If you’re reading this, I imagine you also read the deleted scenes for volu 1. You know the drill. These are all changes I made to the draft based on what-ifs and ideas I had that either got cut from the story, or that Miria and co. never got to see but could have potentially found if their stats were better.
Ahem.
First, a few interesting thoughts.
I spent a long ti trying to figure out whether I wanted to give Miria Alteration or Manifestation as her big talent, once I did the essence rework in draft 2. I was actually leaning towards making Miria a little witch in future worlds as well, but I just couldn’t figure out how to structure the ability set I want her to generally be using around manifestation essence without breaking so rules. Even in draft one, I had the image of Miria using extinguishes and healing everywhere, (or, well, that’s what I envisioned the start of her ability tree to look like before improving. You know what I an).
Anyway, ultimately, I decided to switch Miria from manifestation to Alteration, even though I really think that both could have fit her. The attunent section of how alteration magic from World 2 can work just felt like it matched my image of her much better, and so she’s now an Alteration/Absorption mage.
Which is a sha, because I do actually quite like the manifestation essence system used in this world. I didn’t get to explore all of the details behind what makes it work, but there are actually a lot of interesting and unique corner cases and unique magic components I would have introduced to the System if I had a whole novel to flesh it out instead of a single volu of MaM. Normally, Markets and Multiverses is where I put story ideas that I can’t figure out how to fully flesh out. I have like 20 different ideas for ‘settings’ for worlds that I want to use at so point, and frankly, for so of them I just have no idea what the rest of the story would look like. Mostly because I can’t think of either a plotline or a character for those worlds. The first world of Markets and Multiverses was basically an idea I had where I said ‘what if there were lots of giant fish, flying boats, and a weird eldritch cthulu and giant magic pearl of doom chilling below so knockoff fantasy islands?’ and kind of just went with it.
The second world was a bit more inspired by a few pieces of dia I liked. The two biggest influences were Fallout and Anbennar, although there were a lot of other, smaller influences that also fed into the world and the plotline.
Markets and Multiverses is often where I put ideas because Miria’s story has an overarching plotline and characters pre-built for those worlds. aning I just kind of need to make so adjustnts to old ideas to make them fit the rules for the multiverse that I’ve established for the story. Not too difficult in most cases - the Multiverse in this story has a LOT of room for stuff that contradicts how things work in other worlds, due to how dinsional laws form and how they work.
Anyway, if I write a magic-based non-LitRPG in the future, I expect I will probably recycle and flesh out parts of this magic system again. Or maybe even if it IS a LitRPG. Not sure if that’ll actually be what happens, but I do really think it’s an interesting system if you dig more into it than Miria and company did. This volu was already kinda long though, so extending it further just to develop a magic system that only Sallia will be using in the future seed silly.
Anyway, alternate tilines and deleted scenes.
If Miria’s Perception were higher when she encountered the thought worms, she would have been able to spot the souls of the creatures much more quickly. This, in turn, would have let her kill them much faster, and thus save most of her scout force. If the only casualty of the thought worm attack was the scout leader, I think it’s reasonably likely that the scouting force would have continued on for a while, and probably downed another 5-8 Orukthyri, roughly? It wouldn’t have quite changed the overall battle, but it certainly would have gotten Miria pretty big achievent, and a rather nice Keyword ability. Considering the number of Orukthyri I calculated were left at the end of the fight, I think if Sallia also had excellent rolls, I might have changed the outco of the city battle. However, Sallia’s ntal stats started out kind of average, which ant that, while her ntal stats got pretty good after her 7th rune buff, it wasn’t quite at the point where I felt she could plausibly shrug off the thought worm attack. her Willpower/Intelligence (both defend against Thought worms) wasn’t quite there…
But if she had started out with relatively high grade 6 rolls in those, Miria and Sallia might have turned around the fight with the Orukthyri. It was an alternate tiline I considered, but their ntal stats that they lowballed were important at exactly the wrong ti for them XD.
2. I was originally planning on having Miria, Sallia, and Felix escape into the wastelands alone (or possibly with Anise - I hadn’t figured out if she was reasonably likely to live through that section of the story or not yet, for reasons that will be discussed in change 4).
However, Miria and Sallia both had rather excellent overall rolls, aning the first fight with the Orukthyri and the Orukthyri culling expedition were significantly less disastrous than I had planned on them being. Because of this, Ella wasn’t injured during the fight with the outpost Orukthyri, the way I had originally planned, and so she ended up living through the main fight as well.
3. Since I anticipated Ella and everyone’s families dying during the Orukthyri fight, I expected the three would go into the wasteland with little to no preparation, and thus would never find Silver City. This would have resulted in Miria not learning how to properly control the healing side of her ability until next life (probably - I haven’t rolled her stats for that life yet, and if they were truly horrendous maybe it would get delayed further?). However, since Sallia and Miria got rather good stats, they ended up delaying their encounter with the palace by quite a bit… and they both benefitted rather significantly from that delay.
4. Anise was literally never planned to be an important character at all. In the author’s notes I had written for myself about how I intended to plan so future worlds and stuff, I originally planned to introduce the fourth permanent mber of the cast in the third world. He was ant to hit it off with Felix, and the group would end up sort of befriending him because of that, before he ended up surprising the group by being a permanent mber of the cast. And then they would say ‘ah, amazing! So there are new people that join the Market sotis!’ and then that would start so other chains of events that I originally planned to kick off in the Market section of volu 4…
Apparently we’re speeding that up a bit, because Anise.
Anise… was literally originally intended to ask a question and then fade from the story. I don’t rember how much her original lines got changed from one draft of her original character introduction to the next, but originally, she didn’t even get a na. She was there so that Miria could think ‘oh, you know, the way genetics work is kind of interesting in this dinsion, and the way our abilities interact with that is also pretty weird!’ which is sothing I intend to loop back to in the third world.
However, once I gave Anise a line, I thought ‘huh. Since I already gave her one line, I guess I can give her a second here. It makes more sense than introducing another character, only to ditch them afterwards.’
And then, since I gave her a second line, I decided it didn’t hurt to give her a proper personality, since by now she had shown up twice. It’s only fair, after all…
And then I just kept giving her more and more lines. I ended up really enjoying writing her, so she just… sohow accidentally’d her way into being a major side character? Which was 100% unexpected by at the start of the volu, but by the ti she showed up in a third chapter, I knew she was here to stay for a while. This wasn’t a change produced by stat rolls: it was just sothing that happened that I thought was amusing. Anise is surprisingly fun to write! After all, she’s a super witch!
:D
I will note that, at least in so sense, keeping Anise around might have been incorrect. When I started writing Markets and Multiverses, I had a few different thes for the story in mind.
Like, eight, in fact. Which is probably too many. I’ve co to realize that more thes is not better, and I probably should have trimd that down, but whatever. It’s too late now!
But one of the thes I was writing about for the story was how hard it is to lose soone you love.
And so, Anise dying permanently would have tied in to that the pretty well, but I wrote her more and more, and I was originally planning on introducing a new permanent character next world…
Well, ultimately, Anise ended up staying.
Don’t trust in the future, though! There is very much still the possibility that major characters in the future won’t be sticking around in the story. Ella is very permanently gone from the cast, as is Olav from world 1. While Anise did end up with a fair bit more screen ti than either of those two characters, sotis, parting with those you care about is just part of how the Market and the Multiverse works. Even if there ARE things that can mitigate that if you’re wealthy enough (much like almost everything in the Market, if it CAN be sold soone sowhere is selling it).
5. Felix and Magic Items: To be honest, I was originally expecting Felix to figure out how to make magic items in this world, sowhere around the ti the group explored the Dinsional Habitat Facility. I didn’t think he would get the chance to revolutionize the world, on account of the rather… depressing ending to this world. But I did think that Felix would originally discover how to make magic items by the end of this.
He rolled rather low on Alteration, though, which is what most magic items are based around. With less alteration essence to experint with while growing up, he ended up less proficient in using it and ssing with it than he would have with ‘perfectly normal’ stats - in this case, that would have been Tier 5. It does ss him up a little bit for next world, but for this world’s plotline, it’s actually a rather minor difference. After all, there wasn’t really a set of rolls that could have made Miria and company succeed in saving this world, or at least not one that I could think of.
Sotis, the Multiverse is brutal, and when a tiny tier 5 dinsion pokes its nose into a tier 16 dinsion and wakes up sothing that it really, really shouldn’t have ssed with… well, that’s just going to end pretty poorly no matter what, you know?
Anyway.
Less changes this ti because nobody got totally screwed over by their RNG.
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