Writing Ancestries (Patreon)

Hey folks! Matt Colville here. I just finished writing up some more Ancestries and thought it would be fun to talk about the process and how we got here. Later this week or next week, you may get some more actual write-ups. 😀

We decided very early on that Orden & the Timescape would be the default setting for the game. That may seem like an act of pure hubris on our part, since it started off as my home setting, but there wasn’t really any other good option. Designing an entire fantasy world from scratch is no problem when you’re developing a video game with 300 people working on it for 4 years, but we don’t have that many people or that kind of time.

We could have used…no world. Just talk about Elves and Dwarves and Orcs in purely generic ways, reference popular novels or movies, but then we wouldn’t really be saying anything. And there’s already at least a few people who are interested in Orden & the Timescape thanks to the livestreams and our previous products.

As soon as we started working on the game, having a pre-built world proved its usefulness as we often need some name or place or thing from the world when we’re making gods or magic items, even spell names. “Hey Matt, is there a [random thing] in Orden?” Probably! And if not, then having an established world with a theme and history makes it easier to make something up on the spot. We really do not expect folks to just mass adopt our world as their own. Mostly we expect people to pillage it for ideas!

As an example, Grace was drawing a Dragon Knight Censor. They have a shield, she wanted to put a heraldic device on it, so she asked me “Hey Matt! What does Good King Omund’s heraldry look like?”

Well, I didn’t know! But I know a lot about King Omund! So it was easy and fun for me to figure it out. In that sense, the system is working.

So when it came time to start writing the Ancestries section of the book, it was pretty easy for me since I already know who the Hakaan are, for instance. I don’t mean their design, just the lore. The chrome, so to speak, not the crunch. 

So I started with Dwarves and did the normal RPG book thing and wrote about Dwarves in Orden as though the book were an encyclopedia or a David Attenborough documentary. Third person, omniscient narrator, full of interesting or plausible-sounding detail and generally everyone hated it. 😀

I enjoy writing that kind of stuff, but as I was doing it, it felt weird. It had that “this is how everyone does it” feeling which is sort of the opposite of why we’re working on this game. And there was a lot of “dwarves are…,” stuff that was cultural, not biological, which got real complicated real fast in ways that do not aid creative writing. 

So I put the problem down for a while and eventually while I was working on something else, I was struck by inspiration. “Have a dwarf talk about dwarves.” I think an actual phrase popped into my head. “Dwarves are great!”

I opened a new doc and started writing and it all flowed pretty quickly. Folks on the team really liked it for a couple of reasons. First, it was fun to read. Second, they felt like they learned a lot. But finally, they felt like this was one person's view. There might be others! Not everyone agrees! This creates a LOT of wiggle-room for people to create, even create things that contradict the entry! Are all humans one thing? No! So this lets us say fun and interesting things about different species, without sounding 'authoritative' the way an Encyclopedia wants to be.

Structure of an Ancestry Write-up

Each entry gets a flavor quote, then some short, David Attenborough text, and then just…whatever. Some fiction, basically. People talking. It means the book, or this section at least, doesn’t tell you stuff like…how much do they weigh, what’s their blood type, how long do they live, how tall are they usually? We may include a chart in the front of the Ancestry section with some of that. And I think it might help folks if there was a “example names” chunk, but otherwise the point isn’t to tell you about them.

It’s more fun to meet one! The dwarf entry, being the oldest, really is just a monologue from an unnamed character. It’s the simplest, in a sense. But it works, and I’m not inclined to change it right now. Later entries got more robust and featured more, and more different, characters.

The power of this approach is; I can say whatever inspires me. I don’t have to follow a formula. You will see that some of the entries are very different from each other, within the constraints of “it’s a scene.” My attitude is; as long as you’re hanging out with a Polder or a Memonek, you’re learning about them. As long as I hit certain beats, the rest can be anything, and you’re getting a sense of them. Any scene with Mr. Spock in it, he always acts like a Vulcan. 

The Dragon Knight entry, for instance, gives you a very strong sense (if I'm a good writer) what the people think about them. The effect a Dragon Knight can have on a group of people. Which is, or can be, a big part of playing a Dragon Knight. Assuming you use the lore. Which you don't gotta do! 😀

Because this isn’t how most other games do it, some folks will balk. But that’s true of everything we do. I’ve seen folks say “well now I know about this character but not these people.” That is sort of the point. You learn plenty about Mr. Spock just watching one episode of Star Trek, even if the scene isn't about Vulcans. An encyclopedia entry might be fun, but the show is better. 

Also, in my experience, if you do it right folks learn a lot without realizing they’re learning a lot. I worked on a Sci-Fi game and someone from the publisher complained to me that they didn’t understand anything about the setting and it was all confusing because we did everything in dialog.

“Ok what are you confused by, gimme an example,” I said.

“Well, like ‘Hub.’ Everyone’s talking about Hub but I have no idea what they mean.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

“I dunno! It’s like…Earth? Or our solar system or something?”

“That is exactly it!” I said. “You DO know what it is!” 😀

It turned out, they weren’t confused at all. The reality was, they knew it but they didn’t know they knew it because it hadn’t been presented to them in an encyclopedia-style entry on a load screen or whatever. They got it from context. They heard people in the world, speaking normally, and they picked up on it which is exactly how we learn most things.

So don’t panic! You may get a big, page-long chart with like…average life span, height and weight, stuff like that. And like I said, some example names would go a long way I think. But for the entry itself, this is our approach. It’s a lot more fun to write, I think it’s more fun to read, and I think you learn plenty.

One thing is true of all the intelligent species in our world. Someone made them. It might have been a God or an extremely powerful wizard or witch or whatever, but Orden is a fantasy world and works according to the way a lot of people around the world and throughout history thought our world worked. Evolution, as a scientific theory, is only about 160 years old, and the structure and function of DNA in 1953. So, on Orden, if something can talk? A god did it. Or a mortal with sufficiently godlike power!

This is one of those things about the setting we think the players should know (even if their characters don’t! Not every Hero is a Sage!) and so I wrote the following to go in the actual book, if we have room. Enjoy!

On the Origin of Species

Or, “How Did All These People Get Here?”

Orden is a fantasy world where the gods are objectively real. It works on principles similar to those many people throughout history believed governed the real world. “I dunno a god did it probably.”

Humans, elves, orcs, dwarves, dragons, all have creator gods. The Elder Gods, four of whom made the world for some reason. Maybe they were bored.

The fashion among those gods for creating new, intelligent, species petered after Kul created the orcs. Once humans invented war, it stopped being fun.

It may be that all species were created by gods. That’s certainly what a lot of people throughout our own history assumed. Orden has no Darwin and probably won’t ever. There’s still inheritance, people expect children to look like their parents, but there aren’t evolutionary pressures except on a very local scale. 

And in a world where powerful, world-altering magics are available, mortals sometimes try to recreate the gods' efforts. Some succeed, and new intelligent, speaking peoples are born.

However, mortals are not gods and lack their ineffable wisdom. They are, in fact, very effable. Many have sought the power to create. It is available to any sorcerer of near-godlike power with the right rituals, though these days that power is very obscure. Creating new intelligent species was easier for mortal wizards back in the youth of the world when magic was friskier.

In every instance in recorded history, attempts by mortals to make obedient servitor species backfire. The Steel Dwarves worked marvels with valiar, the truemetal, and the miracle mineral prismacore that grants objects a semblance of life. Eventually their science and magics produced the omnivok, machines that were self-aware. Perhaps uniquely, when the dwarves realized they had created beings equal to themselves they stopped their work and gave their creation full rights and independence, preferring to work with them rather than attempt, and inevitably fail, to be their masters.

Normally, it doesn’t work out that nicely. Even with the best of intentions, things go awry. The Dragon Phalanx were created by Good King Omund’s wizard Vitae to be the perfect knights, dispensing justice throughout the land. But the same sorceries that grant self-awareness also grant independence. Agency. And though they enjoyed thirty years of peace and justice, eventually the Dragon Knights were betrayed by one of their own. Seduced by the power offered by Ajax.

The law of unintended consequences applies to the just and the unjust alike.

Usually when some powerful being tries to create an intelligent people, it’s for less than virtuous reasons. The synliroi are responsible for several intelligent species in the timescape, each an attempt to create a perfectly obedient servitor species. The most notorious example are the kuran’zoi, the Time Raiders who rebelled almost immediately and carry a burning hate for the Voiceless Talkers to this day. 

A perhaps less egregious use of this power is called quickening. Used when a powerful mage lives in and amongst some clever species just on the cusp of self-awareness. These instances, which are much more numerous than creating a new species from whole cloth, are more like the concept of Uplifting found in science fiction. The mage or witch or shaman didn’t create anything. They just gave these cute, clever, frog-things a little boost. A little nudge. And suddenly there are angualotls walking around having conversations with each other, wondering when someone will invent a fabric that doesn’t get moldy in the swamp.

This also carries serious ethical repercussions! “You didn’t create angualotls! You screwed up some perfectly good frogs! Look at them, you gave them anxiety!”

It should be noted that the SF tradition of Uplift stories are also an attempt by early SF writers working before the structure and function of DNA was well-understood, to “explain” why humans seemed, to them, self-evidently different from other species. The Monolith from the film 2OO1: A Space Odyssey is one such popular example.

Nowadays, we know how humans developed and, furthermore, we know we do the same things lots of other species do, just turned up to 11. No supernatural explanation needed here on Earth. 

But where’s the fun in that?! 😀And anyway, this is only how it works on Orden. You may have completely different explanations for why there are several different intelligent species walking around in your world. Or no explanation! Or competing and irreconcilable theories on the matter! Use whatever inspires you. 

At the end of the day, if you throw out all of this and replace it with something you made up, it will be better. Because it’s yours!