I'm truly honored to share Nocturne with you, with the community that ultimately will make it function and feel like a living, breathing world. Throughout the years I've enjoyed forum-based RP like anyone else, but all sites come and go. Someday, the sun may set with Nocturne, but I hope that it brings joy for a long time to come. I built this site not for myself, but for each of you who joins and finds pleasures in it's features, and in the easiness it should provide to fit in - with so many things already in place for you. Largely, I've worked hard to make the need for a staff team minimal. As the user, you have power over:

• Moving, closing, and archiving your own threads.
• Opting in and out of a wiki edit role to contribute to the site, making all wiki and nature entries user-driven. You choose what does or doesn't exist in our world.
• Moderation requires accountability and has escalation guidelines, we all hold each other accountable rather than answer to a set staff team. This helps prevent staff burnout, confusion, and hopefully drama. You're trusted with Nocturne as a whole and with each other. The community governs itself.
• Even with this community-driven approach, staff is here to intervene when absolutely needed in the form of moderators you choose to promote or demote. I'll be there to help along the way.
• Anything that requires time such as character aging, day progression, season progression, moon cycles... it's fully automated.
In addition to these user-freeing concepts are fun features like:
• Full weather and moon phase tracking that is still optional for users to write about in threads.
• Fully programmed events that will affect different areas of the site
• Auto aging, random events, and an easy tool for *any* staff member to post news or start events without needing the developer to launch it.
• No need to create a ton of accounts. Simply register as you, the player, and create characters through the character hub. You're in control of your characters once they leave the draft phase. You don't need any staff member to mark them active once they’ve been accepted, or to change their group/pack/rank.
• Build your character's profile the way you'd like. You have access to safe, sanitized CSS and HTMl. You can use this to enable or disable parts of profiles and to style your character's page however you like (within reason. no one likes neon everything).
• You generate your *own* litters when it's time for characters to reproduce. You choose when this happens (again, within reason and with some limitations), and can opt out of only breeding in the winter. There is no fear of staff member bias for rolling litters, of someone getting it wrong, of anyone feeling anything regarding reproduction is unfair. Staff is only involved in approving final designs to ensure puppies fit site guidelines.
• Litters automatically inherit traits from their parents, can have random mutations, and can be automatically converted to a character when it's time. Litters can also have complications, and keep the parent’s colors and attributes in mind. You can convert a puppy from your litter directly to a character and immediately put them up for adoption.
• No need to track when you can or can't have another litter - the system logs this for you. The same with pregnancy - you'll know what to expect in general at least, with a timer added to character profiles to help you know how far along the dam is.
• Choose who to post with on the fly with no need to log in or out, and change the character who posted so long as a roll hasn't been applied (to prevent roll spoofing).
• Enjoy random events that may appear when you create a new thread or reply to a thread on in-character boards. Random events can be good or bad.
• Anyone can create a troupe, progress to a pack, and make it official or disbanded so long as there is proven IC development. IC development can be tracked as plot-news that will automatically show on a pack's page so long as the pack is included in the plot-news. The only thing you need final mod approval for is an official pack, as staff will have to update the boards to indicate your pack lives there.

Nocturne takes inspiration from several sites I've been a part of, but most especially after one I cherished for a long time: Dawn. Many of our features were seen on Dawn but not anywhere else. Dawn's original creator Madison really poured so much wonderful work into it. I wanted a sustainable site that carried some of the spirit of Dawn - such as the character hub - without relying on myBB or jcink - we are our own platform. Nocturne was built from scratch piece by piece with countless hours of debugging and determination. When I was running Dawn I made mistakes. The users trusted me and I failed them more than once. That said, Nocturne isn’t Dawn. It isn’t an attempt to re-create or re-launch what Dawn was. I want Nocturne to run better, and to be done properly, and for everyone to feel things are fair and that they feel heard. I want to be better, and do better. I want to ensure that you have the freedom to write what you want, where you want, how you want - so long as it follows the rules of the site. To help achieve this - there is censoring for any post labeled M (mature) and for any posts that have content warning tags. You only read what you choose to read. I want Nocturne to succeed not for me, but for you. I want to watch people's joy as they experience an RP world that they build and immerse themselves in. There is no proprietary software - it's made here, with passion, and with the intent of making everyone's lives easier so they can focus on enjoying writing. This won't fix problem members, of course, but hopefully it makes it easier to mitigate them and makes the whole experience seamless. Create your character, and just blend into a world where most things don’t require staff’s help. So again, welcome home. I look forward to seeing how you contribute and to writing with each of you as I can.