Planning for the Future

At one time or another, most of us have dusted off our crystal balls and wondered where our characters will be five, ten, fifty years down the road.

It’s a neat exercise, looking at where your character is now and extrapolating things that might happen in the years to come.  A while back, someone on Feathermoon (I believe it might even have been our own Regatta) started what might at first glance sound like a terribly depressing thread:  the story of her character’s death.  At the same time, the Riders started looking into the future as well.

Both projects sparked some amazing writing, and gave us a glimpse into who we think our characters will be long after the servers go dark for the last time.   It’s been a long while since I last looked forward, but Illithias has started a thread for the Riders, looking 45 or so years ahead, and that has me looking both backwards and forwards.

From pretty much the first night that the Bittertongues were together, Bricu and I have tossed ideas back and forth about directions their story might take — plotlines, complications, things we did and didn’t want to put the characters through.  We’re still constantly doing that, and I think that’s one of the reasons the RP between the two of them is going strong to this day.

One component of that plotting is the willingness to let plans change as the story unfolds.  You can never predict how outside factors will influence the things you’ve plotted out so carefully,  so you need to be ready for new and unexpected developments.  Something we’d discussed, way back when, was whether or not they’d have children during the course of the game.  At the time, we’d both ruled it out, figuring they would have a family eventually, but far enough into the future that we wouldn’t deal with it in-game.

And, of course, when the future-days threads came along, we wrote about their firstborn — Threnn and their daughter both met a rather tragic end in Bricu’s story.  For nearly two years, that what-if story was the end of it.

Then, last summer, while discussing the consequences of another plotline (one which ended in a healing at the Temple of Elune), Bricu said, “Well, what if Threnn gets pregnant?”  I blinked at the screen for a few minutes, turning the idea over in my head.  We both spent a few days thinking about it — it would be a huge wrench in the works for both of them, and would of course radically affect every decision they made from that point on.

Of course, the potential stories that would come from putting them both so far out of their comfort zones was too strong to resist, and we went with it.

It’s interesting to look back and compare where I thought their story would go, and where it has gone.  The future-days plots were never intended to be any kind of set in stone future canon — they were always what-if tales — but elements of that one felt very true to both Bricu and Threnn.

Their current story, the actual canon story, is much happier and, although it’s had its darker moments, has been a hell of a lot of fun to play out.  That doesn’t mean that everything from the other tale has to go away completely — I can see certain elements of the what-if story coming into play even still, spun into their stories in a new incarnation.

So, while I’m trying to figure out who not only Naiara Bittertongue might be in 40 years, but also who her children might be, how about you chime in?  What are some significant things you’d had planned for your characters that never came to pass, or came to pass in a very different way from how you’d envisioned them?   Looking at where they are now, where do you think they’ll be in five, ten, fifty years or more?  (Or longer, for the longer-lived races?)

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »