Extended Setting Information

[vrdr_mods]

The Velvet Room

The room is recognizable to any Persona protagonist (and a fair few of their friends, if they've had the luck to pass through at any point), with its blue ambience and the Aria of the Soul being sung from somewhere unknown. It is circular, with Igor sat at a desk in the middle, much like the Prison in Persona 5, but unlike the Prison there are no jail cells - instead, the walls are draped with blue velvet, and in between them are five different doors.

Every character who arrives into the Dressing Room goes to the Velvet Room and is greeted by Igor first.

You open your eyes, and you find yourself in a blue room, music filling the air. When you look around, there are doors to each side - but there is also a desk in the middle of the room that draws your attention, and a man sat at the desk who has... a very long nose.

"Welcome," he says, "to the Velvet Room." He waves a hand, encompassing the space you can see before you. "This place exists between dream and reality, mind and matter. If you have any concerns about the world from which you have come, you can rest assured that you are not truly absent while you stay here. Still, you should use your time wisely, and form bonds with the others you find in a similar situation to yourself, as you never know where they might lead you! So please, feel free to explore."

The only question remains is this: Will you answer the call of a door that seems most familiar to you, or one that feels more unknown?

The Velvet Room can be accessed at any time by any character in the Dressing Room, Persona user or not, by means of Velvet Room doors that appear in every location at useful points.

Additionally, since characters started arriving, there are new additions to the Velvet Room, such as a Conspiracy Board maintained by one of the local Akechis, tracking the odd phenomena within the setting. The door to Mikage-cho has a warning sign advising visitors to bring real weapons if they wish to explore or seek out a boy in a frog suit who sells them. The third door, Iwatodai, now bears a similar warning that reads: DO NOT go to the tower that appears after midnight unless you have a Goho-M to escape with. Stay too long, and you will be trapped until the tower reappears.

The Doors, and the Areas they Lead To

The doors leading out of the Velvet Room each go to different locations: Mikage-cho, Sumaru, Tatsumi Port Island, Inaba, and Tokyo in that order. But these places aren't as one might remember them... In many ways, they're almost as if they're someone's idea of what they should be like, with the distance separating areas within them nowhere near as long or time consuming as they should be.

People in these areas may act in odd ways, or they may seem perfectly normal. What is true, though, is that there's a clear difference between them and any character brought into the Dressing Room via the Velvet Room.

Normal overworld areas are generally safe. The Dressing Room does not require any money to be spent, and the characters brought in are the only "real" people in existence here, so they will find that they do not have to pay for anything they need (from food and clothing, to phones and electrical goods, to the stranger things like blood in the supermarket), and if they need to find somewhere to stay then both hotels and apartments will literally open up to them.

Places such as Leblanc, the Iwatodai dorms, the Dojima house, and anywhere it's entirely likely that there are many versions of the same occupant will be affected by this being a physical cognitive space, and warp to allow for that. For instance, if two Yu Narukamis took up residence in the Dojima House, the door to their rooms would lead to separate instances of the same bedroom, merely entered through the same door unless they specifically wished to visit the other's room.

Any location able to be visited in-game is viable for roleplay purposes (as well as locations implied to exist within the main setting, such as someone's home within Tokyo). Generally, we ask that you limit this to known locations in the game. So you can't go to 2016 Inaba from Persona 5's Tokyo, but you are welcome to flesh out areas within Tokyo. For example, if you know a real restaurant in a part of Tokyo, your character can find it there. Shadow Operatives HQ? If a character knows the location, they can get there.

We're open and flexible, but just try to keep it in reason. For instance, the Inaba door does include Okina City and the beach as well as the campsite and skii resort from Golden. Iwatodai from 2011 can be accessed by train, as it also appears in Persona 4, and as Iwatodai is in Odaiba, as confirmed by Persona 5, it is possible to find a more modern version. However, neither the 2011 or 2015 versions have access to Tartarus, as the Dark Hour has long since ended.

The true limit of your ability to explore lies in the fact that if you try to travel outside the limits of these areas, you'll just get looped back inside instead of finding any sort of exit. If your attempted escape is dangerous enough, you may disappear for a while - but only until you respawn back in the Velvet Room.

Additionally, Television and Movies may be influenced by character cognition. A prime example of this is the "Gorb Networb," a channel dedicated to recreating moments from characters' lives in a cute, child friendly manner using orb versions of them. There's a Featherman series that is extra glitzy and over the top with a version of Ren Amamiya as Feather Hawk, who is so handsome he sparkles. At one point, Igor versions of Morgana and Adachi had a wrestling match. There's a Teddie newscaster on one of the channels.

Characters can influence the images on the screen if they think about something hard enough, so feel free to have fun with the absurdity. Movie theaters may also air films influenced by character thoughts, wishes, and feelings. "Serpent Below the Belt," a B-movie spawned by one Akechi's poor word choice, is one example. With that being said, any material that is not age-appropraite will be replaced by something more palatable if children are present. If you wish to have threads represented in the media, please make sure to get consent from your fellow players!

The Cognitive Spaces

One major thing that sets the Dressing Room apart from your home is that all of the familiar cognitive and supernatural spaces from the Persona universe exist simultaneously and can be accessed in the same ways they would in their respective games. While to non-Persona users the MetaNav appears as an ordinary chat app, Persona users will find all the usual tools for getting into mischief. And anyone can take a "wrong turn" and end up somewhere unexpected, like Mementos, if players desire non-Persona using characters to get swept up in cognitive shenanigans.

Palaces can be accessed through the same methods as in Persona 5, and any Palace from your character's AU are free game, as are TV world dungeons for those in Persona 4-adjacent AUs.

Staying out too late if you've gone through the doors into Tatsumi Port Island may also mean that you have the experience of the Dark Hour - even if normally you wouldn't. Be careful, as Shadows are dangerous, and roam the streets, and even if all of the NPCs are safely in coffins and are never in any danger, you aren't... Moreover, Gekkoukan High School transforms into Tartarus in all its glory. It is worth noting that all teleporters are unlocked, so characters can easily navigate the tower. They may even find fun things to smash and get goodies like items, armor, and cute costumes.

There is one door to the P1 area, however you can reach the "other" Mikage-cho via walking through mirrors. The Velvet Room door can take you either to the normal Mikage-cho, or this one. Any unarmed children or civilians are welcome to be whisked to safety by Mai and brought to her gingerbread hut. Demons here operate as they do in Persona 1, where you can fight them or make contact with them in order to obtain Tarot cards that can be exchanged with Igor to obtain Personas.

This is true for the demons in Sumaru City as well.*

The TV world and Tartarus offer Shuffle Time to Wild Cards, and Shadow negotiation works as it does in Persona 5, so long as your character has at least one other person to initiate a holdup.

*(P1/2 areas are "under construction" - by which is meant, mods are open to ideas still at this point as to how it'd work, given how those areas have Shadows all over the place.)

Home, Sweet Home

So, you've arrived, you're tired, you need somewhere to stay. Ideally, you'd like to go home. Well, if you have somewhere that exists here (or that
could exist!) then you're in luck.

Leblanc: The café appears normal, however if you want to run it, then that's up to you, since there is no NPC of Sojiro. If the number of people trying to congregate in the café goes over the number who can fit into the seats, then it's possible the café might well make more space to fit everyone. Don't think about it too hard. Don't look at it too closely.

When it comes to the attic, what you get when you go up the stairs depends entirely on what you expect to see. If you're going up there and you have no expectations, you'll see the attic as it's shown in the game before Akira arrives; however if you're expecting to see it from the perspective of your character (or their Akira) then that's what they'll get. Multiple attics may exist at the same time, as well, so don't worry that someone else has already claimed it.

The same concept can - in theory - go for any other home, such as the Dojima residence, Niijima residence, and so on.

The Iwatodai Dorms: The dorms might well be a good place to go if you gravitate toward Tatsumi Port Island, because the SEES home base has plenty of rooms free. All without anything more odd than a corridor that is exactly as long as it needs to be.

Housing in general: As said elsewhere, the NPCs aren't as real as your character, so your character could theoretically just claim somewhere and now they have a new home (while they're here, at least- they don't keep it when they go back to their home timeline/canon/etc, but it will be here still when they come back). Characters can live alone, stay with friends. If they really want to crash in a park or in the streets, they can. Perhaps your character really likes Big Bang Burger and wants to make it their roost. Have at it.

The Metanav App

You arrive, you look at your phone, and... if you've got a smartphone, you'll find that the internet is fully of conflicting stories that don't make sense. Social media doesn't load. What does load, however, is the Metanav, although it looks different than what anyone who's used it before will expect, with a Velvet Room blue background and a star, but no eye.

The good thing is that the Metanav app appears to work - here, at least - much like a "chat and call" app alongside its function of getting you into the Metaverse. If you make friends, you can trade Nav details and keep in contact.

Aside from that, you can still access your call history, normal chat history, and saved photos - however, you can't send anything to anyone you know who isn't in the VRDR. Any downloaded games will work fine, and you can still browse the internet, but any information searched may not be wholly reliable. Video sites operate on similar principles as the television, with cognition influencing the results.

With regards to phone numbers that may be the same: each "world" that people are from in the multiverse gives your character a specific area code before their number, that the Metanav recognises. If two or more characters from the same world are present and were in each other's contacts at home, their contacts with each other will be made available upon arrival, making it an easy way to find out when a loved one arrives.

The Network

As of April 2024, we've introduced a network feature to the game! Characters may now do in-person or network posts in our community. Characters can also send private text messages, either via inbox posts on journals or in locked threads on the main comm. Characters may also make public network posts on the main comm. In general, we ask that you label network posts accordingly. You can do a mix of both!

For an example of an IC inbox, check here.

The network is embedded within the VRDR's blue Metaverse Navigator app, rather than an in-universe version of Bluesky or whatever. Remember, if characters have social media/IM apps on their phones, these will not work in the VRDR.

Note that characters are only identified by their phone number on the network, or by the name they've been saved as in a character's local contact list. There are no profile photographs, and no social-media style profile; though pictures etc can be attached, the system is very basic, more like ascended text messaging.

Hacking: For the benefit of Futabas and others: while most things a hacker would expect to be able to do will work, digging deeper will reveal that the underlying structure of the network doesn't exist. That is, there's no TCP/IP, no IP addresses or cellular network or whatever; there's no "there" there! The whole thing works on cognition.

Remember that the Meta-Nav isn't really an app, but, in Futaba's words, "a mysterious app-like thing".