Open AU Discussion Post

[lethevale_mods]

Having trouble with a facet of your AU backstory? Trying to co-ordinate your AU with another player? This is an open post for players to discuss their AUs, give/receive suggestions, and thrash out any crossover between your characters' pasts!

Comment with your character's name/canon in the subject line, and discuss away!

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Comments

[missionfail]

Alright I'll start it off.

I'd wanted Jasper here to have just come off the Civil War in the US, fighting for the Union. Before that she would have found combat wherever she could, be it in the many Indian wars or against bandits. She'd been born a large girl and had never tried to be particularly feminine, and in fact would often pose as a man as she got older just so that she could enter into combat situations without being questioned.

She had hoped to prove herself during the war so that she'd be seen as less of an abnormality, but never really got the acknowledgement she hoped for. Disgruntled, she left the United States shortly after the war ended and took a ship to England, wanting to leave that whole country and anyone who knew her behind. Here she would eventually join a travelling carnival as a strong woman. It isn't the acknowledgement she'd wanted, but at least the other members of the carnival treat her as an equal.

If anyone else is interested in joining this particular group as it passes through and potentially gets stuck in Lethevale, it might be a fun thing to work with.

[teratias]

Waver's definitely going to be a university student who's traveling for research and Lethevale is in his path. That's the easy part. But the issue for me is how the rest of the canon goes and I don't want things to be weird and obscure because that's all his canon is.

Waver goes through a huge maturation process via a magical battle royale with paired partners in canon. I want to be able to preserve that maturation, but figuring out replacing magical paired fights isn't something I can pick out. The closest thing I've gotten is "getting into weird artifacts being traded in underground London circles with the artifact being supposedly magical (but if it is or isn't is obscure, as per rules in game)"

Any thoughts on how to flesh this out would be really awesome and appreciated.

[singingintherain]

Hmm, your concept intrigues me! I know Clear here is going to be an albino with some past history of being run out of places due to superstitions regarding his coloration, nonsense things like calling him a ghost-boy or thinking he brings bad luck, etc.

Maybe he could hop on your carnival as a sideshow oddity? That'd make for a more entertaining background than the 'wandering vagrant' I'd probably go with otherwise!

[missionfail]

He absolutely could! Anyone with the ability to do so would also be involved in every day carny work, so he'd have plenty to do.

Haven't picked a character yet, just general plotting...

[wyvern_friend]

Characters getting dropped into another world with fake memories and slowly realizing their life is a lie is one of my favorite rp tropes. I'm weird like that. I have quite a few muses that might be fun in this setting and I haven't decided who the lucky(?) winner is.

Anyway, one of my favorite things to do in a setting like this is play around with fake family cr. Setting characters up as parents, siblings, cousins, spouses, etc. Would anyone be interested in plotting along those lines?

[bigfatgreekfuneral]

I'm looking at trying out 2 here as an engineer/mechanic type hailing from Germany who got his start in clockwork and has landed in Lethevale on having found convenient room for work as a repairman. I'm not sure what exactly the stretch between Point A to Point B would've been like yet other than figuring a parallel to his having gotten roundabout kicked out of his group's sanctuary in canon seeming like an easy thing to move it with - possibilities coming to mind range from a portion of his family having attempted to dodge the Prussian draft and been floating around central-to-Eastern Europe since then to a more simple "something's driven a wedge between him and technically more authoritative peers, related or not, and he's been maybe-and-maybe-not-solo drifting around from there to wherever he's pointed by curiosity or possibility of getting to dabble in new area of gadgeteering".

He's going to be on the older side - somewhere in his fifties or his sixties - so there's plenty of room for him to have bumped into other technologically- or curio-minded characters in the right age bracket within the past twenty or so years, and ha, openness to relatives or associates he might be blowing into town with was probably enough of a given by this point.

[singingintherain]

Definitely! He's very much one to be about pulling his weight, albeit prone to foolish mistakes at times. He'll have been raised by an adoptive "grandfather" and be versed in cleaning and cooking, and want to look after the other carnies like his only family. (He'll think a strong woman like Jasper is really really cool, too, 'cuz he's not strong at all.)

Carny sideshow nonsense also gives him more of a reason to sometimes be found in a mask like the one he wears in canon, hah! Bonus.

[missionfail]

Awesome!

And of course if you think of something else before the game opens, don't feel stuck using this idea. There's still a month and all.

[singingintherain]

But of course. At the moment this is clicking nicely into some gaps in my original idea, though, and giving it a more interesting twist. Clear's a kind of ridiculous character and a carnival aspect suits that well. Thanks for (potentially) letting me leapfrog off of it!

[mercenaryempathy]

Might Jasper's circus/carnival thing be interested in a blind medium? Piercing the veil of the beyond, etc. etc. He won't be too useful with the chores though.

[missionfail]

Of course! You can always consider the carnival an open option.

[mercenaryempathy]

Excellent, I think that's the best way to get him into the town, the late 1800s weren't very handicap friendly after all.

[internalizing]

I'm looking at three options here, one because I like writing him and two because their canon experiences make them difficult to write without a good bit of tweaking.

At least for me.

Elijah would probably be a traveling nobleman, horse throws a shoe or something that has him stopping in the town.

Chris Argent I'm thinking maybe a metalsmith of sorts, weapons, silverwork, stuff like that, maybe on his way to deliver something to a client or going to a client to discuss an order.

And Bran Cornick as a normal human would just be interesting, probably just a traveler who ends up there for whatever reason, honestly.

[empathising]

i'm out at the moment so no time to really get in-depth just yet, but i wanted to say i'm thinking seriously about throwing elena in here as a grieving orphan after her parents died, so i'm very excited to see elijah on offer! i'd love to get some cr built into their aus if you're interested :)

[warrior_princess]

ah shit Jasper that's awesome.

...I'm suddenly tempted to try Plourr again, she's another character in the "huge woman who's arrogant as fuck and loves fighting and has Secret Angst" category but unambiguously heroic despite being an ass a lot. She's basically if Anastasia became a space marine on her way to being Aragorn. Historically though I've had trouble with her voice.

I'm also looking into another character who would also have had Civil War ties, though in his case he'd have had a prominently Confederate family but hadn't fought.

[internalizing]

tossed you a pm, but I'm also on plurk if that's easier and we can discuss things.

[fantail]

I'm considering Sakuya Shirogane le Bel, the rich brat fantail from the bird dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend.

no come back this character can totally be taken seriously

The le Bel family had been something to be reckoned with in America before the Civil War. Its patriarch, Sakuya's father, had property and investments in both the North and South and sought to profit off the conflict, claiming allegiance to the Union while putting more support into the Confederacy. Sakuya's black sheep of an older brother, Yuuya, was a spy for the Union and uncovered the family dealings, which dealt a huge blow to family fortunes. Yuuya was disowned and took off to parts unknown. He sent Sakuya letters with no return address for several years, before this correspondence abruptly stopped.

Sakuya was a child during the war. During his father's scramble to reclaim power and influence he's slowly been realizing that he does have a moral compass, though he's reluctant and ashamed to actually admit to even thinking of going against his family. He's finding it increasingly difficult to pretend he sees nothing wrong but doesn't see his way to repudiating anyone either. So, faced with the opportunity to go see a distant French relative's business and practices he jumped at the chance... and while an ocean away from his father, why not seize on the opportunity to drag his feet about going back?

There's a small town here and it's kind of a stretch, but perhaps his brother visited here.

...mmm, I'm not sure in general. I'll work on this some more.

[bloodisthicker]

HEY DID YOU KNOW THAT CANADA CONFEDERATED LIKE THREE YEARS BEFORE 1870 BECAUSE I SURE DIDN'T.

So I figure Tarrlok could be an extremely ambitious young Canadian politician or sth which I'll have to research but I think I could have him try heading somewhere more important than Lethevale when he gets... kind of stuck there. THAT'S EASY NO PROBLAO. I think the thing I'm having trouble with is the fact that like... okay, canonically his dad Yakone was formerly the Don of the Inuit Mafia and had some freaky-ass powers that the Avatar took from him that he tried to teach his kids to take revenge on the Avatar.

Like... I'm thinking that it wouldn't be too difficult to translate that into a real world setting? Maybe Yakone was some sort of incredibly powerful regional chief who'd moved south some and extorted the fuck out of other local tribes and settlers until an alliance between them fucked him up physically and sent him packing up north, where he settled down until he could start preparing his kids for Revengequest until things go to shit on that end. Then Tarrlok, who got a reasonably good education from a lot of his shitty dad's collected resources, heads down south so he can BE A NEW MAN IN QUEBEC CITYYYYYYYY.

But yeah that was kind of disjointed, but I think it might be workable. I DON'T KNOW. ANYONE KNOW CANADIAN HISTORY REAL WELL.

[teratias]

Hope you don't mind my poking a head in here. I think the concept you've come up with is really awesome.

You could perhaps use the "opportunity to drag his feet about going back" to cover a lot of ground/give yourself an awful lot of wiggle room for being in the area actually! Perhaps the nature of just traveling and dragging one's feet could justify taking lengthy coach routes that cut through the area, and thus justify arriving at Lethevale either by way of something going wrong with transportation, or picking a remote location to linger in for a few weeks before heading elsewhere?

[imozon]

SO THIS LITTLE WEIRDO I'M CONSIDERING is going to need some AU TLC. Her name is Dark Dream and she is a magical girl's evil twin who existed for a grand total of maybe two days from when she popped into existence to when she heroically sacrificed herself to save her original who she was supposed to kill.

So yeah in order to exist in Lethevale's setting she kind of needs an entirely new history. WOW I SURE CAN PICK 'EM

[affluenza]

Dandy here is going to be a very wealthy Southern-American looking to start up a new life in a new place. His official reasons are going to be that he found running a business rather dull and would prefer to take his money and invest it in other budding success stories, but his real reasons are that both he and his (now deceased) father committed a string of unsolved murders and he wasn't sure how much longer he could keep his family name clean.

Of course, his true passion is for theater, so he'll likely be trying to set something up for himself and his fellow performing artists.

[fantail]

Aw, thanks!

Yeah that's true. Ideally he'd also come up with a reason to justify staying longer, but with his family being what it is that's not too hard.

...also his brother need not be Yuuya, a boy, or even actually a sibling, I should say.

[bloodisthicker]

I vote Cherche, she could be an adventurer zoologist ala Steve Irwin combined with one of those adventurer types.

...I mean, this guy's whole thing is that his family is Complicated so I can't help with that, but man. Cherche.

[teratias]

Not at all!

Really it sounds like even a flimsy reason would be an ok way to stay away longer. And what he tells his parents may not have to match what he tells people he encounters on his travels?

[fantail]

It'd be some pretty great CR somewhere. Sakuya's and Yuuya's relationship is very hairy but this wouldn't have to be like that. Quite like that anyway. Sakuya is a prickly one.

Yes! I also kinda wish his manservant Albert would turn into a ravenmonster while still acting as a manservant, but that might be stretching things.