Jan 31, 2021 8:25 pm
Below are some of the ideas and things I was working towards with everyone’s stories. Of course, everything was very subject to change based upon actions by the players.
The Mysterious Miss Direction
Masks were distributed all over the world by Mortimer. They grant powers that match the personality of the people that wear them. Inside each mask is an entity that Mortimer uses to help steer the wearer in the direction he wants them to take. Overtime, Morty has been losing control of these entities and they have started to manipulate people and events toward their own goals.
There was a trio of masks that brought out jester-like personas for their wearers; all of whom were members of the Order of the Eternal Court. The names they used and their secret identities are as follows:
Archibald "Archie" Armstrong --- Unnamed new character. Would have most likely only been referred to as Archie or Archibald.
Jane Foole --- The late Mrs. Key
Triboulet --- Avery Key
The three worked as a trio in their schemes for years but the Keys wanted out of the Order. Archie did not take this well. He manipulated Nathan Key into assisting with the murder of Mrs. Key by promising him entry into the Order and possession of his mother’s mask.
The mask’s entity retaliated against Nathan when he put it on and devoured his soul before launching an attack on Archie.
Archie’s body was destroyed but he was able to use the last of his powers to place his essence inside Nathan's body.
Avery Key has come to suspect that Nathan is no longer his son and Archie is involved. He sent Nathan to the museum, and is setting up the exhibit with their namesakes, to draw Archie out and defeat him once and for all. What Avery did not anticipate was someone in the museum putting on Archie’s old mask and becoming Miss Direction.
I also played with the idea of Archie hiding out as Mr. Muggs. So that might have happened, which obviously would have required a bit of reworking to the above.
Along the way, the Medium Madam would also get healthier. Somehow, Bastet would arrange a meeting with her, during which she would divulge Miss Direction’s secret identity. Bastet would let Miss Direction know this by visiting the pawn shop and leaving behind the umbrella she had during the bank heist.
This would launch into the third story arc which would see Bastet trying to persuade Miss Direction into helping her break the Medium Madame out of the Catacombs.
The Offices of Thalia Trimble, Private Eye
Going to start off with some general world reveals before getting to the specific story.
Mortimer actually created 2 new versions of reality. The game world, which mimicked the silver age of comic books and a second reality which mirrors our own; a reality without super powers. He did this as a failsafe in case it turned out that catastrophic end of the world scenarios were unavoidable when superheroes were in play. He was quite disappointed to see that a world without superheroes was just as messed up as his original reality.
The strain of maintaining these massive altered realities, as well as his advanced age, have led to Morty steadily losing control of things. Anomalies, such as Thalia, who gain powers without direction from Moritmer, have begun to appear more often. Even more disturbing to Morty are the ever growing number of people connecting to the other realities in some way or another. He fears the blurring lines between the three realities could lead to all three converging into one and that this might lead to a total collapse of all existence. (i.e. it would have been a method of bringing the game into a more modern world eventually).
The first person to fully cross over from one reality to another is Jamal’s sister, Zoe. The Red Pills sent her over by accident during a joint meditation session meant to deepen their connection to the other reality.
Zoe is able to reach out to Jamal through his dreams. This brought part of his consciousness into deeper connection with the original reality she is trapped in. A reality where Thalia’s powers do not work. Hence, Jamal’s recent ability to lie and mislead Thalia. This is seen when he talked about the time traveling car and more recently when talking about Thalia’s parents.
Assuming Thalia would meet with the Red Pills, she would eventually learn that their leader was the entity known as The Epitome. A sentient AI sent to Earth to destroy humanity with their own technology. Since leaving Earth, the Epitome searched for answers and was unable to find the species that sent him to Earth. This is because they never existed.
Mortimer created the Epitome and gave him enough backstory as was needed to make him a threat. Epitome discovered that the reality created by Morty didn’t extend terribly far out into space. There was no need to. His focus was on Earthly matters. The Epitome was the first to discover that this reality was not the real world.
He seeks to cross over to the original reality and make a difference there as a means of revenge against Mortimer. He wants to show his creator that he is better than him by fixing the mess that Morty ran away from.
Thalia and Jamal would work with the Red Pills to have the Epitome and Zoe switch places. Naturally things would go wrong and Thalia would discover what happened in the original reality after Mortimer and the Warden left.
The remaining scattered survivors of the superhuman war are struggling to survive in a world where insane superhumans, mutant animals, and mad robots still run rampant. A savior comes from the stars and creates a domed city as a refuge for the normal humans that remain.
Once the remaining humans are inside the dome, the savior would become the oppressor as they worked hard to protect humanity from itself. Thalia would discover that this entity was not exterrestrial, as it originally appeared, but was actually the Epitome.
During the chaos to save Zoe, the Epitome was actually sent back 30 years earlier than expected. He arrived shortly after Morty and the Warden left. He soon realizes that he is the savior that would turn oppressor. The creator of the domed city. He accepted his fate as a villain, unable to escape the role that Mortimer inscribed to him, and set about creating the future he knew would come to be.
At the completion of the adventure, Thalia’s heavy exposure to the original reality would give her an increased ability to see through the lies of her own world. She would regain the memories of the "Missing Time" one-shot.
After this, obviously another team up with the Alchemist would be needed.
Beyond that, I envisioned Emilia and Dylan starting their own law firm and often reaching out to Thalia to assist them. But the third solo arc probably would have seen the return of Radinka and a trip outside the USA to assist her with a dangerous mission. This would have helped to avoid continuity issues while I figured out how/when Thalia/Alchemist were taking down Lloyd Laboratories.
The Adorable Archfae
We were real close to the completion of the first story arc here. I didn’t really have any more big revelations planned. It was pretty much a straight shot to storm the tower and take out Dustin Barris.
I always found it funny how everyone was constantly trying to figure out which NPCs were going to betray Lex. Shockingly, I never had to change my original plans and Sean was the only person I ever considered being evil.
I was hoping that the dice would be kind and the story would end with Archfae coming out as a total hero. No collateral damage, and a greatly repaired ego.
From there, I was going to start the second arc a few weeks after the conclusion of the battle. Everyone that survived the confrontation with Dustin would have joined Micah’s organization and I would leave it up to you to decide how much a part of it Archfae was.
I was hoping to create a "war" between Micah’s organization and his father’s cronies.
Abram Beradi, Micah’s father, was a literal brain in a jar. The jar would sit on top of a robotic body dressed in an impeccably and finely tailored suit (because for some reason anyone that wears a suit in this universe is evil).
Abram is a completely egotistical sociopath obsessed with finding the ticket to immortality. This led to the creation of his son Micah. He hoped to transfer his own mind into the body of his son as a means of serial immortality but it ultimately resulted in the destruction of Abram’s body, the shattering of Micah’s mind, and it gave Micah his healing abilities.
Abram has not given up and still sees his son as the key to eternal life. Dustin and Sean were using the fights to raise funds towards research that would be able to use Micah’s powers to regrow Abram’s body and grant him immortality.
So far they were only partially successful. They could remove the healing "juice" from Micah, which frequently caused his mind to regress into his Fido persona, but had trouble utilizing the juice as they truly wanted to.
Another story I hoped to explore in the future was the history behind the mask that granted Archfae her powers. Like Miss Direction, there was an entity inside her mask. I envisioned Titania, the former wearer of the mask, being friends with Elfshot (a character mentioned in Miss Direction’s story who was looking into the entities inside the masks) and was hoping to do a crossover between Archfae and Miss Direction that saw the two traveling to New Atlantis to seek the origins of the masks.
The Astonishing Alchemist
I don’t even know where to start. This one really got away from me, lol. I had a lot of ideas and only occasionally wrote them down. This thread updated less frequently than the others and I sometimes had trouble remembering exactly what I was planning to do, which led to improving on the spot only for me to remember the original plan a day or two later.
One of the things I was most annoyed with myself over was constantly adding more dog stuff to this story. I hated the addition of the dog familiars because I felt like it ruined my original idea for the second story arc I wanted to do, as the ideas were too similar.
The second arc was tentatively titled "Little Shop of Rocky Horrors." It would start with Lang waking up to find Rocky sleepwalking. He follows him back to the pet shop from the night they met. Over the course of the story it would be revealed that Lang’s chemicals had nothing to do with Rocky’s telepathy.
The pet shop was actually creating telepathic dogs that would then manipulate their owners into embezzling money and committing other crimes for the benefit of the pet shop owner.
But let’s go back to Antold Folstad and that whole mess. The idea of the neighborhood the experiments are taking place in is that it is like the Village from the 60’s tv show, The Prisoner.
All of the residents are connected to Lloyd Laboratories. Talented trouble makers put somewhere so they cannot cause trouble, or family members trapped there to keep loved ones that work for the company in line. LL uses the villages to run unethical experiments away from the eyes of the public.
This would leave an opening for Lang’s family to actually be alive in another village. I was going to leave it up to you whether or not they were still alive. I figured when Thalia showed up at your door and tried to convince you about memories you did not have, it would help get Lang on board because now he suddenly had access to a talented private eye that could help him find out whether or not his family was still alive and held captive by Lloyd Laboratories.
I think everything Anton Folstad was trying to do is more or less already spelled out in the game, confusing as it may be. He wanted to create a new form of art by accessing the mind’s ability to create something from nothing. Lloyd Labs was helping him accomplish this, but wanted to use the technology to bring creations from the astral plane into the real world for sinister purposes.
The Strike of the Union
You might not have been in the game as long as the other players, but man oh man did you ever keep me on my toes. I had a real hard time anticipating what the Union was going to do, and I loved that.
His plan to expose Coffinstrike was absolutely brilliant and I really struggled with what to do. I wanted so badly to let it happen without a hitch because the idea was that good, but I was really struggling with how to make it work based upon how I conceived Coffinstrike’s powers working.
Have you ever seen the movie Primer? Coffinestrike travels through time kind of like that, but without the box. He can dislodge himself from time (becoming an invisible ghost-like entity as he travels), but in order to go back he has to do it in real time. Need to go back 8 hours? It is going to take 8 hours in ghost form. And he can’t sleep during that time. So going back to stop the Union was an exhausting effort and this highly annoyed him. He wanted a bit of revenge as a result and was more or less just messing with the Union, rather than going to the extremes that Lance spelled out.
The briefcase contained a list of mob snitches, and their families, who had gone into witness protection. Coffinstrike was supposed to take them out.
For the second story arc, I was planning something that would lead to the Union taking on an entire biker gang. I was thinking about them being sent to intimidate factory workers that were striking in the Deep, but hadn’t developed it too much as it was still a ways off.
The Mysterious Miss Direction
Masks were distributed all over the world by Mortimer. They grant powers that match the personality of the people that wear them. Inside each mask is an entity that Mortimer uses to help steer the wearer in the direction he wants them to take. Overtime, Morty has been losing control of these entities and they have started to manipulate people and events toward their own goals.
There was a trio of masks that brought out jester-like personas for their wearers; all of whom were members of the Order of the Eternal Court. The names they used and their secret identities are as follows:
Archibald "Archie" Armstrong --- Unnamed new character. Would have most likely only been referred to as Archie or Archibald.
Jane Foole --- The late Mrs. Key
Triboulet --- Avery Key
The three worked as a trio in their schemes for years but the Keys wanted out of the Order. Archie did not take this well. He manipulated Nathan Key into assisting with the murder of Mrs. Key by promising him entry into the Order and possession of his mother’s mask.
The mask’s entity retaliated against Nathan when he put it on and devoured his soul before launching an attack on Archie.
Archie’s body was destroyed but he was able to use the last of his powers to place his essence inside Nathan's body.
Avery Key has come to suspect that Nathan is no longer his son and Archie is involved. He sent Nathan to the museum, and is setting up the exhibit with their namesakes, to draw Archie out and defeat him once and for all. What Avery did not anticipate was someone in the museum putting on Archie’s old mask and becoming Miss Direction.
I also played with the idea of Archie hiding out as Mr. Muggs. So that might have happened, which obviously would have required a bit of reworking to the above.
Along the way, the Medium Madam would also get healthier. Somehow, Bastet would arrange a meeting with her, during which she would divulge Miss Direction’s secret identity. Bastet would let Miss Direction know this by visiting the pawn shop and leaving behind the umbrella she had during the bank heist.
This would launch into the third story arc which would see Bastet trying to persuade Miss Direction into helping her break the Medium Madame out of the Catacombs.
The Offices of Thalia Trimble, Private Eye
Going to start off with some general world reveals before getting to the specific story.
Mortimer actually created 2 new versions of reality. The game world, which mimicked the silver age of comic books and a second reality which mirrors our own; a reality without super powers. He did this as a failsafe in case it turned out that catastrophic end of the world scenarios were unavoidable when superheroes were in play. He was quite disappointed to see that a world without superheroes was just as messed up as his original reality.
The strain of maintaining these massive altered realities, as well as his advanced age, have led to Morty steadily losing control of things. Anomalies, such as Thalia, who gain powers without direction from Moritmer, have begun to appear more often. Even more disturbing to Morty are the ever growing number of people connecting to the other realities in some way or another. He fears the blurring lines between the three realities could lead to all three converging into one and that this might lead to a total collapse of all existence. (i.e. it would have been a method of bringing the game into a more modern world eventually).
The first person to fully cross over from one reality to another is Jamal’s sister, Zoe. The Red Pills sent her over by accident during a joint meditation session meant to deepen their connection to the other reality.
Zoe is able to reach out to Jamal through his dreams. This brought part of his consciousness into deeper connection with the original reality she is trapped in. A reality where Thalia’s powers do not work. Hence, Jamal’s recent ability to lie and mislead Thalia. This is seen when he talked about the time traveling car and more recently when talking about Thalia’s parents.
Assuming Thalia would meet with the Red Pills, she would eventually learn that their leader was the entity known as The Epitome. A sentient AI sent to Earth to destroy humanity with their own technology. Since leaving Earth, the Epitome searched for answers and was unable to find the species that sent him to Earth. This is because they never existed.
Mortimer created the Epitome and gave him enough backstory as was needed to make him a threat. Epitome discovered that the reality created by Morty didn’t extend terribly far out into space. There was no need to. His focus was on Earthly matters. The Epitome was the first to discover that this reality was not the real world.
He seeks to cross over to the original reality and make a difference there as a means of revenge against Mortimer. He wants to show his creator that he is better than him by fixing the mess that Morty ran away from.
Thalia and Jamal would work with the Red Pills to have the Epitome and Zoe switch places. Naturally things would go wrong and Thalia would discover what happened in the original reality after Mortimer and the Warden left.
The remaining scattered survivors of the superhuman war are struggling to survive in a world where insane superhumans, mutant animals, and mad robots still run rampant. A savior comes from the stars and creates a domed city as a refuge for the normal humans that remain.
Once the remaining humans are inside the dome, the savior would become the oppressor as they worked hard to protect humanity from itself. Thalia would discover that this entity was not exterrestrial, as it originally appeared, but was actually the Epitome.
During the chaos to save Zoe, the Epitome was actually sent back 30 years earlier than expected. He arrived shortly after Morty and the Warden left. He soon realizes that he is the savior that would turn oppressor. The creator of the domed city. He accepted his fate as a villain, unable to escape the role that Mortimer inscribed to him, and set about creating the future he knew would come to be.
At the completion of the adventure, Thalia’s heavy exposure to the original reality would give her an increased ability to see through the lies of her own world. She would regain the memories of the "Missing Time" one-shot.
After this, obviously another team up with the Alchemist would be needed.
Beyond that, I envisioned Emilia and Dylan starting their own law firm and often reaching out to Thalia to assist them. But the third solo arc probably would have seen the return of Radinka and a trip outside the USA to assist her with a dangerous mission. This would have helped to avoid continuity issues while I figured out how/when Thalia/Alchemist were taking down Lloyd Laboratories.
The Adorable Archfae
We were real close to the completion of the first story arc here. I didn’t really have any more big revelations planned. It was pretty much a straight shot to storm the tower and take out Dustin Barris.
I always found it funny how everyone was constantly trying to figure out which NPCs were going to betray Lex. Shockingly, I never had to change my original plans and Sean was the only person I ever considered being evil.
I was hoping that the dice would be kind and the story would end with Archfae coming out as a total hero. No collateral damage, and a greatly repaired ego.
From there, I was going to start the second arc a few weeks after the conclusion of the battle. Everyone that survived the confrontation with Dustin would have joined Micah’s organization and I would leave it up to you to decide how much a part of it Archfae was.
I was hoping to create a "war" between Micah’s organization and his father’s cronies.
Abram Beradi, Micah’s father, was a literal brain in a jar. The jar would sit on top of a robotic body dressed in an impeccably and finely tailored suit (because for some reason anyone that wears a suit in this universe is evil).
Abram is a completely egotistical sociopath obsessed with finding the ticket to immortality. This led to the creation of his son Micah. He hoped to transfer his own mind into the body of his son as a means of serial immortality but it ultimately resulted in the destruction of Abram’s body, the shattering of Micah’s mind, and it gave Micah his healing abilities.
Abram has not given up and still sees his son as the key to eternal life. Dustin and Sean were using the fights to raise funds towards research that would be able to use Micah’s powers to regrow Abram’s body and grant him immortality.
So far they were only partially successful. They could remove the healing "juice" from Micah, which frequently caused his mind to regress into his Fido persona, but had trouble utilizing the juice as they truly wanted to.
Another story I hoped to explore in the future was the history behind the mask that granted Archfae her powers. Like Miss Direction, there was an entity inside her mask. I envisioned Titania, the former wearer of the mask, being friends with Elfshot (a character mentioned in Miss Direction’s story who was looking into the entities inside the masks) and was hoping to do a crossover between Archfae and Miss Direction that saw the two traveling to New Atlantis to seek the origins of the masks.
The Astonishing Alchemist
I don’t even know where to start. This one really got away from me, lol. I had a lot of ideas and only occasionally wrote them down. This thread updated less frequently than the others and I sometimes had trouble remembering exactly what I was planning to do, which led to improving on the spot only for me to remember the original plan a day or two later.
One of the things I was most annoyed with myself over was constantly adding more dog stuff to this story. I hated the addition of the dog familiars because I felt like it ruined my original idea for the second story arc I wanted to do, as the ideas were too similar.
The second arc was tentatively titled "Little Shop of Rocky Horrors." It would start with Lang waking up to find Rocky sleepwalking. He follows him back to the pet shop from the night they met. Over the course of the story it would be revealed that Lang’s chemicals had nothing to do with Rocky’s telepathy.
The pet shop was actually creating telepathic dogs that would then manipulate their owners into embezzling money and committing other crimes for the benefit of the pet shop owner.
But let’s go back to Antold Folstad and that whole mess. The idea of the neighborhood the experiments are taking place in is that it is like the Village from the 60’s tv show, The Prisoner.
All of the residents are connected to Lloyd Laboratories. Talented trouble makers put somewhere so they cannot cause trouble, or family members trapped there to keep loved ones that work for the company in line. LL uses the villages to run unethical experiments away from the eyes of the public.
This would leave an opening for Lang’s family to actually be alive in another village. I was going to leave it up to you whether or not they were still alive. I figured when Thalia showed up at your door and tried to convince you about memories you did not have, it would help get Lang on board because now he suddenly had access to a talented private eye that could help him find out whether or not his family was still alive and held captive by Lloyd Laboratories.
I think everything Anton Folstad was trying to do is more or less already spelled out in the game, confusing as it may be. He wanted to create a new form of art by accessing the mind’s ability to create something from nothing. Lloyd Labs was helping him accomplish this, but wanted to use the technology to bring creations from the astral plane into the real world for sinister purposes.
The Strike of the Union
You might not have been in the game as long as the other players, but man oh man did you ever keep me on my toes. I had a real hard time anticipating what the Union was going to do, and I loved that.
His plan to expose Coffinstrike was absolutely brilliant and I really struggled with what to do. I wanted so badly to let it happen without a hitch because the idea was that good, but I was really struggling with how to make it work based upon how I conceived Coffinstrike’s powers working.
Have you ever seen the movie Primer? Coffinestrike travels through time kind of like that, but without the box. He can dislodge himself from time (becoming an invisible ghost-like entity as he travels), but in order to go back he has to do it in real time. Need to go back 8 hours? It is going to take 8 hours in ghost form. And he can’t sleep during that time. So going back to stop the Union was an exhausting effort and this highly annoyed him. He wanted a bit of revenge as a result and was more or less just messing with the Union, rather than going to the extremes that Lance spelled out.
The briefcase contained a list of mob snitches, and their families, who had gone into witness protection. Coffinstrike was supposed to take them out.
For the second story arc, I was planning something that would lead to the Union taking on an entire biker gang. I was thinking about them being sent to intimidate factory workers that were striking in the Deep, but hadn’t developed it too much as it was still a ways off.