sandukutupu Arc User

Activity

• 
  captainflipflop → sandukutupu

  Hello,
  My name is Scott Roepel, I'm a freelance writer and Neverwinter player myself.
  I saw your post about The Fire of April Contest and wanted to know if you'd be interested in talking a bit about the creation process for an article?
  It wouldn't go into detail about the arsonist, just explore how you came up with the concept and how you are putting it into place.
  If you are interested, please let me know.
  Thank you for your time.
  Scott

  0

  August 22
  • 
    sandukutupu

    Sorry for such a late commentary on this, the concept was to make a mystery and use the last available authors to play parts. As most players know, The Foundry was a game mission/campaign editor that ran the life of this game until April 11th, 2019. The Foundry was built mostly for ego stroking, there was no way to abuse it as a cheat engine as so many implied. When module 17 changed the mechanics the developers dropped the Foundry and all the works with it.
    
    My Foundry quests included puzzles, some minor mystery to be solved. For solving the puzzle, I got in the habit of including prizes by game mail. Over time the prizes became more elaborate. When the Foundry ended, I was/am still in collection mode. I keep banking items other players feel I should be using to my own advantage. After 4 months of banks filling up, I thought I better have a massive contest to give away a large lump. I created a new guild and opened another bank within and deposited my overflow. Then I collaborated with some authors who were not told what they were to do other than be interviewed by an investigator and they might drop a hint about a Waterdeep Knight. I collected and edited their interviews into my plot.
    
    Sir Cody Cuspit is an anagram for Cryptic Studios. In essence, I was saying Cryptic Studios burned the Foundry to the ground. I had thought about linking him back to an official in Waterdeep, an adversary of Dagult Neverember whom was trying to promote unrest in Neverwinter. I dropped that and went with simple insanity. This was pretty much my way of saying, good-bye to the best feature Neverwinter Online ever had to offer. At this point I would like to tell you all the authors "real names" but some remain a mystery to me;
    
    Brian Black (my spouse) as hotfrostworm - Gruula Axebreaker & Faral Loreweaver
    Dr. Simon Tomoko as doctordna - Calamity Venomtongue, Sarah Bookbinder, & Corporal Nick Hudson
    Xanros Dirgel (pretty sure that is an alias) as blargskull - Hiviticus & Reid
    Josh A. (met him learning the Foundry on STO in 2012) as sameriker - Makaria Demonbone, Shava Darkhawke, & Kris Silverkin
    I filled in the rest with most of my characters.
    
    As for the little details, "oil of shale" is an old school name for kerosene. When writing up stories, I do research into what people actually did back 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. Writing for science fiction is too hard, you need to actually research facts about the topic. This is why I stick to fantasy. I filled in red herrings where needed such as, many of the characters blaming Neveremeber for the fire and Aero blaming the Zorgs.
    
    The winner found the insane knight in the basement of the Broken Crown. I knew this would be one place accessible by anyone with a level 10 character since Sir Cody was level 10 himself. There was always the off chance someone outside the contest, would stumble upon him, and at least 2 people came in a saw him there but never bothered to read his history.
    
    In my opinion, the best way to make characters come to life in your stories, is to know every detail about them from cradle to the grave. A recent pitfall of a famous fantasy author is, she doesn't seem to know her own content and keeps changing it just to please the fans. Know your content and know your characters.

    October 19