• Member Since 29th Apr, 2020
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Dewdrops on the Grass


A lady in her 30s who likes to write. Like my works? Feel free to donate to my Ko-Fi account. :twilightsmile:

More Blog Posts126

  • 4 weeks
    Hiatus For Now: Phoenix and OHS Both

    Hello my lovely readers,

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    19 comments · 410 views
  • 8 weeks
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  • 14 weeks
    Phoenix Update: Set a New Record!

    Hello my lovelies. If you've not already seen, Star Trek: Phoenix has released its latest full chapter, episode 7 for season 3, "Under the Sea." As you might surmise, it involves hippogriffs, and was a huge ton of fun to write.

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  • 16 weeks
    Update for Phoenix Plus Other News

    Hello, my lovelies. If you've not yet seen it, we have an interlude up for Star Trek: Phoenix written by my editor, Vic Fontaine. It features a couple of characters we haven't seen for a long while.

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    1 comments · 253 views
  • 18 weeks
    Commissions Open! -- See Details Inside --

    Hello, my lovely readers! Last week or thereabouts you saw me explore the idea of commissions, which I am now opening! I will have a limited number of slots available; once those slots are filled I will close commissions until I have fulfilled them. This post will be regularly referred back to for the commission rules, which are as follows:

    Last Updated: 11/22/23

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    2 comments · 238 views
Dec
31st
2020

Background Series Part 3 · 11:00am Dec 31st, 2020

Hello! Welcome to the third part of my background series! Like the first two parts, there will be spoilers up to the current posted parts as of the posting of this blog entry, in this case, Part 1 of Chapter Three.

This part will touch upon some of the choices I've made in terms of facilities aboard the cruise ship, as well as how that influenced the ways in which I developed the murders thus far seen. If you're looking for more details on Chapter Two's murder itself, please see the blog entry for Part 8 of Chapter Two, as I describe my process there.

With the cruise ship, as I stated in part one of this series, I wanted a location that was opulent, luxurious, and massive in scale, while simultaneously feeling like a prison cell. So, how did I decide to choose which facilities belonged on the ship?

With the initial chapter, the choices were easy. I needed a few basics that are present in any Danganronpa series: a place to eat, a place to get supplies for murder, a place to meet up, and so on. Most cruise ships have a standard layout of dining rooms, separate restaurants, etc, but I wanted something that was reminiscent of the general settings used in Danganronpa, that force the characters to all eat in the same place. Thus, I came up with the promenade, a design that's far more akin to a shopping mall than a traditional cruise ship layout. It's partially based on the promenade from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as I'm quite the fan of that series, and I thought the concept had some merit.

The promenade, as described in the story, is laid out in three sections, running from fore to aft. There's the food court in the center, where the promenade breaks off towards the other facilities (and to the courtroom elevator), the restaurant quarter towards the aft of the ship, and the shopping quarter to the fore of the ship. The restaurants here are more like the kind of food kiosks in a mall, where you go up, you order, and then you find seating in the central area. Thus we have a curious mixture of high class food with low class dining accommodations. It's bizarre, and it's meant to be. It forces them together. There are separate restaurants and dining facilities elsewhere on the ship, but the passengers will never see them.

The shop choices, I will admit, are quite odd, but again, that's on purpose. Several of them cater to specific interests--sports, fashion, jewelry--while a few others are more basic, standard type things you'd see on any cruise ship. This was to personalize things a bit towards some of the characters without going as far as V3 did with each character having an individual lab. Many of the later locations would be chosen with this same idea in mind, of slight personalization without being overt. Also, we have not seen everything to these shops. There are a few surprises in store.

The other few things open in the first chapter aren't that important, other than as more or less standard set dressing. The one exception is the bridge tower. This is not the way bridges are usually designed on cruise ships; in fact it's a lot more like a military ship's bridge. This, again, is on purpose: Monoponi modified this ship for his own purposes, and the bridge tower was one of those modifications. It allows him to stand above the passengers, be imposing, intimidating, simultaneously dangling the ability to take control of the ship right in front of them whilst also acting like a prison guard tower. It's close to the fore of the ship rather than after so it can look backwards, forcing the passengers to rely on where the ship takes them rather than having any real control.

For the second chapter, we opened up a theater, game corner, and library. All three of these, I touched upon a bit in other parts, and don't want to reiterate too much. I will say that these are all types of places that do exist on real cruise ships, but usually as smaller facilities. The purpose should be fairly obvious, but the library is by far the most important, as a source of useful knowledge, an intentional THH/SDR2 allusion by showing up in Chapter Two, and so on.

The game corner and theater, meanwhile, existed to serve the purpose of the plot. Everything does, but especially these only came into being because the plot required it, and because I thought they would be fun set dressing.

All three are accessible via the promenade, as you might imagine, it will continue to expand further and further in a similar way to what's been seen thus far. However, this does result in a chokepoint.

Chapter Three opens up a lot more of the ship than it appears at first glance. The access corridor they find is one of the crew corridors, the type of place passengers aren't supposed to have access to on the ship. I chose this because I wanted the characters to have more ways of sneaking around, so that everywhere has multiple means of access. The promenade is great and all, but without another way of getting around it'd be too easy to block off access to half the ship.

I don't want to go into too many details about the fitness center or spa yet, lest I spoil, but both were chosen not only as standard features aboard cruise ships, but because I wanted to give the characters something physical to do, and something to relax with afterwards. That and I might be wishing terribly I could visit a spa like that myself and haven't been able to properly for years.

Every location has meaning, even if it's only to provide a single implement used in a murder or as a location for said murder. I also have been trying to pick facilities that exist on real cruise ships. There's more I'd like to say here about this, but I don't want to spoil future chapters either. For now, let's just say I had a lot of fun looking into places that could appear on a cruise ship, and modifying them to suit my purposes has been quite entertaining in and of itself. One of these days I will draw out proper maps of this ship, if I can figure out how to make them look good. For now, I bid you adieu.

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