Hi again. So here is that retrospective post on the Road to Lithorca (RTL) story arc; this is going to be long and have a lot of topics addressed, so I am putting the majority of this behind a read more break just to try and keep this from taking up the entire front page of my site. So click on the read more link below if you want to read all this info about the RTL story arc! If this sort of inside info does not interest you, I guess just vote in the current polls on the right there if you haven’t yet and/or check out some of the RTL chapters posted free in the freely released sets tab up top!

So here this goes; this is a massive discussion of sorts and I only know to start at the beginning. I knew I was not particularly ready to make a story arc when I made the first chapter of RTL, but I knew I needed to push myself into making something anyway. I always used to hesitate in releasing anything because I doubted myself early on, and I planned to use the story arc as a way to make myself release content. If I had waited to release image sets until I was truly happy with them, I would maybe release a set every few months or something back then; art is one of those things you can endlessly refine – you just have to know when it is good enough to stop, otherwise you spend way too long on one thing and get little out of it considering the time spent. I think the first chapter of RTL came out fairly well considering all that I tried to do in it and considering this was back before I got octane; back when renders took just as long to not look quite as good usually, and when I had to waste a lot more time fixing things than I do now. Rendering with poser is an entirely different monster compared to rendering with Octane, and I think I did the right thing switching over despite the initial problems and the sizable learning curve.

So starting with RTL 2 I used Octane and things were really messy for a while; especially in certain sets where some items just refused to work properly. (Some of this was me not knowing how to work octane right, other times are just items made poorly and/or items based on poser material room features that do not translate to octane well if at all; still at least poser has these options, as opposed to DAZ.) These first few sets had many things put in to establish characters, the world, relationships, and assorted other mechanics that help the story progress – most scenes in the first four(?) chapters all have underlying purposes behind them in addition to the base visuals. The story itself changed a bit early on – the original script had both sisters getting taken back to Zayla’s hideout; the older one first and then the younger one later. (Half of RTL 3 was supposed to be the one elf sister but I changed it to both be the innkeeper.) However, I realized this made everyone involved seem really stupid in some capacity so I cut it down to only the one sister getting caught/rescued. The main scene content of RTL 5 was decided by special vote on the site, so I made a scene with tentacles assaulting a random slave character (pale elf) I made to take the place of the older sister, since she was no longer going to get captured and since putting the little sister in this chapter made no sense. This pale elf character was never meant to be anything meaningful, and I was going to not even have her escape in the end; but more on that later. The point of RTL 5 was to show Zayla being evil and show the fate of sex slaves in unfavorable conditions.

The other middle RTL chapters I felt were overall very good; I like 6 and 7 in particular since they show the subversion of character strengths rather well. (Salune is the weakest of main characters on Zayla’s side [or in general, really] but she is the only one who ‘wins’ in the first match up, and the mighty Zayla gets fucked hard and trapped temporarily because of her overconfidence and tiredness.) I knew that I could not have characters straight up fight each other, since that would be boring and very one sided in most cases; but I also knew that I had to make things more interesting than having one side win all the time for boring reasons. These middle chapters from 6 to 11 show the assorted powers/strengths/weaknesses/motivations of the characters involved in addition to just having the sex scenes; these chapters show who can beat who and why. No character is invincible, and each character can be beaten; sometimes very easily by another specific character. I like all of these middle chapters for different reasons but if I had to pick one that could have gone better, it would be RTL 8. I like the content idea of this set, but I had so many problems making this for many reasons. The scene itself changed three or four times because things kept not working in some capacity. I also had to change the monster model for a similar reason; and all these issues affected the final product a bit. Even so, it is decent enough and a necessary setup chapter for later on; and I did learn a lot from doing it regardless. (People also allegedly wanted to see beast/monster content so that was there to fill that quota as well.)

As for RTL 9, the original script had the two elven sisters getting gangbanged  and repeatedly creampied by orcs and then the older sister was taken away to be the orc’s plaything once they were both confirmed to be pregnant via magic. This seemed a bit too dark though, and especially since I changed the script to not have the other sister in here already I decided to let both elven girls here get saved. This also allowed me to work in the pale elf in the final chapter, which at least one person liked. (O_O) It is hard to pick a ‘best’ chapter for me, but I guess I would say RTL 11 if I had to pick one since it is the ‘climax’ of the story in practice – RTL 12 is more of an epilogue. Also, the epilogue was originally going to just be a few images tacked on to the end of RTL 11, like how the first two chapters were ‘double issues’ – but I then changed it to make chapter 12 a full content chapter with the freed elves. Each chapter I tried something new, and I think most of it went fairly well, even if not for the reasons intended. Overall, I am happy with how things turned out, especially with my catastrophic spinal injury mid way through this. I think the characters and world were set up well and that this arc serves it’s purpose as an introduction to the story proper. I did not work in all the major characters I had at the time, but I knew there was no real way to do that without taking some serious liberties with certain things and making everything far too convenient. Besides, they fit better in the chapters coming up anyway; at least going by the early storyboards I have at the moment. Even without those two, there was a great mix of scenarios and content types in RTL, and I hope to keep that going/improving with the upcoming city arc.

Funnily enough this is rather short considering all that I could say; but I don’t want to straight up scare people away from reading this. I have plenty more sexy characters and scenarios coming up; and I hope this post might encourage people to read through the RTL story arc if they haven’t already. (It’s all up there for free!) Thanks to those of you who actually read through most and/or all of this and I hope this gives you some insight into my reasoning/thought process when making content. I really do think most of this through in several ways; but not to any extreme levels. Comments and such are welcome as always; things aren’t likely to change much if nobody says anything to me – so if you want to see more of something, it is best to speak up about it. The only guy who bothers to comment here most of the time has gotten several things he asked for. Anyway, I will be back late this week with an early preview of the upcoming story arc for my patrons and some sort of content update next week, likely the new mini-set preview or new DA stuff – so check back for that!