We are the Voices - GM Guidelines

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You may not be a Greater Voice, no, but the memories you help create and share are no less valuable to the community.
As has been established in I Know a Guy, the Chromanexus is massive. Infinite, even. The Greater Voices have a measurable say in all things, establishing the rules existence goes by and providing the core infrastructure supporting the entire multiverse and often traversing every far flung corner of existence in the stories they share, but they are not omnipresent. It is simply not possible to tell every story there is to be by their efforts alone, and so it is guidelines have been provided for you, the player, a Voice yourself, to tell your own stories and share them with the community, weaving a tapestry of narratives even greater than any could write alone.
In other words, despite not being an administrator, you (and any other player for that matter) are welcome to GM your own content in the Chromanexus, provided you stay within the guidelines laid out below. These guidelines evolve the longer you stay with the community and engage in content, giving you increasing control over how you can contribute to the game at large without infringing on the core structure of the game itself and the story of the Chromanexus.

Divine Ranks

Your "Divine Rank" is a rough measure of how long you've been and engaged with the community of Chromanexus. You likely already noticed that every player has one of seven ranks (not counting administration), which increase whenever you're posting in community channels, the game hub, the Overworld, or Domain. Genesis (Tatsu) gives points to players every time they send a message, though no more than once per minute, at an interval of 20 points per message. Increasing your Divine Rank is part of the key to expanding what you're allowed to create, but alone isn't much more than an aesthetic role assigned to active and/or veteran players who've been on the server a while.
To check your current score, you can use the /rank command in any channel and Genesis will tell you your current score and progress to the next rank.

Approvals

The second key part to expanding your creative contributions are Approvals - as a GM, you can create and oversee missions for characters in the game (both yours and those of other players). These missions can freely award experience, gold, Ruby Tears and Chromatite, and even magic items in some cases.
Planning & Approval takes place in the petition-the-voices channel under the Grimoire, using a private thread so you don't have to worry about other players peeping and potentially getting spoilers for what you've decided to create. If you're familiar with adventure planning as laid out in D&D's DMG, you'll find our process isn't entirely different as its core, barring a few minor exceptions.
It should be noted, you can make adventures for any number of players (including even solo missions, on the condition you're running it for someone other than one of your own characters). However, for an adventure to be counted towards your GM Contributions, it needs have a minimum of four players (which can count you, if you send one of your own characters on the mission). In any case, each section below will detail what you need to know to get a mission approved.

The Adventuring Day (Encounter Planning)

In a typical D&D environment, the golden rule for an adventuring day is 4 - 6 encounters (with time for at least one or two short rests), and an optional boss encounter if relevant to the story flow. An encounter can be either combat or social, with combat pitting the party against one or more monsters, and social putting the players into an RP scenario that requires skill checks to get through. Unlike normal D&D rules, we permit players to earn experience even for social encounters, meaning those factor into your budget as well.
Generally speaking, your ideal target for gameplay is about two-thirds social (RP) to one-third combat. This does not necessarily refer to encounters themselves - if you create a full adventuring day with nothing but combat, try to plan and create time for RP between encounters to help the players develop their stories and immerse themselves in the story you're trying to share.
That said, you don't have to run a full adventuring day. By the nature of our play-by-post environment, even a single encounter can take a few days to finish. As of publishing this page, we'll also be including templates for lore friendly, easy-to-run encounters in a later update to the Opus.
Where your mission occurs can be anywhere in the Overworld (except the Breach) or in a player's domain. For Overworld locations, be mindful that the Corridor mechanic (permitting players to transport their characters to/from the Breach) only permits transport to established locations and landmarks. In other words, if you want your adventure to happen somewhere that's never been visited before, plan your adventure to begin in a population center or location of significance in the same realm or plane and include some minimum amount of travel (on foot or by vehicle) in your encounter plans. Administration can help you sort out these details if needed.
How can you tell if a place is not established? Quite simply, it doesn't have a page in the Wizipedia's Atlas. Anywhere that has a page in the Atlas can be teleported to via Corridor. Otherwise, your party will have to travel there from somewhere nearby, which may factor in to your planned encounters for the adventuring day. As your approval count increases, you'll get permission to submit your own locations (landmarks, realms, and worlds, as noted in the table at the top of this page) to the Wizipedia. You submit these locations via blame-a-gan, using the Lore and Submission tags. For an effective area description, consider a minimum of 500 - 1500 words for your submission. Administration reserve the right to tweak or deny your submissions to keep them friendly to established game lore, if necessary.

A Note on Domains. If you choose to set your adventure in a Domain, please first be mindful of any notes you should keep in mind while playing in the area by checking that Domain's post guidelines (next to the "New Post" button). Second, be respectful of the Domain - just like anywhere else in the game, adventures you write cannot take control of nor permanently deface a place that is not yours to control or permanently deface, not without the explicit written permission of the Domain's owner noted in your approval. In this same vein, a Domain's owner has the right to know what's happening in their Domain - consequently, they are permitted to join / be invited to your planning and approval thread for the adventure, even if they themselves are not in the mission.

Experience Budget

When you plan a mission, whether you know your party composition yet or not, you need to be mindful of the D&D experience budget. If you're not familiar with the term, it's a measurement of how difficult a given encounter is relative to the combined level of everyone in the adventuring party. The Dungeon Master's Guide summarizes it pretty effectively.
If you're new to encounter planning, choose a level you would like to try and write for, keeping in mind the general power scale you'll expect for characters as you do: levels 1 - 5 are small time heroes (get Gertrude's cat down from the tree levels 6 - 10 are folk heroes (help protect a town from a goblin infestation levels 11 - 15 are heroes of repute (hunt a dragon and levels 16 - 20+ are in the realm of myth and legend ("kill God", as the memes would have it). Once you've picked your level, choose the difficulty you'd like your encounters to be and whatever experience value is there, multiply it be the number of characters you expect to join the encounter. That is your budget.

For example, I'd like to run a deadly mission for four level 15 characters. According to the XP chart, a deadly budget for a level 15 character is 6,400 XP. Four characters means four times 6,400 (4 x 6,400), which equals 25,600 XP. With this value in mind, I can now start to plan how to spend that budget on individual encounters for the mission.

Again, in case you missed it earlier, if you're going into this with the plan to get more official Approvals under your belt and gain access to higher levels of GM contributions, like your own Domain, your mission or adventure is required to have a minimum of four players. If you bring one of your own characters along, you may count yourself as one of those four players. Likewise, you cannot bring more than one of your own characters on a mission. We also recommend you try to avoid bringing more than five characters on a mission or adventure - too many characters can actually trivialize even end game bosses well before they should be able to in some contexts, and that may not be fun for everyone involved.
The easiest way to keep yourself honest? Use DDB's Encounter Tool (or a suitable third party option, if you've got one) and using the Manage Characters button, set the number of characters and their levels. The tool will auto calculate your maximum budget for the encounter, and will keep track of it as you add monsters and combatants. Be aware that the adjusted XP value is what compares against your budget, not total XP. Total XP is what you award your players when it's done. If you need help understanding how exactly adjusted XP works, feel free to ask in blame-a-gan.

To determine the CR of a social encounter, you first need to set a skill challenge. The challenge should be overcome with a check using one of the player's six core Ability Scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma). Players may then ask if it is appropriate to apply proficiency with a given skill or tool to the check, assuming you don't recommend one to begin with.
The average difficulty of the check determines its CR. Generally speaking, a valid skill challenge needs three checks. It may be more for a particularly complex situation, but to keep it simple, we'll use a trap as an example: a typical trap requires an Intelligence check to find it, another Intelligence check to figure out how it works, and finally, a Dexterity check to successfully disable the triggering mechanisms (obviously there are exceptions to this). For a harder-than-average trap, we'll say each of these checks requires a DC of 15 to succeed. Add each DC together, divide by three, then round down to the nearest whole number - since all three of our checks were the same, it's easy - 15 + 15 + 15 is 45. 45 divided by 3 is 15.
Then, divide this result by two and again, round down. This is the trap's CR. So, 15 divided by 2 is 7.5, or 7 if we round down. Thus, the trap has a CR of 7 and is worth 2,900 XP.
Social encounters can be anything that might need a skill challenge, and may not necessarily have any obvious win condition. A conversation with the town guard could count, as you try to bribe the night shift into looking away from this one part of the wall tonight so your party can sneak into the palace. A success grants experience and a new way to get into the castle, potentially making the later boss fight easier as they won't know you're coming. A failure grants half the experience, because it was still a learning moment, but the party loses out on the opportunity to sneak in.

Like any D&D game, encounters can and often do change as the mission progresses depending on how the party plays and what feels right. If you think your adventure needs to change enough to warrant a new or modified encounter or skill challenge midway through, make sure to make a note in your planning thread so staff can sign off on the change.

Adventure Rewards

Every adventure results in rewards, making it a lucrative industry for even the less-than-heroic sort to dive head first into. For the environment of Chromanexus, we've made a few adjustments to the mission reward promise to support the Echo system and streamline what is otherwise and often considered one of if not the most tedious part of planning a mission.
Rewards.
Experience is based on the Total XP value of your mission, not the Adjusted XP. Divide the total XP by the number of party members. Each party member gains the result as XP for completing the encounter or adventure. We do not worry about calculating allied NPCs and companions in the XP share, so you don't have to think about that.
In addition to the mission's rewards, you may choose to offer a Ruby Tear as part of the mission rewards. If you do so, choose a property from the Creator, History, Minor Property, or Quirk list that is either related to something that happened during the mission or is related to something discovered while on the mission. 
Next, is gold and items.

1. Open https://5e.tools/lootgen.html.
   
   
2. Set the Challenge Rating to match the highest CR enemy in your adventure.
   
   
3. Make sure Is Treasure Hoard? is check marked. If it's not, checkmark it now.
   
   
4. Roll loot.
   
   
5. At the top of the loot generated to the right, note whatever gold value has been listed as GP worth of coins, art objects, and/or gems at the top of the loot list.
   
   If your adventure includes three or less encounters, divide this value by the number of party members, round up to the nearest gold coin, then use this as your GP payout (ex: a party of four gets a hoard worth 30,000 GP for finishing a two-encounter adventure; divided by four and rounded up, that's 7,500 GP each).
   
   If your adventure includes four or more encounters, then post the undivided payout as the GP payout for each member (ex: a party of four gets a hoard of 30,000 GP for finishing a six encounter adventure. That's 30,000 GP each).
   
   
6. Take each mundane or magic item rolled and either keep it on the board, or replace it with one of the following rolls (in your planning and approval thread preferably, for visibility):
   
   Mundane or Common Item: 1d6+3 Chromatite Fragments
   Uncommon Item: 1d6+2 Chromatite Shards
   Rare Item: 1d6+1 Chromatite Chunks
   Very Rare Item: 1d6 Chromatite Slabs
   Legendary Item: 1 Pure Chromatite
   
   Note with Legendary items, they must be converted to Pure Chromatite. The final values of each Chromatite roll are given each (so for example, if you roll 1d6+1 Chunks and get a result of 5, then every character in the adventure gets 5 Chromatite Chunks).
   
   
7. You may swap out any remaining magic items on the list with items you think would make more sense to come from the mission, provided the items you choose are not on the Restricted Items list. You may request to add an additional item to the list if it's necessary to the adventure you're trying to tell, provided you explain why it's necessary to include rather than just replacing one of the other options on the list.

How the party gets these rewards is up to you. Perhaps they actually found the items in the mission. Perhaps the characters received the rewards as payments from nobles and merchants pleased to see the problem dealt with. Perhaps it magically appears in a chest back home and the player interprets it as gifts from their god for a job well done. It's intentionally left vague so you can all have fun figuring it out on your own. Whatever the context is, the wealth and rewards are expected to make it to the characters without necessarily raising any ethical or moral questions about why the characters kept the gold from the poor village they just saved from poverty.

Submission

Once you've planned your adventure, sorted out your encounters, and set your mission rewards, toss them into your petition-the-voices thread (assuming you have already made one) and ping DM Approvals for review and approval (not all staff look at mission approvals, so do not ping Administration or your Approval will be denied).
Make sure the message before your ping includes your rough outline, your recommended character level for the adventure, expected encounters (along with each combatants' and skill challenges' CR), and your rewards. For best results, try to format it using the template provided in xp-and-rewards, since it should look more-or-less the same when you post it there after the adventure is complete.
Administration will confirm your mission is planned for four or more participants, as well as confirm your encounters and rewards follow the above established guidelines. Administration may also request elaboration on particularly story elements you wish to include, and recommend tweaks and adjustments to your story to keep it lore-friendly to the game and help expand the story you're trying to tell.
Assuming everything looks good, staff will tell you the mission has been approved and you are then free to post it in matchmaking-lfg to gather a party and quest. If the mission meets the necessary criteria for your Approval count, it will be updated here (in the side-bar) at the end of the week.

GM Compensation

After your mission is complete, whether it was successful or not, you as the game master are given a small bonus for your character as compensation for taking the time and effort to create content for the server. This is a separate benefit from mission rewards, whether you have a character on the mission or not.
You gain one-quarter of all experience awarded during the mission as "GM XP". You may then distribute this additional XP across your characters as you see fit, including giving it all to one specific character if you prefer. When logging GM XP, do it in the same rewards thread you used to post XP for your party but include (GM XP) after the mission name. For example:
!xp 1000 An Easy Mission (GM XP)
Additionally, you gain a copy of the highest rarity Chromatite in the loot list, which again, you can give to any one of your characters.

For example, let's assume you run a mission with a total XP reward of 8,000 XP. A quarter of this total (8,000 / 4) is 2,000 XP.
You may then add 2,000 XP to one of your characters, or award 1,000 XP to two of your characters, or any mixture thereof as long as the total redeemed is no more than 2,000.

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