This site is for the trial run of Horizon, which has finished! If you want information on the full game, commencing October 2005, you should go here.

Turnsheet Guidelines

Turnsheeting in Horizon exists for two purposes:

For you to tell us on an in-character level what you want your character to get up to between sessions.

For you to tell us on an out-of-character level whether you're enjoying the game, and whether there's anything we can do to help you enjoy the game more.

The IC Part

In-character, there is two months between each session. This is enough time for you to enact four wonderful plans in order to achieve your goals. The in-character part of the turnsheet should ideally be split into four sections: Actions, Housekeeping, Opinions, and Expenditure. Four corners of nature's harmonious turnsheeting cube.

Actions

You get four actions in a turn. An action is an attempt to achieve something non-trivial. For example:

Assassinating someone is an action.
Breaking into someone's house is an action.
Kidnapping and interrogating someone is an action.
Going on an expedition is an action.
Working on an invention is an action.
Brewing alchemical things is an action.

You should detail how your character intends to go achieving the goal you set for yourself in each action. You should give us as much detail as needed to let us know what you intend to do and how you intend to go about it. If you're sparse on the details, we'll be obliged to guess how you go about things, and our guesses might not be the way you were thinking of. At the same time, bear in mind that we have around 100 actions to process each turn: don't go into minute detail. Furthermore, in general we will expect your character has a decent idea of how to do the things your character is skilled at: if you turnsheet something which seems OOC sensible to you but would seem IC eccentric to your character, we'll check with you before assuming you go ahead with it.

It's legitimate (and often sensible) to put in multiple turnsheet actions towards achieving an especially difficult goal. Many actions could conceivably be broken down into multiple steps: as a rule of thumb, if the steps are relatively simple, straightforward things, there's little advantage to putting individual actions into them. For example, if I turnsheeted:

1: Bake a cake with a file in it.
2: Get a disguise.
3: Put on the disguise and visit Ugly Bill in the Doghouse, handing over the cake.
4: Hide Ugly Bill when he escapes.

I'd be wasting my actions, when I could just write:

Action 1: Bake a cake with a file in it, disguise myself, visit Ugly Bill in the Doghouse, give him the cake, give him sanctuary when he escapes.

On the other hand, if the steps in question are complicated things (and are, in fact, major goals in their own right), it's more sensible to turnsheet them individually. For example, if I wrote:

1: Buy loads of guns and establish secret caches in the hills around the city. Recruit the disgruntled steamworkers who've been fired from Mr Edward's cheese factory for the revolutionary cause. Blow up Colonel Zero at the annual parade with the explosives I made last turn. Lead my Richterist goons in a revolution to establish a socialist utopia.

I won't get as good results as if I wrote:

1: Buy loads of guns and establish secret caches in the hills around the city.
2: Recruit the disgruntled steamworkers who've been fired from Mr Edward's cheese factory for the revolutionary cause.
3: Blow up Colonel Zero at the annual parade with the explosives I made last turn.
4: Lead my Richterist goons in a revolution to establish a socialist utopia.

And chances are the GMs would note that I've tried to cram 4 different actions into 1 and rule that I only get as far as hiding the guns in the hills.

It is, of course, entirely acceptable to put contingency plans into your turnsheet. (For example: "Here's action 1a and 1b. If Frank gets back to me with the idol, I'll go for action 1a; if Frank fails or betrays me, I'll go for action 1b instead.")

Housekeeping

The housekeeping section of your turnsheet is for those things which are too minor to merit a full turnsheet action, but which you'll still want the GMs to be aware of. Acceptable housekeeping actions include, but are not limited to:

Paying rent and/or protection money.
Giving money to PCs and NPCs.
Scoring whatever horrible drugs you ruin your body with.
Putting advertisements in the small ads.
Writing news articles and submitting them to newspapers.
Doing your job.
Attending an event or meeting you've been invited to (so long as you don't intend to do anything more complex than turn up and talk to people).
Talking to NPCs. (Discussions with other player characters should really be handled over e-mail).
Tidying your room.
Angsting.

The rule of thumb is that if it's part of your character's regular day-to-day routine, it's a housekeeping thing.

Opinions

If your character is trying to express a particular opinion to people during this turn, point it out here. It might be helpful.

In particular, if you hold rank in an organisation your opinions can come to mould that organisation's policies. The higher your rank, the more closely you'll be listened to - for example, the opinions of Rank 4 mobsters or government insiders will carry more weight than the opinions of Rank 1 goons or government paper-pushers.

Expenditure

Here's where you should keep track of how much money you are giving to people, and how much money you're receiving. Check the money rules for more details.

The OOC Part

If you have any complaints, suggestions, words of praise or other OOC issues you'd like to raise with the GMs, feel free to put them in your turnsheet, e-mail the GMs, or talk to us at RPGSoc events. Please bear in mind that while we'll listen to all your comments, there's a limit to how much we can change the game to enhance your enjoyment without damaging other people's enjoyment.

Giving Us Your Turnsheet

The preferred format for turnsheet submissions is via e-mail to the GM team. Please refrain from attaching your turnsheet in the form of a text or word document - copy-and-paste it directly into the body of the mail, please.

The GM team can be reached at:

team_of_traitors at yahoogroups dot com
or
rpgsocgm at maillist dot ox dot ac dot uk

The deadline for turnsheets is 11:59pm Friday. The GMs will usually meet to discuss turnsheets on Sunday; while we will attempt to process all turnsheets we receive by then, we'll regard turnsheets received after the deadline as being optional.

Please turn up promptly to sessions - we intend to time in at 8:30pm after an hour turnsheeting players, and we would prefer not to inconvenience timely players by making them wait while we turnsheet late ones. If you expect to be late to a session, let us know in advance - if any of our GMs have time, they'll happily give you turnsheet results via e-mail to save you and us time at the start of the session.