A Backdrop of Doom

As mentioned, I am also intending to use this blog to jot down notes and ideas - and this is one such!

Being old, I played a video game back in the day called "Myth: The Fallen Lords". It was a hell of a lot of fun mostly because my friend and I played through the single player campaign co-op. You weren't really supposed to - you could only play missions co-op if you had beaten them on single player - but we discovered a cheat code that "insta-won" any level, so we would start a level in single player, insta-win it without even looking at it, quit, and then play it in multiplayer, which was much, much more fun.

The game was platoon-level real-time strategy in a fantasy world; your troops were elven archers, dwarven grenade tossers, and crazy barbarians with claymores. The bad guys were various humanoid monsters - orc and goblin type stuff, but creepier. It was fun to play, and the world-building was well done. It was also challenging - there were lots of ways to fuck up, the bad guys were hard and you had to hit them just right, and your forces carried over between levels so if you only just eked out a win, you weren't going to succeed on the level following.

Now, if you're worried about spoilers for a game that came out in 1998, you will want to skip the next bit.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the game, perhaps oddly, was the ever-growing sense of doom that came with each mission. You see, you would "win" any given level - and then discover that, elsewhere in the world, the bad guys were marching from triumph to triumph and just rolling over all your allies (who you'd thought were fairly tough) and pretty much everyone but you. You'd start rescuing people from some city while the good-guy army dealt with a bad guy army up north. You succeed in the rescue, and learn that the good-guy army was totally obliterated by heretofore undreamed of amounts of bad guys. You'd cut through some local groups of bad guys to avoid being entrapped - and then learn that the entire north half of the good guy country had been overrun. You'd retreat again and discover that other kingdoms you'd hoped to get help from would not be sending any help because not only had they been conquered, it had been achieved through impossible dark magic that twisted their citizenry into still more monsters and those critters were now coming for you.

The news just kept getting worse, even as you succeeded in desperate mission after desperate mission.

It was awesome.

Anywhoo, I was recalling that experience and thinking that it could be a fun backdrop for a dark fantasy erotic mind control story. The small group of protagonists learn of an evil plot to take over world (using lots of delicious mind control and corruption) and set out to foil said plot. They discover along the way (as they are going from place to place attempting to learn what is really happening and what if anything they can do about it) that the plot is totally already underway. And then the news reports start rolling in about cities and then kingdoms being absorbed into the suddenly very real mind-slave empire.

Could be some lovely scenes of various former allies and contacts being reached out to (via magic radio / palantir / crystal ball) only to discover that they are now eager slaves of the Witch-Queen.

"i belong to Her now; serving Her is my life's purpose. You are fortunate you could still contact me. Most humans here had nothing in their minds of worth to Her and have been transformed into drudge (note: 'drudge' as a group noun), but some of us had information or skills that could be made to serve Her. i was fortunate enough to be one of those. Mmm, it took Her only an hour to bend my soul. Now i am Her creature forever. i was so stupid to try and resist. Surrender, all of you. Join me."

And all that coming from someone that only a while ago had helped our protagonists and sworn to fight the WQ to her last breath. Delicious. A few repetitions of that sort of incident ("Not you too!") and you've really got an oppressive/erotic atmosphere!

Throw in a possible means of stopping the WQ if only our heroines can figure out what it is and reach it in time, a secret traitor or two, and you've really got a story.

As it happens, I do have a dark-fantasy-overrun-by-wicked-goddess universe ready to hand - the above plotline would work really well when paired with 'The Loosing of the Dark' for instance - but I'm kinda-sorta leaning towards the heroines managing to scrape out a win, which is not something I'd do to dear Sauriann. Although she was defeated, once, in the WQ era, and is actually staging a comeback at the "present" time in Middle Urth. Would have to be a new story, though; it won't mesh with what I am doing in 'That Which Has Been Lost' (you'd like a link for that one, wouldn't you?) so I can't work it in there.

And, more pertinently, I have other story ideas higher in the queue. Still, worth putting down for possible reference.