I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I think it is.
I've been struggling lately with writing my story/plot, it's by far my biggest road block. It used to be mapping, but now I've improved my mapping skills a bit and feel more comfortable with it, so I need to work on my story writing so I can actually put all these maps to work and use!
I have a pretty decent base and idea of what I want in my current project. I want it to be simple, straightforward, classic, cliche, basic, stereotypical, and nothing too long or ambitious. Just a simple, feel good game that I can be proud of saying "I made this." I want it to use as much of the RTP as possible, and keep things uncomplicated.
I really like Yanfly's basic JRPG structure of Town 1 -> Dungeon 1 -> Town 2 -> Dungeon 2 -> Town 3 -> Dungeon 3. I could do a fourth if necessary, but I think three works best with this idea I have.
So it's a basic classic JRPG medieval fantasy world where Town 1 is the kingdom with a castle and you have a king. With this kingdom, that I have named Aubridor, there is an archmagus that's basically the most powerful magic user in the world. He was a teacher for both the church clerics/healers and the scholars/mages, then suddenly one day he goes missing. It turns out, three special relics/artifacts are also missing from the castle vault, and the king orders three of the four party members to search him out. I want the four party members to be the stereotypical knight, cleric, mage, thief, where the knight is following the duty of his king, the cleric wants to keep balance in the world, the mage was a pupil under the archmagus, and the thief has his own mysterious motives that he slowly reveals throughout the game. Obviously the thief wouldn't be ordered by a king to do anything, so I'll write more on my idea of him later.
So I've had some ideas of what those relics are, why the archmagus took them, and what he plans to do with him. There's a very old game called Majesty I loved playing as a kid, and its first mission was for the player to retrieve the Magic Bell, Holy Book and Eternal Candle (there's little to no context of these items in Majesty, so I wanted to make my own) and these are the three relics. One idea I've had is that the archmagus has a wife, and the wife either is sacrificed by the archmagus because he discovers three rituals that bring him everlasting power, or that the wife chooses to be sacrificed so he can use these three rituals with the artifacts to resummon her from the dead with everlasting power. Another idea is that there's a stereotypical dark phantom corporal being that entices the archmagus and wife that if they do these rituals, they'll achieve everlasting power but in the end they just sacrifice them selves so the dark phantom can reborn as the final boss. Finally, there's the classic idea of the archmagus being revealed to a prophecy that there will be four heroes who will rise over him in power, he wants to always be the strongest so he tries to stop it by using these three relics to achieve everlasting power but ends up fulfilling the prophecy through it. The plot progression should be like each of the three dungeons are where the archmagus is doing the rituals with the artifacts, you fight a boss (for some reason I need help to think of) at each dungeon, then move to the next until the final dungeon is the series of final bosses from whichever idea I use. Depending on the idea, the archmagus in the end reveals he was the final sacrifice in these rituals and either the wife is reborn, he is reborn, or the dark phantom is reborn and that is the final final boss. As for the rituals, my ideas were: the ritual with the Magic Bell sounds the calling of the dead souls to make their way back to the live world, the ritual with the Holy Book allows the dead to transcend the line between dead and live world, and the ritual with the Eternal Candle gives everlasting life to the soul that successfully completes the other two. Depending on the chosen idea, I can fit the relics' purpose to the idea.
As for the thief, I want him to be traveling to Aubridor from a far away city/town where his child sister of shared orphaned parents died to starvation, because he was unable to steal enough for both of them. He catches a rumor of those three relics and how they can resurrect the dead, so he becomes interested and travels to Aubridor. Basic idea is the game starts by providing a brief intro of the archmagus, then the king informs the three party members a basic general idea of what happened and orders them to go find him. They don't know where to go or where to start, so you make your way to the pub where if you talk to thief sitting there, he says he'll only talk if you order him a drink. So, in order to make the thief join the party and have it make sense to be on this journey with them, I need a reason why. I can't really think of a compelling one, the closest thing I got is that you need to use his services for something, like lock picking, that only he can do. Or you get captured by some bad guys and you need his help to break out, something like that. What I do know is that I want him to join before you do any battles because I want to balance all my encounters with the four of them together in mind. I could even make him being from Aubridor and not traveling from anywhere else. A thief being with an uptight knight and holy cleric makes for good character dialogue and personality growth I can do throughout the game.
And that's about all I got so far with my story. I've got plenty of decent maps already made like the full castle of Aubridor finished, most of its town, and all of its shops. I even got some dungeons maps completed, like a cave and some of an ice cave. As for more inspiration of the archmagus,
@JohnDoeNews made a great sliding bookcase graphic (
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/secret-doorways-and-other-edits-mv.88858/) that leads to a hidden doorway so I thought maybe I could use that as part of the story telling of investigating what happened to the archmagus, how did he research these things, etc. but I haven't really come up with anything yet.
Not having these ideas settled and beginning production on my actual game rather than just keep making random maps driving me nuts. I'm losing sleep over this and just don't know what to do, and the more I stare at this fairly blank word doc the worse it gets. Nothing just comes out aside from what I've written here, and I don't feel confident at all producing based on this alone. I even tried just "winging" it and hoped it would come to me as I started writing events and text messages, which sometimes works for me if I can get into the flow, but that hasn't been working for this.
I know this was long, sorry, but thanks for reading and caring, I'm just stuck at this point and not sure what to do. I've been at this point for a very long time now.