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Dino Attack RPG: Director's Cut Trailer

FAQ:

Q: What is Dino Attack RPG?

A: Dino Attack RPG (concluded as Dino Attack: At War's End in 2012) is a "play-by-post" text-based roleplay game on BZPower that ran from July 1, 2005 through December 21, 2012. For those who aren't familiar with this type of forum RPG, different BZPower members take turns writing an ongoing story that was largely overseen by me, the RPG host. It was primarily inspired by the LEGO Dino Attack line in 2005, but also incorporated many other popular LEGO themes and games at the time including Alpha Team, Adventurers, LEGO Island, Agents, Power Miners, and LEGO Universe.

Q: Why does the story jump around so much? I can't keep track of everything that's going on!

A: This is a side effect of the RPG's "play-by-post" nature. When players directly interact with one another, you can have long stretches of posts telling a single story. But, when players are acting independently, then each post tells a different story. Furthermore, "double posting" generally isn't allowed on BZPower, so one player would often have to wait for another player to post before they could continue their own story. In the early days of the RPG, posts were only a few sentences long on average, meaning you might only get a short paragraph of one story before it changes to a different story, admittedly giving the RPG a chaotic, messy feel as you're constantly quickly jumping between different characters and stories. This issue becomes less prevalent later on as the players started writing longer posts. The Director's Cut does attempt to mitigate this by reordering posts so that the story does not jump around as frequently as in the original play-by-post forum topic, although this is still unavoidable to a degree.

Q: Why are certain original characters, particularly those inspired by the LEGO Alpha Team theme, introduced as though the reader is expected to already be familiar with them? Is there some backstory that I'm missing?

A: Dino Attack RPG was created as a direct successor to BZPower's most popular LEGO RPG at the time, Alpha Team: Mission Deep Freeze RPG . Much of the playerbase from Alpha Team RPG carried over to Dino Attack RPG. As a result, many players were indeed already familiar with characters such as Chompy, Little Bot, PBB, Guardian, Frozeen, Phantom, Chaos, and General Evil, as well as other story elements such as Robo-Blades and G.E. Bodies, and so they required no introduction at the time. When necessary, the Director's Cut provides the essentials needed to know who these characters are.

Q: Why are some sections of the story glossed over as brief summaries, while other parts of the story seem to be omitted altogether?

A: In February 2013 (less than two months after the RPG's conclusion), BZPower was maliciously hacked. The entire pre-2011 BZPower Forum Archive was deleted as a result, including the original Dino Attack RPG. About one-third of the RPG was successfully recovered through the Wayback Machine's Internet Archive thanks to an incomplete 2007 backup, but even this archive was still missing a number of pages, and coverage of anything from 2009-2011 is scarce at best. With about two-thirds of the RPG lost forever, the missing content had to be reconstructed using summaries from the Dino Attack RPG Wiki or else extrapolated from the recovered content. In some cases, it's just no longer possible to know what is missing, leading to unavoidable gaps in the story. This led to the creation of a downloadable archive for Dino Attack RPG, preserving as much of the original RPG as we can.

Q: What is the Director's Cut?

A: The original RPG was written by dozens of people, each with their own writing style. Plot holes frequently arise, and other portions of the early story are later deemed non-canonical as the canon became stricter around 2008. And, if I'm perfectly honest, I really do hate my old writing. The goal of the Director's Cut is to address all of this in order to create a more cohesive reading experience. I playfully call it the "Director's Cut" since I, as the RPG's creator and game master (i.e. its "director"), am providing my own personal re-edit of this story as an alternative version for our audience to experience.

There are three general "tiers" of edits made to RPG posts:

1. The majority of posts are kept largely intact, with only minor editing for consistent formatting or correcting spelling/grammatical errors. Posts that are written in first-person or in script style are rewritten as third-person prose but otherwise kept intact. If it makes sense to do so, then the order of posts may also be shifted around. Since the canon was firmly established by the time At War's End began in March 2012, the overwhelming majority of edited posts from At War's End only fall into the first tier.

2. Posts with non-canonical content are rewritten in a way that reinterprets the material so that it would fit the current canon. For example, posts that use the BIONICLE settings Mata Nui and Metru Nui are rewritten to instead feature Enchanted Island (from LEGO Pirates) and Astor City (from LEGO Ultra Agents). I considered it important to retain the general gist of the original post and keep as much of it intact as possible, but I allowed myself to take some major liberties as needed.

3. When it comes to my own posts, I go full George Lucas! Quite a few of my posts from 2005-2007 are extensively rewritten, sometimes from scratch, in order to better match my own personal standards for writing. I still made sure to retain the gist of the original posts and many of my early posts still have not been radically altered, but otherwise I felt free to rewrite as much as I wanted to.

There are a few other special cases that do not fall into the above tiers. In some instances (e.g. Rev and Sereve's final confrontation with Landro, or Rex's battle with Sharptooth), I've completely rewritten the RPG's missing content from scratch because merely summarizing it did not feel satisfactory. There are some other brand-new scenes added here or there, which should entice those who have already read the RPG. Additionally, I've taken some of Dino Attack RPG's "Expanded Universe", a series of short stories written after the RPG ended, and directly integrated them into the RPG so that they now read as part of the ongoing narrative.

Q: Is the Director's Cut the definitive canonical version?

A: Yes... and no. As explained above, one of the main goals of the Director's Cut is to rewrite non-canonical posts so that they would fit the current canon. However, what I've offered with this Director's Cut is one possible interpretation of the canon that applies some creative license to make it all work. You can take it or leave it. It's possible that some material that I've left in the Director's Cut (such as Coldwire, or Magma's mutant arm) might no longer be considered canonical by their original writers, while other parts I've altered (such as Kotua learning Cane's name during their first meeting) are actually non-canonical but included here to improve the reading experience.

It is also important to note that the Director's Cut will not be replacing the original Dino Attack RPG; I shall continue to support the original downloadable archive and make it available for posterity's sake.

----

Fitting music:
Mission Complete: Ending Suite - Rex's theme
The Equation - Frank Einstein's theme
Skin on Our Teeth - Escape from Mercy Hospital
When Ginny Kisses Harry - Amanda's theme
Downed Dragon - Rex's first assignment

----

Anyways, welcome to the beginnings of the Dino Attack RPG: Director's Cut mirror on DeviantArt! You can also read it on BZPower for old time's sake, or you can download the entire story now in DOCX or PDF format if you just can't wait to read it!

Now that we have formal introductions out of the way, let's talk about this new prologue. Though, I say "new" very loosely, since my DeviantArt followers should quickly recognize that this is cobbled together from three preexisting short stories: First Assignment, Rex's Awakening, and Dear Sister. Therefore, pretty much none of this is new, aside from a few minor alterations.

Still, I thought it would be nice to give a proper introduction to the main story, rather than immediately thrusting you into the beginnings of the Kotua Crisis like in the original RPG.

Besides, one of those "few minor alterations" is removing the "said bookisms", as TV Tropes calls them. Yes, as late as 2014, I was still falling into the writer's trap of doing everything to avoid the word "said" like the plague (just because our English teachers said it was a "boring" word to use), including using some improper verbs like "shrugged", "grinned", "frowned", etc. for dialogue! Nowadays, I'm much more lenient about it. So, I think this small change does represent myself growing as a writer.

If you read Dear Sister, you might notice that some of the dialogue and prose has been subtly altered in order to not explicitly expose Amanda's past. That's what happens when you take the end of a prequel story (where the reader already knows the spoilers) and make it the prologue of the main story (where the reader has yet to read the spoilers). Still, I think there are enough hints there that a savvy reader should begin to suspect that there's more to Amanda than she lets on...

Regarding the character Walker... well, he certainly dates the story, doesn't he? 2012-2014 was a much simpler time for the internet, a time when it considered cool to watch Nostalgia Critic and make references to him. While I have mixed feelings about Nostalgia Critic nowadays, I ultimately decided not to edit or remove agent Walker's presence in this story, with the justification that he's written as both a homage and a parody; therefore, if you dislike Nostalgia Critic, you can always choose to view Walker as a parody rather than a homage.

LEGO Dino Attack belongs to The LEGO Group.

EDIT 7/3/2022: Updated to version 1.2.

Description

Previous: N/A

Next: Chapter 1: Looking for Trouble

----

Dino Attack RPG: Director's Cut Trailer

FAQ:

Q: What is Dino Attack RPG?

A: Dino Attack RPG (concluded as Dino Attack: At War's End in 2012) is a "play-by-post" text-based roleplay game on BZPower that ran from July 1, 2005 through December 21, 2012. For those who aren't familiar with this type of forum RPG, different BZPower members take turns writing an ongoing story that was largely overseen by me, the RPG host. It was primarily inspired by the LEGO Dino Attack line in 2005, but also incorporated many other popular LEGO themes and games at the time including Alpha Team, Adventurers, LEGO Island, Agents, Power Miners, and LEGO Universe.

Q: Why does the story jump around so much? I can't keep track of everything that's going on!

A: This is a side effect of the RPG's "play-by-post" nature. When players directly interact with one another, you can have long stretches of posts telling a single story. But, when players are acting independently, then each post tells a different story. Furthermore, "double posting" generally isn't allowed on BZPower, so one player would often have to wait for another player to post before they could continue their own story. In the early days of the RPG, posts were only a few sentences long on average, meaning you might only get a short paragraph of one story before it changes to a different story, admittedly giving the RPG a chaotic, messy feel as you're constantly quickly jumping between different characters and stories. This issue becomes less prevalent later on as the players started writing longer posts. The Director's Cut does attempt to mitigate this by reordering posts so that the story does not jump around as frequently as in the original play-by-post forum topic, although this is still unavoidable to a degree.

Q: Why are certain original characters, particularly those inspired by the LEGO Alpha Team theme, introduced as though the reader is expected to already be familiar with them? Is there some backstory that I'm missing?

A: Dino Attack RPG was created as a direct successor to BZPower's most popular LEGO RPG at the time, Alpha Team: Mission Deep Freeze RPG . Much of the playerbase from Alpha Team RPG carried over to Dino Attack RPG. As a result, many players were indeed already familiar with characters such as Chompy, Little Bot, PBB, Guardian, Frozeen, Phantom, Chaos, and General Evil, as well as other story elements such as Robo-Blades and G.E. Bodies, and so they required no introduction at the time. When necessary, the Director's Cut provides the essentials needed to know who these characters are.

Q: Why are some sections of the story glossed over as brief summaries, while other parts of the story seem to be omitted altogether?

A: In February 2013 (less than two months after the RPG's conclusion), BZPower was maliciously hacked. The entire pre-2011 BZPower Forum Archive was deleted as a result, including the original Dino Attack RPG. About one-third of the RPG was successfully recovered through the Wayback Machine's Internet Archive thanks to an incomplete 2007 backup, but even this archive was still missing a number of pages, and coverage of anything from 2009-2011 is scarce at best. With about two-thirds of the RPG lost forever, the missing content had to be reconstructed using summaries from the Dino Attack RPG Wiki or else extrapolated from the recovered content. In some cases, it's just no longer possible to know what is missing, leading to unavoidable gaps in the story. This led to the creation of a downloadable archive for Dino Attack RPG, preserving as much of the original RPG as we can.

Q: What is the Director's Cut?

A: The original RPG was written by dozens of people, each with their own writing style. Plot holes frequently arise, and other portions of the early story are later deemed non-canonical as the canon became stricter around 2008. And, if I'm perfectly honest, I really do hate my old writing. The goal of the Director's Cut is to address all of this in order to create a more cohesive reading experience. I playfully call it the "Director's Cut" since I, as the RPG's creator and game master (i.e. its "director"), am providing my own personal re-edit of this story as an alternative version for our audience to experience.

There are three general "tiers" of edits made to RPG posts:

1. The majority of posts are kept largely intact, with only minor editing for consistent formatting or correcting spelling/grammatical errors. Posts that are written in first-person or in script style are rewritten as third-person prose but otherwise kept intact. If it makes sense to do so, then the order of posts may also be shifted around. Since the canon was firmly established by the time At War's End began in March 2012, the overwhelming majority of edited posts from At War's End only fall into the first tier.

2. Posts with non-canonical content are rewritten in a way that reinterprets the material so that it would fit the current canon. For example, posts that use the BIONICLE settings Mata Nui and Metru Nui are rewritten to instead feature Enchanted Island (from LEGO Pirates) and Astor City (from LEGO Ultra Agents). I considered it important to retain the general gist of the original post and keep as much of it intact as possible, but I allowed myself to take some major liberties as needed.

3. When it comes to my own posts, I go full George Lucas! Quite a few of my posts from 2005-2007 are extensively rewritten, sometimes from scratch, in order to better match my own personal standards for writing. I still made sure to retain the gist of the original posts and many of my early posts still have not been radically altered, but otherwise I felt free to rewrite as much as I wanted to.

There are a few other special cases that do not fall into the above tiers. In some instances (e.g. Rev and Sereve's final confrontation with Landro, or Rex's battle with Sharptooth), I've completely rewritten the RPG's missing content from scratch because merely summarizing it did not feel satisfactory. There are some other brand-new scenes added here or there, which should entice those who have already read the RPG. Additionally, I've taken some of Dino Attack RPG's "Expanded Universe", a series of short stories written after the RPG ended, and directly integrated them into the RPG so that they now read as part of the ongoing narrative.

Q: Is the Director's Cut the definitive canonical version?

A: Yes... and no. As explained above, one of the main goals of the Director's Cut is to rewrite non-canonical posts so that they would fit the current canon. However, what I've offered with this Director's Cut is one possible interpretation of the canon that applies some creative license to make it all work. You can take it or leave it. It's possible that some material that I've left in the Director's Cut (such as Coldwire, or Magma's mutant arm) might no longer be considered canonical by their original writers, while other parts I've altered (such as Kotua learning Cane's name during their first meeting) are actually non-canonical but included here to improve the reading experience.

It is also important to note that the Director's Cut will not be replacing the original Dino Attack RPG; I shall continue to support the original downloadable archive and make it available for posterity's sake.

----

Fitting music:
Mission Complete: Ending Suite - Rex's theme
The Equation - Frank Einstein's theme
Skin on Our Teeth - Escape from Mercy Hospital
When Ginny Kisses Harry - Amanda's theme
Downed Dragon - Rex's first assignment

----

Anyways, welcome to the beginnings of the Dino Attack RPG: Director's Cut mirror on DeviantArt! You can also read it on BZPower for old time's sake, or you can download the entire story now in DOCX or PDF format if you just can't wait to read it!

Now that we have formal introductions out of the way, let's talk about this new prologue. Though, I say "new" very loosely, since my DeviantArt followers should quickly recognize that this is cobbled together from three preexisting short stories: First Assignment, Rex's Awakening, and Dear Sister. Therefore, pretty much none of this is new, aside from a few minor alterations.

Still, I thought it would be nice to give a proper introduction to the main story, rather than immediately thrusting you into the beginnings of the Kotua Crisis like in the original RPG.

Besides, one of those "few minor alterations" is removing the "said bookisms", as TV Tropes calls them. Yes, as late as 2014, I was still falling into the writer's trap of doing everything to avoid the word "said" like the plague (just because our English teachers said it was a "boring" word to use), including using some improper verbs like "shrugged", "grinned", "frowned", etc. for dialogue! Nowadays, I'm much more lenient about it. So, I think this small change does represent myself growing as a writer.

If you read Dear Sister, you might notice that some of the dialogue and prose has been subtly altered in order to not explicitly expose Amanda's past. That's what happens when you take the end of a prequel story (where the reader already knows the spoilers) and make it the prologue of the main story (where the reader has yet to read the spoilers). Still, I think there are enough hints there that a savvy reader should begin to suspect that there's more to Amanda than she lets on...

Regarding the character Walker... well, he certainly dates the story, doesn't he? 2012-2014 was a much simpler time for the internet, a time when it considered cool to watch Nostalgia Critic and make references to him. While I have mixed feelings about Nostalgia Critic nowadays, I ultimately decided not to edit or remove agent Walker's presence in this story, with the justification that he's written as both a homage and a parody; therefore, if you dislike Nostalgia Critic, you can always choose to view Walker as a parody rather than a homage.

LEGO Dino Attack belongs to The LEGO Group.

EDIT 7/3/2022: Updated to version 1.2.