Thanks for reading!
This page is a special one. It was supposed to come out for the Return to Roots event (which is why it uses so many Hobbytown images), but due to IRL difficulties, coupled with difficulties in defining the format, I never managed to get the concept going let alone the page posted.
But here it is at last! For promptcon, the page uses the prompts "Peace", with secondary themes being centered around the prompts "Friend", "Family", "Travel", "Liminal", "Encounter" and "Safety".
The concept was to fill a gap within the universe. How could people get their hands on stuff from all over the Backrooms? How does the Backrooms monetary system work? What would a social place in the Backrooms look like? and most importantly, how did the MEG and the BNTG better their diplomatic relationship since they splintered?
The format was something I wanted to try for a while. I’ve been trying to find a way to make clinical more appealing since the start of the year, and this was one of the ideas I had. A journalistic writing style can hopefully be more catchy and therefore more interesting. Logically, this is also a Daily Rooms article, a GOI Red-eyes Dragoon and I are slowly but surely working on. It also features the character of Dan Abbolt as the author, a name that might feel random but which is actually linked to a POI I’m working on, a liminal photographer whose overall story intertwines with the long-gone era of the antiquity Iron First, although it is not relevant here. Dan isn’t the only character to get namedropped too, actually. I tried to use characters that already existed, such as:
- Katherine Zimals that you already know of
- Aster, a member of Amor Incrementum and a former friend of Kain Petrie
- Anthony Kelvin, historian of Team Hermes of the Ariane Circle featured in a lot of FR pages as a part of the Hermes Saga
- Antoine Talor, a scout from Housekeeping present in Level 5.3
- Sebastian Muller, an entomologist working in Housekeeping and featured in Firemoths
Tried to display some other pages in a natural way, such as Level 304, Level 718 or Level-159, the two latter being connected to Level 4. Same with objects, I tried to showcase some real-world things and some anomalous stuff to make trading feel more linked to the universe. The Object 85 trading comes directly from its page!
Worldbuilding-wise, the events of the Bakcrace leading to the BNTG and the MEG getting closer is inspired by how the “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” which led to the USA and China bettering relations between the two countries. I tried to adapt the idea with images of Hobbytown, which led to the whole toy car race thing, which sets up some interesting worldbuilding about what kind of hobbies Backrooms people are up to. In a place where so much stuff gets handmade, it’s only a logical outcome, isn’t it?
You can also see two unexisting links on the page, one for the BackWeb and the other for the GPD trading scale. Both are in-universe elements I’d like to expand at some point as they are interesting parts of the universe.
And that’s… Basically it! I hope you liked the page. I also want to thank Greggita Mahayfaio,
Spectre48 and
Super-Robot14 for the reviews they provided on the page. Y’all are great people!