Happy New Year, and welcome to a fresh and tasty Dev Diary from the team at The Chinese Room. We are starting the year by talking about the player character, Phyre, and how you can shape their legend and add to it as you play. As you’ll see below your story will start wearing rags, but will it end in riches? Seattle’s fate is in your hands.

An Elder of your choosing
As our game starts, an Elder that some call the Nomad wakes up in an abandoned building in Seattle. They don't know where they are or how they got there, but they are quick to adapt - the Nomad is old, and they have survived for a long time.

It is clear that they have experienced the deathlike sleep of torpor. The last they remember was a smile and a piercing pain in the chest, delivered in their Haven in Tunis at the start of the 20th century.

Now they are awake. What happened to them in their long slumber, and who woke them? Why does their Blood lack the strength and power they are used to? And why is their body carved with arcane sigils?

The Nomad is a legend amongst Kindred. Their name has been whispered for four hundred years - of their presence in revolutions, on battlefields, at slaughters, and at the fall of Princes. Are they escaping these situations, causing them, or taking joy in red wrath and ruin? Whatever the truth, they are a catalyst - when they appear, the world of the Kindred will be irrevocably changed.

The concept of the Nomad came when we were expanding early ideas of Phyre to make the most of an Elder's history in the world. There is a reason a vampire survives - and in the game our vampire is always on the front foot, leaving an indelible mark on Kindred society. That must have been true for the rest of Phyre's existence. So what might people in Seattle have heard?

In our story, different characters have different beliefs about the Nomad and their history. While these events may not have an immediate effect on the game world, they will affect how our protagonist is treated. We have deliberately left it up to the player to decide how Phyre treats these stories and their legend, and how much they tell other characters about their past - and indeed, which stories they tell.

How would a Prince behave if asked for a favor by the legendary and powerful Nomad, who is not yet caught up in local politics?

The themes behind the Nomad
In Bloodlines 2, the matter of history takes a front seat. Our protagonist is centuries old, and while they may change things up to survive, adapt and keep pace with the march of time, they’ve nonetheless garnered something of a reputation. If a time-immune forensic detective were to inspect and compare the various crime scenes that are human history, they would no doubt find one set of fingerprints consistent. May you live in interesting times, etcetera etcetera. Playing an Elder was a bold choice; to move forward without leaning into the unique opportunities that provides for roleplay would be a missed opportunity.

In Narrative Design, we often find ourselves pulled between two ideals: providing agency and choice for players to make the story their own vs keeping the story feeling intentional, strong and tightly wound. The solution, then, is to establish what is immutable and, within that, carve out a more flexible play space. Ultimately, a good story is driven by characters being true to their psychology and either following that thread down towards tragedy, making the same mistakes over and over, or seizing upon the chance to challenge and change themselves.

That’s what makes a happy ending triumphant: a character’s ability to sacrifice what they have desired and strained towards for so long, to defy the never-ending hunger of old, painful wounds for a chance at long-lasting healing. It’s what makes a tragic ending tug at our hearts: we see clearly what the character needs, and we see them turn away from it one too many times, too consumed by their pain to do the hard thing, give up their coping mechanisms and save themselves. What I’m getting at is that history, for us, is not merely superficial or textural. Sure, the Nomad’s been around a while, and sure we want to give you folks the chance to say what they did with that time. But as far as storytelling tools go, that doesn’t give us much and, as Narrative Designers, we need tools that will allow us to chisel out those big, emotional moments. So more important than the ‘what’ is the ‘why’. The play space.​