Welcome to Urth Roleplay!
This guide is meant for new users and will help you get settled in. By the end of this guide, you’ll be more familiar with our community, you’ll have claimed your very own nation, and you’ll have built the foundations for your future roleplaying and worldbuilding!
Urth Roleplay (AKA Urth RP) is a collaborative, modern-day, and modern-tech roleplay environment that has existed for over two decades. It’s set on the planet Urth (hence the name), an Earth-like planet orbiting around the star Tep. Take a look at our map here and our wiki here!
While we strive for a certain level of in-character realism, we’re not afraid of a little bit of fantasy or whimsy. Urth is inhabited by a wide variety of sapient species, from humans, to standard fantasy creatures like elves or orcs, to the more exotic cava (bird people), and even the delightfully strange symbiotic symphs (to name a few examples)!
Overall, we’re a rather laid-back and friendly community. Everyone goes at their own pace and collaboration is a near-constant fixture. We do have some activity requirements, but we are very accommodating and understand that real life always comes first.
If all this sounds good to you, then let’s get started!
Getting Started
By participating in Urth RP, you agree to abide by our rules. Ideally, you should read the whole rules post, but a summary of the most important rules have been provided near the top for your convenience. You can read our rules here.
Now that you’ve read our rules, you’re ready to get started. In Urth RP, we use a few different platforms. This section will guide you through creating accounts for two of them. If you already have accounts for Discord and Discourse, skip to the next section.
First, we’ll start with creating a Discord account and joining our Discord server. In this community, we use Discord as our main hub of operations. Nearly everything that ends up on our other platforms was at one point discussed there. We use it for community announcements, coordination with other roleplayers, polls, general discussion, support, hanging out, etc.
- Create a Discord account if you don’t already have one. You can do so here. You’ll probably also want to download the app instead of using it in your browser. Make sure to verify your email as well.
- Join our server.
- After joining, you’ll be greeted with the Server Guide screen. There are a few basic steps on it to help you get started, which are fairly self-explanatory. The most important part will be to read the post from Urthbot in new-nations-start-here. It’ll tell you how to get verified. We try our best to keep up, but verification is done manually, so it might take a bit.
- Once you’ve completed the “quests” in the Server Guide, even if you’re not verified yet, you can proceed.
Next, we’ll create an account for this forum, if you haven’t already. Some may refer to the forum as “Discourse,” which is the forum system we use.
- From this page, click “Sign Up” in the top right of your screen. You can create an entirely separate account, or create it with the Discord account you just made.
Now you have accounts for two of the three services we use! You’ll still need an account for the wiki, but we’ll create it later. Depending on your level of familiarity with Discord and Discourse, they may seem overwhelming at first, but by the end of this guide, you’ll have a better idea of how to navigate them.
Navigating the Forum
On the main page of the forum, you can see all of the categories. Every header in bold is a category or subcategory. Of relevance to Urth RP are the categories with the turquoise-colored sidebars. Here’s a quick breakdown of the three most important Urth RP categories:
- Nation Creation Starts Here: This is where nations are created and changed. A few important informational posts, such as this one, are also located in this category.
- Urth: This is where forum roleplays of all types are posted.
- News Broadcasts: Here, people create threads for their news agencies and post news stories within them.
A note on terminology
You might see things posted to the forum referred to as threads, topics, or simply posts. For most purposes, these terms can be used interchangeably. Officially, Discourse refers to the initial post as a “topic” and to subsequent posts within that topic as “replies”.
For easy access, you may want to have these categories appear on the sidebar at all times. If you hover over the “Categories” section at the left of your screen, an edit button should appear. By default, the most popular categories on the forum appear there. If you click on it you can select categories you want to always appear in that spot. Make sure to save the changes when you’re done.
Now that you have a bit of familiarity with the forum layout, you should be able to navigate to the Nation Creation Starts Here category for the next section.
Creating Your Nation
Now for the exciting part! It’s time to create your very own nation. You’ll want to navigate to the Nation Creation Starts Here category and find the Nation Registration Guide.
The New Roleplayer Guide won’t go into detail about nation claims. All that information is in the Nation Registration Guide. Follow that guide, and return to this one once your claim is posted. You should open a New Nation Claim ticket in the map-discussion channel on Discord to build your claim alongside the cartographers.
While Waiting For Approval
You’ve posted your very first nation claim! The Cartography Department will be voting on it shortly, and will reply to your original post with the results. If your claim is accepted, it will be added to the map in the next update.
While you’re waiting for your claim to be approved, here are a few things you can do (in no particular order):
Wiki
If you have any questions or need help with the wiki, make use of the tep-wiki channel on the Discord server.
Before doing any work on TepWiki, you’ll need to create an account. You can do so here.
Note: While you will be able to create pages and make edits, they will have to be manually approved by staff at first. To get verified (so your edits are automatically approved), just ask in the tep-wiki channel.
Once your account is made, you can start working on a wiki page for your nation. The first thing you’ll want to work on is the infobox for your nation. An infobox is a standardized table of information that appears on the right of your screen on wikis (like on the wiki articles for countries, for example).
We have a simple tool that you can use to quickly create a page for your nation with an infobox. Clicking the “Create Page” button after entering your nation’s name will bring you straight to page creation.
The only thing on the page will be the infobox. You should start off your page by filling out that template with your nation’s information. If you’re not sure what a parameter does, you can refer to the documentation for that template or look at the source code of someone else’s page.
What is a wiki template?
A wiki template is a standard format for a commonly used element on the wiki. Some have a whole bunch of options and parameters, like infoboxes, while others have no customization options and will only (for example) add an informational banner at the top of your page (such as the WIP template). Templates begin and end with two curly brackets (e.g.{{WIP}}).What is a parameter?
In a wiki template, each line that begins with a pipe (|) is a parameter, such as|common_name=in the country infobox.
Once you’re done building your infobox, you can start writing the body of your page. The rest is up to you, but here’s some general advice:
- Save often! Don’t needlessly lose hours of work. If the wiki page you’re working on is mostly text, it’s generally a better idea to draft it elsewhere (like Google Docs) and then post it. This is also good advice for your future forum threads.
- Use banner templates. Until your nation is accepted, use
{{DOESNTEXISTYET}}at the very top of your page to denote that it’s not yet canon. Once accepted, you might want to change it to{{WIP}}to denote that it’s a work in progress. - Look for inspiration. You can look to Wikipedia or other TepWiki pages for an idea of how pages are structured and written. The Wikipedia Manual of Style may be of use. Be mindful not to copy the work of others though!
- Ask for help. We have quite a few people who are quite experienced when it comes to wikis. They probably have the answers you seek.
Roleplay
Already have a brilliant idea for a roleplay that you desperately want to start writing? Feel free to get started! We just ask that you wait until your nation is accepted by the cartographers before posting it to the forum.
You can also read the RPs others have written! You’ll find all of those in the Urth category.
Discord
While you wait, you can explore the Discord server. We try our best to make it as intuitive as possible for new users, but if you’re not sure what a channel is for, look at the channel description (top of the screen) or ask.
Make sure to head to the pings-mart and react to the message to select what topics you want to receive notifications (or “pings”) for. Also, add your pronouns to your profile card in the relevant field.
You should also get to know your fellow roleplayers! Make sure to speak to your future neighbors, it’s important that you work on things together!
After Approval
Congratulations on getting approved! You’re now officially a part of the Urth RP community. We hope you’ll enjoy your time here.
Now that your claim is approved, you may want to join international organizations. For the International Forum (IF), you can apply for membership in this thread. Other organizations conduct their affairs in other Discord servers, the links for which are available in the link-library channel. They will guide you through their application process once you join. There are also other community roleplays that you can participate in, which are always pinned at the top of the Urth category on the forum.
You can continue (or start) working on the foundational steps laid out in the previous section. Otherwise, you’ve completed this guide! If you followed it all or most of the way through, let a member of staff know! We’d love to hear any and all feedback you have about this guide and the joining process in general.
Happy roleplaying!
Written by turtle in January 2025.