It's been a while since I've had a ZFRP plot with as convoluted a development as my Season 13 one. For that reason, it's finally time I dusted off the old Plot Retrospective tag and give some behind the scenes information on the many twists and turns I took while coming up with what we eventually did this year!
I had many ideas for Whalestrand, but I also had a desire to minimize how many events I ran. I wanted to do more with less. This naturally led to the concept of a plot that was a series of widely-varying vignettes that may or may not have all been connected. In the final version of the plot, most of the events actually were connected in one way or another, but this wasn't a guarantee early on. A lot of the pieces of The Cabinet of Curiosities were snipped portions from what could have been bigger plots, so this was something of a "best-of" of the many story concepts I was sifting through. Let's look at each one of these individual pieces, and what got cut in favor of the snippets I cobbled together into the Cabinet.
DEMON PLOT
This one didn't get too far, and was mostly just some cool character designs I wanted to use in RP. But the basic gist was that a human, pictured above, had struck a bargain with demons for power and was using that power to try and... uh... rule Whalestrand, or something else appropriately evil. The design I used, Hush from Fortnite, reminded me of Plague, and I considered making her his sister. Whether she would be as goofy as Plague, I hadn't yet decided. I'd also considered pulling in Himiko Toga from My Hero Academia as an ally for Hush.
I can't go into detail on the demons who might have appeared in Demon Plot. I had only solidly settled on one before scrapping the plot, and that one demon is currently slated to appear in my (completely different) Demon Plot I'm planning for Season 14. If all goes according to plan, you'll meet them soon.
KIRBY STUFF
There was a brief period where I was going to work Kirby content into the plot. Meta Knight and his crew playing a major role in Chao's Heidegger event in Season 12 was born from me being high on Kirby at the time due to having been playing Forgotten Land, and I considered using not only Meta Knight but also Forgotten Land's version of King Dedede. The Meta Knight event idea was for him and his cohorts to challenge an equal number of Kobbers to a series of one-on-one duels, not for any malevolent reason but solely to test their might. King Dedede's event would have been similar - fancying himself a high-ranking warlord of Glasetera's icy wastes, Dedede would have demanded the Kobbers show him a good fight for him to be willing to let them near his territory. Eventually I moved on to other video games and the Kirby stuff got dropped.
MAY PLOT/PIRATE PLOT
This was a short plot, about three or so events in length, about May (and perhaps Murasa and her crew as well). It would have consisted of a series of battles at sea against various foes. Three of the planned major antagonists made it to the final plot, and two did not. Large portions of the plot were reworked into my final draft, and I actually had the entire plot planned out from start to finish, so this one's got a lot to talk about!
In the 2022-2023 offseason we would have been introduced to Mr. Krabs and his restaurant, the Krusty Krab. There were no plans to use Spongebob or Squidward, but Plankton was on the table briefly early in development. Krabs would have been his usual gruff and stingy self, though eager to butter up the Kobbers in hopes that their infamously deep wallets and large appetites would make him rich. His event would have centered around him recruiting people for a hunting expedition that he was pretty cagey about. When we went off into the sea with him, he would have eventually discovered what he was looking for: a herd of Steller's Sea Cows, a creature that in real life went extinct centuries ago but in RP had hung on in a remote area away from humans. He then would have eagerly begun hunting the sea cows to make super-expensive Sea Cow Burgers and we'd have to stop him. An alternate version of this event revolved around Ann Glerr hunting for the sea cows to prove they still lived so she could advocate for them to be legally protected, and when we found them, Mr. Krabs would be already there trying to poach them. It would have turned out that sea cow was the secret ingredient for Krabby Patties.
This event ended up getting wiped, along with Krabs and all his tomfoolery, but I did include some dead sea cows as some of Kingfin's victims as a nod to their former role. Will Ann ever get to see a live one?
Robo-May's event was originally very different and planned to happen far earlier in the year. It would have transpired that Mr. Krabs was allied with a pirate gang, working with them because, of course, money. These pirates would have been harassing Whalestrand for years, shaking down innocent fishermen and sailors and making off with fish and cargo. And the ringleaders of the pirates were a pair of fearsome ladies named Ramlethal Valentine and... MAY! Of course, since "May" was here in Whalestrand attacking people even in past years, when the real May was over in Agama, it would eventually be revealed that the evil May was Robo-May, an artificial creation based on a young lady the people of Whalestrand had simply thought had fallen in with the wrong crowd rather than leaving Whalestrand to seek her fortune in Agama.
Ramlethal didn't turn out to be a bad person in ZFRP, only standing against us in a Blood Bowl game because Edgar Markus paid her a lot of money to do so. Was she a true villain here, as the leader of a band of thieving pirates? Well, no, but it would have certainly seemed that way... at first.
My main plan was for us to face off with Pirate Queen Ramlethal twice. The first time we'd mostly be fighting Robo-May while Ramlethal provided support using her pirate ship, and upon Robo-May's defeat Ramlethal would flee. In the second and final encounter, the ship would be revealed to have the engine Pokemon Revavroom attached to it as a figurehead (previously it would have been concealed in a wooden casing) and it would also attack with gold-plated Bullet Bill Blasters (as seen in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, where they are called Bombshell Bill Blasters). This would have been a pretty direct riff on the Starmobiles from Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and I kept that general feel for the Robo-May battle that actually made it to print, complete with using the Team Star battle music.
Notably, there would be a tank on board the ship with this creature inside, a rare fish species that the pirates would have implied to have stolen from a fishing boat. However, it would be revealed that this fish was the true pirate boss, he and Mr. Krabs part of a nasty ring of uplifted sea creatures that traded in endangered ocean animals, exploiting the very ocean they came from out of nihilistic greed - 'if dirty mammals are going to raid our home, we'll get all the best stuff before them!'. He (I never thought of a name for him before scrapping him) would have posed as innocent cargo to keep himself from being suspected of wrongdoing, putting on the hat and bandana when he felt cornered enough to go on the offensive. Ramlethal would have been a kidnapped innocent forced to pretend to be the leader, set up to take the fall for him in case he was ever caught.
The evil fish would have one last trick up his sleeve, though, as when his back was against the wall he'd call in Kingfin.
Kingfin would have made a few appearances before this event, causing trouble out at sea but not mindlessly killing everything like he did in the final version of the plot. We would have learned that Kingfin was the ultimate weapon of the pirates - whether Kingfin was himself the true boss or just a heavy that the orange fish ordered around was undecided.
Ultimately I salvaged the parts from this plot I was most confident in - Robo-May, Kingfin, and the idea of fighting Robo-May on a big, aggressive vehicle that could fight by itself, a la Team Star. The rest I was content to consign to Davy Jones' Locker.
CIRCUS PLOT
I have been wanting to do a plot about an evil circus/carnival/theme park for literally almost the entire time we have been doing RP, but every time I think I'm ready to do it, something comes up that makes me second-guess it! This time around it was Aqualand. SK got to the 'evil theme park' thing first, and although mine was much more in the vein of a twisted carnival than a corrupt water park, I still ended up backing off, especially since we had the boardwalk as well. And then CW took us to CarnEvil, which also kinda covers the same ground... Similar to my much-delayed idea for a Mario Plot, this concept's been kicked aside so many times I'm about ready to give up on it.
My idea for Circus Plot was that Magilou would have been the owner of her own circus, Magilou's Menagerie, and would be facing competition from a traveling carnival that had parked itself near Whalestrand and was hell-bent on running her out of business for reasons I did not establish before abandoning the plot.
Before I gave up on it, I considered tweaking the evil company to provide other forms of entertainment. One thing I had been leaning towards, inspired by Jurassic World Dominion, was an underground colosseum that played host to vicious Zoofights-like animal brawls, which still kept many of the carnival tropes I liked while not being a carnival (the use of performing animals/freak shows as a spectacle, for instance). The Kobbers would have set out to shut it down as a sharp contrast to how much we've changed from our origins. A major boss of this plot would have been Gunga Rao, a monstrous armor-wearing elephant who was the reigning champion of the colosseum. I would eventually find another way to use an elephant in Season 13, but I did try another way to fit Gunga Rao in somewhere first.
TREASURES OF THE HOUSE OF BUXTON
Here's the point where my many ideas were finally starting to be refined into a single cohesive plot, because this is where I first really started working with the idea of a series of vignettes, only loosely connected, built from the pieces of discarded plots.
As you may recall if you're up on your GB lore, Angelica von Buxton is the last known living member of her bloodline in the Gunningshireverse, the once-prestigious Von Buxtons. In the Prime universe, however, the Von Buxton line went extinct a few centuries ago, with Bartholomew Von Buxton, AKA Armory, the last one. This plot would have put a spotlight on the two of them as Angelica, with the help of Allison and The Coven, attempted to track down artifacts belonging to the Prime bloodline that were scattered around Glasetera and surrounding countries, resulting in a spooky European tour. The Sega Genesis game Castlevania Bloodlines was a big inspiration here, particularly its' map screen that dramatically introduces each new stage with a very memorable musical flourish. I planned to lift that concept directly, showing off a map at the start of each event that updated as the plot progressed. The artifacts would have combined into a medieval suit of armor similar to Armory, but sized for Angelica. I had six planned: a sword, a pair of gauntlets, a bracelet, a medal, a shield, and "armor" that would have filled in the missing gaps. Each piece of the set would have had a different guardian and taken place in a different location, though I didn't have a guardian set for every piece by the time I ditched this version of the plot.
An otherwise-abandoned island would be where Robo-May made her base. Still a pirate in this draft, she would have stolen the gauntlets from somewhere. A destroyed snowy village was the resting place of the sword, and here we would meet Jormungandr in the first appearance of what would eventually become H'aanit, Lynn, and Laila's chunk of the plot. The medal would be found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea, where Kingfin guarded it, no longer connected to the pirates. The shield was on display in a colosseum, where the Kobbers would have to face Gunga Rao for possession of it. The bracelet would have been in a haunted circus in my last attempt at doing something with that concept, and the armor would have been right back at home inside Whalestrand's clock tower, but neither location got a guardian attached at any point.
THE BEASTS OF GLASETERA
The Beasts of Glasetera was a H'aanit-centric plot that involved accompanying her on a variety of hunts, dealing with troublesome wildlife (or, in at least one case, interfering to rescue it). The version of the Mr. Krabs event where we come across him hunting the Steller's Sea Cows was revived for this plot, too, though it didn't stay long. A gimmick I was planning for Beasts was having six events, each with a single-word title. We'd kick off with "Titan", featuring the Titan Klawf vs Alpha Blooper battle that made it to the final plot basically fully intact. Next was "Insect", an event featuring a Slither Wing coming to blows with an Iron Moth. This event was reworked into the hunting competition casual event I held during Brawl Season, with the moth-on-moth combat being how Margit got Dee. Next was "Angler", the Mr. Krabs event, followed by "Monster", where H'aanit had to deal with an ornery Therizinosaurus and Megatherium. When I opted to drop this event, I simply gave H'aanit the dinosaur offscreen instead. Next up was "Abyss", which was a noncombat event focused on deep sea exploration. Finally, there was "Terror", which was the same "encounter Jormungandr in a destroyed snowy village" idea as the previous draft, still with no Krakenspine or Lynn/Laila involved.
What do those event titles spell? TIAMAT! The seventh and final event would have been called "Tiamat", and featured the same twist as the final plot of Attami actually being Tiamat's personal robot slave, alongside a brainwashed Osaka and Mr. Spell.
A major theme of this draft was the idea of having very few proper antagonists. After last year had the Kobbers save the world multiple times against horribly-dangerous foes like Mallus, Calado Calmante, Heidegger, and Harlequin, I wanted to step back from villains and try a plot where the dangers were mostly just wild animals defending themselves, with the sole possible exception of some pirates or smugglers (like Mr. Krabs) as minor foes. Tiamat being added to the plot (the name gimmick of course didn't come until then) changed this, but most of the events were still "animals fighting animals, deal with the problem". Too many of them, in fact. Recognizing the limitations and repetitiveness of this draft, I kept just the Blooper/Klawf conflict and reworked or scrapped the other two animal-versus-animal events.
THE ALMOST-FINAL DRAFT
As things finally began to take shape, a plot very similar to what I actually did was outlined. The main difference was that most of the Pirate Plot, minus Mr. Krabs this time but with Ramlethal, Robo-May, Kingfin, and the evil fish, was grafted onto it as a pre-Brawl arc that also included the Klawf/Blooper conflict as a quasi-related kickoff. From here this arc finally mutated into what we got in the end, a simple two-event arc with Kingfin as the boss. Another smaller change was that the hunting event was only a bug-catching contest, without a fishing derby added as well. Additionally, this version of the plot lacked the Robo-May event entirely and instead featured a different, one-off event I'm considering using as part of my 2024 plot, so I won't go into detail about it here beyond the fact that it centers around the Artcade. You may remember the Artcade was hinted to have something odd going on with it in the blogpost that introduced it. That's still on the table, but the event was removed from this year's schedule as I sought to downsize.
This version of the plot also had a different penultimate boss, with none of the Garfield elements anywhere to be seen. The first day of the two-day finale would have been a moody trek through a foggy crater and an abandoned laboratory, drawing heavily from Area Zero in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and climaxing with a battle against a hijacked Osaka being controlled by Mr. Spell, who was evil in this version. In the final version, though, Mr. Spell was just another puppet of Tiamat.
I also had a short list of events marked as "Optional" in this draft, which were extra ideas that weren't necessary to hit all the highlights I wanted to hit. The Therizinosaurus vs Megatherium event was here, along with the noncombat deep sea event from Beasts of Glasetera and two events I may use in some form next season, including one that I had titled "The Stupidest Thing Ever", so look forward to that maybe!
CUT CHARACTERS/IMAGES
Next up we have some pictures representing scrapped characters and elements that never found their way into one of the above plot outlines. Here's one, a DALL-E image from back when AI art was tiny and blurry and much less impressive. I got this image when trying to generate pictures of white mages. I thought it worked really well as a representation of the spirits of Grenivak, though it lacks the later idea I had where Lynn's skull helmet was in fact traditional Grenivak fashion.
Here's Marla from Bravely Default II, who might have popped up in an event concept I had where there were multiple evil Mays running around at once. Robo-May would have been the leader, of course, but we also would have had to deal with Marla as well as Doopliss from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, both of whom can transform.
I was looking up monster scenes in crappy CGI movies one day out of boredom when I stumbled upon this surprisingly interesting-looking dragon design, particularly striking because of its' sideways-opening mouth. I considered using it and the other creatures from the movie it appeared in, but ultimately took a pass. The movie in question is Monster Island, an Asylum film that has all their usual hallmarks: poor CGI, amateur production, and the clever money-saving tactic of showing the monsters as little as possible.
I was never sure what exactly to do with it, but I'd really wanted to do some deep sea exploration, with or without combat. The deep sea is a fascinating and scary place, where some of the craziest-looking creatures on Earth live. One of the possible finds down there was much more benign, though - the Ancient Mother from Endless Ocean, basically an extra-big albino blue whale. She would have been benevolent, naturally, but I wasn't sure if I wanted an outright Big Good or if she was merely an animal that happened to be very docile.
I considered Oodako the giant octopus as a helpful, Huge Hermit-style "large battle character" a couple times, but I already had the Alpha Blooper and Octomammoth, who can do basically the same stuff but on a smaller scale, so I scrapped him. Since Draco took him as the City Of Beasts bartender, I think it worked out. He still got to appear!
Here's another giant sea critter I considered as a helpful jumbo-size fighter: Leedsichthys, one of the largest fish to ever live on Earth (over fifty feet long!), who lived during the time of the dinosaurs. During any ocean-themed battles, Leeds here could make an appearance and help the Kobbers out. One particularly bizarre idea I had, though, was that Leeds was the transformed version of one of my cast members, and she was keeping her fish form a secret from everyone until inevitably something would happen to reveal the ruse (probably Leeds taking critical damage and being unable to maintain its' form). And who was Leedsichthys? Magilou, of course! I considered having her lean into the "chaos clown" stuff more by having her be like Clownpiece and able to turn into a giant creature, but instead of a dragon she just turns into a big fish. It would have been neat to have a huge fish helping out the Kobbers in RP whether or not it was secretly a jester witch, but the niche was taken by other characters like Octomammoth and Anchorage and we didn't really get enough ocean fights for me to have that many different sea animals fighting in them. Leedsichthys is still a really neat fish though and it'd be nice to use it somehow someday.
This is Binah, from Lobotomy Corporation. Binah was planned in some versions of my plot as a decoy antagonist. She would have been the head of BioSyn, who you may know is InGen's competitor in the Jurassic Park series. We would have come across the Paradox Device (sans Tiamat influence, she wasn't part of the plot at this stage) and found the BioSyn logo on it, or we would have found BioSyn logos on some other antagonist like Robo-May. BUT... BioSyn would have been innocent! When confronted, Binah would explain that BioSyn had been steeped in corruption and evil... and then she'd swooped in, bought the company, installed herself as CEO and began a top-to-bottom cleanup that resulted in mass firings and arrests. The BioSyn-marked projects would have been remnants of the previous company, stolen or smuggled away before she could have them inspected or destroyed. Essentially this was the way I'd get a problematic machine or three into RP while still adhering to that idea I'd had about a plot with no true Big Bad in it (except Jormungandr, but he wouldn't have been connected to the BioSyn stuff). The spooky lady who is cruel and callous in her source material, running the shady company that's usually a darker version of a company that was already a Kobber foe in RP... all above-board and apologetic. Binah and BioSyn were dropped from the plot, but their role eventually came to be filled by Loremaster and Hell, Inc. More on that later.
And with that, we have finally seen ALL of the various scrapped plots and drafts that eventually led to the Cabinet of Curiosities. A mess, frankly, and I'm actually kind of surprised it all fit together relatively coherently with how many sources these event ideas came from, but the pirate, H'aanit, Garfield, demon, and Tiamat elements all managed to come together to make a good whole.
With all the cutting room floor out of the way, let's take a look at the movers and shakers in this plot that helped make it what it was.
ASHLEY
So about that framing device... It may be a little odd, but for anthology shows like Unsolved Mysteries, One Step Beyond, and Beyond Belief, I actually enjoyed the framing devices and host monologues as much as, if not more than, the actual vignettes. Seeing the host pop up every episode was oddly comforting, especially when they took the time to share some interesting background information on what was coming up or what we'd just seen. I decided I wanted to give that a try with my own plot host, and Ashley was a great fit for the role. An even better fit than I'd expected, actually, since she wound up winning the Brawl this year. I wasn't able to reshape my plot to give the champion a spotlight like I did in 2015 when I did a deep dive on Silence after her surprise victory, but Ashley was already in a good spot as the hostess of the plot and with her ties to Hagplot ensuring she'd keep popping up throughout the year.
As you might expect, there were some ideas I had for episodes of Ashley's show that went unused. Here they are!
The Lost Colony of Roanoke: Founded in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh, this colony, located on Roanoke Island, was the first known attempt of an English settlement in the Americas. It had a short and troubled life, abandoned quickly due to poor relations with natives and a lack of supplies. Re-founded in 1587, when it was checked on in 1590, it was left completely abandoned. The only clue was a fence with the word 'Croatan' carved into it. To this day it's not certain what happened to the unfortunate colonists, but the top two most likely theories are that the natives either assimilated or killed them. Unconfirmed reports of native tribe members with European features persisted for years after the end of Roanoke.
Clever Hans: Clever Hans was a remarkable performing horse who worked his craft in the early 20th century. His owner was a mathematician and horse trainer named Wilhem von Osten. Hans was advertised as being capable of reading, spelling, telling the time, and could understand spoken German, but he was most famous for being able to do math. He could seemingly add, subtract, multiply, divide, and even work with fractions. When Wilhem asked Hans a math problem, Hans would paw at the ground with his hoof the correct number of times. The secret behind Clever Hans was discovered when scientists began running experiments on him, though - it turned out that Hans could only give the right answer when he was able to see the person asking him the question. From there, it was deduced that Hans was picking up on subtle cues that made him realize he should stop, in particular the raising of the eyebrows of the person asking the question. Since this happened regardless of who asked Hans a question - Wilhelm, a scientist, or anyone else - it was found that Wilhelm wasn't being a cheat - he just had no idea he was subconsciously reacting to the horse approaching the right answer. So Clever Hans was indeed a very smart horse... just not in the way people thought.
The Wrangel Island mammoths: The woolly mammoth died out in most places before modern human civilization began, but on this small remote island, a population of mammoths hung on until about 2000 BC - more recently than the construction of the famous Great Pyramid of Giza! The thought of mammoths enduring this long has fueled hope for some that they may still be alive somewhere, but unfortunately there's just not really anywhere for mammoths to hide in the world for this long without being noticed. I scrapped this segment because it was too similar to the passenger pigeon one and instead gave us some mammoth content in the Jormungandr event.
Raining animals: This is a rare and bizarre but persistently reported phenomena in which animals seemingly fall from the sky, often all the same species at once. Fish and frogs are the most common victims. Some scientists have advanced the idea that waterspouts are sucking up the poor creatures and then dumping them overland, but no one has ever seen a waterspout actually do this, so it's just a theory. Other ideas include a flood or other harsh weather causing animals to be swept out of their habitat, and in the case of a rain of birds, a storm enveloping a flock of them and making them fall.
Living entombed animals: This refers to the supposed phenomenon of animals, almost always toads, found alive inside rocks or coal, something that seems impossible because how would the animal get anything to eat? While it was a popular thing to report on in the 19th century, it hasn't been taken seriously in many years, and can probably be chalked up to a combination of tall tales, hoaxes, and mistakes (a toad being disturbed by mining and hopping out nearby just as a big rock is split open, for instance). The most dramatic story of this sort was of miners who blasted open a cave only to be confronted with a living pterodactyl that emerged from the cave, squawked at them, fluttered its' wings, collapsed, and died. This story dates back to when newspapers would make up fake stories to set themselves apart from their competitors, and as such we can unfortunately assume that a pterosaur did not, in fact, survive over 65 million years buried in rock.
H'AANIT
Finally!
I mentioned in last year's Rejected Characters Depot that I've been trying to make a new archer character for years, only for each one to get Cutting Room Floored. When I played Octopath Traveler over the 2021-2022 offseason, though, I at last found the one that would click. H'aanit is great, a big tough barbarian huntress lady who kicks ass and talks funny. I was unsure going into the season what exactly she would end up doing, especially as my Beasts of Glasetera plot was rejiggered to focus less on animal control and more about robots, but fortunately she has found some places to slip in. She hasn't been super important but she's been prominent enough to get by, and I'm pleased with how she's done so far.
Guess the main point to touch on would be that accent. I've lessened its' use as time goes on, partly to keep it from slowing down my writing too much and partly because I imagine the Kobbers have led to H'aanit spending more time around other people, and it's weakening her old-fashioned tongue being around so many other people who don't talk like she does. It'll probably never be fully gone, but she at least isn't throwing around "eth" and "en" so much now.
By the way, if you were curious - I was unsure whether or not H'aanit would have ties to the other Octopath main characters who've made it to RP, Cyrus and Tressa (both played by Hooded Pitohui), but as it turns out, H'aanit was namechecked by JRM during the 9th Brawl as having taught Tressa a skill, so the two are in fact acquaintances at the least!
LYNN SKAU, AKA THE DRIFTER
Somsnosa from Hylics is one of many girls I've seen art of, gone "cool", and filed into an RP folder. Not all of these cool girls get to make it to RP, but Somsnosa did at least! Albeit only as a faceclaim. Hylics is a very strange series I don't have direct familiarity with, and I decided I'd be more comfortable just faceclaiming her. Plus, as mentioned in Chatzy at one point, Somsnosa's name is kind of a mouthful.
Lynn's lore got pieced together over time from a few different brainstorming sessions, and by 'brainstorming sessions' I mean daydreaming while in the shower or listening to music. I wanted to explain as much of her oddities as I could - the blue skin, the bone helmet, and the ragged cloak. Pretty quick I settled on Lynn being a mysterious drifter who wandered around Glasetera before Chara eventually lured her into spending most of her time in Whalestrand. Chara wasn't part of my plot, but she was instrumental to ensuring Lynn got into RP instead of getting cut. I have found that making a duo or trio out of a few different character ideas is a good way to get all of them to the forum. Pairing off these two loners worked out really well, and I like their dynamic of Chara being lazy but chatty and bringing Lynn into social situations while Lynn is the responsible one who lightly scolds Chara for their chocolate addiction and can snark right back when she feels like talking. Lynn became a lot more gregarious once Jormungandr was dealt with, and less uptight too. She was way too young to have had such a burden placed on her.
Lynn had been the last survivor of Grenivak pretty much from the start. If I was going to play a drifter, I wanted a firm reason why they were drifting, and being a homeless orphan was certainly a good reason. Lynn fell off pretty hard once her arc ended, but I feel like I could and should be using her more, so keep an eye out for her to come back next season. It helps that I really enjoy playing as Chara, too.
LAILA BAKKEN
One of my very first concepts for Whalestrand, Laila is a kinder and gentler version of her source material. In the indie horror game "The Elevator", you wind up riding with the nameless Elevator Girl as she asks you probing moral questions and tests your character. How you respond to her determines which floor she drops you off at, and unsurprisingly most of the floors offer terrible fates for people she deems sinful, even for minor transgressions like picking a sweet dessert over a healthy one or playing on a slot machine. In RP, Laila's standards are relaxed so that she doesn't cause problems for any Kobbers with dark pasts or loose morals like Baccarat, Sinful, or Roman. If you are rotten enough to get her attention, though, look out.
Laila originally wasn't tied to this plot, nor was she conceived of as Lynn's sister. However, two things got me to change my mind. First, the lack of people doing stuff in the hotel meant Laila wasn't getting many chances to appear. Second, I noticed a resemblance between her and the pictures of Somsnosa I was using for Lynn's faceclaim, particularly in the face and hair. Seeing an opening for a fun twist that would make Laila relevant, I made them sisters. Before I did, though, Laila's connection to the plot went in a couple other directions.
One early idea I had was for there to be a prophecy to defeat Jormungandr. This prophecy stated that every time Jormungandr attacked a village or group of people, anyone who managed to survive was a chosen one. When enough of these chosen ones gathered together, they could defeat Jormungandr. Laila would have still been undead, but she would have lived through a much older attack from a hundred or more years in the past. A few other characters would also be revealed to have survived Jormungandr, including Captain Murasa and H'aanit (who would have encountered him alone during a hunt for a different creature). Even Elvira was potentially connected to things this way, but in the end I simplified it, removed the prophecy, and kept just Laila and Lynn as the two known survivors of a Jormungandr attack, even if Laila didn't live very long afterward.
The exact nature of Laila's class of undead took some time to settle on. I didn't want her to be a ghost as I had one already with Murasa. Elvira disqualified "zombie" for the same reason. And I didn't want her to be a demon, like in her source game, either. Ultimately I made her a unique brand of undead that has qualities of both zombies and ghosts, but is neither. She looks and acts like a flesh-and-blood human, but is made purely of ghostly flesh that regenerates when lost, having no bones or organs and therefore letting her take grotesque amounts of damage and survive. I've been referring to her in my head as a "wight". So if you wanted to know what Laila is, there you go. Laila's a wight.
JORMUNGANDR
The final boss of my plotstuff this year! Okay, no, not really, but I was extremely pleased with how Jormungandr's stuff came together. I set out to see if I could still make a compelling antagonist with just a single two-day event and some prior solo posts to build them up, and signs point to yes!
Jormungandr came to RP because of his status in his source game, Bravely Default II. As is known by now, that game is kind of a mixed bag compared to the better games on 3DS, with one of its' biggest issues being very uneven difficulty. Jormungandr is kind of the gold standard of that despite being an optional boss. The fight against him unlocks pretty quickly once you get to the section of the continent where he can be found, but this is far, far too early to face him and the advertised difficulty level of the mission is pretty much a lie - it's high, but not nearly high enough to emphasize just how much of a threat Jormungandr is. Both myself and Chao fell for Jormun's trap, finding ourselves thrown into a battle that was simply impossible to win with our current levels and setups. It may have been poor game design, but it still meant Jormungandr got stuck in my head, and was a big factor in putting him in RP. Another factor was the very nice design touch of having a bunch of weapons sticking out of his back, implying he's survived many fights with would-be heroes and come out on top.
A note on Krakenspine Mountain... the name comes from our "toss out names for the new setting" powwows. One of Harpy's ideas was "Krackenspine" and I loved it, so I tweaked it a bit and used it as the name of Glasetera's most infamous mountain. Krakenspine is much safer to climb these days now that Jormungandr isn't Fisher Kinging it up, though it's still no joke.
Connecting Kingfin to Jormungandr was a late idea but it worked wonderfully. Jormun being some kind of horrible necromancer also allowed for the big emotional punch of him summoning Lynn's own friends and family to attack her, and it let the mammoth join in the fight as well. Jormungandr killing extinct species like mammoths and Megalodon was meant to underscore just how long this horrible thing had been a problem. I really wanted to sell Jormun as a big deal despite his short arc, and I think I succeeded. It helped that he was so tough, too - I personally think if you pitted my two big final boss battles against each other, Jormungandr would defeat Zombie Tiamat and Attami, though it would be close.
I enjoyed making Jormun's fight a ridiculous spectacle, even if Draco's posts kind of poked at it and showed we were using potentially suboptimal tactics at a few points (particularly the decision to have the final round be us riding the severed summit of Krakenspine down the side of the mountain). I was going full Rule Of Cool (and also preventing the need for everyone to have to trudge back down the mountain after the fight) but poor Margit and Dee were not ready for it.
The final post with the ghosts walking off into the distance was potentially the most emotionally destroyed I've ever been writing anything. I could barely get that post out, I was just in tears. And yet I kept on looping that Celeste ending theme, unable to stop myself! It's always sad music that gets me the most.
GARFIELD (AND GARFIELD-RELATED ACCESSORIES)
"Gooper. Why did you put Garfield in RP. Why. Why did you do that."
Because I had to, dear reader.
I think Garfield gets a bad rap. He's mocked for being boring, corporate, and unfunny, and yeah it's true that the strip was better in the 80s and 90s than it is afterward, but I'm honestly very drawn to the Garfield universe as a relaxed, safe one. It's comfort food. No matter how many years go by, there's Garfield, still up to his old tricks. He turned 45 this year and I'm old enough to have celebrated his 20th anniversary with the excellent "20 Years and Still Kicking!" book I received as a present when it was a new release. Garfield has been part of my life since basically the beginning - one of my oldest memories is bonding with a Garfield plush as a toddler. I still have that plush. It's absolutely wrecked and ragged from decades of use, falling apart with holes in it, but I'd never, ever throw it away. So yeah, I've got a big soft spot for this series, and I wanted to play with it in RP. All my other long-time fandoms have gotten turns to shine in RP (Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Battlebots, and of course Pokemon), so why not Garfield?
Writing Garfield in RP has been way too fun. Reading his stuff for decades has given me a pretty good grasp of his voice (which people did agree with me on, and I was very happy about that), and yes I imagine the late great Lorenzo Music voicing all of his lines. My Garfield is based on a mix of the early 80s "wide-headed" comic strip Garfield and the late 80s Garfield and Friends Garfield. The former is more catlike, walks on all fours almost all the time, and has a cute and appealing look to him I've always really enjoyed. The latter provides the famous voice and is more action-oriented. Combining the two gives us probably the ideal Garfield for RP, a snarky commentator who can mix it up when his back is against the wall.
I've joked for years about doing a Garfield Plot, but I was completely serious. Despite being known for banal "lazy cat around the house" gags, there's genuine lore in the Garfieldverse if you're willing to go digging. In particular, the Garfield cartoons have been much more willing to go into "villains and adventures" styles of stories than the comic strip, and that is where all of the Garfield antagonists I used came from. Dr. Garbanzo Bean is from an episode of the first Garfield cartoon, Garfield and Friends, where he kidnaps Odie to make an army of robot dogs in his likeness he plans to sell as the perfect pet. Master Control, who has Metalla as a subordinate, is the leading baddy of a four-episode arc in the more recent The Garfield Show cartoon, where he aims to conquer Earth by replacing everyone with robots. The similar motivations and easy tie-in to the overall robot theme that was building in my plot thanks to Robo-May still hanging around as well as Attami's secret connection led to the bizarre merging of Garfield stuff into the Cabinet feel surprisingly natural.
I considered making Metalla more important by having her get away for now only to be dealt with next season, but ultimately I preferred taking her off the table now and giving my Season 14 antagonists more room without having to accomodate her too. This was also the final nail in the coffin for the old "Osaka fights the Kobbers with Mr. Spell" concept, though, since Metalla had to take the first half of the two-day finale for herself. I gave her Master Control as a mech so he could be in the plot as well - he'd originally been slated to appear as himself, but the antagonist slate was too crowded for such a small arc so there wasn't room for him as his own guy. As for Garbanzo, he was always meant to be the ineffectual starter villain who stepped aside for more serious threats like Metalla and Tiamat, though I did consider us facing off with him properly on his own plot day when he unleashed a house-sized Robodie and hopped inside to pilot it. An Odie giant mecha was almost a thing.
Garfield Plot wasn't the season-long epic I'd dreamed it could be, but at least it finally happened! And we still don't know where Lyman went...
LOREMASTER
The surprise adoption! When Helltaker came out, we made so many jokes about how doomed we all were to inevitably plop a bunch of cute demon girls into RP, but things didn't turn out that way, at least not at first! Planned Helltaker characters either got Cutting Room Floored (Cerberus) or played minor roles without being major faces (Judgement, Lucifer, Malina). Really the only prominent one has been Beelzebub, and even then she's Draco's in-universe narrator so she doesn't get much actual attention as her own character. But for our spookiest season yet, I set out to change that. First I introduced Justice as a regular cast member, and although she's a little overshadowed by the louder and more popular Burnin she has found a nice role to play as a ZFPD member. Next I decided to adopt Loremaster from Harpy after I felt her small role in 2021 RP left a lot of potential unused. And finally, my plot next year is planned to be a Demon Plot that will hopefully feature Justice, Loremaster, and Lucifer in various roles. We've neglected the Helltakers for too long!
Anyway, Loremaster is pretty much my version of Chao's Sally, but I didn't want her to be THAT oblivious so she's kind of more like Wolfgang? Or maybe even Dr. Crygor? She's a friendly mad scientist demon, is the important part. She did some contract work for the Radical Dreamers once upon a time and is not pure lawful good like many Kobbers are, but she's far from an evil person and sees great value in the Kobbers' approach to things. The Loremaster/Justice/Lucifer/Beelzebub relationship graph is a complicated one I haven't properly sorted out yet and will need Draco's aid to do, but I'm hoping next year we can lay out the specifics and answer some questions, particularly the thorniest question of all: Why is Beelzebub an outcast?
Loremaster's way into RP was a matter of convenience as I needed someone to be responsible for the Paradox Device and I liked the idea of Dr. Garbanzo Bean not being the inventor but rather just someone who'd stumbled across it and was trying to make sense of it. Loremaster is the brains behind it, having been tinkering with genetics. But who was the unauthorized subordinate who let Tiamat's soul merge with the Paradox Device? Who stole the machine before it could be disposed of? Who is the actual cause of pretty much this entire Paradox Device mess?
Wouldn't you like to know! Stay tuned.
ATTAMI
Well, here she is. The fat robot herself. While I had intentionally leaned into making a character I knew Draco would enjoy by providing a robot girl that works in an office environment (two of his favorite things!), I didn't expect JRM to latch onto her so hard! I was very happy for it, though. Miyoi is a darling and one of my favorite Season 13 debuts, and the connection between the two is such a fun, cute one.
As you'd probably guess once the truth of her name was revealed, Attami was planned to be connected to Tiamat basically from the start. Only briefly did she exist in my plans as a nameless robot girl that's just another Hoshii employee - pretty quickly I decided to make her my "surprise villain" and then came up with the name not long after by using an anagram generator, then taking a result I liked and massaging it to give it an alternative explanation (the "ATM" designation, which put her in Hoshii Holdings' financial division).
Attami's food addiction was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and Food Plot escalated it faster than I had otherwise thought. Attami was originally going to be more of a slow burn, gradually discovering things and coming out of her shell, but she ended up becoming very friendly, very personable, and very gluttonous at breakneck speed. I think we can certainly blame Miyoi for it - as one of Attami's closest friends, her cheerful personality was sure to rub off on the impressionable robot.
Attami's surprise turn as the final boss of the plot went through many, many forms. It took a long time for me to settle on what she would look and act like before I gave her the alternate headgear. Alternate Attami concepts included:
* A completely normal but dead-inside Attami who acted like she was fresh off the assembly line and didn't recognize the Kobbers
* Zombie Tiamat gradually erupting out of Attami until she resembled the Stranger Of Paradise model with Attami lodged in Tiamat's chest like Osaka ended up being
* A blank-eyed, vacant Attami who moved like a sleepwalker or zombie and was constantly leaking white fog from her mouth that formed a ghostly Tiamat looming over her
* A feral, hunched-over Attami with pieces of the Paradox Device lodged in her back and Tiamat's arms replacing her own
* Probably the craziest one: Attami was one of Celestia's Warmechs after being zapped by the Paradox Device and having her mind wiped, either Skeiron or Warmech Delta. Skeiron appearing as himself during one of Cornwind's events this year meant he couldn't possibly be Attami, though, and I backed off from the concept and instead just had Attami be inspired by Warmechs instead. I'd also considered giving her two allies in her fight in the form of Warmechs Alpha and Beta, who would have been a steampunk Warmech and a normal Warmech respectively, forming a Past-Present-Future trio with Attami.
I also had a couple different ideas for giving Attami a new super-form she would acquire upon breaking free of Tiamat's control and turning back to our side. The first idea was Attami being able to transform into a mecha-Tiamat, and the second was making her into a dragon-slaying knight with a huge sword and a tower shield. The main thing that kept me from doing the latter was that I'd wanted to illustrate it, but didn't have the energy for a second Attami MSPaint after finishing the helmeted one.
Attami wasn't going to enter this year's Brawl at first. That spot was slated for Burnin Justice to take, but ultimately I think I made the right decision pushing their entry back. Burnin and Justice got off to a slow start this season and it wasn't until mid-summer they began to pick up steam, Burnin in particular. Attami, meanwhile, had ended up more popular and built-up than I'd expected, so she got to cut in line.
TIAMAT
Shady's back, tell a friend. Every year I do a "Tiamat cameo", just like how Chao always does a "Ridley cameo". It's a couple of the Kobbers' oldest foes and the running gag of their persistence as they pop up again and again in one way or another. Many of Tiamat's appearances were some kind of harmless gag, like when she appeared on a mural in La-Mulana or as a fountain statue in Finé's lair. When we fought the Tiamat cameo, it was always something else instead of THE Tiamat, like Heart Star Tiamat or an InGen creation using Tiamat cells. But since she lacks the baggage or controversy of certain other old foes, I thought it would be fun if the real, original Tiamat mounted a comeback after so many years, so I decided to make her the surprise Big Bad of my plot!
I was very careful when doing posts about the Paradox Device. I wanted to say just enough that you could admit I left a couple hints, but I didn't want anyone to figure out the reveal before it happened. After Gust's identity was figured out before my Jenny LeClue plot even started, I wanted to hang onto a big surprise this time so I really didn't want to say too much! Fortunately it worked out, the usual suspects for figuring out plot twists all seemed to be caught flat-footed and I got my surprise twist onto the forum intact!
This was the definitive, 100% certain end of the original Tiamat. Her offscreen third death in Season 3 had given me the wiggle room for her to survive a supposed soul-shattering, but not this time. Tiamat is done. I have also considered dropping the Yearly Tiamat Cameo to really emphasize that it's over, but I did have one last really cool concept for a Tiamat appearance (that almost made it into this plot) that makes me hold back from going that route just yet. We'll see if I do it!
I certainly wasn't expecting Tiamat to get a sort of happy ending, but the combination of Dexter and Miyoi's attacks ended up being perfect for giving Tiamat the one thing she was never able to have: Peace. She accepted her defeat, she realized why the Kobbers stood so strongly against her, and she let go. And without that burning anger and determination keeping her shredded soul going, Tiamat Prime finally faded away for good. Forever and ever. Finito. For real this time.
I think that should about do it, but if you have any questions, I'll see if I can answer them. If you read this far, thanks for being so interested in my plot stuff! Hope you enjoyed me finally doing one of these blogs again after so many seasons I skipped.
From a certain point of view, Beelzebub is one of my most prominent characters!
ReplyDeleteShe only gets about one or two posts a year with her actual text effects though!
I love the Rule of Cool as much as anyone, but don't be surprised if it gets TOO cool for the normies. ;V
Margit wasn't supposed to have too much Main Character Energy this year, but oh well.