I’ve been doing some fan fiction dabbling for the better part of two, perhaps three years now, and its been centering on a Guild Wars 2 alternate timeline I call ‘(Lay) Healers of Tyria’ – LHoT for short.
While I’ve had the general outline of its events in my head, there have been times where I’ve needed to be more concrete in what the overall setup is. This post is the beginning of that.
So, where to begin? In most AH formats, there is a PoD – a Point of Departure – that is the beginning of where things actually changed. Problem here is that, in order to do that in a sane manner (for its Story’s sake) you have to undertake two separate PoDs – and the actual first one is not what you’d normally think of.
Lets begin with the more obvious PoD – the actual ‘Lay Healers’ dropping into this new world. Unfortunately we have to do some worldbuilding on the side, as very few gamers have even heard of the RoleMaster RPG (other than in frustrated cursing perhaps). So I have to first lay down the note that these two characters are, in effect, ‘magical surgeons.’ There’s more to it than that, but since about 99.5% of their spells aren’t carrying over anyway, that’s good enough.
A second issue is with character backstories, but in the cases of Sungak and Arthur (our two ‘drop-ins’), I am letting their personalities and dialogue (internal and external) do that for me.
The third (and hopefully last) issue is with character translation, but again their old character archetypes are well known to me – they’re my old characters after all – and so moving them to appropriate (mostly) character classes in GW2 was relatively straightforward.
So, with PoD 1 outlined, what is PoD 2 exactly? Its the ‘standardization’ of the entire GW2 Storyline.
Let that sink in for a moment – I’m effectively having to re-write the perspective on its entire story so that its changed from a traditional MMO’s ‘you are central, regardless of those around you’ to ‘there is only one set of “Big” heroes, and yet you do play a part in the larger scheme of things.’ So there is only one Pact Commander from the start, which in turn (during the Scarlett ‘campaign’) leads that person to personally pushing for what we know of as the Guild Initiative. But, the Guilds (as I shorten it) have a larger supporting role – some can become more active and more toward ‘hero’ status over time.
This eventually does cause a larger systemic issue with the Pact, post Heart of Thorns – they’re in tatters, and the Commander (now officially the Marshal in my outline) ends up taking the extraordinary step of expanding Pact Command so that never happens again. As Sungak and Arthur arrive sometime in the middle of LW-S2-E9 (Point of No Return), Sungak (who for a time was a Mayor) helps in this planning – at the expense of being tapped for one of these Command positions. Though he only agreed because his role was to be a permanent liaison to the Guilds, and assist in their movement throughout Tyria – basically what he was originally doing anyway.
It is a pretty massive change; when compared to the rather linear fashion of the existing Living World and Expansion content, a lot of it can now run in parallel – which can either shorten or lengthen relevant parts of the timeline, depending on circumstances. Also, a lot of it will not be run by any one person(s) anymore – I’m slowly assigning Command slots to the major parts, but its been a new form of slog that I’m unfamiliar with. Its been a fun challenge anyway, so I keep at it. I’m even finishing a little ‘one shot’ of sorts by adding a glimpse of what the current-day Pact/Guild operations (as well as the central city, known as Lion’s Arch) are looking like these days.
So, there in a (not so small) nutshell is the high level view of LHoT. Part of it will likely be split off to something more generic, as part of a useful worldbuilding exercise; that can potentially save this pain by others later.