Battle Century: Zoidian Tribes.

[Kantorock]

I'm not sure if this classifies as "fan fiction" in the sense of it being a story, but I felt I should share this particular piece with everyone.

Recently I managed to get my hands on a translated version of the original source materials that came with the Zoid Core Box. Mind you, the translation was very poor and very literal, but it was a translation none the less. It took some time to fully understand it, but I finally worked it all out.

In brief, I took a portion of the information and turned it into workable source-books for my fanverse, Battle Century. This is the first installment. It gives a brief but descriptive overview of the Zoidians. I hope you enjoy.

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[Maethius]

Wow, a phenomenal amount of work and detail went into this. So you took the crumbs that we were given from different sources and made a whole cake? Very well done! The background feels solid and written as well as a college text on the subject of Zi Anthropological Studies 101.

[Kantorock]

Nov 7, 2011 0:56:24 GMT -5 Maethius said:

Wow, a phenomenal amount of work and detail went into this. So you took the crumbs that we were given from different sources and made a whole cake? Very well done! The background feels solid and written as well as a college text on the subject of Zi Anthropological Studies 101.

Thanks. I tried to stay true to the style of writing that was used with the Zoid Core Box inserts. However, there was a lot of information missing, so I had to resort to making it up while still being believable at the same time.

[Zoidmagnite]

Nicely done. I'm sure it must have taken quite a bit of critical thinking in finding a balance, as well as strengths and weaknesses to all of the tribes. Of all your work (of which the characterization in your letters are nicely done), I find this Universe fan-made reference most impressive.

Now it would be interesting to see you apply your efforts to world-building and start cranking out some prose.

[Shizuhara]

How much of this was your own creation?

I honestly thought it was all official until I read the comments here. It's very well put together.

[Zoidmagnite]

Yes, I, too, am curious as to how much 'filling in' you had to do. Could you elaborate?

[Kantorock]

Nov 16, 2011 11:55:58 GMT -5 Shizuhara said:

How much of this was your own creation?

I honestly thought it was all official until I read the comments here. It's very well put together.

Nov 16, 2011 18:32:06 GMT -5 Zoidmagnite said:

Yes, I, too, am curious as to how much 'filling in' you had to do. Could you elaborate?

Thank you, Shizuhara. I did my best to try and emulate the way the Core Box info-sheets were written in.

To answer both of your questions, I would have to say about 85% of it is filling.

Despite being featured in every single Zoids series ever produced (Z-Knights not included) information on the Zoidian species is extremely rare. Not much was given about them in the Core Box info-sheets beyond a small paragraph for the eight dominant tribes, and the fandom was eerily silent on the question of "Who are the Zoidians?" It was critical for my me to answer that question before I started crafting the history of my fanverse, and in turn translating that history into workable playable stories for my RPG.

[Zoidmagnite]

I'm not sure that even TT itself knows very much of the ancient Zoidians. For a Universe, it can be non-critical so long as enough smoke and mirrors exists to support a Toy Line. However, for fictional story-telling, the plot holes can get fairly large. I would assume an RPG is not quite so worried about those holes.

The good thing about leaving gaps in a universe is that the fandom can expand the universe to suit their interests. The down side is that it can create huge debates as to the validity of any one fan's universe. So, if I understand you correctly, you had skeletal information for each of the tribes in a literal translation that needed to be transformed into workable english language. And the part about Zoidians is your best guess as to how they exist in your RPG.

Sounds good to me.

Best of luck to you with your RPG.

[DarthPardus]

I love this! ...Although I do have some questions. Are the heights, eyes, and hair colors all from the original text or made up fluff?? The reason I ask is that some other media show some wild hair and eye color not used here, nor does it reflect at all the black hair and green glowing eyes of the Nyx tribes. That i know is from artwork directly used in the line boxart.
Anything on that?

[Kantorock]

Nov 27, 2011 17:41:55 GMT -5 DarthPardus said:

I love this! ...Although I do have some questions. Are the heights, eyes, and hair colors all from the original text or made up fluff?? The reason I ask is that some other media show some wild hair and eye color not used here, nor does it reflect at all the black hair and green glowing eyes of the Nyx tribes. That i know is from artwork directly used in the line boxart.
Anything on that?

I wish I could say that it's all canon, but it's not. I created most of it out of a lack of information from what appeared in official and fan works. I needed a consistent description for each tribe for my RPG, so I was forced to come up with a stereotypical look at them. However, that's not to say that all members of a certain tribe look exactly as I described them. One has to remember that there are over 50 different Zoidian tribes, and they are constantly merging and splitting off from each other. A member of the Wind Tribe is just as likely to have blue hair and white eyes due to his cross-tribe heritage as a member of the Sea Tribe is likely to have green eyes and dark skin due to having a Nyx Tribe parent.

[Maethius]

That's basically how I formed my own early Battle Story for my collection and customs... couldn't read Japanese! Eventually I evolved my own version of Zi that was a huge departure from the official one. The best way to explain it? Hit Zi with another mega-disaster and start a new era!