From BFCC to Mensura College

“Wait, didn’t Arilin teach somewhere called BFCC, not Mensura?”

Yes. Well. Therein lies a story. Or several stories. And an ongoing retcon.

Cast your mind all the way back to…um, sometime in the mid–2000s. I don’t remember which year. It’s not that important. In addition to the famous-slash-infamous Macrophile.com, there were other macrophile forums. I can remember Lava Dome Five, Lofty Bearing, BigFurs, and Offscale; I’m sure there were others. Each of them theoretically had their own focus, although in practice the differentiators were the choice of forum software and the set of regular posters.

While my personal web site back then was a subdomain of Macrophile.com, my favorite forum was BigFurs. The community was lively, kept a good signal-to-noise ratio, and lacked the fierce partisanship that at least one other site actively cultivated. (I have stories about that, too, but those are for another time. Preferably a time with rum.) I won’t say I was all that active, mind you, but I wasn’t all that active anywhere, due as much to my own shyness and poor time management as anything else.

One of the many things I wasn’t too active in was forum-based roleplaying. There might have been a bit of snobbery there—I’d come to vastly prefer MUDs/MUCKs for online roleplay—although some of it came back to that poor time management. I could set aside a few hours a few evenings a week for real-time roleplay, but was positively lousy at remembering to check forums throughout the day. (If you’ve never been on FurryMUCK or similar systems, imagine a kind of cross between IRC or F-Chat and an old text adventure game. Instead of channels, characters move between locations, manipulate objects, whisper to one another, lead one another around holding hands, and so on. It’s old and creaky and difficult to explain to anyone born much after 1990 at this point, but when you got into it, it offered a sense of place and immersion that no other text-only system I’ve seen has.)

Yet an elaborate setting that some BigFurs members came up with captured my imagination: a community college for mixed sizes. Artist Crux Lo was one of BigFur Community College’s early champions, although its primary motivator was Heartwing, with some foundational backstory put together by writer Kereminde. (I don’t think Heartwing is still around the fandom anymore.) Rather than taking the tack of just throwing up an initial post and hoping people joined in, BFCC recruited already-established original characters and fursonas as staff and students. Arilin joined as a professor.

I’ll admit that my bad scheduling got the best of me; I got out a handful of posts, but as the action picked up I quickly got swamped. But I still liked the setting, and I wrote a story for it: “Higher Learning,” the tale of Arilin’s first day. The story doesn’t have a lot of plot to it, and I’m not honestly sure how many BFCC participants even read it, at least when BFCC was a going concern—but one seemingly innocuous choice on my part ended up having a major influence on my later stories.

See, before this, I’d occasionally roleplayed characters from stories that I’d written, including Arilin herself, but I didn’t worry too much about “continuity” between the story’s setting and FurryMUCK. I almost never wrote sequels, and if I did, they’d just be sequels to the stories, treating the RP as non-canonical. But there’d only been one story about Arilin at that point, and in that story—“Cheating at Solitaire”—she was a psychopathic villain. The RP version of Arilin, by contrast, had started out as the same cute fluffy terrifying giant monster but had become socialized over the years, coming to treat littles as people. (Tiny people she enjoyed screwing with and sometimes seriously traumatizing, but, you know, still people.) So “Higher Learning” used that version of Arilin. The notion that she’d come from her homeworld to the world of FurryMUCK became her actual story canon, and that new world was implicitly the same world as BFCC.

BFCC as a roleplaying milieu didn’t last all that long in the grand scheme of things. I don’t have the lowdown on why; a lot of people loved it, but it might have been too demanding on people’s schedules, or people might have burned out, or any number of other potential issues. But it had lasting effects: Arilin’s position as a literature and composition professor became cemented as part of her character. Over the years of my own on-and-off roleplaying since then, I introduced other new characters native to this unnamed, semi-defined world—or to Arilin’s family, as her origin story had become incorporated into the milieu by proxy.

This all worked, mostly, in roleplay, but when I decided I wanted to continue that “version” of Arilin, to use that world, in stories, it created problems.

First off, the big one: I hadn’t created BFCC. I couldn’t use other people’s characters without permission, and I’m not comfortable using other people’s characters in my writing anyway. And, let’s be honest: BigFurs Community College only works as a name for the specific context of being an RP setting on the BigFurs forums. Removed from that context, it sounds awfully silly.

Second—and this is sometimes a controversial opinion, but I’ll go to the mat for it—what makes good roleplaying, at least in the way furries tend to RP, rarely makes good stories. A character’s background and powers are whatever their player says they are, and we (mostly) all agree to work within that framework. But in storytelling, “everything is possible” leads to a mess. Characters need to face challenges and complications. Problems can’t be too easy to solve. If everything is possible, nothing matters.

So while I wanted to keep telling stories in this world, I realized that it needed become something a little different. I wanted to keep the “look and feel” of the published stories, but work backward from them to create a firmer foundation. How did this Hogwarts-esque giant college work in its world? What towns was it near? Was this the only area with giants and magic? How did Arilin really get to this world?

Independently, I’d found myself dissatisfied with the way I’d developed Arilin in RP; I’d gotten too loosey-goosey with her personality, alternating between sociopathic, elegantly refined, and wide-eyed naïf depending on whatever fit the mood. So, I decided to come up with a story that both “re-introduced” Arilin the way I wanted her to be—an attractive, friendly and wryly humorous middle-aged professor with a terrifying edge she usually kept hidden—and set her college in a larger world that preserved the strange magic while grounding it as much as possible.

The resulting story was the novella “Teacher’s Pet,” in which a student with a crush on Arilin finds herself imperiled by a villain who’s normal-sized, without magic—and probably one of the scariest creeps I’ve written about. (Sometimes it’s good for us macrophiles to remember that size and meanness are fully independent variables.) The College Formerly Known as BFCC now had its own architecture unrelated to the original RP, and sat on the edge of a “little” city it had an uneasy relationship with. Giants and magic did exist in the outside world—or at least had, before some unspecified event happened that caused the giants to mostly retreat across a great, Grand Canyon-esque chasm and largely fade into folklore, taking magic with them. It’s suggested that giants have a proclivity toward magic that littles don’t, perhaps because giants couldn’t even exist without magic.

There were a lot of things that remained unsettled: who started the college, and why? How much does the rest of the world know about the sudden re-appearance of giants and magic? What do they think about it? Presuming there are giant lands on the other side of the Great Chasm, what do they think about giants traveling to school in little lands? I’ll let you in on a secret: at least at that point, I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, because I didn’t need to; I just needed to set the baseline necessary to tell the story at hand. (While this is a subject for another post, spending a lot of time building out the parts of your world that aren’t necessary for your story can be perilous: once you’ve come up with a cool idea, you’ll want to find a way to shoehorn it in, which can lead to an awful lot of “as you know, Bob” scenes.) I have answers to some of them now, although the ones that aren’t in the story yet are subject to change.

One other thing left unsettled, though: the name. If you read “Teacher’s Pet” closely, you’ll notice the name of the college is never mentioned. But I couldn’t just keep dancing around that indefinitely, so for this serial it’s gotten an official name: Mensura.

It’s interesting looking back at “Higher Learning” now. The school isn’t mentioned by name, either (it seemed kind of goofy for a story even then—sorry!), but it’s as close as I could get to the RP incarnation of BFCC. I’ve already retconned more than I thought; the school is a lot more madcap there. Also, BFCC itself had a somewhat handwavy “campus-wide magic protects littles from giants” rule. That’s in that first story, but “Teacher’s Pet” demotes that from known fact to mere assumption:

The common wisdom was that the college founders had put elaborate protection spells for little students in place, but the school brochures always used careful phrases like “safe within reason,” and the liability disclaimers you had to sign before attending were scarier than most of the giants were.

Why? It goes back to the difference between roleplaying worlds and story worlds. The designers of BFCC wanted to stay with the gentler side of macrophilia, so they wove a “no rampage” rule into the setting. But I don’t need to restrain players from taking the story in directions I don’t want, right? Having the giants checked only by social pressure and a bit of clever architecture adds a kind of ambient background tension that I love. Between magic and mad science, little students at Mensura College aren’t defenseless, but at the end of the day, there’s an awful lot of implicit trust in every interaction between someone six feet tall and someone eighty feet tall.

While BFCC is long gone as a roleplaying setting, it has not just one but two spiritual descendants. Crux Lo is creating the web comic Megapolis, with a different take on how to construct a city and world of mixed sizes and a different set of characters (although one with cameos from many other people’s characters, and at least one reference to a certain fluffy feline professor—call it an alternate timeline version of Arilin). If you’re somehow here but haven’t checked it out yet, it’s definitely worth the look.