The Last Poster Wins [v31]

[Neo Emolga]

You guys might not believe this, but the VERY first thing I do when preparing a new season of Stalkers is… *drum roll*… come up with the single word that links them all together. Liked “wicked” or “corrupt.” Each Stalker’s name then starts with one of those letters. So for “wicked,” I might have one Stalker use the “W” to be “Wanesoul” while the “I” might be “Ichorspit.” Or something like that. It may sound silly, but the thing is, it gets the creative juices going. I come up with a Stalker name for each letter and there we go!

Once I get a Stalker name for each of those letters, I then start working on some of the other things like the map, though first I kind of need to decide what biome is going to be featured and how big of a town this is going to be and what its story is. Then I kind of go random with it, drawing roads here, square and rectangles here and there to resemble buildings, add some forests here and there, and so on. After that’s done and the map looks nice, I start numbering all that stuff and then writing those short one-paragraph descriptions as to what those places are. Some of them I had advance intentions as to what those locations are, but I’d say about 80% of them are made up on whim. I have a dark love for writing up the descriptions of the dark, effed-up ABANDONED places. >:3

While those locations get determined, I make the list of civilians. So if I decide some square on the map is an apartment building, then I create Pokémon characters to live there (same with businesses), and usually I use the random Pokémon generator and use the ones I think would be the best fit for the setting and scenario. I might drop in a few homebrewed characters I suddenly come up with. I then give all of them personalities, likes/dislikes, a workplace, a living place, hobbies, and friendships/rivalries with other civilians (sometimes those get added during the course of the game). I then randomly roll which ones are Stalkers (I used to decide this manually, but I have a feeling with all the seasons that have gone on, people would know my style xD). That makes it much harder for peeps to figure out which ones are the culprits.

So we could say some random Jubilee the Eevee ends up as Wanesoul. I look at their personality and their likes/dislikes and decide “ok, how can I corrupt these and what does it mean to be Wanesoul?” I then flesh out their background story a bit more. Sometimes I tweak the personality a bit depending on how I want this corruption to go. Let’s say Jubilee the Eevee is a kind and faithful soul who likes knitting and sewing. Well, now that she’s Wanesoul, those traits of hers are now used for all evil intentions, BUT in a way that’s hard for those who know her to detect. She may now be deceptive, using her kindness and previous honesty to have others let their guard down around her. Then, maybe because she likes sewing, she does something sick and twisted with that as a murder signature, like sewing her victim’s eyes, mouths, and throats closed with some sick, demonic power, causing them to suffocate. And bingo, a new Stalker is born!

With the Stalker’s backstory made, I then decide what their route is going to be like. And each Stalker has a theme, so we can use Wanesoul as Jubilee the Eevee again and her dark theme of sewing. So maybe a few things along the route could be a corrupted plush doll that has reassembled, or maybe gathering dark needles to ram those into a voodoo doll that causes some other kind of reaction or item to appear. I always build a Stalker route working backwards from the big reveal and it works like a tree, branching out with small paths of A goes to B to unlock C that lead to the item(s) that unlock that Stalker’s lair. Some items will be rigged with traps. So in Wanesoul’s case, we could say she’s big on Purity damage (since her Stalker’s name implies harm to the spirit). Maybe a little Sanity damage dashed in here is okay, too. Some Stalkers really stab the Health stat down. Others might go more for Sanity damage. A lot of them are mixes of these. It all depends on their kind of style and what their murder signature and themes are like.

Once I have all the items and steps needed for that Stalker’s route, those then get placed on the map or handed to a civilian (I have a giant reference thread for where everything is and it’s all color-coded too xD). I try to place these in locations that somewhat make sense, but sometimes it can be a bit of a stretch. But that’s ok, I figure I can work those into the narratives later. I then add the extras like graphics, puzzles, and all those good extra bits that sure, don’t NEED to be there, but they give the whole thing a lot of enjoyable extra flavor. And I repeat this whole process again for all the remaining Stalkers.

Once those are done, then I decide exactly what I want to do for the “Sin Purge” ritual thing and this changes every time, essentially. Some components of it may have the same kind of route system going. Others… might have some other gimmicks going on. It’s a bit more open-ended compared to Stalkers. I play around with various ideas but I can honestly say for Duskwoken, things have changed from “ah, this thing looks holy, obviously part of Utopia’s Sin Purge stuff” to… well, you’ll see. Things aren’t so obvious anymore and you’ll have to dig around to find out! But I try to make a background story with these as well and give each part of the route or process some kind of purpose as opposed to “well, you need this holy water because… well, just because.” Nah, at least use it in a way that it cleanses a previously corrupted item that needs to be converted because it has some special kind of function or something along those lines.

But that’s basically how it goes! Yeah, it takes a few months to create everything and get all the prep stuff done, but it’s a dang fun thing to host. Search and interview results may have the items and route/item things the player will run into, but when the whole thing is underway, I now have the enjoyment of writing the narratives of what that player comes across in that search or how that discussion with the civilian will go (based on the rapport and the civilian’s personality). That’s a whole lot of fun, too. But the ultimate guilty pleasure comes from finding out the player DIED from the trap they ran into and that prompts Aglome Oen to narrate the post instead with snarky and cynical commentary.

It’s quite a bit of work to host, but it’s a HECK of a lot of fun, also. The other great thing is that it’s flexible. Even after the whole thing has begun, I can add new graphics later or adjust things depending on the situation. Usually I try to avoid making drastic changes (like Season 5), but it’s possible. If a gimmick I had in mind isn’t working, I can try to work things out behind the scenes that doesn’t make it look so obvious something got chopped. Or if I forgot to place an item (sometimes happens), well, poof, I can hand it over to a civilian or put it in an unexplored location and as long as I can explain how it got there during the narrative-writing, no one will suspect a thing! It’s impossible to predict exactly how things will go down, but having that flexible room to make tweaks can make all the difference.

I think the only thing I wish I did with Stalkers RPG was invent it years earlier. There have been plenty of PE2K and PXR members that have come and gone and I would have loved to see if and how they would have gotten into these. But hey, you guys are here and I’m glad to see it’s gotten plenty of love! You guys make it all fun and awesome! :3