I'm seriously considering starting an RP, but I have a few different ideas and probably only time to really do one of them. So..I'm gonna lay them out on the table and see if anyone's more interested in one than the others?
-Regular Shifts (I swear I named it this before Strange Shifts came along!):
An idea I've had knocking around for a while. A bunch of various people each win a sweepstakes of some sort that gives them a free vacation week/month/some period of time on a resort island none of them have ever heard of. They arrive, and it seems like a really great place. But the island has a curse: Anyone who sleeps on the island gains a second form. The new form is shifted in and out of via triggers unique to the person themselves, and nobody is immediately aware of the new form's existence, nor what their individual triggers are. For example, the character I have in mind for me to play shifts into the new form at sunrise and shifts back to normal at sunset. But triggers don't have to be time-based; they could be as simple as sneezing, being punched, or hearing or saying a particular word. The alternate forms should usually come with mild mental changes; both forms are the same person but they find themselves with slightly different attitudes and reactions to things, is what I mean.
The story is supposed to be about the visitors to the island discovering what's happened to them, and looking for the origins of the curse in hopes of fixing it. Lots of interaction between folks' characters is key to making it interesting.
Since this involves lots of shifts back and forth, I wouldn't want to do all of the transformations myself. In fact, my original concept for this idea had people always handling their own transformations, but I wouldn't make it a rule that people have to. I'd be fine with people (including myself) doing each others' transformations, at least the first time it happens.
-Magic School:
Some out-of-work or otherwise unhappy-with-their-present-lives adults get letters informing them that they have magic potential enough to get full rides to a school that teaches magic. The Truth is that the school is a boarding school that has been for teenage boys for a long time, and has decided to turn co-ed to get better business, but for whatever reason the administration thought it would be a good idea to turn those adults into the first group of female students. So, a new dorm was built specifically for the female students, with a special enchantment on the doorway to each individual dorm room that changes anyone who steps through. The new students are not informed of this, and are surprised to find themselves turning into teenage girls (whether they were male or female before), each aged somewhere from 13 to 17. It's important to note that these enchantments don't go away, they just don't affect a person who's been changed by them already, so there is potential for more people (i.e., the male students) to be lured through the doors and altered.
This idea is inherently an AR one, but the higher end of the available ages can still look like adults. Since there is magic involved, the end form caused by the enchantment isn't necessarily as human as the person started with (i.e., possibly animal ears and a tail, wings, horns, whatever else). I would appreciate help handling all the transformations involved with this one, but I might be able to do it on my own, I dunno. After the transformations occur, this RP is entirely about their lives at school (and possibly eventually getting back at the bozos who thought turning them into small girls was a good idea!). There's a lot of "infrastructure" to the RP that I don't have together yet at all: Classes, teachers, 'normal' students, so on; this is where I might really need help.
-The Transformist again:
The link has all the information on this idea, but I'll try and summarize it here: In a modern-day world where magic is starting to become known, a being with extremely strong transformative powers goes around changing people for..some reason. Some wind up with more ore less magical power than they had before; the changes are visible to all around and come with only mild mental alteration at most. More of a standard "get transformed, run around" sort of RP than the above pair. I'm not sure I want to do everyone else's events all the time, so (as with the first time I posted it) it would be helpful to have someone else handling a few of the characters, especially mine if I come in with one.