Comics that Never Were #2 (Patreon)

In advance, I want to warn you that the scripts for what I am going to describe are lost to time.

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When Zach and I finished issue #1 and realized we had something special in Thieves Can't, I went to town on writing issue #2.

Candor, Reynauldo, Keelie, and Ormond set forth after the spell scrolls. They found the goblins camping at the entrance to a massive dwarven cave structure (Doc's Deep, on the map from issue #1). 

Candor proceeded to try her hand at negotiating with the goblins the way she'd always planned to. She learns that the goblins are working for a warlord -- a lycanthrope they call Big Bad. The goblins are doing this warlord's bidding because their homeland is held hostage. They have no choices, and it looks like no real option for peace between the goblins and the players exists, until Candor offers to help them kill the warlord.

And then Ormond, under pressure from Keelie and Raynauldo, steals the scrolls -- more than successfully sneaking to the goblin in the back who was holding them, more than successfully removing the scrolls unnoticed from the goblin's unconscious form (non-lethal sneak attack) -- but failing to take into account the noise a goblin would make waking up.

Ormond flees into Doc's Deep, chased by angry goblins who feel betrayed suddenly, and with his friends following close behind. Keelie is bashing down goblins as she over-takes them, and Reynauldo is (under the stern admonishments of Candor) lagging behind to heal those goblins. 

Ormond becomes lost in the tunnels, and finds himself at the edge of a bizarre structure covered in ancient dwarvish runes. He hides behind the structure, rubbing one of the runes as he does -- and finds himself in a twisted plane where the dwarven tunnels are bridges over infinite darkness. An ocean roars above his head. He struggles to try to activate the structure again, but can't. The water above him comes rushing down.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gate, the goblins, Keelie, and Candor reach the structure. Ormond's tracks end here, and the goblins Capital F Freak Out. The spell scrolls are dead, they lament -- as is their homeland. When Candor asks why, they explain that the gateway is tuned to a space where the negative plane and the water plane almost meet, held apart only by ancient dwarven magic. The two planes jostle and fight and wear on the gateways. It's dangerous and full of terrifying monsters, and worse, the gateway floods at regular, predictable intervals, first with elemental water, and then with elemental death.

We see Ormond holding onto the structure with one hand, holding his breath as the ocean washes over him.

Candor and Keelie fight the goblins, who refuse to allow them to touch the structure -- it's suicide! They would let endless water and endless death into the tunnels!

Reynauldo watches from the shadows, with his stabilized-but-unconscious goblins dragged along on a rope behind him.

The goblins notice him immediately because he's in heavy armor. 

We see Ormond breathe easy, the water finally gone.

We see the darkness overtake him.

Seeing their companions alive, the goblins agree to open the portal, but only when the process is finished. They need the scrolls, and they still like the idea of killing Big Bad. 

The portal opens, just before the lead goblin can touch the runes.

A skeleton steps through in Ormond's clothes, holding the scrolls.

"Guys, the negative plane sucks."

End.

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Why we didn't write this:

Zach and I got into a MASSIVE FIGHT over this script. Huge. It almost ended the project. It felt like a story, not a game of D&D. It felt forced. All things he said that I completely disagreed with. He had no substantive changes he wanted made, but he hated the idea of low level players dealing with planar travel, he hated that the villain wasn't present, and he hated the mechanics of the runes activating the gate (it has no basis in RAW.)

We didn't speak for a couple of days. It was a pretty nasty fight. I'd worked hard to get this thing written! 

But what I hadn't done was consult my partner at any step of the way. I'd run to my writey hole and had written, and in doing so, had treated him like a worker instead of a partner. 

"Here's my script. Draw plz." And when he didn't? When he had a complaint? I reacted in the worst possible way. I could have changed the runes to some other gimmick. The planar travel could have been some other kind of trap. I never once considered that his problem with the individual elements was his way of trying to have input in a script that I presented to him as final and untouchable. 

That's no way to be in a partnership.

I still don't agree with a lot of his criticisms of that script (which I wish I could find. It wasn't finalized by any stretch of the imagination, but it would be nice to have) but throwing it out was an important step to keeping the project alive. Throwing it out let us start over and write a story together.

Parts of the discarded story will, I suspect, make their way into issue #3, but not without the full team effort and clear boundaries about what each of our responsibilities as creators are -- how much influence he has on the writing and how much influence I have on the art.