I’m using this as a sort of launchpad for various things I’m trying to write which aren’t games, or at least form a narrative of some sort.
Something to note is that these are, for the most part, first draft at best, written on my phone in cafés or bars or hostels. Little to no editing has occurred. Formatting gets a little weird because different systems interpret an end of line differently.
There Is No Such Thing As A Rail Pirate
https://hoarde.net/craigblog/?page_id=5778
Years ago this line, delivered in a clichéd pirate manner, came to mind; “Here we be, becalmed upon this desolate siding”. I have no memory of what spawned it, or why cartoonish pirates would be sailing on a rail network, though it may have had something to do with rail bikes, maybe?
Anyway, the idea got kicked around a bit, and morphed into something in which such a ridiculous line could actually happen, though it also moved pretty far from that idea.
For the record, this was years before I read Railsea by China Miéville.
Anyway, I’ve been reading a bunch, and as my brain starts to relax after a fairly eventful and often unpleasant year, I’ve been getting more interested in doing creative things that aren’t the Former Job. Which is what led to this.
Halloween Isekai
Isekai (Japanese: 異世界 transl. ’different world’, ‘another world’, or ‘other world’) is a sub-genre of fiction. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime, and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe
https://hoarde.net/craigblog/?page_id=5872
A number of months ago I had a weird dream that had enough narrative to it that I wrote it down.
A group of people running through a disjointed landscape to accomplish some important task, passing through sections of buildings & parts of ships & ending up at a huge temple in the rain. They’re coworkers, and aren’t in the the best shape for a lot of running, and one of them apparently has the task of carrying a door handle with the keys still attached.
The whole thing had a very Cartoon Horror sort of feel to it.
Thanks to some friends I’ve read a lot of Isekai stuff recently, and it got me wondering about whether that dream would fit into the “reincarnated into another world” genre, which then had me wondering what would cause a whole bunch of people to get Isekai’d all at once, which then made me imagine the folks in that other world having to deal with a sudden flood of Isekai protagonists on no notice.
And so I wrote the start of it