Plot Bunny Academy
Jan. 7th, 2023 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe long thing I wrote last year, the one based on the Pathfinder module Academy of Secrets... I am not sure a polish is really what it needs. It might need taking apart for parts and starting again.
I mean in fanfic land you can post both versions and it's just variations on a theme, plus I know there's phases in writing a thing where you've figured out all the problems and none of the solutions, but... I just have a different idea of what the interesting bits are than I did when I started.
(Discussing specifics gets into spoilers, obvs.)
Like, peak relatable in that module: Terentius stuck in the library. Terentius stuck in the library for 24 years. Because he cannot leave without finding the right book.
And! The book he cannot leave without is his spellbook! His, that he wrote!
So it dont say if the room would react diffently were he to try this, but, it may well meet the letter of the rule if he sat down and wrote a new book.
Terentius stuck in the library for twenty four years because he kept looking for the perfect book
rather than writing it himself
is peak relatable.
And the way I've written it certainly notices that, but, then there's a fight. Because it's a Pathfinder module, so then there's a fight is just how it's structured.
Winning by giving him ink, paper, and pens? Felt too cheap. Even when writing out spells is not in fact cheap, in gold terms.
But it's also about, what kind of stories do I want to write?
I mean, on the one hand, I am not excelling at fight scenes, and they're where the rules meet the road in ways that reveal swiftly that I am not in fact good at rules
but
I feel today
I would enjoy much more
the version where he just... writes his way out of it.
But also! There are invisible people in the room, moving the books around, so he can never be sure where anything is or if he's checked it already.
Now you might think he could fix this by, for instance, throwing books into the corridor when they were not the right book, but he is in hell, so they would of course just throw them back.
And you might think if he got really desperate, or just cared less about books than the average bibliophile, he could destroy each book when he was sure it was not his book.
... it tells you more about a wizard's character if he could not in fact imagine doing so.
Or possibly if he spent a decade not doing so, because *books*
and the decision to try messing up the books was as difficult for him as the decision to sign a contract with devils in the first place
because that adds depth and flavor to the torment, obvs.
But! In order for the initial setup to be as described
the books survive
so, how?
And the whole building is a replica of a lost building from the Academy, which is very atmospheric, because each year a new set of students walk in there and discover a new set of ways it can be hell.
But I've written fights.
Not even very academic fights.
I had the right idea at the start but everything has stats so I just... hit it, in the end.
But you need to extract the maximum hellish horror from the setting. Condensed, but made of real academic corruptions.
The entry hall where you find your name already written is just your basic surveillance creep, but you can tie it in tighter. I mean hell isn't know for wearing lanyards, but we're looking now, so it's got to be parts we recognise.
The fellow student with every intention to sell your soul gets skipped right over in my first draft, in favor of crunchy spatter horror when he fails to charm the local soul eater. But there's so many better angles on that.
And what *does* go on in the Professor's office? When you discover a room full of bones, clearly labelled with a cause of death each, how does that tie in to one's experience of Academia?
The library has a very library torment ... especially if you can't get out ie graduate until you finish writing.
The lecture hall is going to be the classic here's an exam you didnt study for on a subject you didnt even know exists, but with only one devil in there doing the questioning you do lose a little in terms of audience. But I don't have to stick to the scenario, so, how about if the seats are full of tormented souls, and the horror is gradually realising you went to school with them?
And then there's the alchemy lab. Which is full of human fluids, which is indeed hellish, but make it personal and more horror and it's not just a nasty place to get in a fight, it's...
your friend went in the alchemy lab and came out
Changed.
Is he your friend any more?
Turning that into a fight scene isn't where the Horror lives.
Through the archway at the end of the hall is an arena for duels, so, that one's an actual fight.
... how to make it more academic...
... the snake fighting portion of your thesis defence aside...
And then in the main hall you meet the guy in charge and according to him only get out if you sign. Not necessarily to sell your soul. Just to work for him.
I mean you can very much spin that into an academic debt and employment in academia Thing.
Thing is the draft I've already got treats a lot of this as just backdrop to their personal drama, which, well, the inability to think of a plot where I could show off my OCs was indeed why I picked up the module to use for structure, but is also not the point.
Also I have almost but not quite got it all in focus as being about Gules (who is not Giles because alternate universe so I cant write him out of character obvs)
Gules worked as the librarian in the years leading up to the destruction of the building containing the library
which may or may not have involved attempted ascension
but did not involve actually saving the books.
So when he looks through the library they are His Books
and he wants to take them with him when he leaves
but did see what happened to Terentius when he attempted to so specify.
... a lot of books get out, but then you're left to wonder why the devils let them...
But like, aside from being the setting for the module, why would this building be his own personal hell?
In another module the hell a bad guy is trapped in has rooms crafted to explore each of his sins.
So what sins do you get from a library, an alchemy lab, or an office full of carefully labelled dead?
For an adventurer the dead are probably graves he looted, or for an academic just the tendency to treat the important bit of dead people as their records. For Giles the alchemy has obvious parallels, and the summoning circles in the duelling hall. All I've got in my drafts is a comment that there's no loos in the entire building but Gules points out there's a sink in the alchemy lab. Minor sin implied. In the lab full of samples.
I've got too many characters to make the hell properly specific.
Gules and Grethe worked and studied there together immediately before the destruction, if it feels personal it is personal to the two of them. Need to strengthen that in a new draft.
... Gules lost his memory though, so if the building reflects his sins he wouldn't even know.
... Grethe would though. That'd be fun to draw out.
Thing is if it's a horror story made of personal sins then the solution cannot be
hit a devil until they stay dead.
I mean that's... that isn't a virtue.
It's pretty unsatisfying anyway. Like the only kind of catharsis it does is the hit things bit, over and over again.
But if I'm doing an adventure the characters are going on, well, they've got all these hit things skills. Hitting things be where the fun is, when what you've got is hit things skills.
I keep wanting to strip Arne's team out of the story, to make a more focused and wieldy group. Three upper level heroes, two young cohorts, and the ongoing absence of Raen. (yes that's a Rayne version, not appearing in the story because of the bad thing that happened back when. nobody even knows if he's a ghost.)
actually the Raen thing should count large in the sins hell torments the characters with. Gules only knows he didn't save him and woke up reincarnated. Grethe knows he was in danger because Grethe chose an apprentice and a whole chain of events kicked off. In any accounting of sins he should rate a mention. Even though they don't know what happened, they can fill in versions that make them feel bad.
I should abandon the fighting and make it their personal hell, then.
An academic hell they were all trapped in together once, and some planned to send their kids into again.
It's where all the emotional juice comes from.
... that's a very much bigger rewrite.
This morning's thoughts brought to you by
that stupid recurring nightmare where a teacher tells you hurry up you're in the wrong room
but then you can't go fast enough to follow them
so you check your schedule
and there's a whole bunch of classes
and you haven't been going to them
and if you don't pass them all
they'll somehow take your qualifications back.
I mean who doesn't have academic nightmares?
Walking into a hell built of them ought to be personal and pointed and
not actually solved by stabbing anything.
... well, not *only*.
Can have a cathartic stabbing as a climax
as a treat.
I was also thinking about the Academy setting
specifically Toff Ornelos
who is a very boring bully in the couple of paragraphs or source text about him
bound to a job he hates by obligations to his family.
The only clue you get for how he attained such a high level
is he's a famous wizard duelist.
... a player character of his level has done a majority of an Adventure Path, at least 5/6ths of it. He could have done some pretty intense things, but we don't hear of them.
But then I imagined him played by ASH
and then of course his character has to have depth.
... plus there's another teacher at the Academae with the initials ER, whose speciality is transmutation, the magic of transformation, so of course my other obsession introduces himself...
Mostly though I keep carving one aspect off of Giles at a time to fuel a character, and at the Academy I just imagined two that can meet.
The thing is, Rupert Giles, out of a sense of obligation to his family and a belief it would save the world , signed up to a job that was basically
send a teenager out to die.
He held a position of responsibility in a school
where many things regularly tried to kill the students
so he chose to... teach three of them how to survive?
And then when he thought they needed to stand on their own two feet
he left.
Those aren't the defining features of a whole seven seasons of complex character, those are the aspects I'm focusing on today, because
I split Gules out to be the guy who realises how dangerous the school is but concentrates on keeping his chosen few alive rather than changing the system, only now his personal hell is going to be that, because he left the school to look after itself, moved on, and forgot all about it,
now he's sending his daughter into the same system, with even fewer chances to help.
Like, reruns, but this time he actually *is* her father. So does that change things?
Toff though, Toff makes the choice to stay in the school and nurture generations of students through this difficult and dangerous time
and he's *terrible* at it.
That's module canon, between the lines. He's a terrible administrator, in the source text, but also, a lot of students die. A Lot. Every year. And he's sitting there being Lawful Neutral about it and trying to keep the system going unchanged, because of course that's what his family did, that's what they sent him here to do, so that's what he will do.
Even though they're killed by everything from day to day business to the graduation test.
The parallel to Giles starting the Cruciamentum... Toff is the guy who goes through with it and then has to tell himself it was the proper thing to do, no matter the consequences.
But I decided Toff could also be season 6 Giles, returning home,
but this time he gets assigned an important post at the Academy.
So when Willow kicks off
(and there are so many ways in Pathfinder rules for Willow to kick off, just being a high enough level Witch can get you there, when your patron is Vengeance, which Willow's plausibly is when her first big spell is the soul restoring vengeance curse)
when Willow kicks off and Giles knows her soul needs saving
what if he isn't just between jobs right then
what if he's been given another, huge, responsibility?
Say it is Rupert Giles who is handed the Academy and told it's his job now to protect and instruct the next generation...
well.
Whichever choice he makes, the story can punish him for it.
Go to Willow and the next thing that happens is the kick off of season 7
and the First attacks.
Stay at the Academy and a new dark power rises.
Mean to do to canon Giles, but if we want to make Toff interesting...
maybe he went to his Willow and that was why a new headmaster who was Not an Ornelos ended up in charge.
Or maybe he didn't, because his family told him to challenge the interloper for the seat, and he fully believed it was the only way to keep the Academy in safe hands.
Got to figure out which is the most drama, if I'm going to tell it.
As for Elgin Remorri... I have seen retellings of BtVS where Ethan went with Giles when he returned to the council, and I have seen stories where Ethan ended up working for the council, though not both at once. You have to change both council and Ethan to make that work out, and they could end up unrecogniseable.
If I want to give this new ER an aspect of Ethan to explore...
well Elgin Remorri's alignment is plain Neutral. Not chaotic at all.
Though as an Old mage he may be wandering a little, and he gets uncomfortable when things stay the same for long.
Yet he's described as an Acadamae Institution, as if he's always been there.
The Acadamae is famous for summoning and binding devils.
(The binding is important. As is the banishing.)
So Toff or Elgin summoning things wouldn't be a problem with this institution.
But it still is an institution, with long standing traditions and rigid ways of doing things.
If ER started out Chaotic then he'd have to rein it in, just to attend, let alone teach here.
If he was attached to a particularly Lawful man...
it still seems a way of making him smaller. a giving up, to get let in.
So instead... it's about the students. Because yes, there are stupendous things that a lone mage can get done, magic is brilliant and beautiful indeed, but, imagine:
a hall full of three hundred and thirty people, watching a lecture, where you can tell each and every one of them how to change the world like you did.
One of my favourite readings of Ethan Rayne is that he's trying to wake people up. Large scale workings of magic necessarily shows people that magic works, and when the magic works to change people into something they at least said they wanted to be... imagining waking teh workd up to that. Making them want it, not just as a story, but as part of their own lives. Imagine giving them the tools to become literally whoever and whatever they wanted to be, and reshaping the world with it.
Well Elgin Remorri lives in a world that is very much wide awake, to magic. To the possibilities of reshaping themselves, and their surroundings. And okay, there's boring things like levels and spells that only last for combat rounds, but. He doesn't have to wake them. He just has to deal with the world being full of slightly dozy people who ... mostly want to learn ways to hit things real good.
Implicitly threatening his entire class with being changed into birds while implying they're all magical failures takes on a different cast then. It's not that he's given up on them as Pathfinder wizards, or that he's wandering in the mind in an illness sense. He's just wanting to break the bounds of magic itself, and tired of anyone not seeing the beaty in it.
Could get him to convert to Nethys, see how he likes the one mage who achieved magic with no limits...
Meanwhile he's a burned out academic who took this job on because he saw so much bright potential in future generations, but has stayed long enough the students are just bird brains.
I think I'm thinking up a better set of stories, taking on aspects of what interested me in other characters and adding them to this setting.
But the things I'm thinking up are not going to be settled by a fight scene.
Everything needs to get a much stronger metaphor layer than the game module can give it.
So that's a back to the drawing board for that story.
Maybe.
I mean in fanfic land you can post both versions and it's just variations on a theme, plus I know there's phases in writing a thing where you've figured out all the problems and none of the solutions, but... I just have a different idea of what the interesting bits are than I did when I started.
(Discussing specifics gets into spoilers, obvs.)
Like, peak relatable in that module: Terentius stuck in the library. Terentius stuck in the library for 24 years. Because he cannot leave without finding the right book.
And! The book he cannot leave without is his spellbook! His, that he wrote!
So it dont say if the room would react diffently were he to try this, but, it may well meet the letter of the rule if he sat down and wrote a new book.
Terentius stuck in the library for twenty four years because he kept looking for the perfect book
rather than writing it himself
is peak relatable.
And the way I've written it certainly notices that, but, then there's a fight. Because it's a Pathfinder module, so then there's a fight is just how it's structured.
Winning by giving him ink, paper, and pens? Felt too cheap. Even when writing out spells is not in fact cheap, in gold terms.
But it's also about, what kind of stories do I want to write?
I mean, on the one hand, I am not excelling at fight scenes, and they're where the rules meet the road in ways that reveal swiftly that I am not in fact good at rules
but
I feel today
I would enjoy much more
the version where he just... writes his way out of it.
But also! There are invisible people in the room, moving the books around, so he can never be sure where anything is or if he's checked it already.
Now you might think he could fix this by, for instance, throwing books into the corridor when they were not the right book, but he is in hell, so they would of course just throw them back.
And you might think if he got really desperate, or just cared less about books than the average bibliophile, he could destroy each book when he was sure it was not his book.
... it tells you more about a wizard's character if he could not in fact imagine doing so.
Or possibly if he spent a decade not doing so, because *books*
and the decision to try messing up the books was as difficult for him as the decision to sign a contract with devils in the first place
because that adds depth and flavor to the torment, obvs.
But! In order for the initial setup to be as described
the books survive
so, how?
And the whole building is a replica of a lost building from the Academy, which is very atmospheric, because each year a new set of students walk in there and discover a new set of ways it can be hell.
But I've written fights.
Not even very academic fights.
I had the right idea at the start but everything has stats so I just... hit it, in the end.
But you need to extract the maximum hellish horror from the setting. Condensed, but made of real academic corruptions.
The entry hall where you find your name already written is just your basic surveillance creep, but you can tie it in tighter. I mean hell isn't know for wearing lanyards, but we're looking now, so it's got to be parts we recognise.
The fellow student with every intention to sell your soul gets skipped right over in my first draft, in favor of crunchy spatter horror when he fails to charm the local soul eater. But there's so many better angles on that.
And what *does* go on in the Professor's office? When you discover a room full of bones, clearly labelled with a cause of death each, how does that tie in to one's experience of Academia?
The library has a very library torment ... especially if you can't get out ie graduate until you finish writing.
The lecture hall is going to be the classic here's an exam you didnt study for on a subject you didnt even know exists, but with only one devil in there doing the questioning you do lose a little in terms of audience. But I don't have to stick to the scenario, so, how about if the seats are full of tormented souls, and the horror is gradually realising you went to school with them?
And then there's the alchemy lab. Which is full of human fluids, which is indeed hellish, but make it personal and more horror and it's not just a nasty place to get in a fight, it's...
your friend went in the alchemy lab and came out
Changed.
Is he your friend any more?
Turning that into a fight scene isn't where the Horror lives.
Through the archway at the end of the hall is an arena for duels, so, that one's an actual fight.
... how to make it more academic...
... the snake fighting portion of your thesis defence aside...
And then in the main hall you meet the guy in charge and according to him only get out if you sign. Not necessarily to sell your soul. Just to work for him.
I mean you can very much spin that into an academic debt and employment in academia Thing.
Thing is the draft I've already got treats a lot of this as just backdrop to their personal drama, which, well, the inability to think of a plot where I could show off my OCs was indeed why I picked up the module to use for structure, but is also not the point.
Also I have almost but not quite got it all in focus as being about Gules (who is not Giles because alternate universe so I cant write him out of character obvs)
Gules worked as the librarian in the years leading up to the destruction of the building containing the library
which may or may not have involved attempted ascension
but did not involve actually saving the books.
So when he looks through the library they are His Books
and he wants to take them with him when he leaves
but did see what happened to Terentius when he attempted to so specify.
... a lot of books get out, but then you're left to wonder why the devils let them...
But like, aside from being the setting for the module, why would this building be his own personal hell?
In another module the hell a bad guy is trapped in has rooms crafted to explore each of his sins.
So what sins do you get from a library, an alchemy lab, or an office full of carefully labelled dead?
For an adventurer the dead are probably graves he looted, or for an academic just the tendency to treat the important bit of dead people as their records. For Giles the alchemy has obvious parallels, and the summoning circles in the duelling hall. All I've got in my drafts is a comment that there's no loos in the entire building but Gules points out there's a sink in the alchemy lab. Minor sin implied. In the lab full of samples.
I've got too many characters to make the hell properly specific.
Gules and Grethe worked and studied there together immediately before the destruction, if it feels personal it is personal to the two of them. Need to strengthen that in a new draft.
... Gules lost his memory though, so if the building reflects his sins he wouldn't even know.
... Grethe would though. That'd be fun to draw out.
Thing is if it's a horror story made of personal sins then the solution cannot be
hit a devil until they stay dead.
I mean that's... that isn't a virtue.
It's pretty unsatisfying anyway. Like the only kind of catharsis it does is the hit things bit, over and over again.
But if I'm doing an adventure the characters are going on, well, they've got all these hit things skills. Hitting things be where the fun is, when what you've got is hit things skills.
I keep wanting to strip Arne's team out of the story, to make a more focused and wieldy group. Three upper level heroes, two young cohorts, and the ongoing absence of Raen. (yes that's a Rayne version, not appearing in the story because of the bad thing that happened back when. nobody even knows if he's a ghost.)
actually the Raen thing should count large in the sins hell torments the characters with. Gules only knows he didn't save him and woke up reincarnated. Grethe knows he was in danger because Grethe chose an apprentice and a whole chain of events kicked off. In any accounting of sins he should rate a mention. Even though they don't know what happened, they can fill in versions that make them feel bad.
I should abandon the fighting and make it their personal hell, then.
An academic hell they were all trapped in together once, and some planned to send their kids into again.
It's where all the emotional juice comes from.
... that's a very much bigger rewrite.
This morning's thoughts brought to you by
that stupid recurring nightmare where a teacher tells you hurry up you're in the wrong room
but then you can't go fast enough to follow them
so you check your schedule
and there's a whole bunch of classes
and you haven't been going to them
and if you don't pass them all
they'll somehow take your qualifications back.
I mean who doesn't have academic nightmares?
Walking into a hell built of them ought to be personal and pointed and
not actually solved by stabbing anything.
... well, not *only*.
Can have a cathartic stabbing as a climax
as a treat.
I was also thinking about the Academy setting
specifically Toff Ornelos
who is a very boring bully in the couple of paragraphs or source text about him
bound to a job he hates by obligations to his family.
The only clue you get for how he attained such a high level
is he's a famous wizard duelist.
... a player character of his level has done a majority of an Adventure Path, at least 5/6ths of it. He could have done some pretty intense things, but we don't hear of them.
But then I imagined him played by ASH
and then of course his character has to have depth.
... plus there's another teacher at the Academae with the initials ER, whose speciality is transmutation, the magic of transformation, so of course my other obsession introduces himself...
Mostly though I keep carving one aspect off of Giles at a time to fuel a character, and at the Academy I just imagined two that can meet.
The thing is, Rupert Giles, out of a sense of obligation to his family and a belief it would save the world , signed up to a job that was basically
send a teenager out to die.
He held a position of responsibility in a school
where many things regularly tried to kill the students
so he chose to... teach three of them how to survive?
And then when he thought they needed to stand on their own two feet
he left.
Those aren't the defining features of a whole seven seasons of complex character, those are the aspects I'm focusing on today, because
I split Gules out to be the guy who realises how dangerous the school is but concentrates on keeping his chosen few alive rather than changing the system, only now his personal hell is going to be that, because he left the school to look after itself, moved on, and forgot all about it,
now he's sending his daughter into the same system, with even fewer chances to help.
Like, reruns, but this time he actually *is* her father. So does that change things?
Toff though, Toff makes the choice to stay in the school and nurture generations of students through this difficult and dangerous time
and he's *terrible* at it.
That's module canon, between the lines. He's a terrible administrator, in the source text, but also, a lot of students die. A Lot. Every year. And he's sitting there being Lawful Neutral about it and trying to keep the system going unchanged, because of course that's what his family did, that's what they sent him here to do, so that's what he will do.
Even though they're killed by everything from day to day business to the graduation test.
The parallel to Giles starting the Cruciamentum... Toff is the guy who goes through with it and then has to tell himself it was the proper thing to do, no matter the consequences.
But I decided Toff could also be season 6 Giles, returning home,
but this time he gets assigned an important post at the Academy.
So when Willow kicks off
(and there are so many ways in Pathfinder rules for Willow to kick off, just being a high enough level Witch can get you there, when your patron is Vengeance, which Willow's plausibly is when her first big spell is the soul restoring vengeance curse)
when Willow kicks off and Giles knows her soul needs saving
what if he isn't just between jobs right then
what if he's been given another, huge, responsibility?
Say it is Rupert Giles who is handed the Academy and told it's his job now to protect and instruct the next generation...
well.
Whichever choice he makes, the story can punish him for it.
Go to Willow and the next thing that happens is the kick off of season 7
and the First attacks.
Stay at the Academy and a new dark power rises.
Mean to do to canon Giles, but if we want to make Toff interesting...
maybe he went to his Willow and that was why a new headmaster who was Not an Ornelos ended up in charge.
Or maybe he didn't, because his family told him to challenge the interloper for the seat, and he fully believed it was the only way to keep the Academy in safe hands.
Got to figure out which is the most drama, if I'm going to tell it.
As for Elgin Remorri... I have seen retellings of BtVS where Ethan went with Giles when he returned to the council, and I have seen stories where Ethan ended up working for the council, though not both at once. You have to change both council and Ethan to make that work out, and they could end up unrecogniseable.
If I want to give this new ER an aspect of Ethan to explore...
well Elgin Remorri's alignment is plain Neutral. Not chaotic at all.
Though as an Old mage he may be wandering a little, and he gets uncomfortable when things stay the same for long.
Yet he's described as an Acadamae Institution, as if he's always been there.
The Acadamae is famous for summoning and binding devils.
(The binding is important. As is the banishing.)
So Toff or Elgin summoning things wouldn't be a problem with this institution.
But it still is an institution, with long standing traditions and rigid ways of doing things.
If ER started out Chaotic then he'd have to rein it in, just to attend, let alone teach here.
If he was attached to a particularly Lawful man...
it still seems a way of making him smaller. a giving up, to get let in.
So instead... it's about the students. Because yes, there are stupendous things that a lone mage can get done, magic is brilliant and beautiful indeed, but, imagine:
a hall full of three hundred and thirty people, watching a lecture, where you can tell each and every one of them how to change the world like you did.
One of my favourite readings of Ethan Rayne is that he's trying to wake people up. Large scale workings of magic necessarily shows people that magic works, and when the magic works to change people into something they at least said they wanted to be... imagining waking teh workd up to that. Making them want it, not just as a story, but as part of their own lives. Imagine giving them the tools to become literally whoever and whatever they wanted to be, and reshaping the world with it.
Well Elgin Remorri lives in a world that is very much wide awake, to magic. To the possibilities of reshaping themselves, and their surroundings. And okay, there's boring things like levels and spells that only last for combat rounds, but. He doesn't have to wake them. He just has to deal with the world being full of slightly dozy people who ... mostly want to learn ways to hit things real good.
Implicitly threatening his entire class with being changed into birds while implying they're all magical failures takes on a different cast then. It's not that he's given up on them as Pathfinder wizards, or that he's wandering in the mind in an illness sense. He's just wanting to break the bounds of magic itself, and tired of anyone not seeing the beaty in it.
Could get him to convert to Nethys, see how he likes the one mage who achieved magic with no limits...
Meanwhile he's a burned out academic who took this job on because he saw so much bright potential in future generations, but has stayed long enough the students are just bird brains.
I think I'm thinking up a better set of stories, taking on aspects of what interested me in other characters and adding them to this setting.
But the things I'm thinking up are not going to be settled by a fight scene.
Everything needs to get a much stronger metaphor layer than the game module can give it.
So that's a back to the drawing board for that story.
Maybe.