Santa Story is a roleplay story done by Last Friday and Nionkirby. Nionkirby is the gamemaster, while Last Friday is the player. Technically anyone can play, but only Last Friday has so far.
The premise is about what you'd expect, but there's so much more to it than that. This story plays with the Santa Claus mythos in many expansive ways, such as:
- Time magic is used to deliver presents (or coal) to all the children on time
- The North Pole makes extensive use of Magitek
- Every inhabited planet has its own Santa Claus
- The North Pole has a transporter which can take one just about anywhere
- The North Pole is inhabited by Over Nine Thousand hypercompetent Christmas Elves of all sorts of professions
- Santa is a title/position, which is passed on to a successor when the current Santa retires
- Santa himself has a lot of useful abilities, such as invisibility magic, the power to make temporary openings just about anywhere, amazing lockpicking skills and government funding
and that's just scratching the surface.
Another feature is the Universal Market SP, a handy tool from which Santa can buy all sorts of useful items using points. Points are earned by grinding items up in the Point Grinder: the more valuable/important the item, the more points are received.
In Last Friday's game, he adventures as Santa Claus of Earth 17 (hereafter referred to as "Santa-E17", for convenience's sake). As Last Friday is the only one who has played, only tropes regarding Santa-E17's exploits or The Multiverse in general are available.
For tropes about Santa and all the other characters, as well as tropes specific to different players' games, check out the Characters page.
This work contains examples of the following:
- Alternate Universe Fic: The story pulls this with Pokémon Black and White. Team Plasma are much more violent and successful, using weapons and even tanks to forcibly acquire and occupy the Pokémon League headquarters, among other places. They're working on a secret science project. From that point it totally deviates.
- Arc Villain: Mimi, Metal Sonic, Ghetsis.
- Big Good: The original Santa is implied to be this, since he is apparently able to save planets from destruction on short notice.
- Children Are Innocent / Kids Are Cruel: Played both ways. For the most part, Earth's children are the regular innocent types, but a handful of them are mean (not to mention gutsy) enough to attempt to capture Santa.
- Difficulty Levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, Impossible, and Weird.
- Easy-Mode Mockery /
It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Easy mode is deliberately made to be so easy that it would be no fun to play. For example, if you opted to fight a powerful enemy, some Contrived Coincidence would kill him before you could even land a shot. - Nintendo Hard: Hard mode certainly qualifies. You have to be more resourceful, clever and careful than ever to succeed here.
- Hard Mode Perks: Playing on harder difficulties can grant better rewards and opens up different events.
- Harder Than Hard / Platform Hell:
Word of God states there is no known way to get out of situations unscathed in Impossible mode, so to achieve any success there requires you to outsmart the GM. This is hard, because he's pretty good about considering all possibilities. - Bizarro Episode: Any time spent playing Weird mode is basically this, since actions can have completely random outcomes. Unlike what's normal with this trope, though, everything that happens in Weird Mode sticks after you switch out of it.
- Easy-Mode Mockery /
- Godzilla Threshold: Every Santa is given a silver bell to ring in case of a dire, fate-of-the-planet emergency. This will summon the original Santa.
- Hint System: Hint cards, purchasable from the UMSP. Two varieties exist:
- Ordinary Hint Cards cost 20 points (or 50 for a pack of three) and give a hint of randomly-determined relevance.
- Super Hint Cards cost 100 points plus 10 for every Super Hint Card you have already purchased. A Super Hint Card will answer one question you ask it.
- Magic Wand: Santa-E17 stole a couple of them from Mimi's lair: a very powerful gold wand, and an even more powerful platinum wand. They both have the following powers, though the platinum wand's effects are greater:
- Power Up: makes the target much bigger and stronger; when used on an object, temporarily transmutes it into very hard magical gold or even harder magical platinum
- Defense Up: greatly increases the target's resistance to damage
- Speed Up
- Dispel Magic
- and a Magikoopa-style Magic Missile
- Set Bonus: By using the gold and platinum wands together, tremendous power can be evoked.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Played for Drama when it's revealed that Team Plasma's project is Mewthree.
- Mega Crossover: Mostly made possible by the North Pole's transporter, though some villains (Mimi and Metal Sonic) find their own ways to Earth.
- The Multiverse: Related to the above. This also allows other people to play the game: presumably, the next player to start up will control Santa of Earth 18.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The UMSP sells many things that can help make or break the game for Santa: extra lives, time manipulating devices, and esper pacts just to name a few. It also sells sunglasses, hair ribbons, and marbles (But each one has a different colored ribbon inside!). These items are as ordinary as they sound.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: One Santa was honored at the Santa Convention because he managed to save his whole solar system from destruction, somehow losing an arm in the process.
- Precision-Guided Boomerang: The Magic Boomerang from the UMSP. It is described as one "that ALWAYS comes back."
- Random Number Generator: Used to see the outcomes of most actions. It generates a number from 1 to 100, biased toward the middle to enforce more average results and give more impact to those elusive spectacular failures and successes.
- Reality Warper: The "Mechanikizer" from the UMSP is able to "change the local dimension's mechanics to the mechanics of any other known dimension at will." Nobody but the GM knows the true extent of its power because nobody so far has been willing to drop 20,000 points on it.
- Save-Game Limits: Suspend Save is always available. Besides that, saved games only restore when Santa loses a life. (This can be invoked by sacrificing a life.)
- The very expensive "Recorder Watch" must be bought from the UMSP for you to manually save your game. Otherwise, you can only save after beating a major boss.
- Science Fantasy: The combination of things from all over (including magical bullet storms and advanced robots) give the story this sort of feeling.
- Shout-Out:
- Santa has government funding and amazing lockpicking skills. Sound familiar?
- An elf damages Santa's gift sack by putting it in a Blendtec blender.
- Creatures which Santa can call using Summon Magic are called espers.
- An artist elf at the Santa Convention venue looks like Bob Ross.
- A boy from Icirrus City is named Pit.note
- Summon Magic: From the UMSP you can buy a "Ring of Pacts" and then buy pacts with espers, which can be summoned to assist you. See the Characters page for details.
- Teleporter's Visualization Clause: The North Pole's transporter can make a portal to just about anywhere, as long as some sort of coordinates or reference is known. This includes worlds that, in real life, are fictional.
- Time Stands Still: The Stop Watch from the UMSP does this. Not only does it cost points, but you must spend points to buy charge for it as well.
- Unobtainium: Adamantium. It requires a lot of rare and/or exotic materials to make, and even then it can only be synthesized via an extensive process by a powerful mage. The results are worth it, though: it is 100 times harder than diamonds and able to withstand any earthly heat. note
- Video-Game Lives: Extra lives can only be purchased from the UMSP.
- Violence is the Only Option / Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: A significant amount of difficulty and hardship could have been averted if Santa E-17 had just executed Ghetsis at the first opportunity. He didn't do this because he is a Technical Pacifist. He also doesn't feel comfortable playing judge, so he wanted to let the Unova authorities handle it. Then, he wasn't aware that Ghetsis could teleport right out of prison..
- Wide-Open Sandbox
- With This Herring: For the prologue, you receive a simple weapon and a length of rope. Good thing there's plenty to procure on site.
- A Wizard Did It: Magic and magitech explain away a lot of things, such as how a sentient cloud of gas native to a nebula is able to function in an environment suited for the more corporeal Santas and how it can communicate with them.
