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Writing Ancestries
🕑 Added 2024-07-11 00:13:29 +0000 UTC
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. đ
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 wasnât really any other good option. Designing an entire fantasy world from scratch is no problem when youâre developing a video game with 300 people working on it for 4 years, but we donât have that many people or that kind of time.
We could have usedâŠno world. Just talk about Elves and Dwarves and Orcs in purely generic ways, reference popular novels or movies, but then we wouldnât really be saying anything. And thereâs 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 weâre making gods or magic items, even spell names. âHey Matt, is there a [random thing] in Orden?â 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 âHey Matt! What does Good King Omundâs heraldry look like?â
Well, I didnât 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 donât 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. đ
I enjoy writing that kind of stuff, but as I was doing it, it felt weird. It had that âthis is how everyone does itâ feeling which is sort of the opposite of why weâre working on this game. And there was a lot of âdwarves areâŠ,â 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. âHave a dwarf talk about dwarves.â I think an actual phrase popped into my head. âDwarves are great!â
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 justâŠwhatever. Some fiction, basically. People talking. It means the book, or this section at least, doesnât tell you stuff likeâŠhow much do they weigh, whatâs 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 âexample namesâ chunk, but otherwise the point isnât to tell you about them.
Itâs more fun to meet one! The dwarf entry, being the oldest, really is just a monologue from an unnamed character. Itâs the simplest, in a sense. But it works, and Iâm 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 donât have to follow a formula. You will see that some of the entries are very different from each other, within the constraints of âitâs a scene.â My attitude is; as long as youâre hanging out with a Polder or a Memonek, youâre learning about them. As long as I hit certain beats, the rest can be anything, and youâre 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! đ
Because this isnât how most other games do it, some folks will balk. But thatâs true of everything we do. Iâve seen folks say âwell now I know about this character but not these people.â 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 theyâre learning a lot. I worked on a Sci-Fi game and someone from the publisher complained to me that they didnât understand anything about the setting and it was all confusing because we did everything in dialog.
âOk what are you confused by, gimme an example,â I said.
âWell, like âHub.â Everyoneâs talking about Hub but I have no idea what they mean.â
âWhat do you think it means?â I asked.
âI dunno! Itâs likeâŠEarth? Or our solar system or something?â
âThat is exactly it!â I said. âYou DO know what it is!â đ
It turned out, they werenât confused at all. The reality was, they knew it but they didnât know they knew it because it hadnât 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 donât panic! You may get a big, page-long chart with likeâŠaverage 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. Itâs a lot more fun to write, I think itâs 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 donât! 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, âHow Did All These People Get Here?â
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. âI dunno a god did it probably.â
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. Thatâs certainly what a lot of people throughout our own history assumed. Orden has no Darwin and probably wonât ever. Thereâs still inheritance, people expect children to look like their parents, but there arenât 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 doesnât work out that nicely. Even with the best of intentions, things go awry. The Dragon Phalanx were created by Good King Omundâs 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, itâs 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 kuranâzoi, 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 didnât 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 doesnât get moldy in the swamp.
This also carries serious ethical repercussions! âYou didnât create angualotls! You screwed up some perfectly good frogs! Look at them, you gave them anxiety!â
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 âexplainâ 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 whereâs the fun in that?! đAnd 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 itâs yours!
Comments
Caleb Lee
I can't help but think back to your video, I believe it was RTG 100, when you talked about being gangpressed into making worldbuilding streams for Evolve, and how subsequently those streams were the most popular by the excited user base that you'd cultivated. Because, I feel the same effect working on me! I think I am going to go write something now. Maybe my spacefaring, time traveling, moon terraforming catfolk (ancestry name pending). Could be fun.
Eran Arbel
I love how MCDM art is high-quality, modern, detailed drawings while "that other game's" art looks like age-old paintings, weathered by age, viewed through dirty glass.
Murilo Trigo
> Mostly we expect people to pillage it for ideas! Yessss Really cool and useful post!
Hayden Pech
Iâm seriously waiting impatiently for these books :)
Brandon Fusco
Love this section! I think if it gets to a real draft, it would definitely be worth running the "Uplifting" section past some sensitivity consultants though as a LOT of real world harm has been done under the banner of "Uplifting" the *insert casual derogatory* people of here-and-there. I know y'all would never cast such a thing in a positive light, but I think definitely worth a few more words to reassure folks of both good and bad faith of your framing.
Forgotten
Hub mentioned! \o/
Ron Hopping
Theres a lot of fun in no supernatural explanations but I love fantasy ones too so, no complaints here. More smart frog people, for sure.
Eric Venegoni
Your voice comes through in your writing so well, but no one knows this world like you, so these windows are so important to share that with everyone. Loved hearing you read the long versions on stream, glad I donât have to try and make cuts, I donât envy you that! Canât wait to explore it all!
Joshua Heisler
â However, mortals are not gods and lack their ineffable wisdom. They are, in fact, very effableâ getting some serious Terry Pratchett vibes here!
Arek Schneyer
I really like this section, and hope it ends up in the book!
Valentino Konjik
FYI: earthdawn Lore ist Witten in the same style. Mighty dragon(s) talk about other species from their perspective
Sylvie Smith
"They keep putting magic in the water, to turn the friking frogs sapient"
Aaron
Turn this into a video, more content for you, less reading for me. Lol.
Jacob Montague
I am really looking forward to the ancestries section of the book!!
Chappy Hall
The Dragon Knight art is RAD
Seth Lang
I love this, and admit I'm one of those people chomping at the bit to steal ideas and inspiration for my own setting! Love everything we have seen so far!
Guillaume Bonnet
That Dragon Knights art is so inspiring! I want to play them!
Ormus Erebus
Love the write up at the end! Always had this feeling that whenever I described one of the species in my world that I was describing them too broadly (Like an Encyclopedia!), your approach is much better.
Caleb Fasnacht
I love that all of the species are created. To me, that just brings so many story possibilities.
Michael LaRowe
There are those that say we any of us only exist so the universe can know itself and be ashamed of it's mess. All these asteroids just out here, floating. Get a black hole and clean all this junk up, universe! Stop playing with nebulas!
Roman Penna
Oh I really like the Origin of Species write up - that's a good basis for a lot of world building right there. I also like how there aren't answers for every ancestry or where they came from. Gives some imaginative juice to me!
Kyman201
IMO if you deadass make your own TTRPG system you're well within your rights to make your long-running homebrew setting the default setting :P
