Heh, glad to hear it. I'm experiencing the opposite right now. I've felt like Demogate's been dead for months, with no real continuing development of the narrative of the history of the settlement. Unlike in Steelhold where we performed various feats of backstabbery, here we've kind of just... stagnated. This is why I sure as heck ain't voting to put Demongate in the hall of Legends. I voted for Steelhold because it was completely bloody awesome. I don't think the narrative we've constructed here is enough for me to get over my discomfort over voting for things I'm part of.
If we're gonna do another Steelholdian narrative-driven fort, I suggest that we go back to the more specific setting of a penal colony (we can do something else, like a genuine military-centric fortress, a religious settlement, a grimdark perspective etc) as constraints generate creativity and I feel like we've made a setting so generic that the real focus of the fort was always on personal dynamism. This left the thread really vulnerable to stagnating when characters died. I really didn't have another Vlad up my sleeve, so I became useless when his story concluded. I've noticed a lot of people seem to have been coping with the monotony of the setting (it gives very few reasons for interaction between characters) by bringing old characters back into the mix.
Not entirely sure what we can do to avoid this kind of degradation of the thread in the future (I'm going to arbitrarily term it Interaction Famine) but I think a good solution for future exposition-heavy forts would be to increase factionalism. Polarizing the characters and driving them into conflict definitely can't go wrong in terms of provoking interest! The question is how we're going to do it. In Steelhold what started as "every sociopath for themselves" worked out - we established clear factions (mind you, the only faction that was really a permanent thing was the Zane-Emdief-Rhaken triumvirate, Old Gods bless) that didn't result in the narrative stagnating. While in Demongate we kind of shied away from interpersonal conflicts, meaning that we settled into a "mainstream group vs the other writers in the thread" mentality.
If I were to do Demongate again, I'd have tried to be more divisive. For example, maybe instead of turning Vlad from "disgusting cheerful pragmatist mercenary" to hype-rationalist militant Philosopher-King of Demogate could have prevented the Evening Prayer Group. I really liked the Evening Prayer Group, but it turned what had been a narrative of Knights/Padre vs. Militia/Factioneers (although Asmoth never went further than teasing that. RIP) vs. Whatthefuckwaseveryoneelseevendoing? into Reasonable & Important Dwarves vs Literally Everyone.
Tl;dr here's what I think we should do for the next thread:
-Be more divisive and less prone to compromise, though factions being temporary and people going from allies to enemies temporarily is by no means bad.
-Get back to a setting thats more specified. If only the bloodkin had actually showed up (looks at RAWs, blushes)
-Figure out what we're doing here. If I'm correct most of us are really into the universe we've been making for 2 threads now, but maybe a clean break and starting afresh would be good for us? I know some of us weren't keen on doing a direct sequel as opposed to a spiritual successor in the first place. Mayhaps they were right.
-Challenge? I feel like next time it'd be good to embark somewhere where we don't end up in a permastable fort like we did in Demongate. So what do we do? Mod elves to give them better weaponry? (Stone/glass weapons and innate skills could make them very, very threating in nonconventional ways) Settle in a particularly unfriendly biome, with close proximity to enemy settlements + necro towers? Make it mandatory to go to war with everyone? Come on, you know you want to give Gnorm more excuses to murder overseers.
-Megaprojects: I feel like we could benefit from some architectural weirdness. Not really my thing personally (you'll remember that most of my projects have been security/morale oriented in both forts) but some of my favorite developments in these threads have been the bizzarchetecture. Imagine if we actually bothered to finish Castle Helgarde, or the magma weapon, or used the arena.
-Personally I'd like to get the guys from Ardendikes onboard with us. They're good at story, like to do the classical ridiculous construction, and we could use the fresh blood IMO. They've got their own fort going on right now, but it seems pretty dead. They've always had a much slower pace than we, but I think maybe it's worth looking into.
Sorry for the Great Wall-of-Text of China, I'm worried about mongolians on 120 mg of Concerta and have been writing essays for the past 12 hours. (My academic career is... completely and utterly doomed btw)
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Topic: Demongate: Wrapping up the Loose Ends. (Read 698393 times)