jl8e

The Critical Shift story is done in primary writing, and mostly done in revision. I'm not posting it all now to keep from overflowing people's friend lists, but expect a chapter every twoish days until it's done. (There may be delays due to internet problems at home.)

I didn't mean to wait so long between posting the first chapter and the second, but I was shorter on time than usual this past week.

( Critical Shift: Rebirth )

The set after TFT turned out not to be Critical Shift as we had planned. Critical Shift was going to be a new starter set, but that fell through. We reorganized the design team, and decided to do a Western-themed set first, with the hopes that we'd still be able to do CS as a starter set.

So, we took some of the cards left from CS playtest, mixed in new Western-themed cards, and made Shurikens and Six-Guns. (Yeah, yeah, Shurikens are Japanese, and Shadowfist is primarily Chinese-based.)

The set was still set post-Critical Shift. The main story, which was never written, was more of the usual: bad guys try to Take Over the World, Dragons stop them, etc. IIRC, Braz volunteered to write it, but that didn't happen. This story intersects it slightly (technically just after the main story's end), and should tell you everything you need to know. (I never released it because I was waiting for the main story to be finished. You'd think I eventually would've figured out that that trick never worked.)

This story was an idea of Gavin's that we thought was pretty cool, so we tossed a few references into the set, but nobody actually wanted to write it. Eventually, I decided I was capable of it, and had some ideas about how the plot could work, so I took a shot at it. It also ended up providing some background on one of the random "what's their story?" characters who occasionally pop up in Shadowfist sets, and some early setup for a future set's story, which will now never happen. I also wanted to work the set's Purists into it, just to provide some explanation for them, but they didn't have an actual purpose, so they didn't make it in.

This is the next-to-last piece I have, but the last one (the Critical Shift story) is a big one, and still unfinished, although I'm making good progress. (Especially now that I'm done with Portal 2.) It's broken up into six parts, but I don't want to post any until it's done, since I may need to make more changes to the early parts as the later parts develop.

( The Ballad of Jia Baoyu )

Another one of the post-critical shift stories.

This one was to answer the big questions about how the Dragons winning the pulp juncture could actually work, and it does, although I'm not convinced anybody but me can actually see it. :)

Since it directly mentions the events of the TFT finale, I was waiting to post it until the TFT story was finished.

( Critical Shift: Zheng Yi Quan )

And now, the first major piece of Shadowfist fiction I wrote: the finale to Two-Fisted Tales.

Fortunately, by the time I wrote it, we knew who had won. If I'd had to write it keeping all the factions viable, it would've sucked. (There's still at least four available.) I honestly don't know how I would've worked some of them in. The faction who were leading going into Gencon were doable, but I'm just as glad I didn't have to. The Jammers would've been really bloody hard.

This was easier for me to write than the other pulp stories would've been. The rest of them were in sub-generes I didn't have a good feel for (For the John Fenris/Golden Gunman story I was supposed to write, I had to download and read a bunch of Doc Savage novels), while this one was something I'd been reading for a couple of decades.

We were waiting for the rest of the story to be finished before releasing the lot, so it never actually got posted.

( It's a long, cold road ahead of our heroes.... )

Since the Two-Fisted Tales storyline could allow any faction to win, I decided to write a story featuring some of the possible futures that could happen.

( Critical Shift: Possibilities )
( Some notes )

This was the first thing I wrote for Fist, and I'd forgotten it existed, probably because I didn't have a stand-alone copy on this computer, just a dump of the N2 story from the old Shadowfist website, and I'd assumed it was just an HTML-ized version of Dave's story.

I don't remember if I wrote this because I felt like the character needed more introduction than he got in the N2 main story, or just because I felt like it.

( Netherworld 2 Prelude )

And now, back to the beginning of my Fist fic.

This one is the second one I worked on, and I think also the second piece of fiction I'd written since high school. The first one was a side-story for Shaolin Showdown, where I bogged down near the end and never finished. I don't seem to have it anywhere convenient.

This one was a companion to Dave's story for Dark Future (which can no longer be directly linked to, for Bad Web Design Reasons), giving the players more background on the new faction, who'd been kicking around since Flashpoint in 96, but were only now coming into their own. (In a lot of ways, Dark Future was kind of a sequel to Flashpoint. There were a bunch of things introduced into the world in passing in there and the Player's Guide. We had no idea what, if anything, was planned for them, so we took the little seeds and made shit up from there. Homo Omega's plan and the Purists had got a little attention during previous Z-Man sets, but the Reascended hadn't been seen since a sentence or two in the Player's Guide.)

And no, in case you're wondering, not all of the Fist fiction I wrote involves somebody infodumping throughout the story. I think there's only the two.

( The Purists: A Debriefing )