Fun fact! My second ever series was slated to be a fantasy series, but I absolutely shit canned the whole thing. I'll never, ever produce it so I'm gonna yap about it here. It was an adaptation of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I wrote and DMed back in 2020 called Cobañera.
The story began with the listener attacking the main speaker (Thorne) with powerful magic. As he struggles against her spells, he tells her to try and remember their journey, that she doesn't really want to kill him. The story flashes back to one year prior, where they first met.
In a world where magic once thrived but is now heavily repressed after a prophecy fortelling the progress of magic would cause a world-ending war, two young and hungry directionless youths meet. They take on an odd job to transport a sealed crate containing a decommissioned and illegal magical artifact to be fully disposed of. On their journey, however, they are attacked by a member of a radical rebellion group (Plague Covenant) determined to restore magic to the world to it's former glory by forcefully infecting people with a plague that imbues them with dangerous and unstable wild magic.
They try to flee, but can't outrun their attackers. The listener tries to save Thorne from the Plague Covenant, and to her surprise, manages to do so using magic. The Plague Covenant yields when they see she is gifted with magic and leave them alone, with both the Listener and Thorne absolutely in shock that she could cast spells.
They become fearful that if someone learned of her magic, they would believe she was infected with the plague. They seek the help of the few who still understand magic, and find themselves entangled between three warring factions, all with different interpretations of the prophecy.
Anyway I got writer's block before I could write the middle of the story. The big plot twist towards the turning point of the plot was that the prophecy never showed their world's future, but rather the past of a long-dead world from a parallel timeline where the magic equivalent of nuclear armageddon took place. The bigger plot twist was that a few hundred powerful individuals from the old timeline escaped to their world before being annihilated. The records of their past were shown to the people of the main story's timeline as a "prophecy" to ensure that the only weapon powerful enough to stop them (the magical doomsday device from the other timeline) would never be built.
The bigger BIGGER plot twist was that the listener originated in the other timeline, AND her parents were the leaders of the super secret super evil final boss faction, ANDDDDD they had been engineering her entire life behind the scenes to make her into a powerful magical prodigy ANNNNNDDDD they brainwash her into becoming their leader and like AAAAAAUUUUGGGHH SRTFFHJG.
Anyway, my cat destroyed my laptop and I had to take a hiatus and work on a smaller, shittier backup laptop that could barely edit sound. I got writer's block and started writing another series instead called San Sequestro 1987, which later became The Neon Barbarian.
Anyway, I never came back to Cobañera. Why? I was struggling to convert a (thirty game long, four-player character) Dungeons and Dragons campaign into an eight episode game. Also, things that work for a tabletop RPG story just don't always work well as an audio roleplay story. There were like a million bazillion plot twists and the abundance of factions that made the story more interesting in the tabletop game made the story worse in the audio RP by just absolutely bogging everything down and making everything messy and convoluted.
I ended up just hating the whole thing. I hated the chosen one plot point, I hated that the plot hinged on the introduction of a bullshit multiverse plot device, I hated the fact that the final villains were randomly the listener's parents. I hated the countless tropes I peppered into the script that are forgivable in an interactive medium like a Dungeons and Dragons game but absolutely dull clichés in a scripted story.
Also my character had a funky fantasy British accent but I hated every rehearsal take I did with that accent. The listener's nickname was, I kid you not, "Cheeky". Around the time my fat idiot cat sent my computer to the shadow realm, I discovered a much more popular VA who's audience seemed to heavily overlap with mine named Scythe Audio. His flagship series featured a similarly impertinant speaker with an English accent and a Listener nicknamed Cheeky and I just stared at the YouTube video thinking "you're fucking kidding me lmao hahaha what the FUCK".
I think that was the last straw for me and I just abandoned the project entirely. A million zillion rewrites and then I found this uncanny similarity to this other VA and I just decided the rewrites weren't worth it for this fuckass story. I ended up becoming friends with Scythe after discovering him through that though lmao so silver lining.
