alexandraerin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexandraerin) wrote2009-04-22 05:55 pm
alexandraerin) wrote2009-04-22 05:55 pm
Entry tags:
3 Seas casting off...
I'm making another blog post right after the last because I'm soooo bone-tired right now but I can't sleep and I'm trying to get my thoughts marching in a straight line before I write some Star Harbor Nights.
This is going to be another Inside The Author's Studio thing, about the two characters who just appeared in the latest 3 Seas update and about the formation of the cast in general. Still not reading 3 Seas? Well, I'm enjoying writing it, anyway. If you like my writing but always wondered what I could do with more of a traditional plot, you should seriously check it out. It's an adventure story. I wouldn't market the website to younger audiences because it links to my other stuff but it's definitely more all-ages-appropriate.
If you haven't read it, the rest of this is mildly spoilery, in the same way that looking at a cast page on a webcomic or reading the inside-the-jacket copy on a novel might be, so...
Anyway, since I revived the story I've been putting together the cast.. when I first started it, it was focused on only a single pair of characters, a runaway slave boy named Jace and the girl he rescued from slavers, Sheiral. Things threaten to bog down with them before I figured out how to cut to the chase a bit. I'm not 100% happy with how I brought them together with the next two characters, but basically I realized that I needed things to come to the point sooner rather than later. The story is not about two kids stumbling around an island trying not to get caught, it's a big world-spanning adventure, which meant I had to get them onto theboat ship vessel before the story could really begin.
The next two characters were Katryn and Loki, and they were the first two characters I devised for the story, the captain of the Horizon Chaser and its resident genius. I'd come up with variations on them before, but never had a setting to put them in. The world of Meridea... the setting of The 3 Seas... came about from looking at a map of the ancient world centered on the Mediterranean, and as soon as I had that, I knew I had their home.
A younger, less experienced me would have mistaken that for a story: a cool ship, cool characters, and a cool setting. That's a good starting point for an entertaining bit of idle fantasy, which can turn into a story, but it's not a story itself. I can do a lot with having characters play off each other, but even Tales of MU has an overarching (or in its case, maybe underarching would be more accurate) plot running behind all the interpersonal bullshit, and a story set aboard a little wooden ship really ought to be going somewhere or else it'll be all too obviously adrift, you know?
When I first described the story on a blog post as a possible future project, somebody commented that they couldn't really see how it would be different than Void Dogs except in the trappings (more fantasy, less sci-fi). With Void Dogs, there are plots, but the number one rule is that they're not allowed to get in the way of anything. I write Void Dogs by figuring out what Point A and Point B will be, and then I have a bunch of other stuff happen.
Zany, improbable stuff. Hijinks ensue, with hilarious consequences.
People like reading it. I like writing it. But I'd be embarrassed if somebody thought it was all I was capable of doing.
So, 3 Seas is my adventure story and that meant I needed more than Katryn the free-spirited pirate lady, her wacky sidekick and their badass magic vehicle... I needed plot and I needed impetus, and that meant expanding the cast. Jace and Sheiral came first, and the pursuit of them was enough to kick-start the beginning of a plot. Unlike Katryn and Loki, their genesis does not predate Meridea, and so their origins and personalities were tied to the setting from the beginning.
Iskondra Devallion is my primary 4E Dungeons and Dragons character. That's the character's actual name, though nobody in the party calls her that. To a one, her teammates refer to her "Captain Fancy-Elf"... though they do, as she points out, call her "Captain". She is, naturally, an Eladrin Swordmage. She is--as an Eladrin Swordmage must be, if played correctly--ridiculous and awesome and ridiculously awesome, and I knew as soon as the first (ten hour) gaming session in which she appeared was finished that she needed to go in a story somewhere.
She was just too good a creation not to share with the world.
Eladrin Swordmage. You don't even have to know what either of those things are to know that it's going to be ridiculous and awesome.
Obviously the 3 Seas character isn't Eladrin, and I needed to adjust the "Swordmage" concept to fit my world, too, but that's where the character came from.
Tauri Quick-Claw has an even older origin than Kat and Loki. The Final Fantasy Legend games for the Gameboy, as the SaGa series was called in North America, had "monster" as one of the available character types. You actually selected a specific monster when you put one in your party, but it was actually a single class -- monsters could eat the meat of defeated creatures and change into another monster... not necessarily the same one that they'd just beaten, it all depended on what their current form was. The starting form was just that, the starting form. It had no lasting effect that was "inherited" through subsequent transformations.
A lot of people liked that system, and it had its interesting points, but the transformations didn't capture my imagination as much the simple fact of being able to play as a monster did (not surprisingly... I added a kobold rights subplot to Keep On The Borderlands when I was in middle school), and I thought of my monster character "Tari" (the name field was limited to four letters) as a wererat long after he'd shifted from that form. Tauri Quick-Claw, as he became known in the less memory-restrictive environment of my head, became one of my stock characters and when I needed someone to be pursuing the 3 Seas incarnation of Iskondra, he came to mind instantly.
These six characters... two created specifically for the story, two who've been adrift in my head for years, one from a video game I played almost two decades ago, and one who I created for a roleplaying game that came out last year... are the principle cast of The 3 Seas. I've been thinking in my head that it's the most gender-balanced of my ongoing stories, but I'm not sure that's true. I suppose it would depend on who was counted as main cast in Void Dogs and how they were counted.
This is going to be another Inside The Author's Studio thing, about the two characters who just appeared in the latest 3 Seas update and about the formation of the cast in general. Still not reading 3 Seas? Well, I'm enjoying writing it, anyway. If you like my writing but always wondered what I could do with more of a traditional plot, you should seriously check it out. It's an adventure story. I wouldn't market the website to younger audiences because it links to my other stuff but it's definitely more all-ages-appropriate.
If you haven't read it, the rest of this is mildly spoilery, in the same way that looking at a cast page on a webcomic or reading the inside-the-jacket copy on a novel might be, so...
Anyway, since I revived the story I've been putting together the cast.. when I first started it, it was focused on only a single pair of characters, a runaway slave boy named Jace and the girl he rescued from slavers, Sheiral. Things threaten to bog down with them before I figured out how to cut to the chase a bit. I'm not 100% happy with how I brought them together with the next two characters, but basically I realized that I needed things to come to the point sooner rather than later. The story is not about two kids stumbling around an island trying not to get caught, it's a big world-spanning adventure, which meant I had to get them onto the
The next two characters were Katryn and Loki, and they were the first two characters I devised for the story, the captain of the Horizon Chaser and its resident genius. I'd come up with variations on them before, but never had a setting to put them in. The world of Meridea... the setting of The 3 Seas... came about from looking at a map of the ancient world centered on the Mediterranean, and as soon as I had that, I knew I had their home.
A younger, less experienced me would have mistaken that for a story: a cool ship, cool characters, and a cool setting. That's a good starting point for an entertaining bit of idle fantasy, which can turn into a story, but it's not a story itself. I can do a lot with having characters play off each other, but even Tales of MU has an overarching (or in its case, maybe underarching would be more accurate) plot running behind all the interpersonal bullshit, and a story set aboard a little wooden ship really ought to be going somewhere or else it'll be all too obviously adrift, you know?
When I first described the story on a blog post as a possible future project, somebody commented that they couldn't really see how it would be different than Void Dogs except in the trappings (more fantasy, less sci-fi). With Void Dogs, there are plots, but the number one rule is that they're not allowed to get in the way of anything. I write Void Dogs by figuring out what Point A and Point B will be, and then I have a bunch of other stuff happen.
Zany, improbable stuff. Hijinks ensue, with hilarious consequences.
People like reading it. I like writing it. But I'd be embarrassed if somebody thought it was all I was capable of doing.
So, 3 Seas is my adventure story and that meant I needed more than Katryn the free-spirited pirate lady, her wacky sidekick and their badass magic vehicle... I needed plot and I needed impetus, and that meant expanding the cast. Jace and Sheiral came first, and the pursuit of them was enough to kick-start the beginning of a plot. Unlike Katryn and Loki, their genesis does not predate Meridea, and so their origins and personalities were tied to the setting from the beginning.
Iskondra Devallion is my primary 4E Dungeons and Dragons character. That's the character's actual name, though nobody in the party calls her that. To a one, her teammates refer to her "Captain Fancy-Elf"... though they do, as she points out, call her "Captain". She is, naturally, an Eladrin Swordmage. She is--as an Eladrin Swordmage must be, if played correctly--ridiculous and awesome and ridiculously awesome, and I knew as soon as the first (ten hour) gaming session in which she appeared was finished that she needed to go in a story somewhere.
She was just too good a creation not to share with the world.
Eladrin Swordmage. You don't even have to know what either of those things are to know that it's going to be ridiculous and awesome.
Obviously the 3 Seas character isn't Eladrin, and I needed to adjust the "Swordmage" concept to fit my world, too, but that's where the character came from.
Tauri Quick-Claw has an even older origin than Kat and Loki. The Final Fantasy Legend games for the Gameboy, as the SaGa series was called in North America, had "monster" as one of the available character types. You actually selected a specific monster when you put one in your party, but it was actually a single class -- monsters could eat the meat of defeated creatures and change into another monster... not necessarily the same one that they'd just beaten, it all depended on what their current form was. The starting form was just that, the starting form. It had no lasting effect that was "inherited" through subsequent transformations.
A lot of people liked that system, and it had its interesting points, but the transformations didn't capture my imagination as much the simple fact of being able to play as a monster did (not surprisingly... I added a kobold rights subplot to Keep On The Borderlands when I was in middle school), and I thought of my monster character "Tari" (the name field was limited to four letters) as a wererat long after he'd shifted from that form. Tauri Quick-Claw, as he became known in the less memory-restrictive environment of my head, became one of my stock characters and when I needed someone to be pursuing the 3 Seas incarnation of Iskondra, he came to mind instantly.
These six characters... two created specifically for the story, two who've been adrift in my head for years, one from a video game I played almost two decades ago, and one who I created for a roleplaying game that came out last year... are the principle cast of The 3 Seas. I've been thinking in my head that it's the most gender-balanced of my ongoing stories, but I'm not sure that's true. I suppose it would depend on who was counted as main cast in Void Dogs and how they were counted.