Chrono Bolt‘s first battle begins with a Dino screaming and two more leaping from some thick grass where they’d been hidden.
Primordial Swamp – Turn 1
The Temporal Predator
Chrono Bolt has officially started over at the Shining Force Central forums. I needed to pull player characters from across time together quickly and give them a reason to stick together, so the first chapter is The Temporal Predator. Spoiler: It’s a giant time spider.
I worked on backgrounds with each player that ended with them time traveling. Each one was unique. For some it was an accident, others it was intentional. Some messed with an artifact, others got blasted into another time, and some simply don’t remember.
But now the group is together, jerked from the time vortex by temporal webbing. Will they escape or end up as the spider’s lunch?
Only time will tell…
Fall of Guardia 1005 AD
Warning: Spoilers to follow.
The original Chrono Trigger ended on a bright optimistic note. Squaresoft being Squaresoft could not let that stand. Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross noted an event that occurred in 1005 AD, the Fall of Guardia. This event was important enough to Squaresoft that they included animation for it in the Playstation re-release of Chrono Trigger. We see the last defender of Guardia fall, Truce is burnt to the ground, and the Masemune was stolen. One hopes that Chrono Break would have let the players do something about this turn of events but…as that was canceled we will never really know.
Chrono Trigger DS included new content that confirmed that Dalton – the gag boss from antiquity who breaks the fourth wall and has a burp attack – was responsible for the Fall of Guardia. Lucca’s fate in Chrono Cross at the hands of Lynx and Harle was unpopular but generally accepted due to the strength of their characters. But Dalton? A boss who the Chrono Trigger group trounced multiple times? How did Dalton, even with an army, defeat Marle and Crono?
An artist named Maggie Karp offered one theory.
https://www.deviantart.com/maggiekarp/art/CTDS-Spoilers-TWIST-108247528
I have my own serious take on this in Chrono Bolt and it starts a long time before 1005 AD. And, yes, the players will have the opportunity to do something about it.
First Mapmaking
In the past I would use programs like GIMP or InkScape to create maps manually. This often led to me perseverating over tiny details on the maps and drained energy that would have been better spent on the game. It was also a pain to track and remember to update things like ‘wall of fire’.
More recently I began to run tabletop games online using Fantasy Grounds Unity. The drawing, grid, and effect tools are designed for this. Plus it comes with a mountain of art assets and it’s easy as pie to add new art assets (like video game sprites). So I decided to try running a play by post game using it.
These are snapshots of the first few maps that I put together for Chrono Bolt.
These serve as teasers for the game but also show what “real” maps will look like. I also wanted to see how well the Fantasy Grounds Unity maps would convert to image. In general, I’m pleased but those grids will need darkened on the lighter backgrounds. The grid also need numbered but since I was going for snapshots I didn’t bother this time.
Fantasy Grounds Unity has support for line of sight and fog of war based on terrain, so I may use them for certain scenarios.
Why Chrono Cross failed as a sequel
I have a deep appreciation for Chrono Cross and consider it one of the best games of it’s era. Despite that it was still, in my mind, a failure as a sequel. There are a number of reasons why but I think it’s crucial mistake was how it treated it’s playable characters.
- Passive Protagonist: Serge is a passive protagonist in Chrono Cross. He rarely has clear motivation, goals, or will. The one exception to this is his relationship to Lynx but even then Serge is always reactive.
- Sidenote: This was not true of Serge in Radical Dreamers. He had clear motivation and comes across as a very different character.
- Companions: Serge’s numerous companions are transient and wield minor influence on the plot. They may be of importance to the plot, sure, but they have little to no agency over events in the game. It was a neat idea to include 45 recruitable characters but a side effect of that decision is that they feel expendable.
Compare this to Chrono Trigger, in which the three core characters – Lucca, Marle, and Crono – see a distant desolate future and decide to change it. There’s a moment in Chrono Trigger where the characters theorize that, perhaps, the time gates were created by an entity (heavily implied to be the planet itself) that’s reliving it’s memories before death; like a person’s life flashing before its eyes. Even if this entity is responsible for time travel, it’s still the playable characters who refuse to accept this ending and decide to change the future.
In Chrono Cross, Serge defeats ‘FATE’ as he was preordained to do by Belthasar. Off screen for most of the game, Belthasar emerges as the one whose decisions shaped the plot for the good. Belthasar and the final boss (who, as a composite character, has complicated influence) seem to be the only characters with the agency to change the plot in any meaningful way. There’s no sense that Serge, his companions, or even his opponents are anything but pawns in the chess game between these two.
It’s not just a departure thematically, it’s a complete reversal and that makes it difficult to reconcile the two games.
Chrono Bolt: First Chrono Tactics game
I’m preparing to run the first play by post game using this system, Chrono Bolt, over at the Shining Force Central forums. I considered running it on my own forums – where I can optimize for play by post with custom BBcode and extensions – but decided I’d rather see how well the system works on an unoptimized platform.
Chrono Bolt will be a sequel to Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. It will address some of the major plot threads left hanging by Chrono Break’s cancellation while fielding an original plot that seeks to reconcile Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Hopefully it will be something fun for the players that evokes fond memories of a beloved setting while enabling them to engage with it in a new way.