I am an amateur writer, and there's one particular story in my head that I'm trying to get out onto the page. But it's hugely complicated. And I seek help.
The backdrop is a Renaissance-fantasy sort of superhero setting, with the classic Musketeers imagery providing the goonsquad mooks, while the awesomeness of the heroes and villains tends heavily toward the imagery of the various Final Fantasy job classes, rather than the genre's usual mutants, aliens, robots, survivors of mad science experiments, and billionaires with prototype hypertech toys.
The story has two main protagonists: the woman providing the reader's POV is a private detective who uses forensic alchemy to determine what sort of magic was involved in a given case, while the client who actually drives the plot is my city's equivalent to Lex Luthor; the city's top organized crime boss, who knows far more than he lets on about how all the "super stuff" precisely works.
He hires her to investigate a murder, so that the very violent, very powerful individuals in his organization can unleash their vengeance once, on the actual culprit, after a cool-headed professional has positively identified the killer. Rather than letting them run amok taking their anger out on anyone who attracts their attention.
The client knows that vengeance must be satisfied, but he wants it done in a precisely controlled manner. Minimum spectacle. So that the city's heroes don't find a reason to involve themselves in what should be a private matter for his community.
Because he's spent decades burying all evidence that the city even has a "vampire problem", and he certainly doesn't want the heroes to have preparations in place to stop creatures like himself when the time comes to slaughter these interlopers who think they have a right to lay down the law in his father's city.
The client is the oldest, scariest vampire in the city, who infiltrated the organized crime network and worked his way to the top of it in order to acquire an army willing to go to war against the city's self-appointed crimefighters. And he works very hard to keep the local vampire population's existence as secret as he can. Because he tried a direct assault on the heroes when he first returned home (to find the banner of strangers hanging on his father's house), and that impetuousness brought about disastrous consequences for his first child.
I should point out that vampires in this setting very much do not get a free ticket to broad-spectrum superpowered awesomeness; even healing their own wounds requires a vampire to possess enough expertise as a Necromancer to make use of "magical taxidermy" techniques. While making new vampires is an incredibly delicate matter of assembling a self-sustaining necromantic construct; easily a feat worthy of a master. Not remotely within the means of a beginner.
I have been mentally modeling the various superpowered characters in the setting in terms of the various Final Fantasy job classes, and I'm looking for specific imagery for the city's heroes. Ideally expressed in those terms. So that my villain protagonst can have specific plans to try to eliminate them.
I know that the heroic roster should definitely lack both the Dark Knight and Necromancer, because I'm using those to model the physical powers and undead-oriented sorcery inherent to the vampires in this setting. They can certainly branch out to other classes (the male protagonist also having acquired levels in Monk, Geomancer, and Beastmaster over the centuries), but without those two they wouldn't really be vampires in my mind.
I'm also not fond of including a Summoner, because bringing forth an unstoppable force to fight the battle on your behalf has all the dramatic tension of Voltron finally forming the Blazing Sword and cutting the monster in half with a single slash. A change in the order of magnitude of the battle's power balance, which only serves to make the audience ask why they even bothered with all the other moves before that. Which would turn the actual heroes into footnotes, and kill the drama of the story.
But other than that, I can't think of any job classes which would be bad fits for the story I've been trying to write.
So, anybody out there care to suggest a hero or two?
The backdrop is a Renaissance-fantasy sort of superhero setting, with the classic Musketeers imagery providing the goonsquad mooks, while the awesomeness of the heroes and villains tends heavily toward the imagery of the various Final Fantasy job classes, rather than the genre's usual mutants, aliens, robots, survivors of mad science experiments, and billionaires with prototype hypertech toys.
The story has two main protagonists: the woman providing the reader's POV is a private detective who uses forensic alchemy to determine what sort of magic was involved in a given case, while the client who actually drives the plot is my city's equivalent to Lex Luthor; the city's top organized crime boss, who knows far more than he lets on about how all the "super stuff" precisely works.
He hires her to investigate a murder, so that the very violent, very powerful individuals in his organization can unleash their vengeance once, on the actual culprit, after a cool-headed professional has positively identified the killer. Rather than letting them run amok taking their anger out on anyone who attracts their attention.
The client knows that vengeance must be satisfied, but he wants it done in a precisely controlled manner. Minimum spectacle. So that the city's heroes don't find a reason to involve themselves in what should be a private matter for his community.
Because he's spent decades burying all evidence that the city even has a "vampire problem", and he certainly doesn't want the heroes to have preparations in place to stop creatures like himself when the time comes to slaughter these interlopers who think they have a right to lay down the law in his father's city.
The client is the oldest, scariest vampire in the city, who infiltrated the organized crime network and worked his way to the top of it in order to acquire an army willing to go to war against the city's self-appointed crimefighters. And he works very hard to keep the local vampire population's existence as secret as he can. Because he tried a direct assault on the heroes when he first returned home (to find the banner of strangers hanging on his father's house), and that impetuousness brought about disastrous consequences for his first child.
I should point out that vampires in this setting very much do not get a free ticket to broad-spectrum superpowered awesomeness; even healing their own wounds requires a vampire to possess enough expertise as a Necromancer to make use of "magical taxidermy" techniques. While making new vampires is an incredibly delicate matter of assembling a self-sustaining necromantic construct; easily a feat worthy of a master. Not remotely within the means of a beginner.
I have been mentally modeling the various superpowered characters in the setting in terms of the various Final Fantasy job classes, and I'm looking for specific imagery for the city's heroes. Ideally expressed in those terms. So that my villain protagonst can have specific plans to try to eliminate them.
I know that the heroic roster should definitely lack both the Dark Knight and Necromancer, because I'm using those to model the physical powers and undead-oriented sorcery inherent to the vampires in this setting. They can certainly branch out to other classes (the male protagonist also having acquired levels in Monk, Geomancer, and Beastmaster over the centuries), but without those two they wouldn't really be vampires in my mind.
I'm also not fond of including a Summoner, because bringing forth an unstoppable force to fight the battle on your behalf has all the dramatic tension of Voltron finally forming the Blazing Sword and cutting the monster in half with a single slash. A change in the order of magnitude of the battle's power balance, which only serves to make the audience ask why they even bothered with all the other moves before that. Which would turn the actual heroes into footnotes, and kill the drama of the story.
But other than that, I can't think of any job classes which would be bad fits for the story I've been trying to write.
So, anybody out there care to suggest a hero or two?
