Stuff related to them there 2021 plots

 As usual my behind the scenes is behind on the times, but it eventually finds its way into your laps! Herein will be the usual jumble of how plans took form or ideas that got rejected, so let's dive right into it!

 

SINTENDO PLOT

 

The Nintendo related plot was the first of the year, and I spent some time pondering which video game girls to include! Originally I considered all of the Nintendo girls being handheld but Gamecube's design and attitude were too fun to leave out, but otherwise it was mostly a matter of finding character designs that meshed with my plans. Switch though was hard to pick, I wanted her in since it felt like Nintendo would demand a Switch girl since they're a living hardware company but so many designs exist out there. The pictured girl above was the original plan and I even airbrushed the single fangs her original images had in preparation, but then I found the design we have now that felt less silly and more grounded and she ended up a more cynical rather than bubbly character. To be fair, Virtual Boy already had all the bubbles so it lead to a more rounded group of personalities!

In the original ideas for the plot the whole GBC/Genesis angle still existed but I wasn't sure how things were going to play out. I considered the girls opening up an arcade of their own to compete with the Sega girls and then wanted to think of a way that it would make sense that the reasonable Hard Girls would be able to lose the arcade to the Nintendo girls. Mega Drive saying in RP they literally have no reason to compete was always part of the plan but then I needed something to make them. Like many ideas I had, the original concept was just Nintendo had their own hard girls causing trouble now, but eventually when I needed a real reason to provoke this conflict in a way that wouldn't smear Nintendo, Sintendo swung in and saved the day! It took even longer for me to conceive of Vodka Drunkenski being in charge of Sintendo as a way of salvaging my old scrapped plan to RP a sympathetic Soda Popinski, but as said elsewhere I originally planned a meaner Vodka who would have punched Mega at the end of the plot before GBC smacked him back for doing so.

I guess a fair bit of technically scrapped content would be the paths not picked in Smash Run, but one scene I did have planned for the plot in general was 3DS would come across Saturn in the maze and try to beat her up. After Saturn was down though she'd start kicking her around and rubbing in the victory before Dreamcast shows up and stabs 3DS through while saying she doesn't get to treat Saturn that way. 3DS would say Dreamcast treats Saturn that way and we'd get a bit of an early look at Dreamcast's complicated way of treating people close to her due to a bad upbringing, but this was back when the girls were meaner and soon Dreamcast got her development elsewhere so the moment wasn't required here. You might remember a similar idea being mentioned for a Mid-Brawl moment.

DOGA AND BRUME STUFF

Gonna keep things moving quick! No reason to say "I thought of this stuff and then used it" after all! Doga's ConjureArms store was mostly a collaboration between me and Pitohui where we messaged each other back and forth and hashed out ideas that way so it's not like it was all my ideas. If he wants to say any possible ideas he scrapped for it in the comments I encourage him to do so, but otherwise one thing that I had planned before I approached him was the idea that Doga was more of a professional grifter rather than a salesman with few scruples.

In the original version of the plot we'd still have Doga and the Rental Shop go head to head in a little contest with no fighting, but why we were doing it changed. Originally I considered that Saturn went and hired Doga when she heard of a guy who was great at advertising, only to hear he suddenly opened up a competing shop. Near the end of the plot we'd get a scene similar to Doga coming to make a deal with Ravio, but instead of just trying to get a cut of Ravio's sales, it would turn out that Doga has a business plan where he makes competing businesses strictly to fail and drive up interest in the products of the person hiring him. He'd eventually bow out gracefully and hand over his things to the guy who hired him and then move on to do a similar PR scam with some other business, but in RP Doga was a guy legit trying to run his shop and saw an opportunity to maybe save him some risk. Basically, Doga's original version was him throwing the competition as part of a grift he though Saturn was in on but she had no idea she hired an elaborate scammer, but I whittled it down to a more traditional contest before I came to Pitohui so it wouldn't be so convoluted.

As many know Doga comes from the Skyrim RP briefly run on the forum and thus he doesn't fit the normal naming conventions for a Brume. In fact, his name is taken from a Final Fantasy III character with a cool theme, and similarly Katy got her name from the veterinarian kids game she came from. For other Brume though, their naming conventions all come from a singular source...

Maya Angelou.

Why Maya Angelou? Well originally Maya's name was something else that started with M but had an appropriate meaning but I didn't like it and swapped it to Maya which means a bunch of things in a bunch of languages but can mean things like Illusion or Magic as well as having a name similar to a 3D modeling software so it all felt sort of adjacent to the magic camera. However, when I started to need to give more lore on her species when she got to chatting in RP I went from having loose ideas to needing to solidify them. We saw me make the name Brume in chat from brumation but when I needed a name for Maya's rival in a hurry I thought it would be cute to have her be Angela, and then we heard about a good girl still working at the Blue Tongue named Lulu. Maya Angela Lulu.

A silly naming convention at first evolved into something more as I needed more Brume names, and you can't really stretch just Maya Angelou into a bunch more. Her middle name is Annie though so Maya's sister? Ani. Her last name at birth was Johnson, so flip it and you have Nojj at the end there. Garrute? Maya is short for Margueritte, so corrupt the ending there and you got his name. Again you can only stretch a single name so far so I started to incorporate some family members belonging to the famous poet. Vivian "Baxter" Johnson was her mother, so Rockwall Security got Bex out of that middle part, Vyva out of Vivian, and Bail from her father's name, Bailey. The words for grandparents in the native Brume tongue and other little things in their lives like the Iyya were all again corruptions of these bases, and actually, I think I might recommend this method to other people looking to invent a culture or tongue. Less so taking a famous lady's name and twisting it around to make new words but selecting a small batch of terms that you construct new words out of to make your language and naming conventions. It leads to certain sounds reappearing or being absent in different measures because you're restricting yourself into evolving from a core batch.

As for the Brume Conspiracy plot, it was actually more meant to be Act 1 of the broader Agaman History stuff I was doing rather than a truly separate thing, hence its connections to the start of the Soul of Agama investigation. Naturally, the original plan was the Brume were in on it and Garrute was too and everything was bad :V Really though, the initial idea was that the erasure of history was done way back when the Brume rediscovered the city and in the present no one was actually destroying any new history, they were just burdened with the secret of knowing their ancestors did such an awful thing. There wasn't really a good ending for this concept, we just learn this information and then decide if we tell the world and hide it but Maya would push hard for telling the world anyway so it didn't seem to have much of a path. Instead this concept was sort of contained only to Ani and we did get to examine its angles with stuff like the Marlow drama that evolved from it so that was probably the best way to realize that concept.

Instead, I don't remember when exactly but someone said they were certain Brume and Alruthine were connected since I was again doing humanoid lizards for some reason, and I began to conceive of ways to make that a true connection. It actually ended up making the Alruthine make even more sense as they learned to imitate Brume but it also gave me a possible twist villain that wasn't just Garrute being a secret bad guy. I actually was super thankful Chao just independently came up with the idea of pursuing the Brume-Alruthine connection with Cirral without any prompting, but it also might have made my hints come off more as background detail to answer that then the intended route of them being clues. I do like to sprinkle lore around with no purpose besides fleshing things out though so again it might have just been people thinking I'm doing that, but I do think that time in chat I was trying to heavily prompt people was necessary to avoid a burbling anti-Brume settlement as we were only seeing what the villain wanted us to see.

As mentioned in chat as well, the canal-running Brume we never met was a scrapped concept because I've wanted to sort of do a plot on the canals but not involving boats for our time here in Agama. Never coalesced into much and I decided to just make it sound like more people were in on the secret by saying such a member existed without needing to implicate a big group of characters who would feel the plot's fall out.

 

SOUL OF AGAMA

Sonho, the blind dream mage whose name literally means dream, came from an attempt to collaborate with Harpy. But to explain that we need to go even further back and discuss Krysquils!

In early plot teasers I mentioned characters used the phrase "By the Soul of Agama!" and then dropped it because it didn't sound very natural, but back then the Soul of Agama was not the big emotionless machine we'd face beneath the city. The Soul of Agama was still beneath the city though, but it was actually the life forces of a bunch of mages swirling around a giant Krysquil. The Krysquil was a mutated abomination made by molding together DNA of other magical creatures into one big living engine of functionally infinite magic, but having it be a living creature made its destructive potential too strong so people used Life Magic to chain it below the city. Agama was abandoned either as a result of a rampage from the giant Krysquil or because everyone had to contribute their life energy to containing it. The idea of Ancient Agamans being accessible even after the city's abandonment came from I think an idle musing from maybe Harpy about an idea where Ancient Agamans sidestepped into some other dimension rather than meeting an unfortunate end, and my mind twisted that into having them stuck in permanent limbo as their souls restrained a massive magical beast!

Well, when we found the giant Krysquil it would be able to speak with its magic. While it might be agreeable not to destroy the world or whatever, it would have spent centuries stewing in its hatred for those who imprisoned it and refuse to budge on killing them if they freed it. If some compromise could have been found it could have helped Kobbers out in future events but we also were slated to probably put it down either with a big fight or some trick and then the life magic would revive all the people in stasis. Eventually a big magical hedgehog seemed less and less interesting to me and less likely to just work in general, but some ideas were being shifted around and reconfigured. We did get the event with Vida still though, a way of stoking mystery and having the Agaman scientists work up to using the lives of humans for fuel. Vida the chimera was originally intended to be more of a vertically oriented creature with no real functional limbs, moving on magic and likely to be invisible for much of the fight with the challenge even being to pin it down. It was always going to be a white many-eyed thing and thus that influenced the appearance of Zoey's pets when they were drawn so they could be components of it. Alli the alteration pet is actually not meant to have a standard form due to its powers meaning it can transform a lot but she was also a source for some of Vida's more unusual features so I don't feel bad for including them.

Criador, again a name that just means Creator, has a bit more of a story, and we'll get back to Sonho soon I promise!

This is Orino. I can't find what his name meant and it's not urinate despite google saying it is, but I guess I forgot the source language. Originally Orino and LEGO Indy were both the sons of Criador and thus brothers, with LEGO Indy sent out into the world but Orino was locked up with the Soul of Agama. I briefly considered the Soul of Agama having no defenses or only simple magical turrets with Orino being the big fight at the end. While LEGO Indiana Jones can break down and rebuild matter, Orino could become any matter, hence the second gooey form that was kind of a grosser version of what LEGO Indy's pinker goop. Orino would be a reasonable sort if he was spoken to and one way to end the plot would be to speak during the fight to talk Orino out of the defense, Orino mostly only doing it because it's all he's known. If we had saved Orino he would have hung out with Indy as a serious counterbalance, more posh and intelligent. Indy ended up having almost a found family in regular RP so Orino was scrapped totally, but even up until the end I did consider an event involving him.

Between the mole event and the final confrontation we would have reached the door to the Soul of Agama and found Orino. One idea I had was that he had set up hypnotic magitech so anyone who found the Soul of Agama left it undisturbed, another was Orino merely fought us here before the separate fight with the Soul. Hypnosis was still included as a means of the Soul of Agama to turn people into willing subjects and the moles who accidentally found it got a dose of that, and Criador was turned more sympathetic and became less complicit in the Soul's creation, meaning his "son" Orino would no longer have any reason to defend it.

Originally the mole battle was also just going to be Mole Miner Max, but to give the fight more layers Wattmole was added, especially since his personality wasn't as concrete in my head as others and it would be a good day to give him more of a spotlight. Incidentally, the original plan for this actually included an entirely different setup! Rather than hypnosis kicking in when a doodad in the lab alerted Max and Wattmole's hidden mental programming, we'd have a day where we needed to figure out the Mole amidst Moles. Someone would try to cause a cave-in to kill the Kobbers while they were, originally, interacting with Sonho. We wouldn't get a good look at them, but Bill would realize he saw the shape of a mole from afar, but mole eyesight being what it is and the distance meant he wouldn't know who among his crew was responsible. We'd have an interrogation day that Bill wouldn't participate in because he'd be heartbroken, loyalty being super important to him and the crew like a family. Wattmole would have been a prime suspect here too, but we did hear some of the clues for Max's suspicious nature in RP even with the concept being scrapped. Max used to work alone so he would have triggered the hypnosis while doing so. Max was also a more combative and mean member of the crew to naturally draw more suspicion, but luckily this just manifested as Dirt Boss and him having a rivalry. Max was never a true traitor and it was always an outside influence, leading us either to the lab or the Soul depending on when in the plan it was placed.

Also, I remember at some point planning for us to plunge into the old buildings at city's center and finding hidden paths to reach the Orino fight, but instead we just got a mix of old ideas to explain how we found the Soul when it was hidden so well the native people of Agama had no idea it was there. I mentioned elsewhere I wanted us to take out a problem native to Agama they couldn't so we weren't just bringing our troubles to the city, hence the whole tie to history and hidden trouble that would bubble over one day suddenly if we hadn't preemptively stopped it.

Now, Sonho! Originally when Harpy was mentioning MAGIC would do some dream traveling this year I thought to myself it could be cool if MAGIC visited the sleeping minds of one of the people trapped in the Soul of Agama's grip. We'd get to see their memories of the civil war as the person sat and drank with MAGIC and maybe gave some cryptic guidance and answers to stoke the flames of the plot before it kicked off. When we talked a bit about it though I realized my idea wasn't quite on the wavelength she was looking for so I started retooling it and soon he became a dream mage and my mental image of him as Fujitora from One Piece was set in stone, the idea that Dream Mages needed to give up their senses inspired by his blindness. Sonho was slated to be visited by MAGIC still while he was doing his new work as defender of Ancient Agama's shame, but then he eventually just got rolled in as an event as part of the broader plot.

One thing that was mentioned a bit was Terroflout. First I wanted to make sure what Bill was smoking didn't bug people so it wasn't tobacco but Terroflout. Second I decided the plant released an unusual gas meant to make creatures terrified and run away to protect it before it was ready to spread its seeds through its fruit. When properly handled it wouldn't make people wig out, so they "flouted their lack of terror" by smoking its leaves or drinking its wine. However, it was said in RP that the product wasn't actually fully weakened when it was being embraced around the time of magic's disappearance, and it was around that time they had just learned how to cultivate it with golem help so such a mistake was natural. Naturally a lot of the panic was legitimate as their magitech city went quiet overnight, but having a panic-inducing plant in their systems lead to more dramatic reactions and pushed things further. I wouldn't say that the Soul of Agama was produced in a drug-fueled frenzy, they would have run out of safe cultivating means quick without any golems now that their magic had been lost, but it probably created the kind of initial frenzy that got people fired up and started them down roads that eventually went dark places. I did briefly consider putting some enemy in a Terroflout grove so we could have a fear-based fight or something but it was hard to tie it into the progression of things.

REJECTED 2022 PLOT

While we're here, we might as well look at some things that were considered for the upcoming year but scrapped! What you're looking at there is Magellan from One Piece, although more imposing than usually depicted. A man with poison powers, he wasn't a character I meant to include in RP, but I did consider him and his power concept as a face claim for a main antagonist in a 2022 plot. I'd have probably called it Death Cure or The Cure for Death and its core concept was a group of people who set up in Agama looking to use its magitech or unusual species to further their research to prevent people from dying. The guy in charge of the project would be a big burly dude with poison powers, I originally settled on something close in concept to Magellan's look and thought I might even just use his look if I got too lazy. The main guy was someone whose family all was killed by a poison that just ended up in their food one day, and in trying to ensure he would not lose anyone else to anything similar he tried to create a perfect antivenom and instead turned his body composition into a malleable poison.

Still, he would actually debut in RP as an amiable guy who hung out at the bar and maybe even Brawled, but later in the year we'd discover the research he was doing in the area was getting more extreme. People were being used as guinea pigs and he even threatens to make Agama a testing ground for a Death Cure with a low chance of success, figuring that even if only a few survive they could advance the research. However, it was also implied he was not really behind this plan at all, instead a figurehead imposed by a group of core villains who basically threatened to do even worse unless he played along as the amicable public face of the project. Near the end of the plot we would do a raid on their main facility and he'd have a moment where his commitment would be tested and he'd likely do the right thing, but there would also be in some form the poison attack on Agama we'd have to repel at the same time. The idea started to mutate to the facility actually being a whole futuristic city and people couldn't come in and stop the villains prematurely because the air was toxic if you weren't immunized against it and the city of the future would go to war with the city of the past.

Roxie's presence in Agama was originally to be because of her coming down to provide her poison expertise before anyone knew that the search for a death cure had a darker side. Similarly I said I might use Cresselia in RP and the idea was that its ability to revive people with Lunar Dance was related to the research of preventing death. Naturally the plot in general would try to guilt the Kobbers about how they only want to prevent the tragic demise of people and related pain and they'd probably get an earful about revival magic at one point they were meant to counter with some cool comebacks. Not many of the characters beyond Not-Magellan were coming together and those that did I snipped out and will be repurposing possibly.

ENDING

I'm getting this out there while I can! If I remember anything new I might comment it, but also, I'll toss in a little thing here. I do remember other ideas like us not knowing Maya's fate until the day of Ani plot so it would seem like she killed her. I wasn't sure what powers Zoey should have at first and considered electric or magitech but I like her pets more. Zoey's quest to find the source of all magic is doomed to be impossible because I'm not going to say all of magic in RP comes from one place but she did learn one source (life) and its more about the pursuit of knowledge than the end goal really.

I almost had no plans for a Cirno day this year! Even considered a Kogasa day instead. If bootleg Cirno fumo hadn't taken off I'm not sure what I would have done. Cirnoil's anger issues might have been a more important element though. Originally it was all going to be Cirno pun creatures but it was harder to realize than I thought so the Tricirnotops was a bit of an odd one out of the three used, but at the same time, I think Tricirnotops was the start of the whole plot's idea! I do recall having the idea of just ensuring the girl's had a good day and having to save them from their stupidity almost like the classic baby in a construction site goof, but having bad actors made it more interactive and silly.

Claire still has some ideas in the pocket that might emerge next year but if I hadn't packed things in so deep she did have concepts that were meant to happen but had no room.

I think that's all that's rattling around in my head for now! Hope this was an interesting look back well after everything discussed happened.