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I have this setting that I hate very much. It's 'urban horror'....'urban fantasy'? I don't even know.

It's literally just Hellboy with literally just Buffy and a little bit of literally just freakin Highlander of all the stupidest things possible, all with the serial numbers carefully filed off because this is my original setting, don't steal.

I blame quiller because his last big writing prompt thread was where it all started, the place where I lost my soul. @the_quiller if you ever log in again: FUCK YOU

Anyway it was kind of fun working out the mythology for the vampires and the various other evil things. I don't know what to call them, maybe that's something one of the faceless and unimportant readers of this thread can figure out to distinguish themselves and earn their right to exist in some small way. The setting has demons as the traditional fallen angels mixed with a bit of Lovecraft who aren't going to be appearing in the story because like the regular angels they're not allowed to directly interfere. Then devils are like...asshole poltergeists just out to be dicks to whoever they can, except they usually need human help to do anything major.

That's the spiritual side and it doesn't need to be that complicated because the characters all mostly fight things you can stab. But then on the physical, aside from vampires you have some other races that are the offspring of cultists and demons getting it on however many thousands of years ago before the whole non-interferance thing happened. Hellhounds are what I'm calling the big dumb monster types, and I'm thinking maaaaybe grendels or something like The Accursed for the varying flavors of the more intelligent humanoid ones. Then there's another group that are specifically the descendents of a fallen angel that at some point was like 'whoops my bad, maybe trying to punch God was a bad idea'. These are all a bunch of very slowly aging or functionally immortal people, sometimes with minor powers. They're considered 'problematic' by SHIELD the BPRD the as yet unnamed secretive government group that deals with this stuff, but not automatically evil so they usually just monitor them unless they're obviously posing a threat.

I have no idea what to call this last group, and I'm honestly not too thrilled with hellhounds and grendels either but for now at least they work as placeholders. Taking suggestions for all of them.

I don't know if I'll ever get around to writing out any of the plots I have for this setting. Seems unlikely. But it has just taken to plaguing me at a time when I really need to be focusing on projects I can finish. It's become THE default spacing out simulation my brain likes to run whenever I'm in a doctor's office or standing in line at the grocery store, driving through a packed crowd of screaming children, whatever.

Somebody please help free me from all these stupid, stupid ideas, or if not that then at least ask me some questions about it all, I might as well get the details sorted out and written down now while my brain keeps jumping in like 'hey Mizal, time for a new episode of The Continuing Adventures of the Sword Bitches!' at every opportunity and it's all fresh in my mind.

Also there are way too many female characters. Like, all potential options I would pick for viewpoint chars. It feels unbalanced but males are just...unnecessary, uninteresting, and irrelevant? I guess I subconsciously realized I needed at least one realistic element to ground this after all the vampire and cultist nonsense.

I dunno, you got too much shit going on and that tends to confuse people. Probably need to dumb it down as well.

Honestly if you really wanted to do Buffy crossover based fanfiction, you should have just had her get it on with Veronica Mars.

Hmm, duly noted. Depending on what I wanted the story focus to be on, I've got seven potential viewpoint characters. In your opinion should I make them all lesbians and then introduce seven more lesbians for them to do the previously mentioned getting it on with?

Yeah, just go for broke and make them all lesbians.

Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars should still be the main focus, but here’s the other seven if you need suggestions.

Harley Quinn
Seven of Nine
Daenerys Targaryen
Lagertha
Sookie Stackhouse
Betty Cooper
Jeannie

I mean if you want, you could switch out Betty Cooper for She-Ra, but I figured you might want another less super powered lesbian to mix things up a bit. Gabrielle from Xena would be okay too.

Their boss will still be a balding white man though. He disapproves of lesbian orgies on company time.

Especially since they never think to invite him.

Oh, so Professor X then.

Actually if this were made into a movie, I'm fairly certain I could interest Patrick Stewart in the role.

So you have this whole world and setting... is there a main character and story yet? Or a collection of main characters? A mob?

There are seven potential main characters, plus their respective lesbian lovers. Keep up.

The plot would depend on which one wound up as the POV char since they're typically off doing different things.

So you're thinking there would be one main character, and not seven? Or would you try to follow the activities of all seven throughout the story? I've seen this done where one chapter is one person/group, then the next chapter switches over to another person or group as the story builds to the climax where they all join together. I've not often seen this done well, but I suppose if you're following each of the seven and their various individual sexual exploits that are leading up to the massive lesbian orgy, I'm sure a certain population of readers will stay interested...

Well dang I was going to write up a quick parody where they kept showing up to fight monsters and somehow it kept turning into the intro of a softcore porn movie, aka most Buffy shipping fics ever written, but then things happened and I spent the last five hours alternating between gibbering with rage and taking naps, because old.

Anyway!

No I'm not planning on letting the player switch between characters, even with writing a story to begin with being an almost entirely theoretical scenario, that way lies madness.

All these characters would be aware of each other from previous encounters and they'd cross paths now and then (some more than others) but except for the one that's a glorified sidekick I picture them mostly off doing their own things just like all the other people and monsters and factions, unless the player themself goes with the choices that get them involved.

I don't really have a plot yet, like I said it'd change pretty drastically depending on which character I decided to focus on, but I know enough about the characters and setting by now that it'd be simple enough to put one together:

A personal conflict is introduced and later resolved as part of dealing with a larger outside threat, and between point A and B there's time spent either killing or investigating bad people to introduce the way the world works, with the player eventually getting to use what they've learned to strategize a little once the stakes are upped. Boom, plot.

At this point a lot of it would unfold organically since I already know how most of the major characters would interact if player choices ever put them in a room together. (And I wasn't intending to write any lesbian jokes but this sure seems like squandering a good lead up to one...)

Oh and I guess for a quick list of the actual stereotypes characters in mind:

1.) Buffy-like and her guardians. She's still learning and tends to get in over her head, while her guardians are minor antagonists toward everyone else and also attempt to secure her in bubblewrap at every opportunity, pissing her off.

2.) Meathead crusader lady who just wants to smite evil all day and views anyone not smiting evil as also evil.

3.) Government agent lady who must manage and direct various meatheads in their evil-smiting endeavors while not going over budget.

4.) Grendel/Accursed lady valued by the agency for her ability to read good. She can get smited last, assuming she doesn't betray everyone first.

5.) Highlander ripoff. Still no idea what I'm calling the neutral people with powers but there's a subgroup that's immortal and the only reason they haven't taken over everything is their instinctive desire to murder each other. Somewhat hypocritically, they REALLY hate the undead.

6.) Rich lady with vampire butlers and evil sister. Might technically also be evil but as long as she wants to help kill her sister everyone will overlook that for now.

7.) Obligatory vampire that is actually good. Her gimmick is that she must always remain completely fucking useless, but she's such a nice and polite girl and bakes good cupcakes so everyone likes her anyway.

You should have worked on writing everything for this idea and had Axiom code and do the art it in order to make a fantastic VN that would obviously sell millions.

I like the names. I also find it interesting how different your brain works than mine. I almost always start with a very vague concept, then come up with the name, and then develop more details about the character. It would appear you build the character and then figure out what their name is.

Shit, this thread was a mistake. I really want to write this now. All characters playable.

Maybe a goal for next year....after I finish my other WIPs. >.>

Nowhere lower and more shameful left to go after writing regular fantasy than urban, after all.

And heck, why not start setting goals for next year. After all, your goals for this are proceeding swimmingly, right?

You realize you have absolutely no way to prove I don't have six completed stories sitting on my computer, just waiting to be pasted over to the site on Dec 31st?

I fully expect that you do and I anxious await January 1 so I can sit down and read them all in one sitting.

Hahahaha. Hahaha. Hah.

S-sure. >.>

My schedule for New Year's Day is totally based around setting aside two nice 2-hour blocks of time to carefully read each and every one of those stories that I just KNOW are going to appear!

Your persistance on reminding Mizal about her WIPs is hilarious. :)

Anyway, Mizal, here's a question I have from your setting. There's a ton of the demonic aspects mentioned, but what about the other groups. Is human society aware of these dark beings and had it changed from them? How's the heavenly forces in this world. I'm guessings it's a rather apathetic god or one who just left it all. Are there angels?

"Your persistance on reminding Mizal about her WIPs is hilarious."

I always saw it as Ogre’s equivalent of pulling Mizal’s pigtails on the schoolyard. (That’s probably considered sexual assault though nowadays)

These are all excellent questions, and things I've already thought about quite extensively! I now have an excuse for my favorite activity of taking time off from working on a real story to babble about a purely theoretical one I'll never get around to starting. Yay!

General human society technically doesn't know vampires and the like exist, and this is actually a point of contention among some of the people who are in the loop; knowing about them theoretically would mean you could fight them openly, people would be more informed and able to take precautions, etc. But some argue there'd be mass panic and witch hunts and lynchings, or worse, people actually embracing the idea of becoming a vampire or wanting voting rights for demon-spawn.

Vampires typically don't have trouble hiding among humans, and obviously it's to their benefit to do so. The really old, really powerful grendels sort of got folded into mythology (see: the actual Grendel in Beowulf), with most of the more factual records of them destroyed or suppressed. They're mostly dead now or lurking at the fringes of civilization, while others are being actively hidden and protected by cultists or vampires. If any of them start advertising themselves too obviously, there's the agency ready to swoop in as well as freelance hunters and a few ancient holy orders still kicking around.

Most though have become so intermingled with humans at this point that they're considerably weakened and can hide or pass off whatever demonic features they may have inherited off as a deformity. After X number of generations you get the ones with no exceptional powers whose brains have mostly unfucked themselves, and they can just live normally and probably don't even realize there's anything off about themselves. (It's hard to say exactly what the cut off is, and sometimes you have minor powers popping up among regular people, or seemingly regular people turning out like that cannibal couple in Russia, so once they lose the fangs it all becomes a grey area that makes life difficult for the agency.)

I would say your average person thinks of vampires and grendels about like people IRL think of ghosts and aliens. Lots of people do believe they're real or are at least open to the possibility, but officially they don't exist and you don't plan your lives around them unless you're batshit.

Though honestly that's the part that I couldn't work out to my satisfaction so it's just going to require some hand waving. I don't think settings like this are really viable anymore when security cameras are everywhere, and everyone's carrying a phone in their pocket. Major demonic activity...glitches them out? Or something. Whatever.

God can't get too involved because that would make for a boring story.

Though actually holy water and crosses and THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU and all that work against evil shit for people with strong faiths, just like witchcraft can be the real deal for cultists. The lady who likes to SMITE! may or may not be talking to angels, and God actually did intervene in significant ways twice in the past: the first time he drowned the world and the second time he made the new crop of half-demons all have stupid murderbeasts or emotional fuckups as offspring, so they would stop declaring themselves god-emperors and building pyramids and ziggurats and shit.

If things get really bad again he'll probably just say fuck it and roll out the apocalypse, and nobody wants that.

But except for the devil poltergeist things, which can be exorcised, all the bad things are either human cultists, formerly human vampires, or partially human grendels, so there's precedent there for not interfering because of free will etc. (The hellhounds are basically just animals.) And though there could very well be an epic angelic battle going on in the background at all times, it's not going to be getting noticed by any characters in a story about stabbing and shooting monsters. Angels are invisible okay???

So while creeping profiles last night I found a story that made me realize a huge oversight: I have no werewolves!

I'm trying to use that one for inspiration. The protag is an 18 year old girl and there's lots of sex, but bewilderingly, there are no lesbians.

I was able to compel an obviously gay werewolf man to marry me however and then rape him, so I guess that's close enough? (You can also get raped if you prefer. Truly this story appeals to everyone and believe me I'm taking plenty of notes.)

I still want to see what you had for your Summer Slam contest entry haha!

Just like the chaos contest story, I'm going to publish it eventually, I've written too much on both to abandon them. The problem is I keep putting old projects on hold to start on new ones. I really really need to resist the urge to enter anymore contests, for one thing.

I will definitely not be starting any dumb vampire stories until I wrap up those two and one other WIP.

Aw, but 'sir', a vampire story is wafer thin! ^v^

Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.

WTF I created sparkles4fags.scrivx and my computer just exploded????

This has now progressed to four separate plots in my head, but I'm still being really good about recognizing it's all too stupid to try and write down.

Anybody know any Latin btw? And I could still use name suggestions for the neutral people with powers, or something better for the evil ones, particularly if it sounds realistically ancient but shortens to something easy to use in dialogue.

My SHIELD/BPRD stand in is still nameless as well.

You have all been pretty useless in this thread, come to think of it.

You should call SHIELD the World-Harm Undoing, Preventing, and Allaying Security Syndicate.

They hide all their shady, ethically questionable activities behind legit-looking canning factories, and their agents can be teleported in by opening up special devices that look deceptively like regular food cans. Opening up a can of World-Harm Undoing, Preventing, and Allaying Security Syndicate make could, for example, summon a squad of elite operatives to blow up or attack whoever you point the device at.

This was inspired. The Agents of WHUPASS need their own story.

...about ladies and their feelings, naturally.

I guess I really am going to be writing this at some point next year. For the same reason anyone is driven to write anything: I thought of a fun gimmick.

Anyway, don't mind me, all of you can now go back to being useless.

You seem to be getting more and more bitter with age. Have you noticed?

No I think what you're seeing is me getting more and more bitter with exposure to CYS.