In terms of lost stuff, I’m thinking for the Demon War of telling a key incident/battle from the perspective of each of the main characters –
so if you can remember something cool you or anybody else did, let me know (otherwise I’ll make stuff up to fill it out). I recognise many of you only joined at the Hamuji War just before the Demon War, so you aren’t in these early expeditions, but I’m going to put those characters into the Demon War so they are introduced before the second (and much longer) Fated story arc. Gerk, Nargoth, Sirith, Scorpiox, Prodigy and Fides will all thus be first appearing in the Demon War.
Also lost on the Toketi forums are the zombie expedition and the expedition to Taonas, so if you want me to retell those, anything you guys can remember will be a great help! Many of the rest of the expeditions are saved on the Gralan forums/the wiki, both of which are down on the web because our old hosting disappeared, but I have old backups from just after we moved to Bastion, which I’ve set up again on my local computer so I can access source material. If people are super keen to have those back up generally, I can play around and see if I can get it to work with my new hosting provider …
Onto some broader notes on the retelling. First and foremost, I know these are
our stories I’m retelling, not mine – so don’t worry, I have intention of trying to publish these or anything (they’re not good enough to do that anyway, I’m not that accomplished a storyteller …). When I do package up the first arc in a pdf nicely, I’ll acknowledge all of you at the start by your character name – very happy to acknowledge you in addition/instead with your real name if you like – just let me know
Second, I’m doing the project for my own enjoyment and purpose (i.e. making the stories accessible and ultimately being able to tell them orally to kids), so I’ve made some narrative decisions to that end in retelling. If you have comments/feedback, I’m open to it (would always love to make these stories even better!), just letting you know the broader decisions I’ve made so you understand why some of the changes are there. These broad decisions are:
- Characters who only appeared briefly/once are being dropped – otherwise there’s way too many to keep track of and I have to invent most of their dialogue anyway (as they didn’t do much in the first place). This includes both people who made one post randomly in the middle of an expedition, and people’s side/assistant characters. The main exception to this will be female characters, because we don’t have too many of those, so in the interests of gender balance I’ve prioritised their inclusion, even adding Tsunade into an expedition to replace Sorongath at one point. Also, Nicholas got retconned in earlier instead of some of the other random Novatainians who never stuck around long, and Da Huntsman has been merged as a character with Q (to honour how much he was around but didn’t expedition).
- Name changes are too complicated, so Frumpmaster just starts as Longbow, Matt just starts as Arnole, Demon of the North will start as Nargoth, Demon of the East will start as Sirith, and I’ll have to see how Scorpiox’s characters progress in later expeditions but I’ll probably collapse some down. Similar with Atticus/Gnaar Mok.
- I’ve tried to make the expeditions relatively self-contained and internally/externally consistent, so sometimes that means dropping minor openings we left ourselves when writing that we never took up, and adding new things in to close plot-holes. If I dropped your favourite bit, sorry – try, and you can probably talk me into putting it back in. I’ve tried to keep characters relatively consistent across these initial expeditions too – if that means I’ve made you too one-dimensional, also sorry – I’m open to help in improving your dialogue/character development (and I expect more character development to occur in the second arc). Being self-contained also means unnecessary references to external events have been dropped (and in other cases my memory just fails me for timing so I’ll just go with what seems good narratively. Like when did Lachlan make me king, or Lyam make Bayen king? I’ll probably just put that in at the end of the demon war. The Gralan senate thing will be dropped entirely, and we’ll just transition from separate kingdoms to Empire at some point – again, can’t remember when – hoping I can tell that from expedition timing).
- I’ve dropped everything I know is directly copyright infringing, including renaming some creatures (e.g. Balrogs have been reworked as ‘Fire Trolls’).
- Because I have kids in mind as a potential audience, I’ve decided to drop the word ‘demon’ throughout. The demons are still there (they’re the major enemy in the first arc, after all!) they’re just called infernals; and Demon of the North/East/Fides will just be Nargoth/Sirith/Fides. I’m still undecided on whether I’ll include necromancy in the second arc or not – I know those events played out IC but I’m not sure how much they made it into expeditions to be packaged up into nice self-contained stories. We’ll see when I get there. The second arc gets darker anyway, especially by the Fated War, so it wouldn’t be too out of place there.