Planned but never written...?

Something Zamuel said ingame this evening made me think about sth I wrote a brief outlind for ages ago, but never got round to writing. I bet we've all got 'planned but never written' AE projects?

Mine was a rather horrendously bloated 15-mission epic (lol I know!) exploring the various layers of 'reality' from we players down through our toons to the characters they sometimes take on whilst in the AE (some MAuthors have written arcs that put you in other people's shoes, as it were).

This humoungus tale was not only horribly large, but its narrative was non-linear, and loosely based on a mashup of The Odyssey and Sylvie, the 1853 novella by the French Romanticist Gérard de Nerval.

It was called 'I, Metaman', which is so gigantically pretentious whilst also being a terrible pun, that it still cracks me up.

I'm never going to write it, now, of course. The profanity filter's my excuse lol.

Anyone else have anything that's likely never going to see the light of the AE?

Eco

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

I remember this thread which is very similar.

Others which I have thought of but never fleshed out.

A Back Alley Brawler hero patron-type arc (In fact if you check out my AE Q&A you can see that I still have it saved and unfinished on my computer.

An arc where your contact is a 5 year old, and the objectives play out as if told by a 5 year old (And then a giant robot comes out! And you have to save a werewolf, but he's nice. And then they find the treasure chest, etc.)

An arc where the objective gets longer as you go along, until I get to the max objective text length. ("Get the treasure." You find a box, but it's locked "Find the key, get the treasure" You find a boss who won't give you the key unless you defeat someone first "Defeat the boss, find the key, get the treasure")

I have plans for arcs that I do want to get done (at least two, for the time being) but since I only have one empty slot left, it's hard to say which will or won't.

I have two arcs in solid stages of execution that were both abandoned, one nearly complete in fact. That one's a pastiche of 50s sci-fi movies that also ended up veering into Lovecraft-ish territory. I have it all set-up, mechanics and custom-foe wise, but had some problems fitting in the text I wanted. I also decided that with a limited number of slots, the idea wasn't worth one.

"Now he's stuck in a book I wrote. A crummy world full of plot holes and spelling errors."

CoH...IN SPACE!!!!

The Second Coming of the Mega Mech...revised.

And my Shadow Shard arc that involves Malta. I actually really want to write this one. I'm just stuck on how to go about doing it.

The Foreign Minister visit.

Where a highly controversial 'minister' from our cabinet (a look alike at least) visits the states and you as liason of the dutch herocorp have to keep the man alive and well.

With heroes like Kapitein Holland, Dokter Paddo, Zwarte Piet and Zeeuws Meisje. Filled with puns and horrific twisitng of the English language as only us Dutchies can do.

Never dared to go with this one as you cannot make things more Polical Incorrect.

The one arc I made 2 years ago was supposed to be the first of 5, one for every 10 level range. The unifying threat behind the arcs, and much of the final plot is worked out, and about half the second arc is written. I can just never sustain an interest in AE writing long enough to do much.

I had grand plans for when the Architect came out that I would make a bunch of story arcs that would delve into my main characters' backstories. Notable ones:

The past of my first character, Patteroast was being tampered with. Go back and do some Ouroboros-style mending to assure that he is NOT killed by the Rikti raids he fought in Chicago.

The Redemption of Particle Accelerator. My main Stalker's backstory is that he was originally a hero who felt unappreciated, and after a tragic accident, turned to crime. During his time as a villain, he never was really evil... he simply stole to get what he needed, and got rid of people trying to get rid of him. The story arc would also involve another character of mine, Dr. Fejwol, whose story has him working as a contact for a time. He was the one who sent Particle Accelerator to the mission in which he was injured, and he would be the contact for the arc. Fejwol's goal in the arc would be to bring PA back to the side of right, as he always felt some guilt about how it had turned out.

THE SQUID AND THE SPIDER

This may be long...


Little known fact about AE terminals is that they're pretty much all connected. You can start an arc in Mercy, complete a mission, then complete the next one in Port Oakes. I once planned to take full advantage of this in a big convoluted project.

For a while I was in the PVPEC for my server. Most events are general mini tournaments, lowbie runs, first to launch the Warburg rocket and other stuff that requires attention but is otherwise low maintenance. For Valentines day I planned to have a massive combined PvE + PvP event using AE, some scavenger hunt type setups, and zone PvP. It was a cheesy love story between an Arachnos operative and Kheldian employed by Hero Corps that was to actually have both hero and villain versions of the story and supposedly have the two teams encounter each other in a PvP zone. I think midway it was Siren's Call and the finale was in Bloody Bay. Since part of the story involved looking for a cure of a deadly illness one of the two of them had, I scouted out individual origin stores and bought appropriately named base salvage to be used for trading with individuals RPing for parts of the storyline.

Oh boy. This would have required a head spinning amount of coordination to get going and would have required a number of participants outside of the actual teams going through it. I also started my planning and organization a little late so completing everything would have put it after Valentines. Plus, the PvP portion would have garnered far more attention than the AE portion (PvP events get decent participation most of the time while the general sentiment is usually lolAE). Something far more sane was run as the actual February PvP event and I eventually deleted the arc from my hard drive.

Or so I thought.

The funny thing about making semi regular backups of your AE material is that it sometimes rescues some stuff from the grave. I apparantly have part of The Squid and the Spider: Blue Version saved but I haven't bothered to look at it. I don't think I ever finished writing it anyways.

There were two arcs I keep thinking I should make but never get around to.

The first, Operation Dunkirk, was tied into the Portal Corp storyline. Portal Corp is always finding dimensions where Humanity has been wiped out, in this case they found a dimension where the sentient species (Felis Sapiens) is in the final stages of being wiped out and need Heroes to help hold the line while they evacuate the survivors and then shut down the portal.

The second, Smoke Grenades and Magic Mirrors, was tied into the Midnighter's Story. This one was never as heavily fleshed out but the basic plan was to have a Technomagi group (called the Sons of Vulcan) and setup a story where the Hero has to track them down using both Magic (Midnighter Oracles) and Technology (a hacker of some description). I've always liked stories that play with the relationship between Magic and Science so this was going to be my excuse to write one.

Kind of a cool topic. Here are mine:

I got about halfway through writing an arc involving the Clockwork, and never finished. Everything through mission three was done, and I had a good idea what I wanted to do with missions four and five, but never finished. That all happened around the time I started my Pro Payne project, and so I was always faced with "use my online time to finish up this arc, or actually play Pro Payne and write reviews" - the latter won out.

I had a conception for an arc where Freakshow were travelling through time, but I never did anything with it.

One of my published arcs that I never advertise (and is not in my sig) is called 'Freakshow War' - I wrote it for my wife who loved fighting the Freakshow. I actually had a place for its story to go in a sequel, but never wrote it.

Not quite the same thing, but related:

The last arc I published (The Blue Devils) was actually a significantly "cleaned up" version of an arc I put on test (meaning I spent a lot more effort trying to make the plot and mission design good). I designed the Blue Devils as a test of whether or not you could create a "balanced" custom group at low and intermediate levels and they still be worth 100% XP. I wrote a sequel to that arc (the early version), but never published it (and never will).

I also designed a custom group for the level range after the Blue Devils; the group itself exists among my absurdly long list of custom critters, and I have a backstory for them (and had a general plotline for an arc including them), but never started actually trying to write that arc.

I also have two fully-written arcs from right when the system first launched that are essentially ego-arcs (essentially = they ARE ego arcs) that were just my way of getting used to using the system. They were published just long enough for me to play through them and actually get experience (they weren't farms, I just wanted at least some tangible reward for the work), and then I removed them (because they're not any good).

Looking through my list of unpublished arcs, I found one I'd forgotten about. The seed for creating this arc came from listening to the Pink Floyd song, "Run Like Hell", which was the name of the arc as well. This was before GR, and it starts out with you being accused of murdering a criminal you were apprehending and having to set out to clear your name. The plan for the last story was to somehow use the ability to fail a mission to give the player a way to decide if they were framed or if they actually did the deed.

Of course, there's no point to ever finishing this arc now.

One that I came up with a while back, before I got discouraged by the (continued) sorry state of the Architect and lack of Dev attention or fixes, and one that I recently thought of but whose time is probably long past (who still slots Hami-Os, anyway?):

Pawns of the Gamester

You've been abducted by the Gamester and forced to be a "contestant" in his latest game. Will you be "eliminated", or advance to the Bonus Round?


Terrorist Cell

For years, heroes have been deliberately exposing themselves or even implanting bits of the Hamidon in themselves to increase their powers. What could possibly go wrong?

The next question would of course be, which of these arc plans sound good enough to be made into a full fledged arc?

I kinda bailed on AE after I did my 3 short missions. The constant updates render some of the arcs not valid and include a huge list of errors. I fixed 2 of the 3 but they never really get play so I don't really bother.

I do appreciate more memory for your missions and was very tempted to update arcs but still haven't bothered. I only use custom critters and refuse to use the same old NPCs we've been seeing for years. I do like AE and find it to be a great tool but the interest is just too low.

I still have one saved, more or less patiently waiting for them to fix and restore certain maps to the AE, specifically the "Floating Ziggurat", in this case.

The story that ended there centered around the player(s) looking for the clues needed to prevent a cosmic avatar of destruction from destroying/devouring all reality. The last mission occurred "outside" the Universe, and previously mentioned map is the ONLY one that ever conveyed this for me.

Just 4-5 missions of short to medium length, some complex dialog, an insanely powerful "godling" to thwart at the end, even some "help" to recruit along the way.

Personally, I felt that one of the arcs charms would have been that the contact, another cosmic avatar, actually communicates with you via the AE system, superseding whatever "fictional mission you were planning on playing", as a reasonably safe way to reach you without damaging the timestream. My own little nod in the general direction of the 4th wall.

A New Positron Task Force

One of the first ideas I had was for a Positron TF replacement that would play off of the then fairly-recent "interview" with the character in the Top Cow comic. It would have started with "student agitators" attacking the Steel Canyon university campus armed with military weapons and, essentially, Vials of Bees. The next act would take the players to the base the weapons were traced to, only to find the place destroyed and being scavenged by Clockwork (for metal) and Vahzilok (for bodies). The players would find the base had been used to store some supernatural items used by the military, which would lead to the Circle of Thorns, thus keeping all the factions from the original TF tangentially involved. Ultimately the players would find it was a Devouring Earth plot to sucker in Positron so one of their Devoured could use some magical "sunflowers" to steal Positron's powers for himself. The final fight would require the players to keep the charged-up Devoured occupied while destroying the sunflowers. This one wasn't done because the AE tech doesn't even begin to offer the necessary tools.

In the Land of The Pigs

Inspired by a Jim Steinman song, this would have been a sequel to "Two Households Alike", dealing with the new dynamic between the Bianchi and Poletti families and a power struggle in the Bianchis. It would have ended on a bit of a twist as the player learns this time "in the land of the pigs the butcher is queen": Katrina kills Vittorio and takes over the family (and gets away with it). Not done due to being out of slots and motivation.

Seize the Night

Also loosely inspired by a Steinman number, this would have been a horror/comedy about the original vampires trying to take back their cultural identity from the 5th Council, Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer and any number of their fellow travelers, including numerous heroes and villains. Suffered from the same problems as the foregoing, plus I never really had a handle on it.

Summer Blockbuster

I never even had a satisfactory title for this one, though I did start working on it on Test when whatever issue made Giant Monsters available in AE was in closed testing. Around this time I had seen a trailer for a movie about "The Guardians of Ga'hoole", about young owls looking for the titular warriors to save them from evil etc. etc. It was fairly vague and it seemed to me that the story would have the owls get to the guardians fortress/sanctuary/etc. only to find the guardians long dead or gone, forcing them to become the guardians. I found out later the actual story was much more typical and less interesting.

The arc I was working on would have had the player wake up after a mediport gone awry to find himself in a stock fantasy kingdom about to be stomped by some Titans (repurposed Giant Monsters). The first two acts would have been told in flashback, with the Contact being the monolith the player ultimately found at the nearby ruins where he'd been told a Champion could be summoned to defeat the returning Titans. Except, of course, the monolith would reveal that whoever found it was the Champion, and now had to choose to either return to his own world (quit the arc) or stay and fight the Titans. If the player saw it through, the souvenir would relate how he'd followed up on what happened to him with Portal Corp, only to find they'd traced his teleport to thousands of years in the past of a nearby world, whose culture still had depictions of the player in its mythology. Abandoned for numerous technical reasons, chief among them discovering that GMs used in AE do not scale down to EB level for soloists, and I never really had a good handle on it anyway.

This is a great topic. I had so many I had wanted to do, but eight slots go faster than you think.


The Miss Jersey Task Force – MJ is away from New Jersey for a week and you get to fill in facing all the threats she normally would. Featuring villains like the Toll-Bot 3000, Toxic Waste and others. Status - Designed a few of the villains for this arc.

All Tricks, No Treats – Halloween is being threatened by other lesser holidays who are jealous of its success and growing popularity. Status - Did a basic outline and started to select maps.

Insert Coin! – A cult of 80’s arcade and pinball purists are outraged by the perversion of gaming today and plan to put gaming back where it belongs…..in full sized arcade cabinets. Status - No work done

Long Live Rock! – Dr. Disco Fever takes another shot at reviving Disco. "Death to Disco!" sequel. Status - Unwritten

Disco Lives! – Villain arc where you are hired to help Dr. Disco Fever take down Rock and Roll. Are you really that villainous? "Death to Disco!" sequel. Status - Unwritten

Name? – Though MA experience classic Paragon Society battles and villains by joining the Paragon Society during its heyday. Featured missions divided by decades 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s and the 1970’s. Sequel/Spinoff to "The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society" Status - Outline mostly done, first mission mostly done.

Name? – You know who is back up to his old shenanigans and he would like your help in making the lives of some of Paragon City’s heroes a little more interesting. This would be a villain arc. Sequel to "A Hero in Need…is a Friend Indeed!" Status - Not Written


WN