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>On the origin of Redux (part 2)
I rambled yesterday about why Redux exists, but I did not ramble about why it exists in the form it does. This section is an excuse for me to divulge some behind-the-scenes info nobody explicitly asked about. I may have divulged some of it previously offsite or in DMs, but in the interest of sharing with my entire audience, I'll put it here too.
Prepping for Redux involved answering a lot of questions. When and where would it be set? Who would it be about? What would they be doing? How would this follow on from the original quest, if at all? As previously discussed, I had neatly bypassed answering almost all of these questions for the OG, and I paid the price for it, so I really, really tried to get everything settled before Redux started. I answered these questions in the following ways:
- When?: After the original quest. I settled on 3 years after as a fairly arbitrary number— I just wanted some distance between the original quest and Redux without making it a huge timeskip, which would've complicated things too much. Also, in an alternate timeline clearly different in various ways from the original quest, but I'll address that below.
- Where?: Elsewhere. The OG was set in the Lea, or essentially a huge grassland in the central seafloor, before the action transitioned to a crab hotel in the mountains (if you haven't read it, don't ask). I thought a grassland was uninteresting and the crabs were conceptually weird, so I ditched both. I don't remember why I picked the Corcass specifically— I suspect it was also arbitrary— but the three "biomes" it had, Fenpelok, the Mud Flats, and Hell, were all invented bespoke for Redux. I really wanted to inject some variety into Charlotte's surroundings without making her travel very far, because one of the fatal flaws of the OG is that it was way, way too sandboxy: Ellery had no special ties to the Lea and could've roamed anywhere, forcing me to scramble to invent things everywhere. Meanwhile, Charlotte, over the course of 50 threads, never ventured more than a couple of miles away from Base Camp... Satellite notwithstanding. This was intentional and, I think, successful. (Manses also added a lot of variety, also on purpose.)
