Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 41: Nightmare Wilderness

Beginning

<- Gold Volcano

We’re done with the Grangold towns and villages for now, so it’s time to head out to the Tartarus pit located in the dangerous western desert.  It looks like a straight walk on the world map, but in actuality we’ll have to go through a dungeon-type location to enter the desert – the Nightmare Wilderness.

This is not a straight walk on the world map

Thankfully, it doesn’t live up to the name and is relatively short to traverse (unlike the many many screens of the Marching Hills).

We even get three brand new monster girls.

The welcoming party

These are Gelatinous Cube Girl, Tiger Girl and Youki.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing Gelatinous Cube Girl ever since she was spoiled on Toro Toro Resistance’s blog.  I was surprised she didn’t show up in Undine’s Fountain.  I must not have been the only one looking forward to her, because – if you’re running the (pre 2.20) Dargoth patch – her H-scenes have already been translated.  I’m guessing this was by one of the volunteers as the translation has a few little quirks (“little swimmers”).

Gelatinous Cube Girl has a temptation move where she drags Luka into her cube.  Her Bad End also involves pulling Luka into her jelly cube.

Could be worse...

Once she has Luka trapped, she forms a jelly cone around his dick and pulsates him to repeated orgasms.  Afterwards, she pulls him all the way in, but it’s fine as she’ll let him breathe, somehow.

Hmm, are we sure this translation is accurate?

Gelatinous Cube Girl is much less fearsome than her namesake.  From the spoiler screenshots I thought there might be some paralyzing electricity involved, or Luka getting diffused within her cube, but it’s mostly just pleasant stuff.

Her temptation scene can’t be requested in the castle, instead she has a new scene unlocked at 100 affection.  She pulls us on top of her bouncy cube and proceeds to bang the shit out of us.

Slime girls can be passionate lovers

Which also looks rather pleasant.

Gelatinous girl seems to fall on the Lime side of the slime family tree rather than the nastier Blob Girl or Slime Beth side.  Not a bad thing, unless you like your slime girls nasty and melty.  Don’t worry, I’m sure the upcoming Tartarus region will give us nasty a plenty.

Youki is big-sis Oni.  I’m guessing that should be pronounced “Yoki”, as those are the name of the big red ogre things currently kicking my ass in Nioh.

She’s certainly muscly.  If she does manage to knock Luka flat with her club, she’ll climb on top and use her muscular pussy to squeeze out all of Luka’s “seed juice”.

Muscles in places you wouldn't even believe

This is another Luka loses the will to carry on Bad Ends, as once she’s done she just buggers off and leaves Luka where he is.

If you recruit her, she has a muscular paizuri scene where she squeezes her big boobs around our cock.  It looks like a lot of force is involved given the geyser of semen she gets out of Luka.

Tiger Girl was another one spoiled before MQ:P [part 2] came out.  She’s got a bit of a samurai theme and some fairly vicious sword attacks.  I’m not really a big fan of the quadruped beast girls like centaurs and some of the kitsune, and Tiger Girl is no exception.  I like them conventionally succubus-like, or very weird.  So, I think we’ll pass on the tiger pussy.

There’s a little hut halfway through the nightmare wilderness that contains a friendly little oni and big oni.  It functions as an inn, but you shouldn’t really need it as this section is mercifully short.

On the other side is the western desert.  Gelatinous Cube Girl is taken out of random encounter rotation and replaced with the Vampire Girl from the original series.  She was one of the first encounters on Helgondo, if I remember right.  MQ:P appears to have moved her to an earlier slot.  She’s also the first vampire you can recruit outside of Vanilla of the loli bandits.  Vampires appear to be very high level monsters in this universe.

There are a couple of locations of interest in the desert.

To the north is the Bird God Shrine.

Be grateful it's a warp point

Ah, I remember this from the original series.  This was how Luka got to Helgondo, and what those mysterious orbs are for.  We need six of them to summon the bird god to carry us over the mountains ringing Helgondo.

The game doesn’t actually mention this.  For now it’s a suspicious location that will clearly do something later.

It does fulfil one important function – it’s the warp point for this region.  Which makes sense, as running through the nightmare wilderness from Lady Village every time you want to visit here would get very tedious.

There’s another location to the southeast.

Yeah, don't go here unless your party is max-levelled

Entering this location scares Alice.  For good reason.  The wandering monsters patrolling the grounds around the abandoned research facility are all chimeras and experimental organisms from chapter 3 of the original series.  They even have the one that was glimpsed in the original series, but never had a fight or scene.

You don’t want to be here right now.  Not unless you want to get slapped around a lot.  I thought my party was over-levelled and still got flattened.  There’s also nothing to do here as the door is locked by a card reader.  I’ll go over it in more detail when the plot calls us for us to actually be here.

What we’re really here for is the Tartarus pit, which can be reached by going south around the mountains and then back north.

And that seems an appropriate point to leave things.  Come back next week when we finally descend into the first Tartarus region of Monmusu Quest: Paradox.

-> Next: Tartarus IV

More Patreon Thoughts

Many thanks for the feedback and comments on my first post about this.  From them I gleaned a few things.

One, people are happy to ship a $1/month to support my writing.  That is reassuring.

The other is that this would be for my fiction writing.  The game reviews, walkthroughs, etc I post on the blog here are nice distractions, but not what people want to be funding via a Patreon.  This is also good to know.

If I hadn't checked first I suspect my Patreon page might have ended up an unholy kludge of talking about blogs, monster girl bestiaries, Japanese hentai games, half-baked game ideas, oh and did you know I sometimes write succubus porn.

Now I know it should be:

"Give me money to write erotic horror fiction featuring sexy succubi and monster girls.  I'm really good at it.  Here's my Literotica page so you can see."

The next point concerns when to go live.

I was originally planning to have the Patreon page up and running by now.  I had a rethink after seeing the excitement in some posts and also some justifiable concern in others (as I've not exactly been the most prolific on the new story front of late).  I don't want to hype things up, get people subbing, and then have that turn bad if the fifth or sixth story in a row I'm working on falls apart before I finish it and I have nothing to show for it by the middle of March.

I want to do this right.

So this is the plan.  I have two short stories on the go at the moment.  When I've finished both of them, I'll open up the Patreon.  I'm aiming to post one to Literotica's usual annual Valentine's Day contest.  The other will be a Patreon-exclusive.  This is so that when I launch, I will be launching with something.  It's also an incentive for me to stop dicking around and finish the stories I'm working on.

That's the plan for launch.  Next, for going forward.

I want to get back on Literotica (and similar sites) this year.  Last year I went for the big novel plans, failed and knocked my confidence a little, so I think a spot of rebuilding on Lit might do me some good.  And who knows, might even result in that long-awaited "Succubus Summoning 301" chapter finally getting posted.

This means taking a look at the other things I have running.

The H-space monster girl bestiary has drifted a little from its original purpose.  Initially it was supposed to be somewhere for me to park monster girl/sex scene ideas until I had a full story to put them in.  With the last few I found the opposite to be happening.  The idea started to expand into a full story in the process of writing it.  Rather than fighting this, as I was stupidly doing for most of last year, I'm going to write these out as full-length H-space stories like the ones I used to write in the past (like this, or this).

The playthrough series of Monmusu Quest: Paradox I'm currently in the middle of has proven to be more contentious than I realised.  I know some people like it from the comments, but I also know some people don't like it because they think it's taken over my fiction writing.  To be honest, me not posting any new stories for ages because there's seven or eight of them rotting half-finished in various notebooks has not helped dissuade this perception.  So my fault there.  I don't want to abandon the series halfway through because I don't think that's fair to the people currently enjoying it.  However, as part of these Patreon discussions, this would be a good point to consider what to move on to next.

One thing the series has been good for is getting me in the habit of keeping to a regular schedule.  (Yes, I broke it today for this, I know.  Writing this post was way more of an ass than I realised - I was supposed to post it yesterday for starters.)  The series even kept going unscathed during a 100-hour playthough of Persona 5, which is impressive considering my bad habit of occasionally going completely AWOL for a couple of weeks at a time on computer RPGs.  Now, if I can transfer this good habit of posting 750-1K words every Mon, Wed and Fri over to posting an original fiction series, we might be onto something.

Yes, I did try this last time with Okasare Kenny, and it didn't work out too well.  The difference there was I was trying to keep to a much more gruelling daily schedule with an idea I knew I should have kept to its original form of a series of novellas.

I think I should be able to keep to 1k word chunks every Mon, Wed and Fri without it swallowing up all my writing time and this would be something that would fit very well to the Patreon model.

So here's the feedback part.  I have a couple of ideas and - as part of a post where I'm looking to grab some Patreon bux - I thought it might be a good idea to toss them out there to see what people think.

1) Ongoing series - [4 (or more) Guys in MGQ-world]

Not MGQ world exactly (I don't write fan fiction), but a similar fantasy setting filled with sexy monster girls that are more interested in fucking the characters than fighting them.  The characters would likely be from our world (similar to the Jackson in HRPG-world stories I wrote a few years ago).  I imagine the mood will be pretty swingy on this one - goofy to start, but very dark in places, especially with the more vore-themed monster girls, but not as grimdark as say H-space.  I've been itching to go full horror-head on an MGQ-style setting for a while, and this might give me an excuse.

The advantages: I'm following on from the game playthrough series with an original fiction series in a similar setting (likely written in a similar style to what I use in the playthrough).  This should hopefully appeal to both the people that like the MGQ playthrough and people wanting original fiction with graphic sex scenes.  I also won't give a shit about quality.  This shouldn't sound like an advantage, but with me - who is way too nitpicky with his own writing - it might free me up to splurge thousands of words of fun adventure and sex on the page without obsessing over how "good" it is and locking up in the process.  Also, gamers in a fantasy world requires zilch in the way of research, removing another barrier to just having fun writing.

This is my preferred option, mainly because while thinking it up I came up with a few "meta" ideas for audience participation that would work very well with Patreon.

On the other hand, it is more MGQ-type stuff, which people might be sick of at this point.

2) Succubus Summoning

This is the option I think most people would want - me continuing Phil's adventures in bite-size chunks here on the blog.

The advantage here is obvious.  Those bite-sized chunks quickly become full chapters and then, before you know it, a full novel.  Plus, people have really really been wanting me to write this for a long time.

I think it also has the biggest danger of failing or falling behind schedule, because I do give a damn about this story and want it to be the best it can.

That said, one of my biggest problems is being nitpicky and obsessing over making a story the best it can.  Trying to hit 3 1K-word deadlines a week, every week might bust me out of that, or wreck me.  Not sure.  The thought of trying to make the series work under those conditions does scare the hell out of me, but maybe that's what I need right now.

High risk, but potentially very high reward.

3) Barry Lyle Goes Out In Fucking Style

You probably don't have a clue what this is.  It's the book I was trying to write in the first half of 2017.  An overwhelming army of succubi invade a city on earth.  Barry Lyle is a student at university when the sky turns black with demons.  After hiding for a while, he realises he has no chance of surviving and throws himself at a group of seven succubi in the knowledge that at least he'll die having his brains fucked out.  The problem: all 7 succubi saw him at the same time and succubi don't fight over food.  Barry is going to have to make a choice and the 7 succubi couldn't possibly let him make that choice without letting Barry have a taste of what they have to offer first...

This is an easy option for me.  The first quarter is mostly written, so I probably have about 3 or 4 weeks worth of updates without even having to do anything.

I don't know how strong the overall idea is.  The mood is all over the place on this one.  The setup is clearly comical, but in order to make Barry's decision to take the suicide-by-succubus option plausible, I had to show him what the other non-succubus demons were doing to the students they caught.  Those scenes... are not comical.

4) Various Mini-Series

Another easy option.  No big series, just various little ones.  I've done this before with the Jackson stories.  The reason you haven't seen the bee girl H-space story was because as I was writing it I thought this might make an interesting little mini-series about a team of soldiers trying to burn down a bee girl hive and eventually being overwhelmed sexily by various bee girl types.

This would make a decent filler option for those times when I need to take a breather on a longer ongoing series.

Those are some thoughts.  I estimate I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the MQ:P series (which will return Friday as normal).  I think it will be another month or so before that winds up.  This gives me some time to get a follow-up series prepped and ready.  (If I decide to go with Succubus Summoning, having the whole first chapter done would be a must before I'd even consider running it.)

Whew, this post was a real ass to write.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Now, time to get back to that succubus Valentine's Day story.  (You are not fucking stalling out on me this time!)