![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Here's the basics, as I put them on AO3:
Title: The Virulent (34892 words)
Fandom: Sunless Sea
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Zee Captain, The Carnelian Exile, Maybe's Daughter, The Quiet Deviless, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Choose Your Own Adventure, Possible Character Death, Epistolary, Canon-Typical Horror
Summary: The Virulent leaves the docks of London with a new captain at its helm: a woman seeking fame, fortune, and adventure on the Unterzee. The zee will always provide opportunities, but not every captain knows how to navigate between the shoals of caution and ambition to find what she seeks.
There's also a transcript version, covering three expeditions, if you want to read a version of the story without having to flip between chapters and make choices.
If you haven't played Sunless Sea, but have ever played Fallen London (aka Echo Bazaar), you know enough to be able to easily read/play this story. If you've never played Fallen London, then what you need to know to understand the story is: London was stolen by bats to a vast underground location, some years ago, because of a deal with devils. And now people set out from London to sail the vast underground ocean in rickety steamers, conducting trade with the many strange ports on the islands out there.
That all said! If you're curious, here is my ramble about the process of writing it.
The tl;dr version of what follows is: what a lot of work! how satisfying it was!
I offered Sunless Sea and Any characters, and matched to someone requesting four of them (the zee captain, the Quiet Deviless, Maybe's Daughter, the Carnelian Exile), and mentioning a few things they particularly hoped to see: southern ports, unusual formats (like epistolary or ship logs), Irem. And a note that they were fine with weird, creepy, and dark results on the story. So I sat back and considered how to get all four of those characters into a story that traveled from London to the far north-east as well as the far south, with maybe some creepy hallucinatory monsters and...and... Huh. No. It was all going to look too contrived.
Unless it was a series of expeditions. I could put the requested characters on separate trips, as well as the requested locations. The Carnelian Exile is easy to find in the south, the Quiet Deviless is near Irem on a lot of maps, Maybe's Daughter can show up anywhere.Simple! Except. Well. I like a challenge, and I like pastiche, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it as a type of IF. I've had fun with Interactive Fiction variants lately, the canon is already a type of IF in both its incarnations, and...my recipient said odd formats were okay, so that included IF, right? Probably? Yes, especially if I included a transcript, just in case I had guessed wrong.
This is the point at which I pulled up Sunless Sea, started a brand new captain, and begin my zailing with a different approach than usual. I wasn't trying to make money, or track down my father's bones, or make it to the far East: it was time to find Irem, locate all the characters requested, and take a whole lot of notes.
Have I mentioned how much I love Scrivener? Because it was absolutely invaluable for this. I had a folder for each of monsters, gods, ports, and characters: and then I had a tab for each of the types of the above, added as I got to them. Absolutely invaluable, because when I'm writing conversation between two officers at the table, I do not want to have to then pause and spend twenty minutes sailing back to a port so that I can remember how it was described in canon and expand on that appropriately. SO MANY NOTES, I tell you. Which god of the zee has what kind of aspect and ritual? How are monster remains described when you pick them up after a battle? Wait, was Shepherd's Wash the island, the port, or the area of zee?
And the characters! This was the bit I was really concerned about. Writing new characters is easy: writing existing characters is one of the big challenges for me during Yuletide. (And part of why I sign up. It's great practice, to try to pastiche someone else's style and characters instead of defaulting to my own tropes and types.) I chased down one character after another, and then threw any resources necessary into following their plots as far as I could. Each character tab had a transcription of every line of dialogue I could see for those three characters, so that I could write their voice, gestures, and intonation properly, even aside from describing them physically properly.
Maybe's Daughter and the Quiet Deviless were the easiest to set plots on, at that point. Maybe's Daughter does a little spy work on the side, and can travel anywhere: I attached her to the Admirality. The Quiet Deviless is in Mount Palmerston, so it was time for diabolic conspiracies and a trip there. But the Carnelian Exile? I didn't have enough time in game to pursue her plotline very far, despite long conversations with her. Besides, I didn't want to repeat a game plot. People can play the game for the plots already attached to those characters! I wanted to show those characters at a different point than the game shows them. Recognizably themselves, but following a different bit of personal goal. So after a lot of thought, the Carnelian Exile got an appropriately unnerving and mysterious plot that could be plausibly attached to her long-term goals.
It is very hard to write her voice. But I think I pulled it off pretty well.
(I swear, I'm not rambling just to boast about how hard this was. It was a lot of work, but it was very interesting work. I love this kind of challenge.)
Anyway. At a certain point I had to start writing the story, and this threw me for a loop briefly. The simplest way to do it would be standard CYOA format. (Especially once I'd decided to go with chapter-based CYOA, rather than trying to learn Twine or the like on top of all the writing and research.) Second person, pause dramatically at appropriate choices. Very straightforward, if often a little bland in style because of trying to leave room for the reader to self-project into the protagonist. Easy to write endings for. "You have been devoured by a mind-altering sea monster" or what not. But... the request specifically mentioned ship logs! And I wanted to capture canon voice and style, but not to the point of writing it in exactly the same second person format as FL and SS as they already were.
So I went with entirely in-setting texts. Ship logs, private journals, letters, excerpts from a tourist's guide when I wanted to give a longer description of a location than the captain herself would write. Which was a lot of fun! Riiiiiight up until I had to figure out how to write Bad Ends, which, most of the time, could not be written in the captain's journal, for obvious reasons.
But that turned out fun on its own, because suddenly I had an excuse to make some of the bad ends even more mysterious and/or grisly, because I could let outsiders describe them. Explorers and other zee captains and whoever else might stumble across the tragic aftermath of a zee captain having made a Poor Choice. This was easier some times than others: if you hit a Bad End in Irem, well, that ended up being more cryptic than I hoped for, because there was no plausible way to describe what happened clearly. Very Irem-appropriate itself, though, yes? And once I was set on this, I made sure to set up endings where all of the in-setting text could plausibly have been recovered by someone else.
And in any case, doing it all as in-setting text was a great deal of fun, because I could do several different styles of tonal pastiche based on who was writing. A sailor writing to her child back home has a different voice than the captain's journal, which isn't quite the same as her official log entries or reports to the admirality, and those sound different than a spy's coded letters or a tourist guide or a different captain's reports.
Choices were another hard one at times. Usually I could leave it as the end of the captain's journal entry, in which she states what decision she made, or an action she had decided to take as soon as she finished writing. But I had one choice that had to occur essentially in the middle of combat, where the wrong choice would mean the entry never could've been written. To which I resorted to--well, you'll see if you play the Carnelian branch and get to that place. The challenge of figuring out how to make this work within the constraints I'd set for myself was a lot of the fun.
Plotting! Also tricky, also fun. I made new tabs and numbered them in the order I made them, so that I could be sure I did't accidentally duplicate any chapter numbers. I wrote down a quite note as to the gist of what was happening in each branch, mapping out each expedition before I wrote it, with notes also on where choices happened, and which chapters they led to. Once in a while, I changed my plan as the writing happened. (There is one chapter listed as "This chapter left intentionally blank" because there ended up being nothing to go in that tab.) I also double-checked my branches constantly, and did one final check after I'd posted everything. (For which I am intensely grateful, as it turned out I had an off-by-one error on an Irem choice which would've rendered that whole branch out of order.) Most of the branches I had a general idea of before I started writing, but no real details until I outlined them specifically.
And speaking of branches--I knew I needed at least three, to get in all the requested characters. I wanted to do something like six, and ended up with five, which is, I think, a pretty reasonable number. And then like a COMPLETE FOOL, the very first branch I wrote was the trip to the north... in which none of the requested characters appear, thus committing me to writing four separate branches minimum. I nearly started writing the monster research expedition next, but instead held it out as a reward for getting the writing done promptly enough. "Write a little faster, Fade! You want to do that bit with the monsters!" I'm quite pleased that I managed to get to it at all, as I wasn't sure I'd make it that far. The Carnelian branch was hard to plot out properly, especially since I had to make sure that the several points where it can loop back to the same chapter always made sense.
In the Palmerston branch, I ended up copy-pasting the same devilish meeting about four times, and then adjusting for each place it might be reached from, because it simply wasn't interesting if I wrote a sufficiently generic version that it could be reached from all those points, even if the meeting was itself very similar. (Or was it three times? And I know the same meeting can be reached from two points. Anyway.) Other times, I would copy text over, and then tweak it slightly based on a choice made earlier that wouldn't have a serious pay-off until later. If you've picked up the Carnelian Exile, your trip to Port Carnelian is just a little bit different, even though you don't pick up with her storyline properly until after you've arrived.
And...that's about it, I suppose. A great deal of work, but the work was so much fun! It's made me want to write more IF, and I learned a lot about branching and merging branches and how to make choices significant and not repetitive. (Sometimes the captain should be bold, sometimes cautious, sometimes kind, sometimes mercenary, to reach various good ends or avoid certain bad ones. And once in a while, it's a coin toss, because luck has always played a role in Sunless Sea as well as skill.) I've also rediscovered my love of settings with a lot of weird in them, which is perhaps responsible for my newest novel project.
Special thanks go to csoru, who gave me such an excellent request, and thus gave me an excuse to play a lot of Sunless Sea and write a lot of things in an experimental style I've been wanting to try out anyway; and to byzantienne, who read every damn word of the story, helped me clarify some ambiguous points (especially around the cannibalism scene), and gave me great encouragement along the way.
Title: The Virulent (34892 words)
Fandom: Sunless Sea
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Zee Captain, The Carnelian Exile, Maybe's Daughter, The Quiet Deviless, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Choose Your Own Adventure, Possible Character Death, Epistolary, Canon-Typical Horror
Summary: The Virulent leaves the docks of London with a new captain at its helm: a woman seeking fame, fortune, and adventure on the Unterzee. The zee will always provide opportunities, but not every captain knows how to navigate between the shoals of caution and ambition to find what she seeks.
There's also a transcript version, covering three expeditions, if you want to read a version of the story without having to flip between chapters and make choices.
If you haven't played Sunless Sea, but have ever played Fallen London (aka Echo Bazaar), you know enough to be able to easily read/play this story. If you've never played Fallen London, then what you need to know to understand the story is: London was stolen by bats to a vast underground location, some years ago, because of a deal with devils. And now people set out from London to sail the vast underground ocean in rickety steamers, conducting trade with the many strange ports on the islands out there.
That all said! If you're curious, here is my ramble about the process of writing it.
The tl;dr version of what follows is: what a lot of work! how satisfying it was!
I offered Sunless Sea and Any characters, and matched to someone requesting four of them (the zee captain, the Quiet Deviless, Maybe's Daughter, the Carnelian Exile), and mentioning a few things they particularly hoped to see: southern ports, unusual formats (like epistolary or ship logs), Irem. And a note that they were fine with weird, creepy, and dark results on the story. So I sat back and considered how to get all four of those characters into a story that traveled from London to the far north-east as well as the far south, with maybe some creepy hallucinatory monsters and...and... Huh. No. It was all going to look too contrived.
Unless it was a series of expeditions. I could put the requested characters on separate trips, as well as the requested locations. The Carnelian Exile is easy to find in the south, the Quiet Deviless is near Irem on a lot of maps, Maybe's Daughter can show up anywhere.Simple! Except. Well. I like a challenge, and I like pastiche, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it as a type of IF. I've had fun with Interactive Fiction variants lately, the canon is already a type of IF in both its incarnations, and...my recipient said odd formats were okay, so that included IF, right? Probably? Yes, especially if I included a transcript, just in case I had guessed wrong.
This is the point at which I pulled up Sunless Sea, started a brand new captain, and begin my zailing with a different approach than usual. I wasn't trying to make money, or track down my father's bones, or make it to the far East: it was time to find Irem, locate all the characters requested, and take a whole lot of notes.
Have I mentioned how much I love Scrivener? Because it was absolutely invaluable for this. I had a folder for each of monsters, gods, ports, and characters: and then I had a tab for each of the types of the above, added as I got to them. Absolutely invaluable, because when I'm writing conversation between two officers at the table, I do not want to have to then pause and spend twenty minutes sailing back to a port so that I can remember how it was described in canon and expand on that appropriately. SO MANY NOTES, I tell you. Which god of the zee has what kind of aspect and ritual? How are monster remains described when you pick them up after a battle? Wait, was Shepherd's Wash the island, the port, or the area of zee?
And the characters! This was the bit I was really concerned about. Writing new characters is easy: writing existing characters is one of the big challenges for me during Yuletide. (And part of why I sign up. It's great practice, to try to pastiche someone else's style and characters instead of defaulting to my own tropes and types.) I chased down one character after another, and then threw any resources necessary into following their plots as far as I could. Each character tab had a transcription of every line of dialogue I could see for those three characters, so that I could write their voice, gestures, and intonation properly, even aside from describing them physically properly.
Maybe's Daughter and the Quiet Deviless were the easiest to set plots on, at that point. Maybe's Daughter does a little spy work on the side, and can travel anywhere: I attached her to the Admirality. The Quiet Deviless is in Mount Palmerston, so it was time for diabolic conspiracies and a trip there. But the Carnelian Exile? I didn't have enough time in game to pursue her plotline very far, despite long conversations with her. Besides, I didn't want to repeat a game plot. People can play the game for the plots already attached to those characters! I wanted to show those characters at a different point than the game shows them. Recognizably themselves, but following a different bit of personal goal. So after a lot of thought, the Carnelian Exile got an appropriately unnerving and mysterious plot that could be plausibly attached to her long-term goals.
It is very hard to write her voice. But I think I pulled it off pretty well.
(I swear, I'm not rambling just to boast about how hard this was. It was a lot of work, but it was very interesting work. I love this kind of challenge.)
Anyway. At a certain point I had to start writing the story, and this threw me for a loop briefly. The simplest way to do it would be standard CYOA format. (Especially once I'd decided to go with chapter-based CYOA, rather than trying to learn Twine or the like on top of all the writing and research.) Second person, pause dramatically at appropriate choices. Very straightforward, if often a little bland in style because of trying to leave room for the reader to self-project into the protagonist. Easy to write endings for. "You have been devoured by a mind-altering sea monster" or what not. But... the request specifically mentioned ship logs! And I wanted to capture canon voice and style, but not to the point of writing it in exactly the same second person format as FL and SS as they already were.
So I went with entirely in-setting texts. Ship logs, private journals, letters, excerpts from a tourist's guide when I wanted to give a longer description of a location than the captain herself would write. Which was a lot of fun! Riiiiiight up until I had to figure out how to write Bad Ends, which, most of the time, could not be written in the captain's journal, for obvious reasons.
But that turned out fun on its own, because suddenly I had an excuse to make some of the bad ends even more mysterious and/or grisly, because I could let outsiders describe them. Explorers and other zee captains and whoever else might stumble across the tragic aftermath of a zee captain having made a Poor Choice. This was easier some times than others: if you hit a Bad End in Irem, well, that ended up being more cryptic than I hoped for, because there was no plausible way to describe what happened clearly. Very Irem-appropriate itself, though, yes? And once I was set on this, I made sure to set up endings where all of the in-setting text could plausibly have been recovered by someone else.
And in any case, doing it all as in-setting text was a great deal of fun, because I could do several different styles of tonal pastiche based on who was writing. A sailor writing to her child back home has a different voice than the captain's journal, which isn't quite the same as her official log entries or reports to the admirality, and those sound different than a spy's coded letters or a tourist guide or a different captain's reports.
Choices were another hard one at times. Usually I could leave it as the end of the captain's journal entry, in which she states what decision she made, or an action she had decided to take as soon as she finished writing. But I had one choice that had to occur essentially in the middle of combat, where the wrong choice would mean the entry never could've been written. To which I resorted to--well, you'll see if you play the Carnelian branch and get to that place. The challenge of figuring out how to make this work within the constraints I'd set for myself was a lot of the fun.
Plotting! Also tricky, also fun. I made new tabs and numbered them in the order I made them, so that I could be sure I did't accidentally duplicate any chapter numbers. I wrote down a quite note as to the gist of what was happening in each branch, mapping out each expedition before I wrote it, with notes also on where choices happened, and which chapters they led to. Once in a while, I changed my plan as the writing happened. (There is one chapter listed as "This chapter left intentionally blank" because there ended up being nothing to go in that tab.) I also double-checked my branches constantly, and did one final check after I'd posted everything. (For which I am intensely grateful, as it turned out I had an off-by-one error on an Irem choice which would've rendered that whole branch out of order.) Most of the branches I had a general idea of before I started writing, but no real details until I outlined them specifically.
And speaking of branches--I knew I needed at least three, to get in all the requested characters. I wanted to do something like six, and ended up with five, which is, I think, a pretty reasonable number. And then like a COMPLETE FOOL, the very first branch I wrote was the trip to the north... in which none of the requested characters appear, thus committing me to writing four separate branches minimum. I nearly started writing the monster research expedition next, but instead held it out as a reward for getting the writing done promptly enough. "Write a little faster, Fade! You want to do that bit with the monsters!" I'm quite pleased that I managed to get to it at all, as I wasn't sure I'd make it that far. The Carnelian branch was hard to plot out properly, especially since I had to make sure that the several points where it can loop back to the same chapter always made sense.
In the Palmerston branch, I ended up copy-pasting the same devilish meeting about four times, and then adjusting for each place it might be reached from, because it simply wasn't interesting if I wrote a sufficiently generic version that it could be reached from all those points, even if the meeting was itself very similar. (Or was it three times? And I know the same meeting can be reached from two points. Anyway.) Other times, I would copy text over, and then tweak it slightly based on a choice made earlier that wouldn't have a serious pay-off until later. If you've picked up the Carnelian Exile, your trip to Port Carnelian is just a little bit different, even though you don't pick up with her storyline properly until after you've arrived.
And...that's about it, I suppose. A great deal of work, but the work was so much fun! It's made me want to write more IF, and I learned a lot about branching and merging branches and how to make choices significant and not repetitive. (Sometimes the captain should be bold, sometimes cautious, sometimes kind, sometimes mercenary, to reach various good ends or avoid certain bad ones. And once in a while, it's a coin toss, because luck has always played a role in Sunless Sea as well as skill.) I've also rediscovered my love of settings with a lot of weird in them, which is perhaps responsible for my newest novel project.
Special thanks go to csoru, who gave me such an excellent request, and thus gave me an excuse to play a lot of Sunless Sea and write a lot of things in an experimental style I've been wanting to try out anyway; and to byzantienne, who read every damn word of the story, helped me clarify some ambiguous points (especially around the cannibalism scene), and gave me great encouragement along the way.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject