Kingdomon: Back to Kin Je’do

“Imagine if the Warlord had never conquered Kin Je’do hundreds of years ago. If their philosophy of living in harmony with nature had been what survived and prospered? How different would our world be now..?”

In game 9, the peaceful citizens of Kin Je’do struggle to find a way to deal with Pashelkata, visiting scholar and spy for the Warlord, who wants to use their knowledge to turn Kingdomon into beasts of war…

In game 71, the crew of the SS Melody from hundreds of years in the future steps out from the Sub-Verse and see Pashelkata, studying in the libraries of Kin Je’do, learning secrets to take back to his master…

In game 15, the Warlord marches on Kin Je’do, enslaving its scholars and looting its libraries…

In game 73, we get ready to go back in time to stop him…

Now that we’ve inadvertently introduced time travel into our game, our Crossroad is, do we try to change history and save Kin Je’do? Because play big or go home.

Before we start, we talk about style: do we want a Crossroad where we sit on the sub and debate whether to intervene, watching historical events replay through hazy ether-windows? Or do we want “Back to the Future” hijinks where characters jump into the past and sneak around in the background, hiding behind bookshelves and eavesdropping on scenes we played a year and half ago?

Our decision: hijinks. So much hijinks. But all just barely toeing the line of not definitely intervening yet, because we can’t decide that until we resolve the Crossroad. We inadvertantly abduct the saavy scholar spy Pashelkata back to the SS Melody in the Sub-Verse, before (double-inadvertantly) returning with him to the Warlord’s camp and getting captured and tied to tent-poles. There are cameos by multiple fan favorites from 50+ games ago. Soooo much happens, with whole background arcs that could be filled in between scenes, like the most bad-ass of fiction. Our imaginary Kingdomon series fan-wiki is melting down from all the traffic.

In the end, just about every character wants to intervene. Touchstone tells us that the crew fervently wants to do the right thing and save Kin Je’do from the jackboots. But the predictions… the predictions are pretty bad. Yes, we’ll change the course of events, but we may also erase ourselves from history. And/or we’ll be trapped in the past, unable to ever return.

Was there a last minute change of heart and a single-handed mutiny/sabotage to avert a decision that could obliterate the whole world we’ve known and everyone in it? There was, but it was nowhere near a sure thing.

And here’s the tricky thing about Crossroads: a Crossroad is always a question about what the Kingdom decides to do, not the outcome. Consequences are for Perspective to declare. Our question was, do we try to save Kin Je’do. Not, “do we change history”. So after all our tampering, sneaking around, and telling people faaaaar too much about the future — not to mention leaving captured advanced technology in the absolutely wrong hands — we could have changed history *even though* we decided not to. Or, vice versa, Perspective could say “yeah, even if we try to save Kin Je’do, we’ll fail and things will turn out the same”.

Our Perspectives told us that if we intervened, it would work. We would win, but at a terrible price.

We almost did it anyway. That’s how much we still loved Kin Je’do.