Opening the Cabinet of Curiosities

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.

Chatzy Madness Volume 412: A Giant Bear Made Of Nickelodeon Gak

PhoneModo: Rickety Town more like
PhoneModo: Uh
PhoneModo: Shitty Town?
PhoneModo: ...I didn’t sleep last night
PhoneModo left the chat
Mirrored Sheep joined the chat
Mirrored Sheep: Come on and ride!
Mirrored Sheep: Big Bunyan Ride!
Mirrored Sheep left the chat

---

KamenModo: posted
KamenModo: WITNESS MEEEEEEEEE

---

HIS WISH IS PUNCH!: "The Tour de France, the most challenging and most prestigious bicycle race, has a long and storied history of cheating. Most people have heard of the decades worth of scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), but the early years of the race involved much more overt methods of cheating. The second Tour de France (in 1904) had so much cheating that it almost resulted in permanent cancellation. Multiple cyclists were disqualified for cheating, and the 5th place finisher was declared the winner since everybody ahead of him was disqualified. And he had also cheated at least once, but for whatever reason was only given a warning. Much of the cheating was amusingly audacious (skipping sections of the race by getting rides in cars or trains, or for those who wanted to still "ride the bike" for the whole course having a car pull them along with a tow rope), but it also included sabotage (nails were laid out in roads to cause flat tires) and even violence (masked men in a car attacking the then-leading cyclists, and fans of some cyclists threw rocks at everyone else as they passed)."

---

Jumpropeman: WOOPER WATCH
Jumpropeman: the next hour is wooperpalooza in go
Gooper Blooper: woop woop
Jumpropeman: no increased shiny rate I believe but I'm getting one dang it
KamenModo: PULL OVER DAT no
MobileDraco: If only those COWARDS would put Paldean Woopers in too.

(later)

Jumpropeman: wooper watch over... zero shinies
LadySeychelles: Oh no
Gooper Blooper: you told me you were going to get a shiny, JRM
Gooper Blooper: you lied to me
MobileDraco: JRM, why did you lie to the boy? ;-;
Jumpropeman: your first mistake was trusting me
Gooper Blooper: I was in my hospital bed and I begged him to catch a shiny woop for the gipper
RubyChao: that shiny woop could have cured cancer
Diadem joined the chat
Diadem: walked into some drama, i see-
Diadem: anyway hello
Jumpropeman: harp, bail me out here, I know you got a shiny woop stash
Diadem: sorry bud i got nothin but an idea to record a Furret solo run
Jumpropeman: play the acerola town song the whole run