Post Volume 2 Deleted Scenes - Markets and Multiverses

If you’re reading this, I imagine you also read the deleted scenes for volume 1. You know the drill. These are all changes I made to the draft based on what-ifs and ideas I had that either got cut from the story, or that Miria and co. never got to see but could have potentially found if their stats were better.

Ahem.

First, a few interesting thoughts.

I spent a long time trying to figure out whether I wanted to give Miria Alteration or Manifestation as her big talent, once I did the essence rework in draft 2. I was actually leaning towards making Miria a little witch in future worlds as well, but I just couldn’t figure out how to structure the ability set I want her to generally be using around manifestation essence without breaking some rules. Even in draft one, I had the image of Miria using extinguishes and healing everywhere, (or, well, that’s what I envisioned the start of her ability tree to look like before improving. You know what I mean).

Anyway, ultimately, I decided to switch Miria from manifestation to Alteration, even though I really think that both could have fit her. The attunement section of how alteration magic from World 2 can work just felt like it matched my image of her much better, and so she’s now an Alteration/Absorption mage.

Which is a shame, because I do actually quite like the manifestation essence system used in this world. I didn’t get to explore all of the details behind what makes it work, but there are actually a lot of interesting and unique corner cases and unique magic components I would have introduced to the System if I had a whole novel to flesh it out instead of a single volume of MaM. Normally, Markets and Multiverses is where I put story ideas that I can’t figure out how to fully flesh out. I have over 20 different ideas for ‘settings’ for worlds that I want to use at some point, and frankly, for some of them I just have no idea what the rest of the story would look like. Mostly because I can’t think of either a plotline or a character that fits those worlds. And I also have a few random characters that don't fit any settings I have laying around, and... well, you get the idea.

The first world of Markets and Multiverses was basically an idea I had where I said ‘what if there were lots of giant fish, flying boats, and a weird eldritch cthulu and giant magic pearl of doom chilling below some knockoff fantasy islands?’ and kind of just went with it. It wasn't a very developed idea before becoming part of MaM, since it was an unused idea. Most of my unused ideas don't really make sense because I haven't spent time fleshing them out XD.

The second world was a bit more inspired by a few pieces of media I liked. The two biggest influences were Fallout and Anbennar, although there were a lot of other, smaller influences that also fed into the world and the plotline.

Markets and Multiverses is often where I put ideas because Miria’s story has an overarching plotline and characters pre-built for those worlds. Meaning I just kind of need to make some adjustments to old ideas to make them fit the rules for the multiverse that I’ve established for the story. Not too difficult in most cases - the Multiverse in this story has a LOT of room for stuff that contradicts how things work in other worlds, due to how dimensional laws form and how they work.

Anyway, if I write a magic-based non-LitRPG in the future, I expect I will probably recycle and flesh out parts of this magic system again. Or maybe even if it IS a LitRPG. Not sure if that’ll actually be what happens, but I do really think it’s an interesting system if you dig more into it than Miria and company did. This volume was already kinda long though, so extending it further just to develop a magic system that only Sallia might be using in the future seemed silly.

Anyway, alternate timelines and deleted scenes.

1. If Miria’s Perception were higher when she encountered the thought worms, she would have been able to spot the souls of the creatures much more quickly. This, in turn, would have let her kill them much faster, and thus save most of her scout force. If the only casualty of the thought worm attack was the scout leader, I think it’s reasonably likely that the scouting force would have continued on for a while, and probably downed another 5-8 Orukthyri, roughly? It wouldn’t have quite changed the overall battle, but it certainly would have gotten Miria pretty big achievement, and a rather nice Keyword ability. Considering the number of  Orukthyri I calculated were left at the end of the fight, I think if Sallia also had excellent rolls, I might have changed the outcome of the city battle. However, Sallia’s mental stats started out kind of average, which meant that, while her mental stats got pretty good after her 7th rune buff, it wasn’t quite at the point where I felt she could plausibly shrug off the thought worm attack. her Willpower/Intelligence (both defend against Thought worms) wasn’t quite there…

But if she had started out with relatively high grade 6 rolls in those, Miria and Sallia might have turned around the fight with the Orukthyri. It was an alternate timeline I considered, but their mental stats that they lowballed were important at exactly the wrong time for them XD.

2. I was originally planning on having Miria, Sallia, and Felix escape into the wastelands alone (or possibly with Anise - I hadn’t figured out if she was reasonably likely to live through that section of the story or not yet, for reasons that will be discussed in change 4).

However, Miria and Sallia both had rather excellent overall rolls, meaning the first fight with the Orukthyri and the Orukthyri culling expedition were significantly less disastrous than I had planned on them being. Because of this, Ella wasn’t injured during the fight with the outpost Orukthyri, the way I had originally planned, and so she ended up living through the main fight as well.

3. Since I anticipated Ella and everyone’s families dying during the Orukthyri fight, I expected the three would go into the wasteland with little to no preparation, and thus would never find Silver City. This would have resulted in Miria not learning how to properly control the healing side of her ability until next life (probably - I haven’t rolled her stats for that life yet, and if they were truly horrendous maybe it would get delayed further?). However, since Sallia and Miria got rather good stats, they ended up delaying their encounter with the palace by quite a bit… and they both benefitted rather significantly from that delay.

4. Anise was literally never planned to be an important character at all. In the author’s notes I had written for myself about how I intended to plan some future worlds and stuff, I originally planned to introduce the fourth permanent member of the cast in the third world. He was meant to hit it off with Felix, and the group would end up sort of befriending him because of that, before he ended up surprising the group by being a permanent member of the cast. And then they would say ‘ah, amazing! So there are new people that join the Market sometimes!’ and then that would start some other chains of events that I originally planned to kick off in the Market section of volume 4…

Apparently we’re speeding that up a bit, because Anise.

Anise… was literally originally intended to ask a question and then fade from the story. I don’t remember how much her original lines got changed from one draft of her original character introduction to the next, but originally, she didn’t even get a name. She was there so that Miria could think ‘oh, you know, the way genetics work is kind of interesting in this dimension, and the way our abilities interact with that is also pretty weird!’ which is something I intend to loop back to in the third world.

However, once I gave Anise a line, I thought ‘huh. Since I already gave her one line, I guess I can give her a second here. It makes more sense than introducing another character, only to ditch them afterwards.’

And then, since I gave her a second line, I decided it didn’t hurt to give her a proper personality, since by now she had shown up twice. It’s only fair, after all…

And then I just kept giving her more and more lines. I ended up really enjoying writing her, so she just… somehow accidentally’d her way into being a major side character? Which was 100% unexpected by me at the start of the volume, but by the time she showed up in a third chapter, I knew she was here to stay for a while. This wasn’t a change produced by stat rolls: it was just something that happened that I thought was amusing. Anise is surprisingly fun to write! After all, she’s a super witch!

:D

I will note that, at least in some sense, keeping Anise around might have been incorrect. When I started writing Markets and Multiverses, I had a few different themes for the story in mind.

Like, eight, in fact. Which is probably too many. I’ve come to realize that more themes is not better, and I probably should have trimmed that down, but whatever. It’s too late now!

But one of the themes I was writing about for the story was how hard it is to lose someone you love.

And so, Anise dying permanently would have tied in to that theme pretty well, but I wrote her more and more, and I was originally planning on introducing a new permanent character next world…

Well, ultimately, Anise is doing Anise instead.

Don’t trust me in the future, though! There is very much still the possibility that major characters in the future won’t be sticking around in the story. Ella is very permanently gone from the cast, as is Olav from world 1. While Anise did end up with a fair bit more screen time than either of those two characters, sometimes, parting with those you care about is just part of how the Market and the Multiverse works. Even if there ARE things that can mitigate that if you’re wealthy enough (much like almost everything in the Market, if it CAN be sold someone somewhere is selling it).

5. Felix and Magic Items: To be honest, I was originally expecting Felix to figure out how to make magic items in this world, somewhere around the time the group explored the Dimensional Habitat Facility. I didn’t think he would get the chance to revolutionize the world, on account of the rather… depressing ending to this world. But I did think that Felix would originally discover how to make magic items by the end of this.

He rolled rather low on Alteration, though, which is what most magic items are based around. With less alteration essence to experiment with while growing up, he ended up less proficient in using it and messing with it than he would have with ‘perfectly normal’ stats - in this case, that would have been Tier 5. It does mess him up a little bit for next world, but for this world’s plotline, it’s actually a rather minor difference. After all, there wasn’t really a set of rolls that could have made Miria and company succeed in saving this world, or at least not one that I could think of.

Sometimes, the Multiverse is brutal, and when a tiny tier 5 dimension pokes its nose into a tier 16 dimension and wakes up something that it really, really shouldn’t have messed with… well, that’s just going to end pretty poorly no matter what, you know?

Anyway.

Less changes this time because nobody got totally screwed over by their RNG.

Author’s Note: I TOTALLY didn’t forget to post this because I was trying to figure out wtf was up with Patreon’s new weird categories nonsense. You saw nothing…