Ignorance is Bliss

Almost a Doomcon entry, now just part of a sweet canon we can build at a leisurely pace.

Thanks to The Whistleblowers for working with me on an excellent end-of-the-world that let me throw some characters in a hella unique situation and run wild with it for 8,500ish words.

Yossipossi Modulum BlazingTrail

Also thanks to Doctor Cimmerian for crit, Cyantreuse for a thorough line-by-line, and Westrin for letting me know that the jokes landed well.

Notes about this Tale:

Essentially, I got super excited when I thought about the idea of a Terminatoresque future apocalypse where the Pattern Screamers wrecked the planet, but there were still Foundation forces holding out because the Screamers only come after you if you know about them so when they're pinned down, the Agents self-amnesticize, and wake up in a 28 Days Later situation where they don't have a damn clue what's going on until they manage to get scooped up and retrained. Alan's cold open was pretty much my first idea from that train of thought.

My first thought was to have Alan essentially go through a cycle; wake up, get picked up and retrain, make friends with the team, go on a mission, shit goes bad, self-amnesticize at the last minute, and wake up to do it all again. Somewhere along the way, the team became singularly Brianna. I also found that I wanted her to be more capable than Alan (it made it interesting for him not to be the Greatest Soldier Evar TM) and as he realized that, it made sense that he was going to have to die to save her so she could fight on better than he could.

It was only an hour into writing it that I realized that I had never actually written a Tale before, that I didn't exactly know how to write one, and that the only time I had tried to write in first-person perspective before couldn't get off the ground. The Whistleblowers liked what I had from the first hour and that gave me the confidence to drive forth. From there, I essentially called on my experience from writing TTG campaigns to drive me through the story. (Where are we? What is located there? What do you do? What effect does that have? Where do you go next? Rinse, repeat.) and it drove me fairly well down the nearly 10,000 words.

The nice thing about writing a story for a Tale versus a TTG is that while you are riffing, if you come up with an awesome idea, you can go back and build in foreshadowing after the fact. In my game nights, I'd always be going "Damn, that would have been awesome if I'd been leading up to that somehow," but for Ignorance, I could go back and add those Chekov's Guns and those plot threads that I'd thought of the ending for.

Special shoutout for Cimmerian and what I think is the brilliant idea for changing to third-person perspective after Alan dies. Just, so thematic, much meaning.