Homelost

Homelost is a Play By Post Game /collaborative storytelling project based on the Homestuck universe. Its plot revolves around a group of players in a session of GNUrb (the open-source variant of Sburb) and their troll counterparts. It can be found on the MSPA forums (interspersed with many, many, many sidetracks and offtopic conversations), and a more cohesive version has been started on a separate website.

Tropes used in Homelost include:

Most tropes that apply to the Homestuck universe in general also apply here. These are only the tropes that are specific to the GNUrb session:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Mother.
• Alternate Corporate Motive Interpretation: Skaianet is portrayed as being nothing less than a Cult. I mean, how else would you win over your prize programmers and have them knowingly - and willingly - cause the end of the world?
• Art Shift: each player has a different art style, ranging from Adobe Flash to pixel art to comic-style to LEGO.
• Artificial Limbs: BM has one. It also functions as a Badass Transplant.
• Ascended Meme: <') also known as the "duck head typo", originated in the IRC chatroom and later appeared in Curtis's flashback as the glitch that wiped his friends from existence.
  • Seen a little earlier too, as Circling Birdies
• Boss in Mook Clothing: According to rH: Eagles.
• Broken Bird: Tricia turns out to be one.
• Cloudcuckoolander & Deadpan Snarker: Tristan - Jeff at this point and cynicalAnarchist, respectively.
• Dumb Muscle: Zeneron, dear god Zeneron, he wants to kill rH solely for getting himself involved in their viagra scam.
• Fire-Forged Friends: 8 strangers brought together by the internet and the end of the world.
• Foreshadowing: Curtis's flashforward, showing him lying dead.
• Game Breaking Bug: This is pretty much the premise of the entire game, given that GNUrb, an Obvious Beta, was also the only way to survive the apocalypse.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: You know this is going to happen when you combine a gameboy containing your soul with your corpse. Poor RH unfortunately, did not know as well as you.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Apparently going to become a plot point soon.
• Improbable Weapon User: several.
  • Curtis uses (ugly) ties
  • Tristan uses Trombones
  • Ian uses guitars
  • Walter beat Imps up with a boom mic, until he figured out how to make it shoot lightning
• Hopeless War: Kythir fights one on LoMaO, commanding an arguably decent Skaian army against the infinitely respawning Underlings.
• Interspecies Romance: is inescapable.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: eight humans, eight trolls, plus the exiles (in this case, ten of them, not eight - it's complicated). Really, it comes with the territory of being a Homestuck derivative.
• MacGuffin: the gold watch.
• Mad Scientist: Urdren.
• Mecha-Mooks: Mother uses these, or rather, cyborg-mooks.
• Memetic Mutation: the guard it has one of her shirts!!!!!!
• Mind Rape: Nectan invaded Kalmar's mind for a brief minute -- not sure which of them got off worse.
• Mooks: I almost feel sorry for the imps. Has anyone even taken them seriously yet?
• Motor Mouth: Kalmar. Just... Kalmar.
• Nicolas Cage: The Nervine Conductor frequently references and emulates the Best Actor Ever.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Tristan, until he dropped it in Act 2.
• Obvious Beta: GNUrb itself is an open-source clone of Sburb that sprung up in about twenty-four hours. The Game Breaking Bugs are everywhere.
• Oh My Gods: Tricia has been known to swear "What the Derse?" and "Oh Skaia". Justified by the fact that she works for the company that produces Sburb so she'd be extremely familiar with them.
• Only Sane Man: The Sanity Ball is passed around the group at a breakneck pace.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Curtis claims to be.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Curtis is always very well-spoken. Surely he must be a polite young gentleman... or a sarcastic, condescending prick.
  • Kythir takes this quite literally, engaging in "discourse," debates in the style of strife, health bars included.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: the Andersons have ASSISTE IPSUM QUIA NULLUS TE ASSISTEBET ^[1]
• Product Placement: rH has an 8-bit tie, which is a real product available at thinkgeek.com, the very best website thing ever in the history of everything.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Evident with the two "human exiles". One's an Idiot Hero. The other is too smart for her own good and tends not to emote a lot.
• Redshirt Army: Inverted with the pawn army on Kythir's planet. Played straight when GA sits in the General Armchair. Problematic in that they are the same army.
• Schedule Slip: it's a casual game played by meme-prone fans. Delays and sidetracks are more the norm than the exception, really.
• Shipping: Not actually conducted by any of the fans, but rather the /authors themselves/
• Shout-Out: A full list of these would be nearly impossible to generate due to its sheer magnitude. Get ten or so geeks to write a story about an epic quest starring themselves; if you don't get several thousand Shout Outs, you're doing it wrong.
  • CA's are mostly Doctor Who based (after GA noted in the chatroom that Curtis looks a bit like the Doctor), including a Tardis wallpaper, Kalmar's obsession with Troll David Tennant, and the initials of Curtis's exile, the Desperate Watchman.
  • BM's shoutouts are based on... everything... From Sabaton and Electric Light Orchestra posters, to using Team Fortress 2's Gunslinger as a weapon and having a character sheet oddly similar to certain other roleplaying games , to his Metroid inspired Varia Trenchcoat. In fact, BM himself is just a knotted mass of various shoutouts, fused into one sentient being by the sheer awesome exuded from within them.
• Shown Their Work: The exileterminal that LC uses has a Linux-based shell, has been used to run vi, and can be programmed in a language that looks suspiciously like Python.
• Take That: Oh what, you directed a movie I don't like? I'll base an unlikeable minor character in my internet fan-fiction on you! HAHAHAHA!
• Timey-Wimey Ball: GA and Catyph seem to be deeply intrrinsically involved in time shenanigans.
  • FMK too! We're basically just a crazy, time-shenanigans hoe-down.
• Vagueness Is Coming: FMK has been indicated to be mucking about with the timeline in order to prevent some as of yet unexplained event. We don't know what it is, but it's probably bad.
  • FGA has tried to warn the present as well, but it turns out being straightforward about such matters doesn't always work. GA: ###'t t## ## s### h##!!!
• Zerg Rush: Kythir's Denizen, free from the constraints imposed by the Monarchy, has taken to using this tactic.

1. ↑ "Help yourself, because no one else will"