The Curse. The biggest ZFRP plot of all time, and certainly not a record I'm willing to ever try to beat! Depending on how you count it, as many as sixty - or more - events in Season 9 had to do with The Curse. But how did it all start?
I haven't made it a secret that the name of The Curse, as well as eight of its' members - Plague, Shrapnel, Reaper, Impact, Titan, Puma, Ogre, and Troll - and several of the machines/vehicles that appeared, like Ogre and Troll's mech suits and the Badass Plague Tank - came from a real toyline. But the true origins of The Curse go back further than that. The Curse's origins are a tale of a little British toy company that could, their habit of reusing any molds they can to cut costs, and the world of 3.75-inch action figures.
It all started with Kong: Skull Island.
In 2017, Kong: Skull Island released in theaters. It was a pretty good movie! I liked it. And, as a kaiju toy collector, I was interested in the merchandise. However, somehow, I resisted temptation to buy anything for a long time. I eventually wound up putting a few of the toys on my Christmas wishlist that year, and I received them - the giant-size Kong figure, and a playset that included a jeep, a human, and the Mother Longlegs spider monster from the film. I've never had much of an interest in collecting 3.75-inch figures and such - it was the classic, popular size for Star Wars and GI Joe figures, among other lines, and I did pick up a few here and there throughout my life, but I always preferred toys of animals, dinosaurs, and kaiju to anything of regular ol' humans. I was taken by these sets, however, and what fueled the fire was that Lanard, the company responsible for the toys, made several toylines and all of them were in the 3.75 scale, which meant they all worked together with one another. This allowed them to reuse figures and accessories from one set to the next to save money (Lanard toys are noticeably cheaper than competing brands making similar products - you can buy a single Corps figure for $2, but a Fortnite figure the same size retails for five or six times as much. The quality is often surprisingly good for the price, too). I liked the idea of making a little toy universe, everything matching up size and style wise with everything else, and Lanard kept coming out with toylines that appealed to me. Their next line was based on Rampage, another movie I thoroughly enjoyed, and I purchased much of that toyline as well. And what Skull Island and Rampage had in common was that both of their toylines were borrowing molds and parts from Lanard's main figure line, The Corps.
First appearing in the 80s as a GI Joe knockoff, The Corps has outlived its' old arch-nemesis. Hasbro, makers of GI Joe, have lost interest in the line and no longer produce it. With no competition except for the even cheaper (and lower quality) toys seen in generic playsets and sold under names like "Kid Connection", Lanard has gone hog wild with The Corps to fill the niche presented to them. One odd aspect about The Corps for a long time, though, was that they had no one to fight. There were plenty of figures in the line, but every one of them was a hero. They did occasionally use a small enemy faction called "The Marauders", but those guys rarely appeared and had been absent from the line for a long time until the middle of the 2010s, when Lanard revamped the line to finally give The Corps their equivalent of GI Joe's Cobra.
Introducing a bunch of new characters (and heel turning two of the heroes), Lanard reimagined The Corps as "The Corps Elite Vs The Curse", and we saw the debut of the star of Curseplot, Plague. This was also when they started to go all-in on ridiculous cartoony storylines, turning The Corps from a generic army toyline into a much more fantastical line with comic-book-like characters, a less realistic sense of style, and a heavy dash of sci-fi.
In the toyline, Plague (originally named Shadow) went rogue when he began experimenting with nanomachines. His obsession with upgrading himself with them led to his epiphany that humankind must merge with machines, and so he began creating an army of nanomachine-filled cyborgs to help him conquer the world and see his vision become reality. The toyline later added Shrapnel, and an online comic panel that depicted multiples of him (seen above) made clear that he was meant to be a Curse foot soldier, the generic dude they had a whole lot of instead of one specific guy. The original man who became Shrapnel got a profile on The Corps' website, but it was also made clear that Plague was using cutting-edge technology to duplicate him many times over to build his army.
In the toyline, Plague speaks of "The Singularity", which apparently refers to the moment mankind and machines are completely united. While The Singularity was significant in earlier versions of the plot, it was de-emphasized over time. The version of The Singularity that made it to RP was the idea of CRAYNet taking over the world via the Internet, though Plague likely knew little about this plan and just picked up the phrase from talking with Screenslaver or something. I'll go into detail about alternate paths I planned for Curseplot's finale in later blogposts.
The next contributing factor to the plot's genesis was my sudden interest in the Jurassic Park/World franchise. While I've enjoyed the series since the beginning, it wasn't until I rewatched the first four films in a marathon with my mom in early 2018, followed by Fallen Kingdom's toyline launching in April of that year, that I became really invested in it. The toys are a huge reason why - I was captivated by them and enamored with their (generally) high quality and play value (Oh, and did I mention the main JW toyline is done in 3.75-inch scale?). I've gone from a casual to a hardcore fan of the franchise in the process and have bought tons and tons of JW stuff (and even some old vintage items from the 90s). I wanted to bring Jurassic to RP, and hit upon the idea of using InGen, the company responsible for creating the genetically-engineered dinos in the first place. Early plans to do a Jurassic Plot were pushed back, however, as I already had plot plans for 2018 and feared that my interest might just be a flash in the pan.
Then came Primal Clash. A 2019 toyline released by Lanard in obvious anticipation of cashing in on the dinosaur craze Fallen Kingdom sparked (it was even called "Jurassic Clash" in the UK, though they were forced to change the name for the US release), this line's main gimmick is soldiers from The Corps (and I mean they're directly lifted without so much as a repaint, though they are never named) riding tamed prehistoric animals. The storyline is beyond insane - Primal Clash takes place in the future instead of the past, a supercomputer named Evolution went rogue and caused the apocalypse, and the animals are genetically resurrected just like Jurassic World. This of course gave me the idea of InGen and The Curse teaming up, and so InGen became a wing of The Curse, getting a series of events devoted to it in August and otherwise resulting in JW critters popping up throughout the year, from Draco bringing back the Mosasaurus (previously seen way back in the fifth Brawl) to Harpy making not one but two characters specifically based around the concept of dinosaur ownership/taming (Sue and Dashra). It proved a great fit for RP, and I plan on continuing the Jurassic-themed fun into next season with more minor events and a new character.
So I found all of this stuff to be excellent ZFRP fodder... but at first, The Curse wasn't The Curse. Despite me getting the idea from these toys, I wasn't fully on board with integrating it into RP all the way. Instead, I was going to make my own evil organization, though Plague would still be at the head. Following in the footsteps of other ominous and vaguely-named villain groups like The Society, The Council of 13, and The Coalition Of Malice, the proto-Curse was called The Syndicate. I later decided to embrace the sillier aspects of the plot, though, as I made a move into making something closer in relation to a Saturday morning cartoon or a goofy old comic book, just like my inspiration. With that shift, a cartoony name like The Curse worked better than the stuffier, more dread-inducing name of The Syndicate. Perhaps if Don Genie had been running the show, The Syndicate would have been a better name!
One of the ways I come up with plots is to think about some kind of hook or unique property that will make the plot stand out. In this case, my planned hook was user participation. With eight prior years of experience roleplaying together as a community, I felt it was a good time to try something that likely wouldn't have worked well at all when we were just starting out - something only our years of working together and feeling each other out could handle. I wanted the collab to be unconventionally loose for a collab, too, as the more complicated it would be to get involved, the less likely it would be that the plot would succeed. So I took a very hands-off approach - all anyone needed to do to have their villain be part of The Curse was simply declaring that they were. I would work together with the user if asked, but otherwise they would simply run their own plot and do everything as if they were running a normal plot - it was just that their villain had affiliations and connections that ran deeper than the ordinary dayplot baddy. And it worked wonderfully! We had people sending their Curse members to other peoples' events to be eliminated, Curse members fighting as protagonists against other villains like The Ravage and Tsurubami, people working together, lots of spontaneous surprises, and more besides. I was overall delighted with how the plot went, though the massive investment of time and energy it required ensures you won't see its' like again from me any time soon. I plan on scaling back next year with Cancel The Apocalypse, the "sequel" to Curseplot that will take up much less of the schedule calendar despite going even further in scope (instead of saving Olympia, we have to save an entire planet!) and any other plots I may do next time around. And I thank everyone who contributed to the plot, which is... basically everyone in our community! The Curse wouldn't have been the success it was without your input.
I think that about does it for explaining how The Curse became a thing. Future blogposts are planned that will go over cutting room floor content and each of my Curse members.
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