6/1: Steel Thy Shovel
Fite Club Plot was born from a simple desire to do something fresh, helped along by my playing Shovel Knight, one of my favorite games of 2017. Shovel Knight is a gorgeous and fun game with a top-notch soundtrack and gameplay that is much more on the good end of the Fake Difficulty vs Actual Challenge scale of tough games. With its' colorful and varied cast, including it in RP seemed a no-brainer, but instead of my usual ensemble antagonist plot, I wanted something more casual and fun that could get many different users involved, particularly ones who miss my plot events a lot like Del, SK, FV, and Draco. By making the plot a series of Fite Club matches, it was broken down into short, easy one-on-one battles that let everyone who wanted to participate be able to. Overall it worked quite well.
Of course, I wanted to finish the plot with a proper event, so that's why Steel Thy Shovel happened. It was a silly plot with silly twists (THEY TURNED INTO GIRLS! WARIO AND WALUIGI ARE THE MASTERMINDS!) as befitting a plot meant for the first third of the year. It was meant as a sort of celebration of Fite Club as an institution, as well as a way to draw some attention to it. As always, Fite Club is more active early in the season and mostly goes dead by fall, but it's still a useful and important part of RP and this plot underscored and reinforced that.
CUTTING ROOM FLOOR: A battle with Shovel Knight himself was a possible part of the plot. Ultimately, though, he was only mentioned via his picture on a sign in Fite Club.
Wario and Waluigi were planned to be assistants for the Specter Knight battle, but were left out. This was good, because I didn't have a final antagonist to pile blame onto at the end, and I wanted one because I liked depicting the Order as being generally decent people who didn't deserve death or permanent jailtime for their cartoony antics.
Another scrapped Fite Club Cameo was Fio Germi, who was pegged for the Propeller Knight battle.
Propeller Knight's original gimmick was that his match was a Ladder Match with the goal of grabbing a trophy or other such object high above his arena. Naturally, he could just fly up and take it, so his opponent would have to focus their attacks on Propeller Knight's headgear to disable it before they could focus on climbing the ladder. This was dropped in exchange for the more game-accurate air strike attack.
King Knight originally had a "Confidence Tractor" as his gimmick instead of Royal Decree. The idea was that King Knight's tractor would grow larger or smaller depending on how he was feeling about his chances in the fight. However, I realized that this was likely to lead to an unstable equilibrium of King Knight either hitting max or bottoming out quickly and then it being very difficult to reverse the fortunes of the battle.
6/7: One Man's Trash
At one point, "Arielplot" was considered to be a yearlong plot with events happening on and off throughout the season, and it still kinda was, but it was broken up into two distinct parts (Arcadeplot and Monsterplot/Bulgraveplot) plus Team Skull's plot, leaving this oddball event isolated near the start of the season long before the plot really kicked in. It wasn't always this way. Hedorah and Del Lago were originally going to be introduced later than they had been, but the creation of "Trash Island" by the pissed-off Sea Witch trying to send a message was the absolute perfect introduction for them.
I've wanted to use Hedorah in RP for a very, very long time. I initially held off because SK said he'd been considering using him, but ultimately he didn't. Hedorah is actually the reason this plot exists in the first place, and was always envisioned as a major endgame encounter to cap off a plot. As for Del Lago, I've thought for a long time that giant salamanders are pretty creepy. Not quite fish, not quite lizards, slimy with eerily tiny legs and creepy beady eyes and a massive mouth. The prehistoric one from Walking With Dinosaurs, Koolasuchus, stood out to me for those reasons, so that's why it was chosen as the antagonist of the blog short story I wrote before doing the plot. It later became Del Lago because Del Lago is a very rare case of a giant salamander monster in media.
I liked playing these guys ambiguously. Everyone familiar with the Godzilla franchise knows Hedorah is big trouble, and the Koolasuchus certainly seemed a threat, but they behaved themselves throughout May, and it wasn't until they detected Dolby and mistook her for garbage that a fight broke out.
Little did I know at the time that the death of Del Lago, and with it the end of the "Ariel vs a giant salamander" arc, marked the end of Ariel's biggest contribution to what was supposed to be her plot...
7/20: Big, Scary, and Pink
Team Skull Plot! I mentioned in 2016 that I had considered tying together all three of my plots that year (Sumireko, Format Wars, and Sarah) so that Salvation would ultimately be responsible for all three plots. I used that concept for real this time, making (almost) all my plots connected somehow. Team Skull seemed to have a random dayplot shoved in between other bigger plots, but no - it was another installment of the main plot!
My plans for Team Skull were originally much bigger, with the idea of giving them an entire, full-size plot to themselves that revolved around members of other evil teams like Galactic, Plasma, and Flare showing up and causing trouble. This was scrapped for various reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I didn't have enough space in the year to fit all my plot plans. However, Team Skull being a major part of a multi-event plot has NOT been scrapped entirely...
In case you missed it, Pinky's origin is a very strange screenshot of a 6th gen Pokemon game that's been around for a couple years. Never explained or given any kind of backstory, the image is clearly impossible yet very well made. The abomination depicted was perfect for the role of a fanmade Ultra Beast, so I took the basic design, worked out how the thing operates (like the ability to "unfold" into the shape seen in the original screenshot), and chucked it into my plot.
I had seriously considered using Officer Nanu on my roster as a regular character, but I lacked the space. He still got to make an important cameo for this plot, acting as the plot's guide and providing crucial backstory that explained why Sid and Melissa were continuing the Team Skull act even after Guzma had disbanded the group.
CUTTING ROOM FLOOR: Speaking of Guzma, his role shifted around as well. At one point the Kobbers were going to battle him, and he might have even had Pinky on his team, but ultimately he was there to set up the plot and provide Team Skull's backstory along with Nanu.
In between merging Team Skull Plot with my main plot and when I shortened it to one event, there was a period where I had a couple other fights against Angelica and Dr. Maddiman's Pokemon experiments. One idea was an early-year battle against a cyborg Kingler made to resemble Steamcrab. Team Skull would believe it was a Water/Steel Alolan Kingler, but it would be hinted at that this was not a natural evolution. Also considered was a cyborg Crawdaunt resembling Krilldozer, who would either fight alongside the Kingler or get its' own event. While the Kingler was meant for Team Skull, the Crawdaunt would have fought Huge Hermit, the two oversized weaponized crustaceans getting in a knock-down, drag-out brawl across a jungle on the island that would require the Kobbers to jump in to limit the environmental damage. While the event didn't happen, the cyborg Crawdaunt got to appear in the plot's finale in zombie form thanks to Cornwind!
8/8: Who Dunnit?
In the second half of last offseason, when I was first getting the ideas for Arcadeplot, playing a bunch of MAME beat-em-ups wasn't my only attempt to get in the zone for it. On Steam, I'd managed to stumble onto two free-to-try pinball collections that offered a free table: Pinball Arcade and Zaccaria Pinball. I was eager to try them out, and wound up going on a serious pinball kick throughout the first half of 2017.
Of course, it's one thing to put something you enjoy in a plot, and it's quite another to ensure people who aren't familiar with said thing will enjoy themselves while you're sperging out about your interests. I knew full well I was the only person in the community to ever talk about pinball (though JRM has played a bit here and there, I've heard, and Draco knew who Black Knight 2000 was), so I did my best to focus on making it a unique and interesting gimmick that could appeal to people who didn't have any familiarity with the ancestor of video games. As part of that, I chose two very unique pinball tables with special gimmicks and merged them into one game. Who Dunnit has a great murder mystery/film noir theme going and has a shockingly involved backstory for a pinball game, while Safe Cracker is a crazy game where you play a thief trying to rob a bank and wind up going from playing pinball on the main playfield to playing a board game on the backglass to try and break into the vault. The two gimmicks meshed well together in an overall crime and punishment theme, so I merged them into one pinball extravaganza.
When I saw the name of the security system you battle in Safe Cracker was "Candy", I couldn't resist the goofy cameo of making her a literal DJ Candy hologram. I enjoyed that crazy last round before you guys managed to break into The Vault to access the data files.
8/15: Going Berzerk
When doing a plot about killer arcade games, it was only natural to bring in one of the very few video games believed to have actually killed someone. The story of Berzerk is rife with inconsistencies and rational explanations exist for why the young man who died playing Berzerk shuffled off this mortal coil. But I've never let reality get in the way of a good fictional story anyway, so the possible urban legend/coincidence is turned up to eleven here. In any case, like Polybius itself, it didn't matter if the legends about Berzerk were true in-universe: Dr. Maddiman was making an artificial creation based on the legends, essentially a "copycat crime" that copied a crime that didn't previously exist.
Berzerk is pretty minimalist, but between the maze, the killer robots, the urban legend, and Evil Otto, there was enough content to go around for an event. I tried to keep it fresh by constantly changing the opponent being faced - first the living arcade machine, then the robot horde, then Evil Otto, and finally Otto's second form.
CUTTING ROOM FLOOR: A possible early angle for Arcadeplot merged Berzerk and Polybius together to make the ultimate killer arcade game. This was changed to Berzerk getting its' own event and Polybius being built off of Tempest instead.
8/22: Stand Up And Fight
The first pinball event was a pinball game structured like a battle. This one was a battle structured like a pinball game. Funny how that works.
I like the idea of the Secret Fiter being more than a Just Here For The Brawl character. Nothing against that, because aside from the characters JRM's sisters enter, the Mystery and Secret Fiters are basically the ideal picks for characters you only want to have fite and nothing else. But I like to lean towards doing something more with my secrets. First there was Gigan, who made a handful of appearances after not getting picked for BBB4. My BBB5 pick, the Patchisaurs, got in using a plot angle and helped sell the Neo Kobbers and WCW as a legit threat. My BBB6 secret fiter, Animal Soccer World, also got to appear in RP later on, this time via Blood Bowl. And finally, there was BBB7, where I chose Black Knight 2000. BK2000 was always pegged to be part of this plot, and though his existence was very vaguely alluded to once or twice, I made sure it was impossible to guess his identity so as to fulfill the requirement that Secret Fiters never appear in RP before the Brawl. He wasn't picked anyway so it was moot, but whatever.
BK2000 was a natural fit for this plot. Pinball is a little lacking in recognizable stars, but the Black Knight is one of a few characters to have first appeared in a pinball game that has some real personality and life to him (other examples would include Ruby from Funhouse, who also made it into this plot, and Pin-Bot from the pinball game of the same name, who did not). Black Knight 2000's origins and true nature are vague in his canon, so I messed around with the concept based on what his two pinball games imply. The original Black Knight pinball game was pretty standard and you could safely assume he was your average medieval fantasy antagonist. Black Knight 2000, however, implies a significant timeskip not just with the name but also with his new lightning bolt weapon and the designs on the pinball machine that evoke what 1989 thought the 2000s would be like. That's how I came up with the idea that the Black Knight is from medieval times, but his brain was somehow preserved after death and installed into a mechanical body.
I connected Black Knight 2000 to The Order of No Quarter for two reasons. The first was to continue the running gag of knights after there were several "bonus events" of Fite Club plot where people battled non-Order knights every time they got in a non-Order Fite Club match before Beheeyem took it back, resulting in characters like Meta Knight and King Vitaman showing up. The other reason was to connect all of my plots this year together (except Samhain's event at the end of the year, which was separate from everything else).
8/29: Sinneslöschen (Polybius)
The concept of the "pre-plot warmup" is something I like a lot. I believe Cornwind invented it, but even if he didn't he's still the one who popularized it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm referring to the bit we see sometimes where a battle against (usually) a huge mess of opponents is set up hours before the event is meant to actually begin, and users are free to engage while the plot-runner isn't around, controlling both sides to give the plot some early action and make it larger and more thrilling without it taking up the entire day of the person running it. It's a clever idea - it puffs up the size and scope of the plot, gives antsy people a chance to play when the plot-runner is busy, and lets people who would normally be unable to participate for one reason or another (usually timezones or schedules) a chance to join in and help and feel like part of the plot's movers and shakers. That, along with the chance to cram in more arcade references, is why this plot did that huge army bit at the start.
I had seen Pixels earlier in the summer to get in some more "research" for this plot, and the climax of that film where hundreds of arcade constructs descend upon the city was a direct inspiration for how the first part of this finale worked, right down to including multiple opponents taken directly from Pixels. This movie wasn't reviewed well, and I understood why, but I didn't care - it was a lot of fun, and I'm rather shameless in my enjoyment of nostalgia (note that the Arcadeplot arc was basically Format Wars 2, with Odyssey and Dolby the two main guide characters).
The final battle with Polybius is another case where, like with Spindlelegs, I built up a monstrous terror only for their opening attack to be a 1. This, along with a few boss tractor issues that occurred on other people's plots during Season 7, was part of why I began transitioning to using a boss tractor that works differently, which I intend to use regularly going forward.
9/6: Monster Island
This plot was the result of another compression similar to the one that removed the Kingler and Crawdaunt fights from the plot. Originally I had a whole rogue's gallery of beasts lined up for events, but rather than spread them out over many fights, I had a few pop up early (like Del Lago and the Gyo) and then tossed the rest in either this event or the small bug-hunting event I did with Draco shortly before this.
Megaguirus was originally meant to have a much larger role in the plot, being a significantly more dangerous threat with an entire event to herself where she attacks the city, but time and plot constraints gimped her rather severely and she was instead a quick boss opponent at the end of this event.
I'll talk about the monsters that were cut from this event and/or the plot at large in the Cut Images Showcase.
9/13: The Power of the Atom (Barnaby)
While Ariel was originally meant to be the star of the final arc of this plot, the focus instead shifted to Dr. Bulgrave and his homeland of Gunningshire, with his old nemesis Sir Barnaby and Barnaby's insane daughter Angelica becoming the true antagonists. Barnaby was initially presented in the Gunningshire shorts on this blog as a very irritating foe - a smug jerk who nonetheless never actually does anything wrong, bad, or illegal. The main idea I had for the relationship between Bulgrave and Barnaby was essentially that Bulgrave was Donald Duck and Barnaby was Gladstone Gander - Barnaby was just better than Bulgrave, with good fortune, wealth, and power, and while he could be an asshole about it he wasn't a true villain. The issue, of course, was that this is a very frustrating sort of antagonist to face, and can't be dealt with in the typical Kobber fashion. There were of course ways to work around it - the scrapped Bulgrave plot that later turned into the BattlePlots event in 2015's Neo Kobbers plot was one such idea, where Barnaby is defeated by simply being beaten fair and square in a proper competition - but Barnaby's odd status made me hesitant to go ahead with any plans. Finally, I had to heel him up slightly when I finally brought him to RP proper for this plot.
Even after shifting into more of a proper antagonist role, I made sure to point out that Barnaby was not all bad, and this was critically important for several reasons. Firstly, making Barnaby a totally innocent person would make this event rather dubious - the Kobbers were already fighting Barnaby under false ideas that he was responsible for Arcadeplot happening, and I can't do an event where the Kobbers are tricked into killing (or beating up) an innocent man, so I made clear that he HAD started committing crimes and doing morally questionable things, even though he had good intentions with at least some of his ideas, like the garbage-eating monsters who actually worked well and did their job for a while, helping to clean up the island that the Sea Witch attacked.
The idea behind making Barnaby a combination of pulp sci-fi and steampunk was that the goofy, intricate creations of early sci-fi seemed a natural evolution from Victorian steam tech, with the two styles sharing a flourish for the dramatic, overly complicated answers to simple questions, and big honking robots with lots of vents and moving parts. As old and silly as that style seems now, it's exactly the sort of aesthetic a steampunk character looking to "the future" might be enamored with.
This was the point that Sonic Mania hype started creeping into the plot. I have a true Sonic Mania plot ready for Season 8, but including some elements of it in this plot (basically just the music, though a couple setpieces were inspired by Sonic Mania) was topical and fun.
CUTTING ROOM FLOOR: Lapen, the one-turn miniboss, was originally supposed to get an event to himself. One idea was to combine his event with the Crawdaunt mutant, with the gist being that he was going out and trying to kill the escaped mutants before they could sound the Kobber alarm, but would wind up in a three-way dance with the Crawdaunt and the Kobbers.
9/20: Is There A Doctor In The House
Yes, an entire plot based around the old "doctor meeting" running gag, where we made some idle talk about maybe having all the various RP doctors get together to talk shop but never did due to it not being a priority. But here, at long last, the doctor meeting happened, with just about every hospital staff member currently active showing up to take part!
While Rinoa entered RP as a planned villain from the start, Nurse Tongus, the other "traitor" that the Kobbers were warned of, was initially not connected to this plot. However, when I added Dr. Maddiman around when Arcadeplot was starting, I realized linking my Yokai Watch character to him was perfect and also explained her seemingly random appearance. She was never meant to be a true heel, of course. She's just too sweet and friendly for that.
10/3: Colossal Kaiju Combat
Here at last was the event I'd wanted to do for years - a big battle with Hedorah! I've always liked Hedorah. He's a very unique Godzilla monster, and makes a great villain. While certainly powerful and dangerous enough to give the Kobbers a run for their money, he also had clear weaknesses that made him mortal. And you know I love my giant monster fights.
Tossing Armor Mothra into this plot was a way to wrap up Rainbow Mothra so that her one-off appearance in Big Bar Brawl 6 wasn't all we ever saw of her. Rainbow Mothra is also the reason I brought Battra into RP, and this event got him involved big-time to no surprise. Was happy Draco played along and brought Mothra to this event, though for a minute I was worried she was going to get herself killed. Fortunately she pulled through.
The slow degradation of Hedorah as his multiple forms were defeated was fun to do. It was kind of like a Villainous Breakdown.
This event more than any other highlights how Ariel wound up being secondary in a plot that was supposed to be about her. The entire concept of this initial event that spawned the entire plot was "Ariel vs Hedorah"... but Ariel was still in the hospital recovering from her run-in with Angelica. While the Rinoa/Angelica connection gave Ariel some late relevance and she appeared for the finale, her plot wound up being more about Dr. Bulgrave than her, and really I didn't have any one character dominating the plot as the character it was "about", which is a big reason why I've struggled to give this plot any sort of name. Ultimately, I guess I just wasn't excited to use Ariel much any more, and that was partly why she faded away this season when it was supposed to be her big return. I decided it was time to retire her as a result, though of course she'll come back if she's needed for anything.
CUTTING ROOM FLOOR: My earliest plan for this plot involved four battles with Hedorah in four separate events, showcasing his continuing evolution into his final form. The Land Form and Flying Form battles were dropped as I came up with more content for the plot, leaving just the Water Form and Final Form events. I made up for it by including Land and Flying in other appearances over the course of the summer. (Sending Hedorah on a plot as a protagonist against some Keres monsters was pretty great, too. I like it when villains fight villains. It's a unique way to give them some screentime.)
10/4: A Major Bloodbath, Don't Be Late
So, Rinoa. While I've certainly enjoyed pulling the "friendly character is secretly a villain" twist a lot, generally using it once a year every year since 2014, this was the first time since Chronos Xarr that the heel turn was front and center of the plot, and the one with the most frequently-appearing character pre-turn. But Rinoa wasn't always a monster!
Rinoa was originally born as a character idea for our Ardea/Porphyrion setting. Intended as a sort of medieval counterpart to Ariel, she would be very similar to her in many ways, including looks, build, and choice of weapon. But since this basically made her an Ariel clone, there wasn't much point in using her, so I dropped her. Then, I got the idea to use her as a secret villain instead, so we got Rinoa.
With Rinoa I attempted a careful balancing act: I wanted to make her seem different from Ariel, so she got the weird accent and the emphasis on specifically caring for animals instead of a broad focus on the environment in general like Ariel (this was, of course, something to show people later that she'd been a massive hypocrite the whole time, since her company was making mutants and revived prehistoric beasts). On the other hand, I also needed to keep her from becoming a Maria-style breakout character in order to preserve my grand plans. She wound up appearing sparingly at first, but I used her more often as she, Ariel, and Penny got involved in several different plots such as the Snowmads and the Keres. I feel I struck the best balance yet of making Rinoa seem like a normal character without making her an obvious enemy.
Then there was the trick I was pulling - that Rinoa and Angelica were the same, and that she was putting up a front with BOTH personas to hide her third, true personality. I left a couple hints here and there (I'm still shocked someone actually found the discoloration on her hat that hinted she wore a skull emblem there when not hiding her true nature) and people seemed to figure out she was trouble before it was properly revealed, with Draco even pegging her and Rinoa to be the same shortly before I I revealed that. Good detective work, dude. The main reason I did this twist was because people generally expect my cute girl characters to be... well, cute girls. Making one of my cute girls into a raging, insane psycho was the best way to subvert that. You may recall I considered doing this years ago with the concept of Sara the Geomancer as Neo Kobber Plot's final boss. I basically plucked that idea from the recycle bin and implemented it.
As for the final battle itself, it was a short atmospheric obstacle course followed by what was basically my little tribute to the Brawl, which is still one of the grandest spectacles RP is capable of and one of my favorite things about ZFRP. It went about as I expected, though CW pitched the angle of saving Angelica in a unique way to me, and I liked it enough to allow it. Funnily enough, the tragic backstory I gave Angelica made CW's idea even better, since it showed she really COULD be redeemed, as the event that made her so horrible was a simple accident. Don't worry - she won't be a problem ever again, and if she does reappear at all, it'll be to show she's a perfectly well-adjusted girl living with her new foster dad Dr. Bulgrave.
10/29: War on Halloween
I'd had this idea brewing for a long, long time. Just about a full year, in fact. The concept was always "Thanksgiving pretending to be Christmas to antagonize Halloween and further drive a wedge between the top fall holiday and top winter holiday", but things did shift around a bit to get there.
The antagonist here was always going to be a Thanksgiving spirit in the form of a turkey, though in the initial plans he was simply named "Tom Turkey" and would have appeared as a harmless looking generic cartoon turkey. He would have been no less nasty than Turkie though, except he might have cursed less. I remembered Thankskilling was a thing, though, and had gotten some talking time in Chatzy years back no less, so I brought in Turkie as the antagonist instead.
The original complete plan for this plot was to hold it inside Samhain's House of Horrors. The idea was that Samhain had come to the mansion to work on it and found it had been transformed into a Christmas wonderland, looking like the inside of a department store in early December. Then he and some Kobbers would have investigated the Christmassy mansion until finding the turkey. This was scrapped because of JRM explicitly stating that Samhain would not make the House of Horrors until Halloween.
Cut Images Showcase
Now I'll go through my RP folder for images I didn't use in my plots, along with explanations. There are lots of unused characters in here!
So that's about all I can think of for now! It's been a very long time since this plot wrapped up (sorry about that) but if anyone has questions about things I didn't cover, please feel free to make yourself known in the comments and I'll try and answer.
Thanks to everyone who participated in my plots last year.
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