TAKE X/The Centrality - Discussion

TAKE X
PART ONE: Take Ten
PART TWO: The Normal Place
PART THREE: Take X

The Centrality

So as Take X nears its end, I thought it'd be nice to have a place to answer questions/discuss things/etc. about the story. As you can see, Take X started as Take Ten, which began about 4 years ago - so there's a lot going on here. If you are confused about anything that's happened so far or need clarification on anything (and let's be fair, i completely understand if you do, sometimes I end up confusing myself), I'd be more than happy to field questions.

Same deal for The Centrality!

Also, as may be apparent, both adventures take place in my fantasy setting, Ennen. I try to worldbuild as best I can in the adventure itself, but if there's anything you want to know about the setting, ask away.

Or, you know, just discuss!

With regards to spoilers, I generally assume that people in this topic are going to be caught up, but you never know. So be cordial with spoiling recent plot things, I suppose.

So I've got a question- how much of the story was planned out from the beginning, and to what degree did reader influences change it? (Been a reader since Take Ten- it's been really cool to see the story start to tie up and enter endgame!)

That's a question with a lot of different answer parts!

First, Take Ten. There was very little planned out aside from Sienna burning down the Guild and attempting to murder the top ten. I knew that would be the driving force behind everything, but I didn't plan past that. I had a few secrets up my sleeve (Ione being a shade, for example), but other than that pretty much everything was improvised in response to commands. Even Sienna killing Palmer! That one was a direct command someone gave during their battle.

In fact, without that specific command, I likely wouldn't have thought to give a Game Over, prompting Takes 11 through 14. And if it weren't for Takes 13 and 14 specifically, Take X would likely not exist! So Take Ten was very heavily influenced by commands.

The Normal Place wasn't originally intended to be part of the same story, even though it featured the pantheon from Ennen. As a result of Take Ten being so loosely planned, I was hitting writer's block pretty bad, so I wanted to take some time to do something unrelated. Once I started nearing the end, though, I began to see how I could tie everything in. Because it was a murder mystery, I had to plan out a lot of it from the start, although I did diverge from the original plans pretty significantly in the last few cases (I can talk about that more in depth if anyone's interested). So The Normal Place, plot wise, wasn't influenced as much by reader direction.

Take X hit sort of a happy medium between the two. I planned who each chapter would star in advance (though I had a star planned for this last chapter - Blue - and obviously that ended up not happening). I also came up with a "prompt" for each chapter: Palmer needs coffee and ends up in Khetaqa, Justice explores Emek and finds a mysterious orb, etc. As a result, I also had "win conditions" in each chapter too. Aside from the starting point and the ending point in each chapter, everything in between was improvised in response to commands. It was also possible to fail a chapter, and I knew that doing so would make the final chapter more difficult, which we can see in progress now.

I've tried to not railroad whenever I can. A good example is the choice at the end of Sienna's chapter. If readers had elected to go in the light door and not the dark, the final chapter would be proceeding very differently. That said, the final chapter has been the most improvised of all of them - I didn't have an outline for this one at all. I have a potential ending written, but it's just potential, and I'm constantly changing it as things happen.

The overarcing storyline for Take X is similar - I had a starting point planned and a rough ending point planned, but in between it was mostly improvised in response to readers.

I hope that answers your question! Thanks for asking (and for following the adventure for so long!) and I'd be more than happy to expand on anything I mentioned here, too.

I have seen several new gods on your tumblr, that we didn't see in the Normal Place. Do they tie into this story? Or are they for a different iteration of the setting?

Also I am glad Meion is okay-ish.

The short version is that, no, they don't tie into the story.

The long version is that I originally came up with the pantheon all in one batch about 3 years ago around when I ended Take Ten and was brainstorming the Normal Place. Since then, I've been working pretty regularly within that setting, and I'd occasionally come up with other domains that it made sense for there to be a deity of (like the sun, moon, and stars, in the case of Asanema). So I'd design a deity for that domain and move on. The 'new' pantheon is largely the same as the old pantheon, but with Monitor out (their role in the pantheon didn't fit for my newer endeavors) and Asanema and Alagi in. Side note - this is the status of the pantheon that will appear in the manuscript I'm working on.

Semi-related, there are ways for new deities to appear in the pantheon story-wise too. If a mortal has enough people believe in them, then upon their death, very rarely, they can ascend.

Also I am glad Meion is okay-ish.

I'm glad I got to bring him back. Meion was always one of my favorites from that group. (Other favorites include Ithria, Duximas, Krytikas, Tukha, and Optrian.) My wife never entirely forgave me for killing Meion.

Also, I keep wondering about the talking Ammon in the Normal Space. I assume that since it went silent in the last court session, I couldn't decide if it was just a puppet with the Siennitor talking through it, or it got the gift of speech which got revoked at a crucial moment.

The answer is sort of a combination of the two.

The Ammon acted as Sienna's eyes and ears in the Normal Place. It had its own autonomy, but it basically was just doing what Sienna wanted (and in fact was almost just an extension of her - Sienna marked it as a hero and in doing so imprinted a lot of herself on it). When the final case rolled around and Sienna started taking a more active role, she decided that the Ammon wasn't serving its purpose anymore and disabled it.

Think of the Ammon as a mini Sienna drone, or something like that, basically.

A Minienna, even.

On continuation of planning/spurofthemoment, were the hidden skills preplanned, or based on user commands? What kind of things could Justice have unlocked?

Who would win in a fight, ATHLITISMOS or Breza

The hidden skills were a completely improvised thing! I didn't plan for them in advance at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure the first time I considered the concept was in Palmer's chapter after he defeated Blue. If I remember correctly, people suggested at the time that Palmer get meta like Sienna did, so I folded that into a secret skill for him. I hadn't actually originally planned for any of the meta elements to come back at all.

Then, of course, once I gave Palmer a secret skill, I had to give one to everyone. I had vague ideas before most chapters as to what the hidden skill would be, but I was open to changing it if necessary. In Sienna's chapter, for example, I knew ahead of time that her secret skill would be the ability to use her mimicked skills at will, while in Shadan's chapter, I didn't know what I was going to give her at all.

The only chapters where the secret skill didn't come up were Makram and Giovanni's (I honestly forget what theirs was supposed to be, but obviously we took a different path through that chapter than I anticipated), and Justice's (for obvious reasons).

I don't think we ever saw Justice's skills at all, for that matter. She would have had a skill to play music on her violin and one to sing, and then her secret skill would likely have had something to do with Emek - maybe luring Miracle Men to her and redirecting them to her enemy.

Also, in a hypothetical matchup between Breza and ATHLITISMOS, ATHLITISMOS wins head-on, but if you give Breza enough prep time, she come out on top.

I see!

Also, amusing, I was wondering why the Miracle Men didn't appear, pondering if recruiting Justice was pointless, but then THAT scene happened.

They were already here.

Yeah, that's one of those things that was originally very different - I had losing conditions for each chapter too, but I didn't think too much about the consequences. So when Justice ended up losing, I had to figure out really quick what that meant for Shadan's chapter (since Shadan was originally supposed to just steal an orb from Justice like she did Makram) and for the final chapter.

I meant recruiting Justice for the final the battle. Justice's chapter wasn't pointless imho. Good to know though, I wanted to ask about Losing conditions too : o

Nah, every character was going to have a role they could play in the final chapter, though some were necessarily going to have bigger roles than others. So, if Justice hadn't lost her chapter, she would have been useful in the final chapter by helping ward off the Miracle Men. But, like you said, they didn't need to show up since she was already there.

As far as losing conditions go, these were the ones that I remember off the top of my head. I didn't necessarily know these conditions at the start of the chapter in question, but they're the ones that occurred to me at the time.

Palmer - Either touched the demon first or lost to Blue
Celeste - Lost to Blue
Duximas - Lost to Mysterious Circumstances
Makram and Giovanni - Either got too close to some of the creatures in the sewer or lost to Pia Amata
Justice - Didn't escape from the Miracle Men or lost to the boss of her chapter
Shadan - Didn't escape from Emek
Sienna - Lost to Blue

"Didn't escape from the Miracle Men or lost to the boss of her chapter"

What was the boss in question? Would the science miraclemen.... combine?

So the boss of her chapter was actually going to be those two guys in lab coats that we kept seeing through her and Shadan's chapters. We didn't get much into it because of how quickly Justice lost her chapter, but those two guys were scientists using Emek as their base of operations.

The idea was that Blue would interrupt Justice's exploration, but would have gotten caught by the scientists after Justice escaped with the orb. The One Goddess wouldn't have intervened to save him, breeding resentment that would have boiled over in Sienna's chapter, leading to him rebelling and being the main character of the last chapter.

That, uh, obviously didn't happen, leading to a wildly different final chapter.

@Sciencemen: huh I thought they were miraclemen too. I wonder what they have been studying there...

@Blue: Alas...

At least we still have his mask maybe it'll be useful...

Seeing Makram and Giovanni in court again just reminded me of something.

We never found out who actually committed the murder Giovanni was accused of. What was the real story there, since we're probably not going to revisit it? (Maybe figuring it out would have been how to unlock their special ability in that chapter.)

That's a really good question, and if I'm being completely honest, that murder was likely never going to get solved. The beginning part of that chapter was planned to end with Makram and Giovanni in prison, and it was supposed to feel really sudden to reflect how Sienna's Vezretti ran its court system. That said, I think the idea was that one of the guards - the ones Makram runs into outside the victim's home - was the culprit.

I assume the sciencemen were not around in the reboot, or Justice managed to outsmart now that the miracle men were not around. You mentioned they were experimenting, what kind of experiments were they performing?

Oh, sorry, you did ask about that earlier and I completely skipped over it. The Miracle Men were indeed absent this time around, which is why Justice was able to outwit the scientists.

The scientists, incidentally, were working on making chimeras and fusions.

In retrospect, I'm kind of okay that we didn't see that in-comic, because doing the sprites for some of those would have been a nightmare.

A beautiful ending indeed ; -; I am glad not everyone forgot about the Recent Events, especially that Palmer remembered. I also theorize that he is Krytikas's secret son in secret, but who knows if that is true.

There are actually some big hints in the adventure as to Palmer's lineage, if you look closely!

Can we talk about the new Centrality too in here?

Yup! Updated the title and the first post to reflect that.

I only found this after I posted on the end of Take X, GOOD ENDING

EDIT:
CENTRALITY IS FUCKING GREAT