A tossed aside storyline

I decided to release all my previously planned storylines that I had drawn up and I have a LOT of them, and some are vague, some are detailed, and more than a few aren't even MLP related. I think that by having to throw my ideas out in the wild, I could re-examine them. Ideas are only as good as the execution, so I don't believe any of them are good due to my failure to complete the stories they're attached to.

I'll start with the two fics I had posted on this site.

The Time God of Equestria was a fic that had very little plan initially and my constant rewrites of that story kind of attested to that, with many saved chapters that have gone unpublished and many more that were published, but I had hidden and replaced with new versions. The initial basic idea was pretty simple.

It was a power fantasy, of introducing an extremally powerful force into a new world that rehashes the plot of Wakfu. One guy is trying to drain all life in order to power a machine in order to return to their family. This connection is formed stronger as they also feel a sense of duty to return the other Displaced home as well and tries to convert them to his side, but will end up seeing the error of their ways and have a happy ending. I didn't quite like how I was achieving this and chose to scrap it for a new draft.

The next draft had a similar idea, but a much tighter focus.

It still had Nox be the effective main villain, but they're defined more strictly as their own character. I was largely inspired by Salt & Sanctuary as at the time it was my all time favorite game and I had even made some art surrounding it by using many of its environments as reference. With that inspiration in mind, I had opted to go a route where the Displacement didn't go according to plan.

When Nox was displaced, they were Nox. That wasn't a displaced, as the many memories of Nox had overwritten the original person and the story would be about that overwrite slowly becoming undone and becoming desperate. The machine must be built. The machine must be activated. The machine must not fail.

The other three Displaced had similar issues, but none of them were quite the same. The Ecaflip is the one that truly didn't face this issue and had completely overwrote the previous person, the Feca straight up shared the body with their counterpart rather than completely overwrite them, and the Masqueraider I was hoping to explore the issue through the various masks they possess. I truly wanted to explore the idea that becoming a Displaced was more than just a costume, and it was quite the horrifying experience.

I didn't know the best way to do this, and that's part of why I had so many main characters. It was for experimentation. That experimentation did eventually lead me, to Gambler's Respite.

I decided I would focus entirely on the Ecaflip, purely because overtime that was the character that I had the most connection with for a variety of reasons I won't quite touch on. The main idea behind them was in a couple of different avenues. Ecaflip's are pretty similar to Abyssinians and I wanted to create the idea that she was their "Princess" since she was an "Abyssinian" that could use magic, and that alone could've given me reason to start this whole political drama if I had started her there. I wanted to go deeper with it.

I had her get abducted by Changelings to create this prison break scenario where they need to play multiple games in order to escape. I wanted to write about Chum due to the events of the comic, and create this sort of redemption for him while also being a massive contrast to the Ecaflip's general personality. They would learn from each other throughout this awful scenario and eventually break out together as opposed to the original plan.

This would be where the second part of the story comes into play with the whole political drama and the royal family propping up this false idea of a "Lost Princess" to try and raise morale after their recent collapse from a certain King's invasion.

She'd have to be pulled between the idea of being royalty and her connections with Chum as some hated criminal. I also wanted to delve into the idea of Displacement during this arc by having her randomly disappear at one point due to being summoned and causing a nationwide panic.

This whole panic leads to Equestria finding out about this new "Princess" which will lead into a new arc where its revealed there are other Displaced alongside her, which would be the Feca. I did admittedly have a very different idea for who the Feca would actually be at this point, and would be nothing like how they were in TGoE.

This is where my notes end when it comes to Gambler's Respite. I have some more detailed notes about the Changelings for a chapter on chapter basis, such as how each of the games were meant to play out and what methods of cheating would be used for each one, but I won't get into them.

I do have some other fics that were never published that had similarly detailed notes, but after seeing how little I did for Gambler's Respite when it came to actually writing I ended up never publishing what I had because I thought 10K was simply too little to work with and people would just be unsatisfied with what's an effective permanent cliff hanger. I will get into those tossed away storylines at a later date