Raptor

Fake gamer; real girl.

🏳️‍⚧️ Amateur game scholar.
Social worker. Events Person
Living on stolen Duwamish lands.


Old website I made for travel writings that droped a database
elucidovia.com/
Mastadon I probably won't use
tech.lgbt/@Raptor
Tumblr I probably won't use
www.tumblr.com/ohthatraptor
Username pretty much everywhere
OhThatRaptor

love
@love

For the past year, we've been working on a DLC chapter for our lesbian road trip RPG Get in the Car, Loser! (Steam and Itch) called The Fate of Another World. Originally, this chapter started life as a bullet point in a pitch document from 2018 showing that we could extend GITCL if we wanted to, and I wasn't sure what to put in there, so "alternate universe where everything is bad" felt like an easy thing to work with, even though I didn't have any concrete ideas for what you could actually do there.

The big bombshell at the core of it, of course, is the appearance of Emily Harmless. Originally just intended to be an explanation for the cool "I WON'T FALTER IN THE FACE OF EVIL" background that shows up as part of the Sword of Fate animation, Emily's small story ended up being more important to the story of the game because I felt like it resonated well, a little bit of real world heroism in a game that's otherwise about bombastic violence. Her death is the big inciting incident that makes the party realize what happens if you don't fight evil preemptively.


She's also a larger than life figure in the head of Grace, and I wanted to really get into that. What does it mean to be someone's favourite hero? We established that Emily was a librarian, a community figure, so it felt like a natural contrast for her to be a much more traditional activist than Grace's rowdy bombastic energy. Still, even while seeding everything about her into the base game, the idea of writing something apocalyptic felt kinda boring to me and I wasn't sure how to make it work. Too obvious, not interesting enough.

Then, of course, 2020 happened, and the idea of writing about anything other than an apocalypse just felt fake to me. A world where everyone's burnt out and tired, where everyone's doing their best to uplift the people around them but society has fundamentally collapsed... I mean, it's obvious stuff, but it certainly ended up emotionally resonating with me. GITCL the base game is worried about cyclical evils and nazis, "what does it mean to fight evil?" and all—the biggest embodiment of every fear of my life that was finally coming true in 2016—so it felt only right for The Fate of Another World to be about fears I didn't even realize I had coming true in the ongoing pandemic era. "Can heroism keep you going indefinitely?" is a question that Emily Harmless was born to answer.

Emily started off as just an embodiment of some big themes, but over the course of the last year of writing her in this chapter—and writing about Grace getting to meet her favourite hero—she's really grown on me as a character. She's not the perfect idealized martyr that she was in Grace's world, and she's not a rowdy slogan, she's just a woman doing her best to keep going even after her world died. She feels betrayed by the heavens, but still fights using their sword because she must. She drives through the burning ruins of her world in the old Bookmobile. She likes to talk about how real change starts with the community, not the individual. Unlike the party, she's a bit of a bummer. Wouldn't you be, under the circumstances? She sincerely believes that being a responsible grown-up means understanding what it means when you talk about fighting for love and justice, not just saying the words, and she's got the action it takes to back that up. I wanted her to feel like a woman that's hard to get along through no fault of her own, but so impressive that you want to live up to her ideals anyway... I wanted her to feel real and complex. Grace is easy to cheer and holler for, but is anything so easy for your favourite hero's favourite hero?

The original idea behind the three DLC chapters was to complement the base game's heroic fantasy with some big genre stuff: comedy (Battle on the Big Boardwalk), tragedy (The Fate of Another World), and romance (Big City Princess, assuming DLC2 sells well enough). I was a little worried that a tragedy like this was going to be too much of a downer under the circumstances, but now that we've finished writing the story, I think it's really the opposite—it was a way to find emotional clarity. So I really hope players love meeting the real Emily Harmless as much as I did!

You can learn more about Emily Harmless and the other characters you'll meet in her world on Steam and Itch, and please, add The Fate of Another World to your wishlist if you think it sounds cool! And feel free to ask any questions in the comments below!


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