If you do them because you want to add depth to a character, then what's the background on why they have this illness; and why are you making it the focus of the characters' personality? If you want to make your character more interesting, add extreme detail into how they would react with such and such topics (religion, past experiences, personal opinions) depending on the relationships with these people and these people (their sister, lover, best friend, or loathed rival). A straight, mentally healthy character can be turned into something amazing if they are done right with a lot of love packed into them.