jl8e

This chapter of CS is the third-longest thing I've written for Shadowfist. (Fourth, if you count the OmniFAQ, but that's a very different beast.)

It contains the only scene I knew was going to be in the second half of CS before I started working on it again, and even then, I wasn't completely sure of the exact motivations. (It's the last one.)

( Critical Shift: Apocalypse )

This is the first truly new bit of fiction I wrote. The TFT Dragon frame was new, but it pretty much followed along how I planned it out way back when.

The second half of the Critical Shift story, on the other hand, was much vaguer in my head. I had some idea how it ended, but not the details, and everything in between was uncertain.

This is certainly not the story I would have written back then. A number of elements are just things I wouldn't have thought about using, or wouldn't have been comfortable with.

It's also a lot longer than the previous chapters. The first three combined are about as long as the fourth, and there was a section that was going to be in this chapter, but I ended up bumping to five for a variety of reasons, mostly pacing. I don't know if the length is because the plot really starts moving forward here, or because I'm writing differently.

It was a bit tricky to get started on this one. I eventually just started writing what ended up being the first scene, realized what the chapter title was, and everything started rolling from there.

( Critical Shift: Compromises )

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 )

Blame ladymondegreen for this one. The first half-dozen or so paragraphs existed. I knew more-or-less what happened after, I'd just been a bit unhappy with my start, and been unsure how to revise them. (I ended up not making any notable changes.)

Then she went and encouraged me. Not only have I finished this one, but I also started writing more of the Critical Shift story in my head before I was done with this.

Anyway, this one's weightier than the Ascended frame, because the Ascended were unaware of what was really going on, whereas the Dragons, since they're the heroes, are in the thick of it.

The sheer number of characters gets awkward at times. It might've been easier if the five McGuffin-hunt stories existed, since I could farm off character work to them. As it is, a lot of them get no real foreground time. I'm not happy with that, but the hoops I'd've had to jump through to even introduce them properly proved awkward as hell.

It also makes inserting the card images trickier than normal. (Especially since things render differently in every single browser I've tried.)
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