13 replies to this topic

[Kwicky Koala]

So I recently got the news that LA is closing down. Maybe this thread is futile because the forum will disappear tomorrow. But one more for the road, I say...

 

I started my reminiscing by reading the LA Chronicles again. I just wanted to say, I think being part of a huge story that we were all creating was really fun. I was hoping people who contributed could get in here and give their feelings on how the stories panned out - editorials if you will - and perhaps tell us what you were thinking while writing, who were the other Chroniclers you admired, and what were the great stories that never got told? The whole thing just seemed to fizzle out - I am partly to blame, my life got in the way of contributing as much as I could've.

 

To start off I will talk about the first tale I properly participated in, "What Could Go Wrong?". It was basically just me and Leo Crimson in the thread, with some additions from Selena. It was a small story, just two pages, but it was really fun for me and it seemed to have a nice beginning-middle-end to it.

 

Basically the plot we were giving to work with was: there's a convoy of Koridaian weapons travelling and we have to intercept it. Step forward Calatian dwarf Leo Crimson, and myself (Catterick). Because my style of writing has always been very campy and not at all serious, this was a lighthearted adventure, despite having a fair share of gore and some mature themes. I really loved Leo's writing, which was very good especially considering he was so young at the time. He really got into the character of this loyal and serious dwarf, and his deadpan delivery worked quite well I think with my flights of fancy. Whereas I would banter with our enemies, the Koridians, and deliberately make them say stupid things, Leo would just punch them out. This is WAR, dammit.

 

Another thing I loved about this story was how we both contributed on fleshing out the NPCs, giving them a large share of the glory, and handling them with genorosity. The story concludes with quite a feel good ending, which suits the frivolity of the piece while also paying tribute to the NPC who dies during the action. It was a great introduction to the Chronicles for me, and I want to thank Leo and Selena for it.

 

One addendum: during the quest we discovered a young girl NPC who was sometimes controlled by Lena. I never was sure what the deal was with her, she was meant to be a child given spy training to infiltrate Calatia on behalf of Koridai. But nothing really came of it. I tried to flesh her out more in a subsequent thread but in the end she was forgotten about. It's a shame, I based my interactions with her largely on my relationship with my own youngest sister (there's a 16 year age gap between us).

 

So come on, share your memories before this place explodes.

[wisp]

I didn't get into the Chronicles so can't participate there. But I wanted to make sure you knew we aren't actually closing LA, only this version of it. At this point it's just not cost-effective or practical to stay on the IPB board (including server costs and IPB licenses), so we've moved LA to a new home. http://legendsalliance.boards.net/

 

We are getting started on full revitalization efforts. We aren't going away.

[Kwicky Koala]

I appreciate it wisp, I registered on the new forums.

[wisp]

Yay! I'm glad you'll be joining us in our new home.

 

I updated the sticky with a link to the new board, just in case anyone else needs it.

[Egann]

I came late to LA Chron, but I had a great time giving my character a terrible day. I remember after he sealed off Arbiter's Grounds I had a maid chuck a chamberpot's contents on him right before he got arrested. Mmm. Classy.

[Selena]

I have very fond memories of the Chronicles. I'm honestly surprised at how far they developed while also staying in line with previous dorms' histories and the Dorm War games. That alone is a big achievement. We pulled some plot points straight out of genuine LA history from 10+ years ago.

 

It was sometimes tricky to balance "total free form RP" and "director guided RP" -- threads often took a life of their own, but the forum moderators often had an overarching plot to tie everything together and keep people motivated. I think the really big story arcs were pretty well-executed. Those huge threads were pretty heavy. We had a lot more in mind, but.... hey, real life takes precedence of a group story. We all get busy as we get older.

 

I'm also surprised at how prominent some NPCs got. I made Eivor as a little throwaway secretary, and she ended up becoming a pretty strong B-string character with a life of her own! 

 

Near the end, my character ended up a little disconnected from the "main group," and I occasionally missed some things in the Wind thread, but I had plans to reunite with you all somewhere down the line. On a day that never came, it turns out. I enjoyed RPing with you guys when it came time for the big threads, and I especially liked hanging out with all the Calatians near the start of the Chronicles. My little mountain minions. Leo was just one of my promising captains when we got started!

[Kwicky Koala]

Being Calatian was very fun, I must admit, though the downside was that I never really got to interact with the Koridai Chroniclers like Egann. Although, generally I preferred being in the background, acting as the comic relief and creating little side characters and mini events.

 

"Call of the Cursed" was the second major thread I participated in. I was really excited by the story and the large amount of people participating, including my old pal Khallos. The atmosphere was very dark and bleak, seeing as we were journeying through a post-cataclysmic world populated by crazies. Towards the end of the story, to pad things out a tad, I got our group attacked by a "female demon" residing in the ruins of the old Labyrinth of Doom. Though I never said as such the creature was implied to by Lycia, who was an indistinct mythological character in the Labyrinth back when it was my dorm . I contined using figures from the Labyrinth's past in the story that "Call" led directly into, "So It Begins".

[JRPomazon]

I feel like I got in on the whole Chronicles sections pretty late with Reclaiming the Past, kind of a side story that did it's own thing while the main events happened elsewhere. I kinda of feel my characters were in their own little world for the most part, which might not reflect well on me as a writer in the whole group thing we had going on. I look back at some of the stories I wrote and my God I was terrible at writing.

 

Considering the nature of things here on LA, I don't think I can give the finale to The Day the Wind Died that I wanted to as a group. I do however intend to write out a finale in some form or another once my life calms down a bit. Only question is where I should post it.

[Nevermind]

I think my favourite recollection of the Chronicles is when I PM'd a bunch of Lena's cohorts and secretly recruited them into my Committee. Boy was she pissed when it was revealed.

Also there was a god named after me.

[Kwicky Koala]

Guess I'll finish up by saying a bit about the last thread I was involved in, "So It Begins." This was essentially a massive fight scene between all the Call of the Cursed expedition against former leaders of the Labyrinth, given life again by Lazu. Oh, and Chikara of course.

 

Seeing as everyone was going all out in their battles, I wanted to make my fight, with Khallos against Veteran, special. For some unknown reason I gave Vet the personality of Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, but the main thing was giving time for Khallos to come in and direct some of the action (unfortunately he went AWOL for this thread). So I got my character lost as Vet cast a spell on him to remove him from the scene.

 

This is where it got confusing, and I was never sure if I made things clear enough. Seeing as Vet was a mod, in this universe Vet gets to use his magic book (Book of Vet reference) to send people to the jail, represented here by a pocket dimension. Catterick arrives and finds it looks exactly like his old home-town. He enters his old workplace and sees a man (another pointless movie reference was thrown in, this time Goodfellas). Turns out the man is another prisoner, one who can shapeshift, and shift the landscape around him to Catt's memory. I based this character on another Loddie who I think was called Link, who returned time and again with other accounts claiming to be other people (hence shapeshifting,) for which he was eventually banned. 

 

So the whole thing is like Russian Dolls, Lazu or Chikara uses their magic to resurrect Vet, who uses his magic to send Catt to a prison dimension, the Imposter character uses his magic to shape the prison dimension to fool Catt, and eventually Catt uses his magic to escape. Self-deprecatingly, I defined my "magic" as making lame references to the world outside the Chronicles. Just as hearing these film, videogame or music references took you mentally out of the action of the Chronicles, by making enough of them (and realising he is in a story) Catt is able to break down the barrier between fantasy and reality and escape through the fourth wall. This is the only way to escape the prison dimension.

 

From there things got even weirder as I was forced to find a way to get back to the Chronicles universe, still waiting for Khallos to arrive and write some of the battle. I decided not to go all the way and simply write myself back into the story, instead Catt passing through the fourth wall takes him to an imagined version of the LA Forums. I envisioned the place as a modern multi storey building, which each floor corresponding to a sub-forum. So Floor 1 would be the Commons, Floor 2 would be Gaming, 3 would be Media, etc. Catt starts on the Jail subforum/Floor since he was banished there by Vet. On Floor 1 Catt met the LA Stealth Squad, which was a popular thing back then. He visits Contro and LA Storyline (virtually identical) before visiting the Archive, a deserted Floor filled with old dorm memorabilia, which he of course recognises seeing as the Dorms and the Chronicles were linked narratively. He eventually finds the LA Chronicles subforum/Floor (where I featured a cameo by DarkJuno) and enters one of the computer terminals (magic boxes?) there. From there he returns to the action in "his" world, landing on Vet who gets beheaded by Khallos. Phew.

[Sir Turtlelot]

I remember being reluctant to join the Chronicles initially, as I had never RPed before, and had always seen it as rather strange. We had a Chronicles recruitment thread in Calatia looking for new members to join, and I eventually said what the hell and gave it a shot. I immediately fell in love with it. I joined the thread Money for the Cause with Leo and Rhia, and I awkwardly narrated my character's every action, since I for some reason thought that was important.

 

I also remember spending a great deal of time creating my character before joining, since character creation and development is a weird hobby of mine. I spent an awful lot of time at Hero Machine, just messing around with design ideas. The character Sir Turtlelot is actually a character I created many years before joining LA, and I contemplated using his standard human form for Chronicles, but I really wanted to try and do something different. There was a skin on Hero Machine that made the designed characters look like an android, and I toyed with the idea of having this iteration of Sir Turtlelot be some kind of spirit powered robot. The idea seemed fun, so I went with it, and since I had been using Darth Vader as my avatar for so long, I based his height and dimensions off of Vader's, making him much larger than normal to boot.

 

It's funny, I never had any real ambitions of being any kind of key power player in Chronicles when I first joined, I just wanted to have a unique character. I figured it would be fun having a big robot with a bunch of knights and warriors. Shortly after we started the thread The Witch of Voodoo Island, Steel PMed me about the thread with some kind of proposal about my character. At the time, I had revealed next to nothing about my character, as I was claiming to reveal it later, when in reailty I was just being lazy and was still putting off writing my book/stories revolving Sir Turtlelot and his adventures. (Years later, and I still haven't made any progress on it.) Anyways, Steel proposed the idea of making Turtlelot be the character destined to wield Diel's sword. My original design for the robotic armor was to have it the creation of Turtlelot's mentor back from his world, but we discussed changing that to having the armor be created by the monks of Diel and Turtlelot's spirit merely inhabiting it. From that point on, I became the only character to really wield any of Diel's power, at least at that point in the story, so being thrown up against Chik seemed inevitable.

 

At first, I only had Turtlelot as an ally to Calatia, rather than a full blown Calatian, as they both had the same goal of stopping Chikara. Turtlelot's whole backstory was to be an ancient warrior who sent to different worlds in the event the scales of balance and power were thrown out of wack. After Selena betrayed Calatia and left a bit of a power vacuum, I had my character step up and take on more responsibilities, and actually start identifying as a Calatian.

 

As I mentioned in our round table for The Day the Wind Died, I had planned on killing off Turtlelot in a heroic sacrifice sort of manner at the climax of the thread. As I said there, I had planned on having him badly defeated by Selena, but just barely surviving by absorbing Lazu's power. Afterwards, I planned to have him seal himself away from the rest of the world, removing from the Chronicles. I planned on occasionally having a ghostly vision of him appear to former allies and rivals, like Leo and Lena, in an Obi-Wan type of manner, but aside from that he would more or less be dead.

 

I actually had a number of other characters in mind for the Chronicles after Sir Turtlelot, but with the 2 character rule in place, I decided to leave most of them on the backburner for the time being. I did get a chance to introduce Nikola to the Chronicles, but I wasn't able to really do much with him, as interest and participation had started to decline badly shortly after his introduction. My plan was to make him a new sort of central villain for a post dorm story arc, but it unfortunately never went anywhere. I may leave it open and just write it as a short story and post it to new LA one day. Outside of Nikola, I had ideas for a Lizardfol thief who had a bad history with Loddies, an apprentice of sorts for Turtlelot from his Cursed Lands expedition, a (former) Calatian officer who served under Turtlelot in the dorm war, and another Guardian (the type of dimension traveling warrior like Turtlelot himself). They were all fairly developed characters, and I might eventually just start writing them in their own stories for fun. If I do, I'll definitely share.

[Selena]

You know, looking through the old threads, I have almost no memory whatsoever of the threads that took place in the Ikana/Fortress/Woods years. My memories of the Chronicles really begin during the Calatia/Koridai era. Or, rather, the big battle at Olimandias that started that era off.

 

Shit, we had the Chronicles forever!

 

Reading through the really old threads is jarring my memory, at least. I'm surprised. We had a lot of threads before we switched to the latter dorms. I guess it's because the Chronicles didn't really mature until then -- that was when all the really big threads started cropping up. The early threads were glorified free-for-alls with minimal intervention or handling. No big arcs. Just a lot of people playing with words. And character rivalries based on who got their butt kicked in the recent Dorm War!

 

I really enjoyed RPing with Rhia. I wish she was still here. I miss her. I always thought it was funny that my little apprentice was all sunshine and rainbows and friendship, albeit with a killer angry side. I also forgot that XX-Year-Old had participated for a while, too!

 

 

 

I remember looking forward to bringing the Labyrinth back into the story because of course I did. I think I was pretty antsy about getting that started. So when the opportunity finally presented itself, I jumped into those threads with glee. Maybe a little too much.

 

 

 

 

 

We should also give Dark Link a lot of credit for world building -- he was the one who came up with a lot of the backstory and nations that played a role in the early Chronicles. Made the dorm banners. Built up stories for older characters that were long gone. I think he went on to use some of this in his personal projects elsewhere, but it was still really impressive that it started off with us. I haven't been in touch with him for a while, but I always admired his creativity and ability to pull a project together with lots of people involved.

[JRPomazon]

Absolutely, Dark Link totally deserves massive props for what he contributed. It's a shame he isn't active anymore or else we could thank him properly.

 

 

Unrelated but I'm going to be posting some stuff in the Wind Died Recollections thread I started before the forum goes dark. If you want to know how it all plays out, that's where to go.

[Nevermind]

He saw. He said it was nice.
That's his version of thanks.