The Vague Rants of Vagrant

So I've finally decided that this is never actually going to happen, even as a quest on /tg/ or something. Which means it gets to go here so I can dump ideas out of my head.

It has been hanging around in one form or another since 2011 at least, and the basic idea was that I had too many Servants I wanted to write about and feature in a standard grail war. So taking cues from EXTRA and the recently revealed details of the cancelled Apocrypha game, Fate/Conflict Eternal was born. Later on, due to the idea of the land used for the Grail War being essentially not under the rule of any specific Second Owner, I renamed it Terra Nullius (No Man's Land) because Conflict Eternal is an awful name lol

The setting was Australia, since I know about it personally, it's never really been raised in TM lore and is a blank slate, and seems like it could be a place with a lot of potent leylines. The concept was a nationwide war with 72 Servants participating. Why so many? Essentially it was my little wankfest of a quest story, it was supposed to be basically an entire nation of interlinked skirmishes that could happen session to session or arc to arc, as essentially an ongoing campaign.

I didn't have much of a plotline as such, but at its core it was set in the declining world of EXTRA. Because of the vanishing magical energy somebody (probably an Einzbern splinter faction but maybe the DAAs trying to repair the damage done by their failed Aylesbury ritual, I never quite decided) just developed a brute force system. Feed enough servants to an inferior grail and eventually the numbers would offset the inefficiencies it had in retrieving soul energy compared to the Fuyuki Grail.

The quest would have worked in such a way that there was no safety net. With so many characters available, if you fucked up in a battle and got killed the POV would just jump to another Master/Servant pair. I had a chart of summoning that allowed about half of the Servants as playable ones, the others being deemed as Too Strong and better as obstacles and foes to overcome.

Due to changes in the Grail System it had 2 additional classes, Striker and Monster, and Assassin was changed to Hunter, which later became Killer. Striker was a class for bare hands, blunt objects or crushing attacks, so things like maces, axes, hammers and the like. Monster was for Servants that could shift to an inhuman form. Transformations occurred via the Class Skill, Bestial Curse, rather than as NPs, so that Monsters could hide identities a little by relying on their weak NPs in human form.

Overall, there were 7 "teams" of 9 Servants, one for each class, but it was really more like a tier of power as opposed to a team, since due to the nature of quests it seemed likely readers would form up alliances of their own.

In the end it got scrapped simply because I am lazy. My excuse is that I couldn't think of an engaging enough hook or twist to the Grail War concept to subvert it and make it compelling from a literary perspective, but really I just didn't want to have to characterise up to 72 Servants and potentially a lot of Masters too.

Also I figured that BL being BL another Grail War quest would just die quickly, and I came up with what i personally think is a much better idea for the magical terra nullius concept if I ever want to write about it one day.

Maybe I'll follow this up with a brief outline of the Servants I ended up choosing for the lineup, with some scant run downs on some NPs, rejected or discarded character ideas and the likes. Many of them just ended up published in the Create A Servant thread in the end. 25-30 of them, at least.