New Game Minus Idea Graveyard

Title seems kind of negative, but wasn't intended to be. Since I'm not likely to write more NGM unless I feel especially inspired, I wanted to share some of the things that would have happened if there had been books #4-7. Some ideas will reincarnate into other projects, but these are specific to Bloodwriath and company. If you like them, hopefully some parts of this post will entertain you - think of this as an epilogue for the characters.

Incidentally, I'm also probably not going to write another LitRPG trilogy I had in mind. Basically, the idea was that there's  a new immersive VRMMO game... and it's badly made. The VR is excellent, but the gameplay is just terrible. Instead of the players being awed by the experience, they'd act like real players and start figuring out how horribly broken the game is. Instead of one main character being the only person to find an exploit, it would have been glitches and exploits on all sides.

Anyway, the NGM trilogy forms a cohesive unit. Future books would have expanded the scope beyond Alliandelle, taking the characters into other worlds controlled by Earth, Aesidh courts, and other powers. The secondary meaning of the series title was actually that doing this would have required creating new characters, which would use the same underlying magic in different ways before merging into the originals.

For example, there would have been an arc where Bloodwraith goes to a JRPG world. In addition to parodying anime tropes, it would have a much more railroaded structure. Bloodwraith would meet some new characters there, one of whom is a "catgirl waifu" archetype (I'll dub her Hammercat, since she fights with a hammer). 

I'll leave you to imagine her interactions with Bloodwraith, but he lives up to his title as Corrupter of Worlds and the two become fast friends. It eventually leads up to Hammercat delivering the line "Nyan nyan, motherfucker" - I don't know how it would have played, but it still makes me smile just to type it.

They also would have spent some time in an MMO world, where there are a lot of people from Earth. This would have included a player who actually ends up being an ally, though her personality traits might end up in some future character. This section would have included micro-transactions and a bunch of stuff along those lines.

I never got to introduce my rogue who is literally a cursed statue. For that matter, I wanted to introduce a character who operates by enemy boss rules instead of adventurer rules, but they never fit. Izzy inherited some of his ideas, though.

The four novels would have introduced new powers on an inter-world scale and the characters would have started gaining the ability to compete on that level. I had some fun ideas for rule collisions, where magic in the form of different game systems crashes together in interesting ways. Anyway, this would have led up to another massive climax in which many of the core systems controlling worlds would be broken.

Incidentally, the book covers would have been:

• Book 4 = Gharavi
• Book 5 = Izzy
• Book 6 = Hammercat
• Book 7 = Bloodwraith

I definitely had a bunch more stuff planned for the game systems, like all the different 100 statistic bonuses. Bloodwraith would have gone beyond the point the Earthian designers ever intended and needed to start developing the system himself. The different orders of magnitude of EXP had different meanings and reaching one billion would have been an important plot point.

As Izzy gets older, she becomes capable of romantic feelings. She gets a few crushes on minor secondary characters, but these don't go anywhere in part because Bloodwraith goes full Lich Father mode. Imagine him looming in the background as a dark evil figure. Those are mainly for comedy, because I wanted to put Izzy together with Hammercat. Because Bloodwraith respects Hammercat, he's completely fine with this and she and Izzy become a cute couple.

Some other parts were vague in my mind, but the final conflict would have been a slightly phyrric victory. Bloodwraith's enemies are defeated and no one is controlling other worlds, but the chaos from this event has twisted countless worlds into distorted forms. After taking some time to rest, the main characters decide to leverage the leveling system for good and clean up the damaged worlds.

So the ending scene would be Bloodwraith reincarnating himself into a new world with an unknown broken game system. The world is very different than anything he's seen before and he's disoriented, until something appears in his vision:

[What is your name?]

Bloodwraith smiles. "Hello, old friend."

-

Those were my ideas, anyway. It felt better to put them out there instead of just letting them disappear back into my subconscious, but I don't know how people will take it. Hopefully some of you enjoyed hearing them.