So, I want to talk about a larger and more interesting topic, but first I need to lay down some groundwork. The next few topics I’m going to talk about are, in this order, plot arcs, character arcs, theming, and then the interesting one, something I call synthesis. Basically every hack has, or tries to have, the first two, but the third is more uncommon and the fourth is (in the FEU community at least) very rare in my experience.
These are, necessarily, going to be less romhack-specific bits of advice, but I’ll still be writing them with an eye towards the peculiarities of the FEGBA format as always, so don’t you worry.
Story Structure I: Plot Arcs
Wherein I discuss the basic factors to consider when constructing the arc of one’s plot.
NOTE THAT THIS IS PART ONE OF A FOUR PART SERIES. WHILE THIS FUNCTIONS MOSTLY AS A STANDALONE TUTORIAL, PLEASE CONSIDER READING STORY STRUCTURE II, III, AND IV TO SUPPLEMENT THE KNOWLEDGE FOUND HERE, AS IT WAS WRITTEN WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU WILL DO SO.
This is a broad subject, so forgive me if I’m less concise than I usually try to be (which, to be fair, already isn’t very much lol). When constructing a plot for a Fire Emblem game, there are some specific complications that limit the kinds of stories we can tell heavily. For instance, an FE game has to include large scale combat between dozens of people after every ~5-10 minutes of writing; or an FE game has to follow a larger band of combatants, and though most of them do not need to be mainstays in the plot, they will always contextualize the story as being one involving a small army of some kind.
Your story necessarily has to fit a Fire Emblem game alongside it, and this means that it has to exist in a context that can allow a Fire Emblem game to happen. Even if you want to do a smaller scale, more focused story (like in Storge, which has a strong focus on a familial relationship), you still have to include justification for why you have an army that constantly gets into fights. This is why many hacks default to fighting bandits for several chapters in a row; the army doesn’t really have a good justification for fighting yet, since the plot pieces are still being set up, so instead, bandits!
Because I’m not exactly sure how to explain the process without a hard example, I’m going to use Lady of Masks (my hack!) as an example, alongside the vanilla games, and explain how these games construct their plots. First, let’s talk about what LoM is before talking how I built it to be that. If you’ve played LoM, you may already have noticed that I never had to lean on the “fighting bandits” thing. While there are some complex character dynamics at play that begin to shake up the plot a great deal (but, of course, we can’t discuss that in depth until we talk synthesis), the actual core plot of LoM is very simple and gets set up very immediately: Haloseians invade Cerahn, Karth kills Fane’s mother, and Ileana is on the run from the Haloseian court and wants the king dead. All roads point in the same direction: fight the Haloseians to accomplish the various goals of the party, be they liberation, vengeance, or a spoiler!
Without spoiling too much, no matter what happens in the game, as motivations evolve and shift, this core goal of “fight Haloseians” never goes away. Much of the earliest early game chapters are spent establishing the reasons why the core cast is motivated to pursue this goal, such that the story can immediately pivot into what’s more important at that stage of the story, which is character development. The plot more or less remains on pause between 1-2 and 1-6, as these chapters are more or less just the escapades of the resistance, but the time spent is important for pacing out other aspects of the story telling. After 1-6, things are kicked into high gear and start to rapidly come to a head towards the finale of act 1, which of course isn’t public yet, but one of the biggest things that begins to happen is that the game expands beyond that core plot (defeat the Haloseian invaders) into new territory, as Maeve and Karth begin to unravel a conspiracy and the plot begins to focus on things beyond just the war between Cerahn and Haloseia – the various sects of the Haloseian faith, the scars of the previous and current wars, etc., all become more important – as mentioned before, the core plot pillar of “fight Haloseians” never goes away, but it meets complications, becomes recontextualized, waxes and wanes in importance as the plot twists and turns its way through to Endgame.
Let’s put it in reverse for a sec. Now that we’ve established what Lady of Masks’ plot is like, let’s discuss the actually important part, which is how I went about constructing this situation. I think most people, myself included, tend to view their story as a series of plot beats and big moments, with chunks of script existing to connect those individual bits of plot together to form a plot. Let’s refer to these as, respectively, your plot skeleton – the bones of your story, the big stuff that the whole game is predicated upon – and the connective tissue – the meat, the muscle, the bits that stop those bones from just collapsing into a pile on the floor. I’ve seen lots of people (both in asking around before writing this and just in general) say they have a good idea of what their plot skeleton looks like, but they just can’t string the events together in a way that’s satisfying. The connective tissue doesn’t exactly come naturally – as a writer, you’re excited to write the big moments you picture in your head. The moment when Black Knight kills Greil, when they sing the galdr in the forest, or Ike’s duel with the Black Knight, these are the moments that you may be most excited to write in your plot.
Now, this will get way easier to understand once you read (and I write) part IV of this series, but using LoM as an example, we can already see how I’ve formed a lot of connective tissue. In the early game, there are only really a few plot beats that I had planned – Fane’s village is attacked and his mother dies, Fane meets Ileana the seer, the events that unfold at the end of 1-6 occur, and then Fane hunts down Karth for revenge. If you’ve played LoM, you’ll know that there’s so much more going on alongside this though – there’s the discussions between Ileana and Fane, Raphael’s growing discontent, the various villain characters, meeting with Jericho, attempting to save the knighthood, your several encounters with Maeve. Beyond the public chapters, there’s the hunt for information about Karth, the investigation being done into the creature met in 1-6, continued and growing tensions between Fane/Raph/Ileana, and further encounters with several of the previously established villains.
Through these various elements, several of them being character development, I’m using them to weave in justification to manoeuvre characters into the positions I want them to be in for the big plot moments. The cast meets Price so they can learn of the knighthood’s survival, and they meet Jericho so they can learn of the prison where they’re held. This is what allows the cast to get to the prison such that the events there can take place. Why does Price know about the knighthood? Because he’s looking for Rory, who was imprisoned alongside them. Why does Jericho know where they’re held? Because he’s Maeve’s retainer and she’s standing guard there. The party lures her away so she isn’t present for the battle, but she still has a reason to show up to that battlefield when she does to find the corpse of the creature, which then kicks off her and Karth’s investigation, which in turn sets up the setpiece that will be seen in 1-E.
This is the process by which you build connective tissue – you find the points where you can find overlap between the events of one chapter and the events of the next. Maybe it’s a character, or a piece of information, or an event that occurs that leads the party in a new direction – picture the chapter in early Awakening, where the party changes course from their destination to try to rescue Emmeryn.
Sometimes these bits of tissue are much easier than this – for instance, 1-5 and 1-6 are connected just by place, as 1-5 is the area outside the prison while 1-6 is the prison itself. Similarly, 1-2 just takes place along the road to Verense, which is the route that the party is taking after fleeing the attack on their hometown in 1-1. If the only way you can think to connect two events together is just that they happen in sequence as the party moves from point A to point B, sometimes that’s okay too – without getting into detail, much of LoM’s second act is just a journey from one point on the map to another, with a much more “one foot in front of the other” vibe to it compared to the first act which likes to time-hop a few weeks or even a month at a time.
This is what you see most frequently in the FEGBA games – the entirety of Lyn mode, for instance, is just the journey from one place to another, with the first chapter being at point A and the finale chapter being at point B. Now, Lyn mode like… sucks… but I promised I’d use vanilla examples! The same thing is mirrored in early Eliwood mode, when you’re often given a location to head to, and then spend a few chapters travelling there, getting into fights along the way and meeting new characters, occasionally running into bits of foreshadowing as you go. In the various FE games with world maps (Sacred Stones, Awakening, SoV) this is also very common – a huge number of SoV’s plot events are only connected by way of place, for instance, as your army journeys to reach the next major landmark in your journey.
While I wouldn’t advise overly relying on this method, it can be helpful if you mostly want to give time for character development, or if you have plot elements that you feel need time (either script time or actual in-universe time) to ‘cook,’ so to speak.
Now, of course, it becomes much much easier to form the connective tissue with the benefit of planning. Knowing what your plot beats are ahead of time, alongside your character arcs and your themes, will provide you with a much deeper well of content to draw from when trying to write script that’s relevant, advances the story in a meaningful way, and gets the player from one plot beat to the next. This will be touched on in more detail in part IV of this series, but in miniature; understanding the ways that your character motivations can (and should) influence the plot will make it far easier to figure out how to get to the next plot beat, as you’ll simply have to motivate that character to pursue a plot thread that leads to that beat. The more you know about where that character’s head is at and where they’re headed, the easier it becomes to find convincing and compelling reasons for that character to proactively seek out the plot in the way you need them to.
In Lady of Masks, saving the knighthood has the very obvious tactical advantage of acquiring a small and well trained army to supplement the resistance, but it comes with a huge risk and isn’t guaranteed to begin with, so Fane is hesitant. The thing that pushes him to pursue it? Cylean’s father is one of the knights presumed dead, and rescuing them also means rescuing her father. At this stage of the script, Fane is especially sensitive to this – he’s lost both his parents by this point. He knows how much he’d give to see his parents again, and he knows how much it hurts to lose a parent, and so the existing motivation of “saving the knighthood makes it easier to fight Haloseians” that ties this plot beat into the core plot of this act is being supported by the additonal, more complex character motivations at play, running concurrently with the plot.
But wait, what about coming up with those plot beats themselves? How do you think up a satisfying set piece or plot event? I’ve certainly seen a few romhacks whose plots more or less never reach beyond that core pillar of “fight (evil faction) because they are an evil faction,” who rely entirely on that “chapters are connected by place” factor to link chapters together, whose characters are mostly or entirely static. Most of these games are very gameplay focused, and what plot exists is entirely to string cool map ideas together, but in a writing-focused context like this thread assumes, we can do better, right? Well, it’s complicated. A lot of it comes down to knowing what elements of the story you’re most excited about, and leaning into them, and that mostly comes through the planning process – when you know your characters in more detail, for instance. For that reason, I’m going to discuss this particular aspect in greater detail once I’ve gone over the process of creating a character arc.
However, a lot of the time it really is just down to thinking about what would be cool to have happen. It would be cool to fight a lightning dragon on top of a big tower in a hurricane! What would I have to do to get my story from being about a young prince coming into his own as an adult to being about doing that cool thing? I’ll have to find a way to introduce the idea of a lightning dragon obviously, maybe the hurricane could be a cool plot point. Maybe the tower is special? But how? How is the player gonna find out about all this stuff? Is the dragon aligned with anybody, or vice versa? Is there a cool way I could introduce the dragon’s allies into the plot? Maybe the dragon is a person! Maybe it’s one of the protagonists, and maybe they don’t even know, and the story has a tragic element to it! Or maybe they do know, and it’s a grand betrayal when the truth comes out!
In the upcoming parts, I’ll discuss how to write a character arc in more detail, and with the extra advice found therein, I’ll also be going into how to use your character arcs to prop up the big moments in the plot, information that will be very important as we get closer to part IV where I’ll discuss the process of synthesizing all of the elements of your script into one cohesive whole. If you feel like there’s anything that you really wish I’d touched on before concluding here, let me know and I’ll maybe add an addendum to this.