by Lady Red
Imagine the scene. It’s January 2025. People you love and respect are amiably bullying you into streaming on your own slot, and you’ve got a discarded idea for mecha mermaids from an art challenge sitting in the junk drawer of your brain.
Then you discover the missing element you didn’t know you needed: Twitch chat.
Specifically, WBPL76’s Twitch chat.
This is how magic is born.
Making Waves
Shoal started as a question I wasn’t sure anyone else would want to answer: What if we built an underwater mecha setting from the ground up?
Not “one episode underwater,” not “two suits that can submerge,” but a world where depth is normal and land is the oddity. Mechs are designed underwater first; everything else comes after. We began at bedrock – star system, orbits, tides – and asked what cultures, tech, and problems would grow from there. I hit “Go Live,” tossed the idea into the current, and waited to see if it took root.
Ten months later, we’re writing our first full book.
A Stream of Talents
Shoal is now a living, breathing world with a steady crew of 30-40 folks showing up every week to build it together. We’ve written ~80,000 words of worldbuilding, shaped our first Compendium into a clean, usable PDF, started drafting the first novel, and designed mechs that actually belong beneath the thermocline. I hoped for this; I didn’t expect it.
The Legion and its Auxiliary are stacked with talent, and Shoal has benefited from all of it. Artists and modelers spun up concept pieces and 3D frames. A community member built a celestial orbit animation to sanity-check our system assumptions. Others dove into deep essays on biology, faith, and power options that made the setting stronger and stranger in exactly the right ways. New writers found their voice with first stories set in Shoal; others picked up pencils and tablets for the very first time. Nothing beats watching someone realize, I can do this – and then doing it.
The best part? Ideas I’d never have had alone keep cracking open new rooms.
A throwaway gag about addictive pearl powder became a full stream on how psionics work (and the joys of in-fiction drugs). A pilot survivability question forced us to lock down interface design and maintenance cycles, which led to quantifying our construction materials. One crab meme detonated into doctrine for a remote crafting city – and a pragmatic take on limb reclamation in crab-person culture.
We’ve invented flora and fauna, foods, and many questionable substances that cultures argue over. On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve debated war crimes and monstrous megafauna, because a world without teeth isn’t worth piloting in.
And about our mechs.
Our Titans aren’t “Gundams in wetsuits.” We have regal Sea Horse knights, Jellyfish intel frames, crab-adjacent aquaculture and combat workhorses, and yes, a cryptid one piloted by a hermit crab (Fan favourite, Benny).
There are Awakened Titans with their own personalities; Chimeric frames threaded with cores from fallen companions; and we even have an infamous sports rivalry that escalated into a city-level “war” when the first personality-enhanced league got a little too spirited.
Hardpoints, acoustic comms, buoyancy management, power curves – all of this has come up and been debated on stream until we had answers that both worked and are fun.
We also learned how to reconcile big, shiny concepts into a consistent whole. Templates for species, biomes, tech briefs, and factions kept our voices aligned. A glossary and weekly debates prevented lore drift and gave us the tools to say “no” for the right reasons. That discipline – boring to explain, thrilling to use – bled into something bigger. Writing a book.
We’ve started exploring the craft of book-writing together. Outlines, scaffolding, character arcs, opening hooks… Shoal is a vehicle for literature learning as well as all the fun of unfettered imagination.
This month we began drafting the first Shoal novel – not a tour, but a lived-in action-pulp adventure where culture, science and machine choices drive the plot instead of decorating it. We’ve bullet-pointed through the first two acts and we’re ready to write the rest.
A Chorus of Voices
Shoal belongs to its community-co-authors of record. I’m lucky to shepherd this project with the best people one could ask for, but Shoal is nothing without my insightful co-host Lictor and the avid work of Ed Gauss, Archon Erikr, TiredGerman, Introspective90, and Xork… among many many many others. All interested voices influence Shoal’s psionic Song, and the tune is better for it.
We also keep our mission simple: underwater first. Culture in Shoal isn’t split by species like a color wheel; it’s shaped by environment, locality, and challenge. A trench city doesn’t think like a shelf settlement even if the species makeup is identical. A storm-battered kelp labyrinth breeds different art, cuisine, and politics than a calm lagoon with Choral infrastructure in its bones. Every piece of Shoal has had many eyes on it to make sure it breathes on its own and fits the whole.
Ten Months On, Here’s Where We Are
- A world with weight – and a weekly audience that keeps us honest.
- A Compendium turning from text heap into a pretty, practical PDF you can keep open while you sketch, write, or plan a session.
- Titans with silhouettes you’ll recognize and materials that make sense.
- Community artifacts – from animations to concept art to 3D models – born out of curiosity and shared standards.
- A writing pipeline teaching us, together, how to carry a story the distance.
If you’ve been in chat since the start: thank you for the pushback, the jokes, and the weird edge cases that forced better answers. If you’re new: welcome aboard. Shoal is built to be played with. Argue a detail, propose a mech role, sketch a city that survives a bad tide year, or draft your first short set in a place where sound, pressure, and patience rule.
We began with a stream and a question. We ended up with a community machine that hums when everyone’s hands are on it. Ten months down. Next up: finish Compendium v1, keep iterating the Titans, and get chapters in your hands that prove this world can carry a story.
More than anything, Shoal is a lot of fun – and I couldn’t be more proud of the community that brought it to life. Next time we’re here, I hope it’s to put a finished, polished novel into people’s hands. In the meantime, check out the links below, hop into the AUX Discord, or join the stream Fridays at 3pm EST. It’s a good time under the waves, and every voice makes the project stronger.
Bring your tools. We’ve got Titans to build.
Links:
AUX Discord
(Look for Shoal in the Creative Writing section!)
WBPL76 – Twitch
(Shoal is live Fridays at 3PM EST for 3 hours every week!)
Lady Red is a digital artist, novelist and unapologetic British person. She is wanted in multiple States for unlicensed reading of bad literature until morale improves. Also a grand purveyor of mobile blood banks
