MOD:WCU:PR3start

Everything in PR3 will be after the war, except the military stint; --it's only fitting to have it end when the war ends, isn't it?

Starting the game, you get attacked at a base, your ship is destroyed, so you you pay for your way off system and a ride to Perry by working as a turret gunner aboard a Drayman. Once at Perry you have no choice but to enlist with Confeds and you make a first stint (very easy), after which you're a Reservist; but now as a reservist they call you back in before you have a chance to escape, and you're into a second stint, this time with Black Ops. Maybe this second stint could begin with rescueing Monkhouse from Kilrathi captivity, and attacking some of their most secret bases with nuclear or biological weapons. This would benefit the whole canon, in that the idea of the kats giving up the fight solely based on the destruction of Kilrah could be questionable, but if some bases they had and thought were super secret get attacked and wiped out just before the destruction of Kilrah, that would make the treaty of Torgo all the more believable. Anyhow, in your debriefing, or the rumors you hear, is that during this operation you'll be wiping out as many as 50 kat bases, but you only end up doing a few of them and the war ends, and now you're a (probably decorated) veteran. After that I have no idea yet, need to learn a lot more about the timeline and the characters and places. There should be at least 1, and more likely two sub-plots per major faction: AWACS, BW, Landreich, Firekka; but I don't know in what order yet. There are basically two choices at each point in the timeline:

A) Choose the same focal point as the main WC timeline and add to its story; or... B) Choose a new focus, in an area far from the focus of WC timeline and supplement it.

And choice A subdivides into...

A1) What you do sets the stage for events in WC, like the Black Ops in kat territory helping justify Torgo. A2) What you find out explains what happens to characters after WC events that were left untold in WC canon. A3) Who you meet and your conversations with WC characters add angles or depth to characters and story from WC canon.

I'd like, over all, to mix these aproaches, or simply not to have a "policy" about it, but just let the story grow on us.

But, coming back to factions, I think we have to try and

1) make a very fine-grained subdivision of the factions 2) understand their complex relationships 3) understand the visions and goals of some of the main players in WC history 4) develop a deep story about each of those characters 5) find lose ends in the WC story 6) come up with stories to tie them up 7) add new characters and stories that would fit

In other words, we start from both ends top-down and bottom-up: Top-down meaning that we know the overall plot: Confed stint, faction-oriented plots, kroiz saga/gun saga; and we're trying to flesh them out. Bottom up meaning the process of discovery, by dissecting the Priv/WC story and finding what's going on, and finding what lacks explanation, and mining little gems that grow into full little stories, and perhaps bind themselves to other little stories forming larger clusters.

Hopefully the dual approach will help accelerate the process: A pure top-down approach would feel like all form and no substance. A pure bottom up approach would give us just loose pearls in limbo. But working both ways should produce at least some early results of story pieces with good form and good substance.

All of the above pertains to coming up with the "deep" story or plot. Turning that into a mission specifications and dialogue should be very easy, as then the work is one of reducing detail. Showing only those elements of the story that Burrows would happen to see, or needs to know. Whatever the player doesn't strictly need to know to play along, we have a choice to make it obvious and explicit, or easily deducible, or hinted at, or really hard to figure out, or possibly impossible. Which is the way life is, after all, there's a lot of stuff we don't know, and a lot of stuff we can't know. _________________ "Glory is fleeting; Obscurity is forever."