New Player Guide
When you first open Ardent, you'll see the home page! The skin might be different, but the contents are the same! Take a moment to read across the top and notice the drop down menus which will have all the information you need to start your very first character!
You'll see the "Information" tab drops down to list: Guidebook, Map & Seasons, Member List, Player Database, and Packs. For now all we need is the Guidebook!
Wow! There sure is a lot of information here! While there's a lot you can read after you've submitted your character, the first and most important thing to do is familiarize yourself with the basics! Here, you will learn about what your character can look like, how tall they may be, and much more!
While reading the "Getting Started" section, you'll see the New Player Checklist! This is for after you've read the basics just to recap and redirect any questions you may have. Once you're SURE you've understood how making a character works, we can move on to ACTUALLY registering your character!
Registration isn't too hard! Just follow the prompts!
You'll need to enter your birthdate here! Please be accurate as mixing up days and years and such can cause a lot of confusion and even lead to admin warnings or banning if you fake your age!
After that, you'll see an agreement page. Read it and accept to continue!
Now the details! See that the Username section is ACTUALLY for your character's name with a spot for Player Name further down! Try not to mix them up! The rest is basic information like your email - if you've registered for any other website before, you know the drill!
You made it! If you look at the top after you log in, you'll see your character name displays at the top now! Clicking that will reveal a handy list of links including: View Profile, Threadlog, Open Buddy List, View New Posts, View Today's Posts, Log Out, Private Messages, and User CP. For now we're going to go into the User CP to get your character's profile up and running.
Here you will open up to your character's profile control panel. On the left under Your Profile, you will see Edit Profile.
This takes you to a page where you can enter in all your character's information such as Nicknames, Relationships, Personality, Appearance, and more! This is where all that stuff you learned from the Guidebook comes in handy! For more information on customizing your profile, you can check out the Profile Tutorial.
Now we're ready to go to the Approvals page under the Maintenance tab!
Here you can see all the characters who are awaiting approval, but none of these are YOUR character, are they? We want to add yours to the list to get approved! The Character Acceptance Forms post has just the thing you need to get your character in line!
Here you can see some types of character forms are broken down. Most likely, you'll be using the New Character Form, so copy that and then let's get back to the previous page!
Back in this we can see a button on the right that says "Post Thread" and clicking that will lead us to a blank post. We can paste that form we just copied here.
Now the form is here and ready to go! Make the Subject your character's name, then fill out the form. When you've filled it out, scroll down, click "Post Thread as Character Name," and you're DONE! Staff will get to it anywhere between a few hours and a few days (we're people too!) If a full week goes by and you check the thread and no staff have commented on it, then please let us know in private messages or in Discord! In the meantime, you can go back and read some of the other sections in the guidebook and maybe some other threads to get familiar with players, characters, lands, and post style!
After you're accepted, you can play! Congrats on your first character and, again, welcome to Ardent!