Ask Us Anything!

[alt_moderator]

The cast thread is filling up rapidly, and while we don't have to fuss about comment collapse, it is getting difficult to navigate...

So here's a new post, where we're asking YOU to ask US: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Comments

[jenett]

I sort of regret we didn't have Irma Pince, who we see really interesting hints of here and there.

And in very general terms - but it was hard, because original characters not tighly connected to other characters are hard to play and tended not to work - I wish we'd been able to get out more 'this is the general population and their reactions'.

I think that got a lot more clear once we got Bill and Rachel and Jeremy and several other consistent NPCs who could get referenced at the Ministry in the final years, but I keep wishing we'd been able to do more with that from the publishing world, or something.

[lapin_agile]

That! Oh, how I would have loved to have had Irma. She and Poppy would have had such an interesting relationship.

There were times it would have been very useful to have had Hooch, and if she'd been played, we'd have found even more use for her. But it was hard, and in the end I think we failed, to capitalise on the potential that lay in her being a mole at Hogwarts--an apparent Order ally, who was compromised and a threat to them.

That was a good idea we couldn't bring to fruition.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

I had fun creating Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank's backstory and connection to the Bones family, and sometimes thought it would have been fun to have her as a played character once she started at Hogwarts.

But I also knew my limitations, and since I struggled to keep up with the 2 1/2 I already had (endless kudos to everybody who played multiple major characters!!) , I never proposed it.

[keshwyn]

That would have been cool, because it would have given us later insight into the DE mentality, at least until His Noselessness did her in. And I knew it was possible she was the mole, but I missed the final confirmation.

[jenett]

We never quite formally confirmed it, but http://alt-umbridge.dreamwidth.org/1819.html?thread=13339#cmt13339 makes it pretty clear she's more than just naturally helpful.

[(Anonymous)]

Was Hooch the mysterious person that Poppy(?) saw skulking around Hogwarts at one point in the early seasons?

(Qwerty88)

[naomikritzer]

Yes, that was one of the plotlines we never quite properly developed.

We could do a whole thread on discarded squids, honestly.

[kiya]

I'm reminded of something I read Neil Gaiman say once, about Sandman and how he did plotting, which was that since once a book was released it was Out There In The World, what he had to do was throw in TONNES OF EVERYTHING so that if he needed it in book five it might have appeared in a junk drawer in book one.

[naomikritzer]

That is a very funny image, and yeah, there was some of that.

There were also plots where we had an idea, set it up, and then the timing for a payoff was never quite right. Or plots where we had an idea, started the setup, and things veered left because we realized there was something we'd overlooked. Or we did something, realized a likely ramification, but never got around to playing out the ramification. Or we had a plan, and just spaced it.

[jenett]

The thing is, as much as I sort of wish we'd pulled some of those plots out (the Hooch one was the one I think I wish that most about), I think it's also sort of entirely realistic - some stuff in the world sort of drifts into your awarnes, and you know there's more there, but you never see the details on it?

I think if we'd had everything sort itself out tidily, the whole project wouldn't have felt as real as it did.

[pegkerr]

PETER PETTIGREW, OMG. For YEARS I kept saying, 'What are we going to do about Peter Pettigrew?' We must have planned out about a dozen different scenarios for dealing with it, and none of them ever became quite airborne.

Part of the problem, I think, was that we dealt in Year One with the big issue that Rowling dealt with in Year Three: Why are Sirius and Remus estranged? What really happened on that Halloween night all those years ago? I liked our version, but it wasn't infused throughout with the circumstances of Peter's betrayal, so it was difficult to get back to it, somehow.

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, that really was the central problem.

I was very happy with the storyline we crafted around him (again, I felt like it explained stuff that never got explained in canon), especially Tosha's role, but although we did discover Peter we never came up with anything especially interesting to do with him afterward. (Which isn't surprising, since we packed him off to Saltash and he wasn't going to be able to escape, and we'd have been idiots to ever trust him, even if he'd taken an unbreakable vow.)

[kiya]

Yeah, I think one of the unfortunate effects of how the game played out was the impression it gave that the people 'on screen' and the people they knew visibly were the only people shaping the world, the only people who knew how to cast a fidelius, the only people fighting, and that can't possibly be the case.

I mean, one can read space around the edges to imagine the cluster of dour Welsh farmers who fideliused a valley and proceeded to carry on with subsistence farming in isolation because the bloody English have finally supplied the last bloody straw, the people in the war on both sides who weren't picked up by an organised group and assimilated with greater or lesser success back into the population because they weren't Faces known to their enemies, the society sycophants cultivating Council favour but never quite making it onto the invite lists, the farmers who managed to cover their tracks on remembering muggles/muggleborn were people better than the Woods, the people who were suddenly put in a position where they had to figure out magical hacks for all the societal infrastructure that had been handled by the majority population before, and I will stop coming up with populations that had to exist, logically now. But they're not actually much with the being in the actual narrative.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I thought we did a pretty good job with other resistance groups, what with Dogstar, the Crimson Company, and the Sherwood Band, and the IMA.

Although it's definitely possible that some of that world-building didn't make it out of our immense plot threads and into the game!

[kiya]

I would say that Dogstar and Sherwood felt the most real to me. But both of those were also the ones that had the most interaction with the face of game.

IMA had the sense of "something real that is almost entirely off-screen, and nobody knows what's really going on in Ireland anyway".

I never figured the Crimsons out, or whether they actually accomplished anything as a group, though.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Well the Crimsons were sort of meant to be not very effective IIRC....

[gwendolyngrace]

Yes, and particularly early on, I tried to show a LOT of that expanse that existed outside the small sample portrayed within the journals, particularly through comments and posts from Lucius, Narcissa, etc.

Deb also controlled Wil Wagstaff, who started as a real bloke but got caught in a very long con played by the Ministry. She also had a raft of ideas as shown in posts by Lana, Poppy, and others, about the greater goings-on in the world. Her posts always leave me in awe because they do an excellent job, IMO, of crafting a wholly believable and rich fabric of life beyond the confines of the playing space.

[jenett]

I was just skimming some of these - and yes, I have been meaning to say, you did such a good job with both of them, of this complex world in particular ways (society, publishing, business).

I think the thing I wish we'd figured out how to do was see something more of thoughts of those people, or at least the ones they were willing to commit to monitored journals) but see all the comments about needing to have other characters to talk to.

Penny eventually started bringing some of that out, especially as things started shifting this year, the daily 'what it's like to live in that world'.

[elisem]

Referencing NPCs and various populations, and showing how they must be working out in the world, is something I really wanted to do with Jeremy, and managed a bit. With Pansy, working on the Food Network and all, he could put to good use some of the contacts he had in the agricultural and food processing industries from growing up at Stretton Farms. (And I agree that Pansy is one of the great unsung heroes of the Order, working to make sure that the food infrastructure of the country did not wholly collapse once the Sleepers started waking.)

Insisting that his parents sort the back pay for Maureen was one of my favorite posts to write.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

It was one of my favourite posts to read too! I loved Jeremy's evolution.