>>6341099Crab hotel is still canon... you know, elsewhere. In a timeline that doesn't matter. It was pretty deliberate that it didn't come back in Redux, though, so you could call it cut content.
Some other things that got cut from OG include:
- Ellery's glass lungs: a weird nonsequitur left over from super-early OG plans, added way too much complication to keep
- The deserted nature of the seafloor: also a leftover from the "civ quest" concept; the setting was more interesting with some civilization in it
- Half the OG characters, most notably Lorne, who was annoying, and Gideon, who was weird (but whose vibes and appearance got recycled-ish into Horse Face)
- The room in the crab hotel which GOT DRAINED OF WATER AND FILLED WITH BREATHABLE AIR, which was nonsensical (and would've muddied Charlotte's mission to return to the surface)
Some things kept from OG but downplayed:
- Handsign: Still exists in Redux, but as a utility, not a mandatory second language for underwater -- which, again, added way too much complication (I semi-retconned it as something most useful for the recently drowned, which explains why Ellery heard so much about it in the OG)
- The strange effects of blood: Also still exist, but got way less attention compared to the OG, and Charlotte was given special non-reactive blood specifically so it wouldn't need to be brought up-- I wanted the focus to be on the new metaphysics introduced in Redux, and also contorted blood to fit those metaphysics (i.e. it behaves like that because it's the human body's main carrier of Law, a concept which didn't exist in the OG)
Some things kept from OG and expanded upon:
Beyond the bulk of the setting and the other half of the characters, the main two "keepers" from OG were Ellery and manses. Ellery was the main character of Drowned Quest, I liked him, the players liked him, and I felt it wouldn't really be "Drowned" without him, so he got kept AND got a huge quest-long subplot centered around him. While I don't regret the choice of keeping Ellery as a major character, in retrospect I think Redux had way too much Ellery too early-- I wanted to use him as a way to get my former voters invested, but they probably would've showed up regardless, and it came at the cost of baffling my already-limited new playerbase. (Cue teenage hysterics already discussed.) But what can you do?
Manses are included in this section not because they actually appeared in the OG-- they didn't, and definitely weren't named that-- but because they were directly inspired by Ellery's mind adventures back in the day. In fact, I originally had it that Ellery *invented* manses, as a result of working out how to explore and stabilize his mindscape, and that's why he was so involved in Headspace. Later, I realized that was stupid. But you can see a remnant of this in the quest: Ellery's manse is on an island because it arose from that mind-ocean he found one time.
