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Post by I'm Murrin »

Where we stopped was waiting for Paula to confirm she's ready to head off for her date.
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Post by Fist and Faith »

Women tend to take a long time to get ready for a date.
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
-Paul Simon
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Post by StevieG »

Poor old Richard has nearly died of starvation, standing there, waiting....
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Post by I'm Murrin »

Heading towards one year since we dropped this. I remain willing to pick it back up if the three of you want; alternatively if you feel like it's over and done now, I'd also be willing to answer questions and talk about behind the scenes stuff if anyone is interested in that.
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Post by StevieG »

I'm keen to pick it up. I don't have as much time as when Covid was locking me down, but I could still post reasonably regularly.

Equally, if the others don't want to continue I'd be interested in some background :D
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Post by Fist and Faith »

caam apparently didn't have the time to devote to this. She always put a lot into these games.
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And disregards the rest
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Post by I'm Murrin »

Absolutely no blame on that, of course. There are many more important things than this.
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Post by I'm Murrin »

My mind has been wandering back to this again and I feel like just ripping the bandaid off and revealing some of the secrets.

The biggest but also possibly least consequential:

The Heart of God has always been a trap. Whether in the original game or in The Outsiders (where attempting to reach it was a very distant potential goal if the campaign ran long enough), attaining the Heart of God in order to claim its power would have resulted, ultimately, in the revival of the One True God who was slain, and the return to a world entirely subject to His tyranny. This was not an inevitability; there was always the option that players would end up destroying the Heart instead, and The Outsiders might never have even gone near it.
Whether this would have been a satisfying conclusion to either game I do not know. Might have been a bit of a kick in the teeth to punish success like that.
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Post by I'm Murrin »

I tried not to plan ahead much with The Outsiders. I truly wanted the story to be player-driven, and for there to be freedom to take it in whatever direction their actions decided. For example, when the Magistrate - a character I had to invent on the spot simply because people kept trying to interact with a random nearby guild member, a strategy I still find a little baffling - asked Paula to dinner, I did not intend for the dinner to take place inside the Guild Hall, but at a restaurant somewhere around the plaza. It was only when you players all seemed to assume that this would be in the Guild building that I decided to run with it.

I did however have a few things in mind for longer term plans, though I liked to keep them nebulous so they could adapt to whatever you guys were doing. The goddess Jove was engaging in a war with the Angels south of Jovian, with the main front being at the dam; I had a notion that after the bank job, the Outsiders would get caught up in something that took them to the dam, and they would be involved in a plot to blow it up, either trying to carry out the demolition or to prevent it.

The war also meant that Jove herself had been preoccupied for a while and had not been looking after her people; the rampant inequality in Jovian which you saw a little of was partly the result of that, and there was going to be an underground movement against the Jovian faith, with the potential to break out into a full rebellion. This movement would be led by the followers of Shimone - Syl's character from Heart of God, a faith that died out quickly because Syl did not end up playing the game. In this conception, their faith continued in a quiet way within the demesne of Jove, until the return of their long-lost Prophet triggered them to become much more active.

...And this is the idea I was most nervous and least confident about. For each of the player characters I tried to look for a story hook that would engage that character in the events; the story hook for Paula came easily from caam's own backstory for the character, which involved an amnesiac husband who had mysteriously vanished, leading her to come on this adventure looking for him. I was having a hard time figuring out who her husband was and where he had gone, but the one idea that kind of tickled my fancy was to reveal that he was, in fact, the lost Prophet of Shimone, whose memory had finally returned to him leading him to rejoin his people in Jovian. I... do not know if this idea worked with how caam conceptualised her Paula and her husband's relationship, and I don't know if she would have liked this idea. I'm also not sure I know how I would handle the whole setup. I guess I just liked the idea of caam's current character's husband being the leader of a rebellion against caam's previous character.
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Post by StevieG »

I'm sure people would have appreciated the kick in the teeth twist :D

I was playing mainly for the experience - I've never played one of these games before, which may have been obvious - but I was enjoying trying to stay true to my character. I had no plans with where my character would go (or be led) apart from a vague thought that he could go either way from a moral perspective. He could have gone down a dark path or a 'light' path - he'd be conflicted either way.

The rest of your story arc would have lost me until I read up on the backstory from the original game. But it sounds interesting.
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Post by I'm Murrin »

Oh, there wasn't really much backstory there, and I'd have tried to keep it accessible. Shimone literally did nothing in the previous game; Syl signed up, created a character, then fell completely off the radar. His starting village became neutral then got swallowed up by Jove's expansion. I just ran into an old PM chain with Syl's ideas for his prophet and there was a thing there about a birthmark which I thought would play interestingly with the amnesia angle.

To be honest your character was the one I had the most trouble finding a hook for. For a bit I thought I might be able to tempt you into getting involved with shady business through the casinos, like maybe you would try to cheat at a game or something, but that didn't bear out in the short time we played.
There was a whole thing with Sara where if you went back to her neighbourhood and tried to do something about the shady landlord you might have gotten caught up in similar business there too, but that was sidestepped by getting the Magistrate on your side and extracting Sara without having to deal with him.
I was thinking about maybe introducing some sort of underground thieves guild or something, but I don't know where that would have gone. It was kind of a side thought really, since the bank job would still be the main focus and there was plenty of time for something to develop.

Speaking of the bank job - if you guys went in there and failed and got caught, I was planning to re-introduce Jed from the barricade as another prisoner in the jail. (By the way, there was nothing interesting in the guardhouse, since you guys seemed worried the fake guards were hiding something in there.)
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Post by StevieG »

In the immediate future, I had a feeling that something significant would happen to Richard while Paula was at dinner with the magistrate. Either in attempting to locate and/or take the construction records, or in response to what might transpire at dinner. I felt it could have been an opportunity for Richard to display his stealth skills, or lack thereof...

He may have also been hoping to pay the guard back for his encounter earlier.
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Post by I'm Murrin »

There was definitely going to be an opportunity for you to get into the Guild on your own and go looking for those records. I needed to give you all something to do so it wasn't all just waiting for Paula; Bela was probably going to get mugged while trying to deliver a bribe for Hestor.
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Post by Fist and Faith »

Pfffff. Bela grew up on the streets. And he was good enough at placing together little clues to see a mugging coming his way. Kind of his power, after all. :D

"I guess I just liked the idea of caam's current character's husband being the leader of a rebellion against caam's previous character."
That ready is good! :lol:

I had no particular plans. I was just going with the flow.
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
-Paul Simon
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Post by StevieG »

Because I know you're just itching to know... :lol:

The inspiration for my character came from a Nick Cave song called The Kindness of Strangers from an album called Murder Ballads. Most of the songs are about murder in one form or another. They're all pretty bleak, some in a black comic kind of way, and others in a more tragic kind of way. This one has a sadness to it - the perpetrator is a man called Richard Slade.

Richard's avatar is a painting of a young Nick Cave. Other options for my avatar included:

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or

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