I was thinking about the absolute carnage of towerfall - you were in a plane before, you’re dead; you were on a train or you were in a car travelling 60mph, you’re dead (assuming people are back where they started and travelling the same speed as they were before the Event) - like yeah, utter bloody chaos because the implication is everything (planet included) moved for 6 months but the humans are dropped into the exact latitude and longitude that they were before (consistent velocity to be confirmed) - every road is a pile-up, there are plane crashes everywhere, everyone is ✨horrifically✨ traumatised✨ (the bleakness is so wonderful, I adore it)

I asked before about how Jonny nearly killed billions of people - surely it must’ve been something regarding the consequences of towerfall? Did he want the people to be dropped back into the space they were in (sans planet)?

please do tell 😆

I FINALLY get to tell this story! Yay!

Enormous Protocol and Archives Spoliers READER BEWARE:

Firstly, you should know that whilst @jonnywaistcoat is a big ideas guy, I am normally the one who ends up going off and actually figuring out how things work in the real world. I’m always ending up saying something like “sure that’s creepy but that’s not how steam trains work. You need to account for the Stephensen Regulator” etc.

This means that when @jonnywaistcoat had thoughts as to how Towerfall worked in early Protocol drafts, I was the one who had to try and make it work. We both wanted to make sure that people could begin to rebuild in a meaningful way rather than going full Mad Max but unfortunately I quickly realised that almost every instinct @jonnywaistcoat had for cataclysms generally lead to the irrecoverable collapse of civilisation and death of basically everyone.

For instance, we both felt that the actual Hellscape could have lasted longer (in the order of months, not weeks) but no matter how I tried to bend things to fit that timeline, the truth is that human built infrastructure does not recover well from that length of absence. (at least, not in a way that doesn’t kill most people from pestilence, starvation and associated wars.) So we had to make it a bit shorter and thankfully we’d already established there was time dilation at play in Archives. (We actually even experimented with it only lasting 1 day but we both decided that wouldn’t hurt enough.)

The worst case of this kind of logistical horror however, was about locations. @jonnywaistcoatwas was really enamoured with the idea that everyone would arrive back, not where they had left, but instead clumped according to their fears. I.e. Everyone in the Arachnophobic domain turns up in Australia together, everyone in the Nyctophobic domain turns up in Antarctica etc. so I dutifully went away and ran the numbers and no matter how I tackled it I kept coming to the conclusion that this pretty much kills everyone in less than a week due to the massive logistical collapse it causes.
(There’s actually a really great examination of this on XKCD)

Now don’t get me wrong, I was all for getting stuck-in telling the story of the bleakest logistical collapse possible but to quote Jonny “that sounds pretty grim and not in a fun way” so in the end we opted to return people where they left (albeit compensating for planetary movement so that we wouldn’t accidentally extinct everyone in the most unsatisfying way imaginable).

So there you have it. Technically, technically I saved the world including all your favourite characters from @jonnywaistcoat’s insatiable bloodlust.

You’re welcome.