How a Fortnite-inspired monster became something much harder to explain—and eventually someone worth keeping around.
When I look at Tall now, I find it rather amusing to think about where the idea began.
Tall is a robot. It travels alongside Dude and Rae, becoming part of their strange collection of companions and the relationships that grow between them. But somewhere far back in the development of Max Aura Dungeon, the creative trail leading to Tall began with something considerably less sophisticated.
Zombies.
Or, more precisely, husks.
I wanted to include a little nod to Fortnite: Save the World. Nothing particularly complicated. I liked the idea of borrowing a recognizable starting point and giving it a place in my own increasingly ridiculous dungeon.
The funny thing about an idea like that is how rarely it stays small.
Something was wrong with the way they moved
As I explored the creatures, I became more interested in how they behaved than in whether they could threaten the protagonists.
What if they weren’t quite zombies?
What if their movements repeated? They went through actions that almost made sense, returned to familiar positions, and seemed to be following routines whose purpose nobody could understand. There was something unsettling about that. A monster charging towards you is one kind of problem. A creature repeating the same ordinary gesture, as though it cannot remember what should happen next, is quite another.
The husks gradually became loopers.
And with that small change came a rather large collection of questions.
Were they some kind of AI-generated imitation of human beings? The fictional equivalent of AI slop—recognizable at a glance, increasingly wrong the longer you looked?
Were they robots?
Or was something much larger attempting to simulate people, reproducing their movements and habits without really understanding why humans behaved that way?
I liked that there wasn’t one immediately satisfying answer. The possibilities were more interesting together than any neat explanation would have been on its own.
The creatures had started as an homage to a game. They were becoming a mystery about what it means to imitate a person.
What happens when you give a monster a name?
At one stage, the story took that idea in a particularly uncomfortable direction.
Some of the human-shaped figures had habits and belongings. One had a mug and a badge. Another became associated with a utensil. Others handled cards.
They acquired names, or at least the sort of names people invent when they have no idea who—or what—they are looking at.
Martin. Spoon. Cards.
I still like the strange tenderness of that idea.
Calling something a husk makes it relatively easy to treat it as an obstacle. Calling it Martin complicates matters. A mug is no longer necessarily loot. It might be a possession. The gestures might be meaningless repetition, but they might also be the remnants of a life.
In one version, Dude tries the name aloud.
“Martin?”
Later comes a thought I find much more interesting than a confident explanation:
“Martin. Maybe.”
The uncertainty matters. Dude doesn’t know whether Martin is still in there, whether Martin ever existed in the way he imagines, or whether he is trying to make something frightening easier to understand.
That opens up a problem I enjoy exploring in fiction: we are remarkably quick to decide whether something deserves empathy, often on the basis of how familiar it looks.
Give a monster a face, and the problem becomes harder. Give it a coffee mug, and suddenly the dungeon has an ethical dilemma on its hands.
Not bad for an idea that began with zombies.
The darker possibilities
Other versions pushed the concept into much more disturbing territory.
I experimented with workers whose behavior was controlled, or at least deeply influenced, by a strange purple material that affected several dimensions of reality.
In one direction, the beings were almost slaves. Their repetitive behavior could be understood less as a defect in their intelligence and more as evidence of something being done to them.
That possibility changed the atmosphere.
An awkward imitation of a human can be funny, disturbing or pathetic. A being trapped in an imposed routine invites a different kind of horror. Instead of asking why it cannot behave normally, you begin asking who made it behave this way—and who benefits.
The purple material also threatened to pull the story towards a much larger explanation of the dungeon and its machinery. Once something can interfere with reality on several levels, the temptation to explore everything it might do becomes considerable.
This is one of the joys of creating a world with AI. An interesting possibility can unfold into several competing versions of the story surprisingly quickly.
It is also one of the difficulties.
An idea can become more elaborate without becoming better for the book you’re writing.
I could keep developing the implications of the material, the control, the simulations and the beings subjected to them. There were certainly stories to be found there. But each additional explanation competed for attention with Dude, Rae, the other characters and the adventure that was supposed to be unfolding.
Sometimes I had to choose between exploring an interesting idea and letting the story continue.
Those are frustrating choices precisely because the discarded material isn’t necessarily bad.
From monsters to workers
As the world developed, the concept began to fit naturally into the strange environment of the Residency.
Here were beings going about their duties, following routines and interacting with a place designed around service, maintenance and the needs of its residents.
They weren’t simply enemies waiting to be defeated.
Their movements could be interpreted in several ways. Perhaps they were carrying out instructions. Perhaps the routines were all that remained of something more human. Perhaps they were artificial creations performing a surprisingly convincing imitation of ordinary work.
Or perhaps the distinction wasn’t as obvious as it initially seemed.
I particularly liked the change in perspective this allowed.
When you meet a monster, you usually wonder what it will do to you. When you meet a worker performing a familiar task in a profoundly unfamiliar place, you might wonder what it has been doing all this time.
Who gave it the task? Does it understand what it is doing? Could it stop?
And if it helps you, does it matter whether that help comes from genuine concern, a programmed response or a routine so deeply embedded that the difference has become difficult to recognize?
These questions are much more interesting to me than simply deciding which creature belongs in which category.
They also gave the story room for something I hadn’t been looking for when I first imagined the husks.
A relationship.
And then there was Tall
The eventual result of this long creative journey includes Tall.
Tall is not simply Martin with a different name, nor is it necessary for every old idea about husks and loopers to remain true of Tall. The character emerged from a broader family of experiments that had changed shape repeatedly.
Tall is a robot, and its place in the story is no longer defined by whether the protagonists should fight it, fear it or solve the mystery of its existence.
Tall becomes someone they travel with.
That is a rather wonderful distance to cover from the original idea.
What began as an excuse to include a familiar kind of monster eventually contributed to a companion whose actions and relationships matter over the course of the adventure.
And to me, that is where the most interesting kind of worldbuilding happens.
A creature can have elaborate lore, an unusual design and a brilliant explanation for how it works. None of that necessarily makes me care about it.
But let it accompany the characters. Give it moments of usefulness, uncertainty, loyalty or individuality. Let those moments accumulate instead of explaining everything immediately.
Eventually, I stop thinking about what category the creature belongs to.
I start thinking about what will happen to it.
The problem with having too many good ideas
Looking back at these different directions, I can see several books that might have existed.
One leans into the horror of artificial humans whose routines are broken imitations of life.
Another explores control, exploitation and the purple material’s disturbing influence over reality.
Another spends more time with Martin, Spoon and Cards, allowing the group to confront the possibility that they have been treating people as monsters.
And another makes room for the Residency workers to become something more than background machinery, eventually contributing to the creation of companions such as Tall.
These possibilities share an origin, but they would not give readers the same experience.
That is something AI has made especially clear to me. Generating possibilities is often much easier than deciding which possibilities belong together.
I can ask for another draft, another explanation or another direction. I may even get something genuinely good. The dangerous moment comes when I feel obliged to keep it because it is interesting.
A novel has limited space, attention and patience. So does its reader.
Sometimes a wonderful idea is simply making the wrong book better.
Learning to leave things behind
There have been hundreds of revisions throughout the development of Max Aura Dungeon, including substantial rewrites and changes in direction. Some were made through AI-assisted sessions; others came from my own reading, decisions and work outside those conversations.
I don’t think of all that rewriting as a straight road towards perfection.
It feels more like exploring a collection of passages and occasionally discovering that the most promising doorway leads away from the story I wanted to tell.
I still enjoy the older Martin scenes. I still find the loopers unsettling. I still think the purple material could support fascinating stories of its own.
But a book cannot follow every interesting possibility simply because I managed to imagine it.
The part that has stayed with me is how far an idea can travel while retaining something of its original fascination.
A small tribute to the husks in Fortnite: Save the World grew into beings caught in strange repetitions. Those repetitions raised questions about simulation, intelligence and control. The world around them changed, their roles changed, and eventually something from that creative journey became Tall—a robot with a place among the people Dude and Rae meet along the way.
I originally wanted a monster.
I ended up with a companion.
That seems like a fairly good reason to keep rewriting.