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Fallen Gods - upcoming Norse saga-inspired roguelite from Wormwood Studios
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
MRY
Wormwood Studios
There was a certain deliberate opacity. Later updates will have clearer titles like "Witches and Dwergs" or "The Fallen God."
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Next update: http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/2018/03/fallen-gods-update-3-winning-was-easy.html
Go through the link to get the audio, which I can't easily put here.
Go through the link to get the audio, which I can't easily put here.
Fallen Gods Update #3: “Winning Was Easy. Governing’s Harder.”
At once the night’s gloom blooms with unearthly hues and the sky becomes a shimmering sheet of fire. You have stood among those lights, basking in the warmth of Orm’s soul-hoard as it glowed upon the guests in Skyhold’s hall. Now, far off and half-frozen, you watch the Trickster’s overflowing wealth spill earthward like froth from a drunkard’s horn. One fading ember falls nearby, singeing the sky as it streaks past.
Fallen Gods takes place in the aftermath of a world-changing struggle called the Overthrow, in which the old, animistic Firstborn gods were driven from power by the united might of men. The leader of those men, Orm the Trickster, took up the mantle of godhood and bestowed the same on his closest followers. These new gods, called the Ormfolk, then ascended to the Cloudlands, where Orm built the golden Skyhold from the plundered flesh of Karringar, one of the defeated Firstborn.
This kind of struggle, in which new gods drive out old ones, is almost universal in mythology—the best known examples probably being the Titanomachy (in which Zeus and his family overthrew the Titans) and Paradise Lost’s struggle in heaven (when Jesus, on behalf of soon-to-be-made mankind, defeats Satan and his overweening angels). In the Norse mythology that helped inspire Fallen Gods, the comparable event is the Æsir-Vanir War (in which Odin and his Æsir clan fought the Vanir). As overthrows go, it’s one of the gentler ones, and indeed the war ended in a peaceful accord. But it still fits within a pattern in which a preexisting pantheon oriented toward nature, fertility, and magic is supplanted or subsumed by one oriented toward war, craft, and cunning.
While I was conceiving and detailing the world of Fallen Gods, I was reading a series of apocalyptic books about our natural world, the best of which (in no particular order) wereThe Sixth Extinction, The World Without Us, Wild Ones, The Moth Snowstorm, and The Peregrine. These suggested that we are ourselves living in the aftermath of a war in which mankind, with its craft and cunning, has defeated nature, assuming its place as the gods of the earth. (Consider the arc of history that runs from the rat-borne, man-killing Black Death’s arrival in Europe to the human-introduced, rabbit-killing myxamatosis’s arrival in Australia.) For most of humanity’s existence, the world’s wildness was oppressive, terrorizing us with ferocious animals, confining us with impassable boundaries, decimating our numbers with drought and disease, and obliterating us with immense disasters. From a posture of weakness and ignorance, early humans worshiped that wildness. From a posture of strength, later humans broke that wildness—what seemed at first the kind of “breaking” that happens when a rider tames a wild mustang, and what increasingly seems to be the kind of “breaking” that happens when you strike a work of art with a sledgehammer.
A second series of nonfiction books also influenced my take on the Overthrow: books about revolutions and their aftermaths. Among the ones that I found particularly striking wereMoscow 1937, The Days of the French Revolution, Marie Arana’s Bolívar, and the memoirWhen a Crocodile Eats the Sun. These suggested the pessimistic conclusion that whether a revolution’s goals are righteous or ignoble, and no matter how wicked its enemies, there is a high likelihood that the aftermath of a successful revolution will be catastrophe. After all, a process that selects for warriors capable of overthrowing their entrenched, mighty rulers is not selecting for (and, indeed, may even be selecting against) men and women capable of building and administering a just and competent civil government in the revolution’s wake. Meanwhile, the bloody, irregular war so often necessary to change rulers, along with the society-wide upending that follows, inevitably inflicts immense collateral damage on the land’s natural, economic, and cultural capital.
The Overthrow in Fallen Gods is a righteous one waged against wicked foes. The old gods were mostly bad gods—at least for mankind. Amarok, the Great Wolf, ravened among the flock of humanity and fed wolfishness to those that survived. The winged wurm Fraener destroyed any man, and any work of man, that might raise humanity up from drudging in the dirt. He was one of those oppressors (we all know them) who degrades his victims and then declares, “I am rightly above them, for look at how poor, and miserable, and squalid they are.” The ever-hungry creature known as Grath wandered the world as a force of famine, devouring whole fields and herds, destroying any hope of stability for a people perpetually on the knife-edge of starvation. Even the less awful beings worked woe: Berkanan who lured children to his woods and made them into wild things; the threefold goddess Karringar who kindled a gold-lust and an iron-madness in men that has never stopped burning; Trund who licked to life the lumbering trolls that were the terror of the hills and dales.
One can hardly fault Orm for honing his cunning and cruelty until he could cut down such gods. Orm was a trickster with a crooked mind and a warlord with a ruthless heart, and to become greater he became worse, a man who bent whatever men could become his tools and broke whatever men could not. He won his crown; he won his wars; he won his godhead. Perhaps not tired of winning, but certainly tired of struggling, he was content to bask in his hard-earned heaven. But a war-torn world needs a healer and a steward, not an absentee landlord. And even when Orm paid attention it was the attention of a man who had become more than a man by the craft of killing, and killing can only get the world so far.
Eventually, the soul-strength that the men and women of the world had given to Orm—the soul-strength he had stolen from the Firstborn—began to seep away. The people themselves weakened and shrank, and their faith weakened and shrank, and then their new gods weakened and shrank, until the very heavens weakened and shrank. Soon, there wasn’t room enough, or soul-strength enough, to share among fearful Ormfolk, who had, for long, long years, always been given more than enough of whatever they might want. These were gods who had forgotten, or had never learned, how to go hungry.
And so they began throwing out their own brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—because even a smaller pie can yield bigger slices when fewer need to be cut. Fallen Gods begins in that time of dearth and death, when the player’s eponymous fallen god has just been cast down from the Cloudlands. He is desperate, not to save the world or free the world, but to flee the world and save himself, for he is no better than the others, only weaker. All the same, however, he must boldly face the bleak consequences of years of neglect and decline, the dangers of a world in which the gods won Ragnarök ... and thus robbed the earth of the rebirth that should have followed.
I’ll leave you with another snippet of music from Anders:
NEXT UPDATE: The Fallen God.
* * *
You can listen to more amazing music from Anders at his Soundcloud page:https://soundcloud.com/isletsound
If you were to read just two books from the list above, I would recommend Bolívar and The Peregrine, both of which are available from Amazon. (We don't get, and would never seek, revenue for clicks-through to Amazon, so no worries there!)
The best pitch for The Peregrine might well be this book talk at Stanford with Werner Herzog, which I have timestamped at a particularly moving passage from the book.[/spoiler
At once the night’s gloom blooms with unearthly hues and the sky becomes a shimmering sheet of fire. You have stood among those lights, basking in the warmth of Orm’s soul-hoard as it glowed upon the guests in Skyhold’s hall. Now, far off and half-frozen, you watch the Trickster’s overflowing wealth spill earthward like froth from a drunkard’s horn. One fading ember falls nearby, singeing the sky as it streaks past.
Fallen Gods takes place in the aftermath of a world-changing struggle called the Overthrow, in which the old, animistic Firstborn gods were driven from power by the united might of men. The leader of those men, Orm the Trickster, took up the mantle of godhood and bestowed the same on his closest followers. These new gods, called the Ormfolk, then ascended to the Cloudlands, where Orm built the golden Skyhold from the plundered flesh of Karringar, one of the defeated Firstborn.
This kind of struggle, in which new gods drive out old ones, is almost universal in mythology—the best known examples probably being the Titanomachy (in which Zeus and his family overthrew the Titans) and Paradise Lost’s struggle in heaven (when Jesus, on behalf of soon-to-be-made mankind, defeats Satan and his overweening angels). In the Norse mythology that helped inspire Fallen Gods, the comparable event is the Æsir-Vanir War (in which Odin and his Æsir clan fought the Vanir). As overthrows go, it’s one of the gentler ones, and indeed the war ended in a peaceful accord. But it still fits within a pattern in which a preexisting pantheon oriented toward nature, fertility, and magic is supplanted or subsumed by one oriented toward war, craft, and cunning.
While I was conceiving and detailing the world of Fallen Gods, I was reading a series of apocalyptic books about our natural world, the best of which (in no particular order) wereThe Sixth Extinction, The World Without Us, Wild Ones, The Moth Snowstorm, and The Peregrine. These suggested that we are ourselves living in the aftermath of a war in which mankind, with its craft and cunning, has defeated nature, assuming its place as the gods of the earth. (Consider the arc of history that runs from the rat-borne, man-killing Black Death’s arrival in Europe to the human-introduced, rabbit-killing myxamatosis’s arrival in Australia.) For most of humanity’s existence, the world’s wildness was oppressive, terrorizing us with ferocious animals, confining us with impassable boundaries, decimating our numbers with drought and disease, and obliterating us with immense disasters. From a posture of weakness and ignorance, early humans worshiped that wildness. From a posture of strength, later humans broke that wildness—what seemed at first the kind of “breaking” that happens when a rider tames a wild mustang, and what increasingly seems to be the kind of “breaking” that happens when you strike a work of art with a sledgehammer.
A second series of nonfiction books also influenced my take on the Overthrow: books about revolutions and their aftermaths. Among the ones that I found particularly striking wereMoscow 1937, The Days of the French Revolution, Marie Arana’s Bolívar, and the memoirWhen a Crocodile Eats the Sun. These suggested the pessimistic conclusion that whether a revolution’s goals are righteous or ignoble, and no matter how wicked its enemies, there is a high likelihood that the aftermath of a successful revolution will be catastrophe. After all, a process that selects for warriors capable of overthrowing their entrenched, mighty rulers is not selecting for (and, indeed, may even be selecting against) men and women capable of building and administering a just and competent civil government in the revolution’s wake. Meanwhile, the bloody, irregular war so often necessary to change rulers, along with the society-wide upending that follows, inevitably inflicts immense collateral damage on the land’s natural, economic, and cultural capital.
The Overthrow in Fallen Gods is a righteous one waged against wicked foes. The old gods were mostly bad gods—at least for mankind. Amarok, the Great Wolf, ravened among the flock of humanity and fed wolfishness to those that survived. The winged wurm Fraener destroyed any man, and any work of man, that might raise humanity up from drudging in the dirt. He was one of those oppressors (we all know them) who degrades his victims and then declares, “I am rightly above them, for look at how poor, and miserable, and squalid they are.” The ever-hungry creature known as Grath wandered the world as a force of famine, devouring whole fields and herds, destroying any hope of stability for a people perpetually on the knife-edge of starvation. Even the less awful beings worked woe: Berkanan who lured children to his woods and made them into wild things; the threefold goddess Karringar who kindled a gold-lust and an iron-madness in men that has never stopped burning; Trund who licked to life the lumbering trolls that were the terror of the hills and dales.
One can hardly fault Orm for honing his cunning and cruelty until he could cut down such gods. Orm was a trickster with a crooked mind and a warlord with a ruthless heart, and to become greater he became worse, a man who bent whatever men could become his tools and broke whatever men could not. He won his crown; he won his wars; he won his godhead. Perhaps not tired of winning, but certainly tired of struggling, he was content to bask in his hard-earned heaven. But a war-torn world needs a healer and a steward, not an absentee landlord. And even when Orm paid attention it was the attention of a man who had become more than a man by the craft of killing, and killing can only get the world so far.
Eventually, the soul-strength that the men and women of the world had given to Orm—the soul-strength he had stolen from the Firstborn—began to seep away. The people themselves weakened and shrank, and their faith weakened and shrank, and then their new gods weakened and shrank, until the very heavens weakened and shrank. Soon, there wasn’t room enough, or soul-strength enough, to share among fearful Ormfolk, who had, for long, long years, always been given more than enough of whatever they might want. These were gods who had forgotten, or had never learned, how to go hungry.
And so they began throwing out their own brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—because even a smaller pie can yield bigger slices when fewer need to be cut. Fallen Gods begins in that time of dearth and death, when the player’s eponymous fallen god has just been cast down from the Cloudlands. He is desperate, not to save the world or free the world, but to flee the world and save himself, for he is no better than the others, only weaker. All the same, however, he must boldly face the bleak consequences of years of neglect and decline, the dangers of a world in which the gods won Ragnarök ... and thus robbed the earth of the rebirth that should have followed.
I’ll leave you with another snippet of music from Anders:
NEXT UPDATE: The Fallen God.
* * *
You can listen to more amazing music from Anders at his Soundcloud page:https://soundcloud.com/isletsound
If you were to read just two books from the list above, I would recommend Bolívar and The Peregrine, both of which are available from Amazon. (We don't get, and would never seek, revenue for clicks-through to Amazon, so no worries there!)
The best pitch for The Peregrine might well be this book talk at Stanford with Werner Herzog, which I have timestamped at a particularly moving passage from the book.[/spoiler
such difficulty
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Robbed of my page views. 
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,425
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Skills, items, fetches and the god’s other powers.
Neanderthal
Arcane
I like the idea of an examination of changing pantheons, i've always wondered how Ullr became an obscure little known deity, when he was once judged as one of the most important, though I always figured that change was mainly down to agriculture taking over from hunting/gathering and maybe the withdrawal of the ice sheets. Intrigued.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Some silliness from Daniel Miller in honor of the weekend.
New title screen?
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Ha! Hopefully we won't have many loading delays in the game. We could have these guys falling where a narrator dispenses the deepest of deep lore.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Next update is up: http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/2018/04/fallen-gods-update-4-fallen-god.html
Fallen Gods Update #4: The Fallen God
Before you stands a man warped by time and wrath, crook-backed and bitter, barely able to heft the sword in his hand. Others crowd about, like and yet unlike the first, each twisted in his own way, smeared on stones so smooth and bright that they are like looking glasses. It is a maze made of you, and staring into it, you seem to see into your self.
The titular hero (or anti-hero) of our game may be fallen, but he is still a god. And even when cut off from Orm’s great soul-hoard in Skyhold, a son of the Cloudlands has many gifts that set him apart from mortal men.
The first is that he is very hard to kill for good. Only a few things are strong enough to make his soul abandon his flesh and bones. Most deaths merely mangle his body, and a few days and a bit of soul-strength are enough to heal even the ghastliest wounds. (Of course, every day is precious to a fallen god who must make it home within three months.)
Indeed, Ormfolk are very hard to kill at all, for even the most bumbling of them has a strength and skill with the sword that outstrips most hardened earthly fighters. And a god can grow even greater in might and wits by drawing on his soul-strength—“leveling up” in RPG parlance, though here at the cost of the same hard-won “mana” (i.e., soul) pool that feeds his greatest skills.
For a god, even a fallen god, has skills beyond swordplay. The player’s god has two out of the following five such skills: Soulfire (by which he can kindle souls into a holy blaze that can burn away curses or burn up foes); Healing Hands (by which he can heal wounds and cure sickness in himself and others); Death Lore (by which he can speak to the dead, calling on their wisdom or driving off restless undead draugar); Wild Heart (by which he can bend beasts to his will or cause the woods themselves to hasten him on his way); and Foresight (by which he can see what lies in distant lands or times to come). These too draw on soul-strength.
And a god has his “fetch,” the fylgja of Norse mythology (or “familiar” in folklore and modern fantasy). As the lore holds, a god’s fetch is female (a bitch wolf, a vixen, a hen raven, or a she eagle); a goddess’s would be male. Each fetch has its own advantages. For instance, the wolf fights beside you in battle, while the eagle can strike foes unaware beforebattle. Fetches also unlock new paths, such as letting your vixen lead starving miners astray to get them out of your way in the “Lost Ones” event.
Finally, the fallen god starts with a mighty item from the Cloudlands, such as the Lur, a horn that can stir the slumbering heart or clear the muddled head of any mortal man. And he will find more as he goes. Our items (as will be discussed in a later update) are like Lone Wolf’s: each is significant, providing not just a noticeable statistical bonus but also new abilities (like crossing streams with the Fording Stone) and new opportunities in events (such as covering an escape by opening the Fog Pot).
All of this power depends on soul-strength. When the god stirs the faith of men and women with mighty deeds (a faith born of fear and a faith born of love are equal sources of this strength), they freely yield some or all of their souls to him. He can also take soul-strength in harsher ways, such as killing lingering beings of old that are still swollen with souls from when they were gods themselves. And there are darker tricks still, like the Soultrap, which snares a soul as it leaves a dying body. One way or the other, perhaps one way and all the others, the fallen god must gather enough soul-strength to win his way home.
I’ve been writing primarily about the mechanical aspects of the god: what the player can do with the god and to the god. There’s a reason for that. The best way to define a character in a game is by the gameplay. Gameplay is like the “showing” of a character in the shopworn “show, don’t tell” writing advice, while narrative is like the “telling.” I’ve mentioned this in connection with Horatio in Primordia: he had to be a scavenger and a tinkerer and a near-pacifist because scavenging and tinkering and eschewing violence are important point-and-click conventions. Horatio needed to be laconic because with so many other characters, if he were a chatterbox the dialogue would become too extensive. Thus, his core traits were dictated (and I would say demonstrated) by the gameplay before any narrative. The same lesson applies to the god in Fallen Gods.
That lesson was first suggested to me in the mid-90s by Scott Dudley, who was making the ill-starred and in-hindsight-troublingly-named Legend of Talibah, a PC Japanese-style RPG. I was a high schooler well into my own ill-starred PC jRPG making career, and I corresponded a bit with Scott about his game, which featured a party member named “Staulker.” I opined that this name seemed a little much, and he replied that Staulker would prove his bad-assery in combat, which, he explained, was really the way that you show a player that a character is cool. A few years later the same lesson was repeated by Suikoden, in which the also ridiculously named Kwanda “Iron Wall” Rosman (an enemy general who could turn coat and join you) was defined primarily by his absurdly high defense statistic, and others of the 108 “Stars of Destiny” were similarly defined by look-and-feel rather than expository dialogue. Yet more years later, Chris Avellone made the same point about western cRPG companions (specifically, that players reacted to them primarily based on how useful they were).
So what character traits arise from the gameplay constraints in Fallen Gods? Well, the game doesn’t really have “quests” in the way a typical contemporary RPG does (i.e., meet NPC; learn about NPC’s problem; visit other NPCs to learn yet more context; discover various solutions; choose a solution; implement it over multiple steps; return to receive a reward). Our encounters usually resolve quickly, with a single paragraph of text describing the dilemma, a single multiple-choice decision resolving the dilemma, and another single paragraph describing that resolution. In order for those thin dilemmas to have meaning, they need to be about the god’s interests, since there is no pathos-laden dialogue tree to make the NPC’s interests compelling.
Thus, they typically take the form of, “Someone is between you and something you want: how can you get it most cheaply?” Whether a foe’s barring your path, a friend’s sharing a gift, or a stranger’s offering a reward, the god’s instinct is to give up as little as he can and get as much as he can. The game’s overall narrative needs to establish and reinforce this self-interest, and so the god—who is, after all, trying to escape the world’s sorrows and not lift them—must be a self-interested figure.
This self-interest is further compelled by constraints on interactions with followers. A mainstay of RPGs since Baldur’s Gate (arguably, since Ultima IV) has been intra-party interactions in which the player character talks to, and usually panders to, his companions. The more the player panders, the more his companion opens up, either as a romantic partner or a troubled friend in need of therapy, or both (as in Bioware games). This entails multi-stage, elaborate dialogue trees (e.g., the Circle of Zerthimon) delving deeply into the rich history and unique psyche of the NPC.
Fallen Gods has no dialogue trees. And the followers in the warband are not unique characters. Each berserk is like other berserks, each churl like other churls, and so forth. Mostly, they are ciphers like “hirelings” in Neverwinter Nights or Diablo II or soldiers in X-COM. Even when they interject thoughts and participate in events, they do so as fairly generic types, rather than as rich individuals, like a thinner version of the Clan Circle inKing of Dragon Pass.
Thus, the god simply cannot be a thoughtful leader of men like Shepard in Mass Effect or The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment, one who takes the time to learn in excruciating detail the lives of his followers. He, like the player, must view his followers as chess pieces: means to an end rather than Kantian “ends in themselves.” He is again motivated by self-interest: what can they do for me and what must I do for them? That is true whether he’s giving them orders or giving them gifts. The latter is an important, thematic part of a saga-inspired setting: to be a leader is to be a ring-giver. But unlike gifts used in Dragon Age: Origins to foster romance and delve deeper into psychoanalysis, these gifts are given only to strengthen the followers and reinforce the bonds of loyalty tying them to the god. If a churl began to share sob stories from his rough childhood, the god would almost certainly stare him into shamed silence.
This overriding self-interest will likely create a gap between what the player wishes his avatar would do and the game lets his avatar do. Generally speaking, people want to do good, and that desire is particularly strong in single-player games, where doing good carries no meaningful cost (maybe a little less fictitious money paid to your avatar as a reward for his quest). People call this a “power fantasy.” Fine. But it is emblematic of the noblest aspect of fantasy: its ability to train us to view doing good as the proper exercise of power.
Fallen Gods has a crueler edge to its fantasy. Although the gods’ foes are mostly wickeder than he is, and although he is certainly capable of doing some good in the world, his motivations are ultimately selfish. He can be bold and open-handed, fearless before fearful odds, clever in outwitting evil minds… but at bottom, he is not on earth to accrue Paragon points, but simply to achieve escape velocity, no matter what gets scorched in his wake or battered down along his runway. Rather than a fantasy in which the player can practice goodness, it is a fantasy that hopefully will leave the player convinced he can do better in this world than the fallen god does in the game’s world, even if the player doesn’t have the same panoply of powers.
NEXT UPDATE: Witches and Dwergs.
* * *
Many people have asked about our pixel graphics. They are made, dot by dot, by Daniel Miller, an avant-garde artist currently doing a series of residencies in Asia. He actually does very little pixel art. While his live performances cannot be captured on a website, you can get a taste for the breadth of his work in his online gallery: http://bydanielmiller.com/
A little over a year ago, I talked with Dan Felder, a thoughtful commentator about P&P RPGs, about how gameplay considerations should dictate character- and world-building. You can listen to the two parts of the interview on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2.
King of Dragon Pass, mentioned in previous updates as a significant influence on Fallen Gods, is a gem of a game. You can get it for PC (75% off as of 4/17/18) or iPhone. The great folks behind it are in the process of making a sequel entitled Six Ages, which looks marvelous.
I fell out of touch with Scott Dudley decades ago, but was pleased to see that he went on to be not merely a successful game developer but something of a renaissance man. Here’s his website: http://zaskoda.com/
[/spoilers]
Also, a fun animation from Dan:
Before you stands a man warped by time and wrath, crook-backed and bitter, barely able to heft the sword in his hand. Others crowd about, like and yet unlike the first, each twisted in his own way, smeared on stones so smooth and bright that they are like looking glasses. It is a maze made of you, and staring into it, you seem to see into your self.
The titular hero (or anti-hero) of our game may be fallen, but he is still a god. And even when cut off from Orm’s great soul-hoard in Skyhold, a son of the Cloudlands has many gifts that set him apart from mortal men.
The first is that he is very hard to kill for good. Only a few things are strong enough to make his soul abandon his flesh and bones. Most deaths merely mangle his body, and a few days and a bit of soul-strength are enough to heal even the ghastliest wounds. (Of course, every day is precious to a fallen god who must make it home within three months.)
Indeed, Ormfolk are very hard to kill at all, for even the most bumbling of them has a strength and skill with the sword that outstrips most hardened earthly fighters. And a god can grow even greater in might and wits by drawing on his soul-strength—“leveling up” in RPG parlance, though here at the cost of the same hard-won “mana” (i.e., soul) pool that feeds his greatest skills.
For a god, even a fallen god, has skills beyond swordplay. The player’s god has two out of the following five such skills: Soulfire (by which he can kindle souls into a holy blaze that can burn away curses or burn up foes); Healing Hands (by which he can heal wounds and cure sickness in himself and others); Death Lore (by which he can speak to the dead, calling on their wisdom or driving off restless undead draugar); Wild Heart (by which he can bend beasts to his will or cause the woods themselves to hasten him on his way); and Foresight (by which he can see what lies in distant lands or times to come). These too draw on soul-strength.
And a god has his “fetch,” the fylgja of Norse mythology (or “familiar” in folklore and modern fantasy). As the lore holds, a god’s fetch is female (a bitch wolf, a vixen, a hen raven, or a she eagle); a goddess’s would be male. Each fetch has its own advantages. For instance, the wolf fights beside you in battle, while the eagle can strike foes unaware beforebattle. Fetches also unlock new paths, such as letting your vixen lead starving miners astray to get them out of your way in the “Lost Ones” event.
Finally, the fallen god starts with a mighty item from the Cloudlands, such as the Lur, a horn that can stir the slumbering heart or clear the muddled head of any mortal man. And he will find more as he goes. Our items (as will be discussed in a later update) are like Lone Wolf’s: each is significant, providing not just a noticeable statistical bonus but also new abilities (like crossing streams with the Fording Stone) and new opportunities in events (such as covering an escape by opening the Fog Pot).
All of this power depends on soul-strength. When the god stirs the faith of men and women with mighty deeds (a faith born of fear and a faith born of love are equal sources of this strength), they freely yield some or all of their souls to him. He can also take soul-strength in harsher ways, such as killing lingering beings of old that are still swollen with souls from when they were gods themselves. And there are darker tricks still, like the Soultrap, which snares a soul as it leaves a dying body. One way or the other, perhaps one way and all the others, the fallen god must gather enough soul-strength to win his way home.
I’ve been writing primarily about the mechanical aspects of the god: what the player can do with the god and to the god. There’s a reason for that. The best way to define a character in a game is by the gameplay. Gameplay is like the “showing” of a character in the shopworn “show, don’t tell” writing advice, while narrative is like the “telling.” I’ve mentioned this in connection with Horatio in Primordia: he had to be a scavenger and a tinkerer and a near-pacifist because scavenging and tinkering and eschewing violence are important point-and-click conventions. Horatio needed to be laconic because with so many other characters, if he were a chatterbox the dialogue would become too extensive. Thus, his core traits were dictated (and I would say demonstrated) by the gameplay before any narrative. The same lesson applies to the god in Fallen Gods.
That lesson was first suggested to me in the mid-90s by Scott Dudley, who was making the ill-starred and in-hindsight-troublingly-named Legend of Talibah, a PC Japanese-style RPG. I was a high schooler well into my own ill-starred PC jRPG making career, and I corresponded a bit with Scott about his game, which featured a party member named “Staulker.” I opined that this name seemed a little much, and he replied that Staulker would prove his bad-assery in combat, which, he explained, was really the way that you show a player that a character is cool. A few years later the same lesson was repeated by Suikoden, in which the also ridiculously named Kwanda “Iron Wall” Rosman (an enemy general who could turn coat and join you) was defined primarily by his absurdly high defense statistic, and others of the 108 “Stars of Destiny” were similarly defined by look-and-feel rather than expository dialogue. Yet more years later, Chris Avellone made the same point about western cRPG companions (specifically, that players reacted to them primarily based on how useful they were).
So what character traits arise from the gameplay constraints in Fallen Gods? Well, the game doesn’t really have “quests” in the way a typical contemporary RPG does (i.e., meet NPC; learn about NPC’s problem; visit other NPCs to learn yet more context; discover various solutions; choose a solution; implement it over multiple steps; return to receive a reward). Our encounters usually resolve quickly, with a single paragraph of text describing the dilemma, a single multiple-choice decision resolving the dilemma, and another single paragraph describing that resolution. In order for those thin dilemmas to have meaning, they need to be about the god’s interests, since there is no pathos-laden dialogue tree to make the NPC’s interests compelling.
Thus, they typically take the form of, “Someone is between you and something you want: how can you get it most cheaply?” Whether a foe’s barring your path, a friend’s sharing a gift, or a stranger’s offering a reward, the god’s instinct is to give up as little as he can and get as much as he can. The game’s overall narrative needs to establish and reinforce this self-interest, and so the god—who is, after all, trying to escape the world’s sorrows and not lift them—must be a self-interested figure.
This self-interest is further compelled by constraints on interactions with followers. A mainstay of RPGs since Baldur’s Gate (arguably, since Ultima IV) has been intra-party interactions in which the player character talks to, and usually panders to, his companions. The more the player panders, the more his companion opens up, either as a romantic partner or a troubled friend in need of therapy, or both (as in Bioware games). This entails multi-stage, elaborate dialogue trees (e.g., the Circle of Zerthimon) delving deeply into the rich history and unique psyche of the NPC.
Fallen Gods has no dialogue trees. And the followers in the warband are not unique characters. Each berserk is like other berserks, each churl like other churls, and so forth. Mostly, they are ciphers like “hirelings” in Neverwinter Nights or Diablo II or soldiers in X-COM. Even when they interject thoughts and participate in events, they do so as fairly generic types, rather than as rich individuals, like a thinner version of the Clan Circle inKing of Dragon Pass.
Thus, the god simply cannot be a thoughtful leader of men like Shepard in Mass Effect or The Nameless One in Planescape: Torment, one who takes the time to learn in excruciating detail the lives of his followers. He, like the player, must view his followers as chess pieces: means to an end rather than Kantian “ends in themselves.” He is again motivated by self-interest: what can they do for me and what must I do for them? That is true whether he’s giving them orders or giving them gifts. The latter is an important, thematic part of a saga-inspired setting: to be a leader is to be a ring-giver. But unlike gifts used in Dragon Age: Origins to foster romance and delve deeper into psychoanalysis, these gifts are given only to strengthen the followers and reinforce the bonds of loyalty tying them to the god. If a churl began to share sob stories from his rough childhood, the god would almost certainly stare him into shamed silence.
This overriding self-interest will likely create a gap between what the player wishes his avatar would do and the game lets his avatar do. Generally speaking, people want to do good, and that desire is particularly strong in single-player games, where doing good carries no meaningful cost (maybe a little less fictitious money paid to your avatar as a reward for his quest). People call this a “power fantasy.” Fine. But it is emblematic of the noblest aspect of fantasy: its ability to train us to view doing good as the proper exercise of power.
Fallen Gods has a crueler edge to its fantasy. Although the gods’ foes are mostly wickeder than he is, and although he is certainly capable of doing some good in the world, his motivations are ultimately selfish. He can be bold and open-handed, fearless before fearful odds, clever in outwitting evil minds… but at bottom, he is not on earth to accrue Paragon points, but simply to achieve escape velocity, no matter what gets scorched in his wake or battered down along his runway. Rather than a fantasy in which the player can practice goodness, it is a fantasy that hopefully will leave the player convinced he can do better in this world than the fallen god does in the game’s world, even if the player doesn’t have the same panoply of powers.
NEXT UPDATE: Witches and Dwergs.
* * *
Many people have asked about our pixel graphics. They are made, dot by dot, by Daniel Miller, an avant-garde artist currently doing a series of residencies in Asia. He actually does very little pixel art. While his live performances cannot be captured on a website, you can get a taste for the breadth of his work in his online gallery: http://bydanielmiller.com/
A little over a year ago, I talked with Dan Felder, a thoughtful commentator about P&P RPGs, about how gameplay considerations should dictate character- and world-building. You can listen to the two parts of the interview on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2.
King of Dragon Pass, mentioned in previous updates as a significant influence on Fallen Gods, is a gem of a game. You can get it for PC (75% off as of 4/17/18) or iPhone. The great folks behind it are in the process of making a sequel entitled Six Ages, which looks marvelous.
I fell out of touch with Scott Dudley decades ago, but was pleased to see that he went on to be not merely a successful game developer but something of a renaissance man. Here’s his website: http://zaskoda.com/
[/spoilers]
Also, a fun animation from Dan:
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V_K
Arcane
they say a gay is a womyn's best friend, so it makes all the more sense a faggod would be accompanied by a bitch or a vixen
Anomander Rake
Savant
- Joined
- May 4, 2017
- Messages
- 631
So when is this game coming out ?
V_K
Arcane
They lie.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,425
Big Wrangle
Guest
I'd say this wouldn't cause that huge of a gap between the player and playable. While many players desire to do good to the world, unless the writing focuses on relatable characters something unfortunate happening it is seen as "it's unfortunate this happened due to my actions but oh well." It's like you broke a Lego building, you think about it for a few seconds and move on.
Gaming the system is also something Alpha Protocol pokes at, when Westridge says you were recuirted due to your skills at manipulating others.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Infinitron Dwergs are our dwarfs(ves) and witches are witches. The witches portion will overlap a little bit with what I talked about in the interview Vault Dweller and I did with Chris Picone.
Big Mutha It depends on the presentation and the player, that's for sure. In the right context (Sim City is an obvious example), players can wreak havoc without the least qualms. But I do generally think that in narrative games, and RPGs in particular, the default hope of a player is that when he encounters people who are suffering, he will be able to help them, not just in a palliative way, but in a curative way. As I note in the update, I think this reflects the basic goodness in most people, and the way in which games and fantasy stories can reinforce that goodness. Though, of course, there's a place for less noble paths, too, which can have cathartic or admonishing qualities to them as well from a moral standpoint, and can simply be fun in any event.
V_K Darth Roxor As I've noted in other threads, this kind of crap puts developers in the unpleasant position of either derailing discussion of their own games or appearing tacitly to condone such ugliness by saying nothing. So, here is the derailment. Norse mythology, Icelandic history, and Scandinavian folklore are rich with details that prove that they were not oblivious to the wide variety in human sexuality. (Take, for instance, the myths regarding the construction of Asgard's walls and Thor's "wedding," or the law providing that a man could divorce a woman for wearing pants, or the story in which Gudrun Osvifsdatter trick her husband Thorvald into wearing a low-cut shirt so that she can divorce him on similar grounds, or the saga regarding Hervor Angantyrsdatter who dressed like a man and lived as a Viking until later settling down a la Eowen, or the intricacies of nith...) Any effort to exhaustively depict the strange and wonderful era that inspired Fallen Gods would need to engage with those elements. But Fallen Gods is not exhaustive; to name just one giant lacuna, the game doesn't let you travel beyond the small island where it takes place, while travel abroad is an essential element of many, many myths, sagas, and folktales.
The fallen god as an avatar is limited in all sorts of ways -- a sort of worst of all worlds in which he is simultaneously something of a cipher and fairly predefined. That means that players are unable to shape their character the way they can in, say, POE and also don't get a complex individual protagonist the way they would in, say, PS:T. So it goes. In predefining that character, I've tried to keep him at the "heartland" of the Ormfolk's norms (which are roughly, though not exactly, those of saga heroes) because otherwise (as in stories like that of Hervor), the game would be about his variance from those norms. That isn't the story I wanted to tell, and it is hard enough for me to finish the story I do want to tell that I wouldn't dream of trying the alternative.
But FG's omissions won't, I hope, be viewed as exclusions. I hope that at the heart of the game people will find that same value that I tried to put into Primordia, which is a kind of ecumenical humanism. Human nature dictates that every one of us is full of traits that give perfectly good grounds for others to loathe us; at least I know I am. Stooping down to try to find more reasons to loathe each other is the antithesis of what I want my games to encourage. Ultimately what I hope they encourage people to do is to stand up straighter in the great, weak shield wall that stands between amicable civilization and brute desolation. While I am realistic (pessimistic) about my ability to make any meaningful contribution in that regard, I would rather not sit by why others use the game for contrary purposes. Hence, derailment.
Sergio A year? I don't know. Some of it depends on factors beyond my control (like when the stars align for the coder to care about getting stuff done), and some of it depends on factors nominally within my control but really no more willy-nilly (my motivation to sit down and write events). Two years ago (when I was going out of my way to avoid sharing much about the game) I was skeptical that it would ever be finished. Now I am reasonably sure it will be, and will be finished within the foreseeable future, but how far, I'm not sure.
Big Mutha It depends on the presentation and the player, that's for sure. In the right context (Sim City is an obvious example), players can wreak havoc without the least qualms. But I do generally think that in narrative games, and RPGs in particular, the default hope of a player is that when he encounters people who are suffering, he will be able to help them, not just in a palliative way, but in a curative way. As I note in the update, I think this reflects the basic goodness in most people, and the way in which games and fantasy stories can reinforce that goodness. Though, of course, there's a place for less noble paths, too, which can have cathartic or admonishing qualities to them as well from a moral standpoint, and can simply be fun in any event.
V_K Darth Roxor As I've noted in other threads, this kind of crap puts developers in the unpleasant position of either derailing discussion of their own games or appearing tacitly to condone such ugliness by saying nothing. So, here is the derailment. Norse mythology, Icelandic history, and Scandinavian folklore are rich with details that prove that they were not oblivious to the wide variety in human sexuality. (Take, for instance, the myths regarding the construction of Asgard's walls and Thor's "wedding," or the law providing that a man could divorce a woman for wearing pants, or the story in which Gudrun Osvifsdatter trick her husband Thorvald into wearing a low-cut shirt so that she can divorce him on similar grounds, or the saga regarding Hervor Angantyrsdatter who dressed like a man and lived as a Viking until later settling down a la Eowen, or the intricacies of nith...) Any effort to exhaustively depict the strange and wonderful era that inspired Fallen Gods would need to engage with those elements. But Fallen Gods is not exhaustive; to name just one giant lacuna, the game doesn't let you travel beyond the small island where it takes place, while travel abroad is an essential element of many, many myths, sagas, and folktales.
The fallen god as an avatar is limited in all sorts of ways -- a sort of worst of all worlds in which he is simultaneously something of a cipher and fairly predefined. That means that players are unable to shape their character the way they can in, say, POE and also don't get a complex individual protagonist the way they would in, say, PS:T. So it goes. In predefining that character, I've tried to keep him at the "heartland" of the Ormfolk's norms (which are roughly, though not exactly, those of saga heroes) because otherwise (as in stories like that of Hervor), the game would be about his variance from those norms. That isn't the story I wanted to tell, and it is hard enough for me to finish the story I do want to tell that I wouldn't dream of trying the alternative.
But FG's omissions won't, I hope, be viewed as exclusions. I hope that at the heart of the game people will find that same value that I tried to put into Primordia, which is a kind of ecumenical humanism. Human nature dictates that every one of us is full of traits that give perfectly good grounds for others to loathe us; at least I know I am. Stooping down to try to find more reasons to loathe each other is the antithesis of what I want my games to encourage. Ultimately what I hope they encourage people to do is to stand up straighter in the great, weak shield wall that stands between amicable civilization and brute desolation. While I am realistic (pessimistic) about my ability to make any meaningful contribution in that regard, I would rather not sit by why others use the game for contrary purposes. Hence, derailment.
Sergio A year? I don't know. Some of it depends on factors beyond my control (like when the stars align for the coder to care about getting stuff done), and some of it depends on factors nominally within my control but really no more willy-nilly (my motivation to sit down and write events). Two years ago (when I was going out of my way to avoid sharing much about the game) I was skeptical that it would ever be finished. Now I am reasonably sure it will be, and will be finished within the foreseeable future, but how far, I'm not sure.
Quantomas
Savant
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2017
- Messages
- 260
Hopefully, this will set you on a track to create a work that is greater than a mere game. FG has a lot of strengths going for it but you will need to avoid the obvious pitfalls. I remember that Disciples 2 once put out two expansions simultaneously, a dark and a light one from which the buyers could choose, and the difference in sales was stark. Something like 80% chose the light one and 20% the dark (don't have the reference available though). If Fredrik Wester would have known, he might have thought twice before marketing Tyranny as the game where evil had won. It doesn't matter on the Codex, but if you market FG (or disseminate game infos for that purpose) you can simply focus on something else.
The theme itself is enticing. It's worthy of a literary endeavour befitting a great work.
Back in the ancient days, in the enlightened places good was considered akin to judging one's actions and its consequences for all aspects of life fairly. You find its roots in all major world religions. It's a sense of circumscription, of being a part of the world.
As tribes increased in number and nations were born, this sense of being a part of the world was replaced by being a member of a society, and frequently it became us vs them. A naked sense of overriding self-interest that didn't make sense on a human level in the ancient days, but that seems perfectly logical for a nation. Today, the average human is still being torn between a desire to be good and the benefit of power that trickles down from the top and makes life in a society easier. Life has assumed a different shape, you have the power to buy. The attitudes of people have changed, fundamentally. The interesting thing is that the intelligence of people also has taken on a different form. What was originally simply dealing sensibly with the world is now a question of exercising your power smartly. The original meaning of doing good seems to have been lost along with its sense of circumscription. Greg Bear famously lamented this state in his Anvil of Stars, examining what it means if people exercise power simply because they can. I'd go a step further though and assert that the original circumscription of power is still there, it's only that people ignore it, to their detriment.
That is merely to say that your choice of a theme is fully on the height of the Zeitgeist.
It is worthy to examine, and maybe a video game will yield more insight than a literary work. But I do hope that you one day take up the mantle to discuss your thoughts that led to the creation of FG in literary circles.
Beyond that, I can only recommend that you have a look at Dead in Vinland. The tutorial and UI is brilliant and the game intriguing, a bit like King of Dragon Pass, but the small group you guide somehow gives the game more heft. I very much like how Dead in Vinland punishes you for failure. It's not severe but it conveys perfectly the sense of a lost opportunity.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I've been following the Dead in Vinland's success with dismay. Yet another piece of Norse inspired gaming that got to market before us, no doubt a much better game, too. :D I'll give it a try.
V_K
Arcane
I don't really want to go into derailment further - I don't care that much about this issue in the first place. However, there's a fault to your logic: this is not an omission, it's a specifically imposed limitation. An omission is a non-action. If the sex of the familiar wouldn't be specified at all, that'd be an omission. Or only having male gods for the simple reason of not having to do the animations/text for the female version. However having a sex of the companion always be the opposite of the PC is a very specific decision, you can't really dismiss it on the grounds of it requiring less effort - because it actually requires more effort.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I understand your point. If you're asking me why I defined the sex of the fetch/fylgja, it is because the opposite-sex familiar is a detail of Norse lore that I've found interesting since I first stumbled across it, I think in one of Edred Thorsson's books, but perhaps in another source. Moreover, having the fetch sexed provides at least one gameplay moment (when your vixen encounters a male fox), and yields some stylistic benefits because the female pronoun can be used to describe the fetch, while the neuter is typically used to describe other animals -- thus, your wolf can be a "she" facing off against an "it," allowing me to avoid specifying which wolf is which in the prose.
The original meaning of the fylgja's contrasexuality is open to debate (at least some commentators analogize to Jungian anima/animus). Whether, within the "extended universe" of Fallen Gods there are male gods with male fetches, and what that might mean, I can't really say. Within the limited scope of what I can fit in the game, there are very few fetches the player encounters, and his own is contrasexual. As I said, to include the full tapestry of the setting's inspiration, or even the full tapestry of the setting, is beyond my limited powers.
You're right, of course, that the story one chooses to tell involves writing this and not writing that; I suppose if you feel obliged to draw inferences from that, I can't stop you. It's a sure sign I've failed as an author if the major takeaway you draw from Update 4 is the one you posted, and it's a shame if that's the reaction players have to the game. But I can't write about the game, or write the game, to try to anticipate and avert all possible affront. I just have to hope that people will show forbearance with my shortcomings and its, and give at least some benefit of the doubt to both.
The original meaning of the fylgja's contrasexuality is open to debate (at least some commentators analogize to Jungian anima/animus). Whether, within the "extended universe" of Fallen Gods there are male gods with male fetches, and what that might mean, I can't really say. Within the limited scope of what I can fit in the game, there are very few fetches the player encounters, and his own is contrasexual. As I said, to include the full tapestry of the setting's inspiration, or even the full tapestry of the setting, is beyond my limited powers.
You're right, of course, that the story one chooses to tell involves writing this and not writing that; I suppose if you feel obliged to draw inferences from that, I can't stop you. It's a sure sign I've failed as an author if the major takeaway you draw from Update 4 is the one you posted, and it's a shame if that's the reaction players have to the game. But I can't write about the game, or write the game, to try to anticipate and avert all possible affront. I just have to hope that people will show forbearance with my shortcomings and its, and give at least some benefit of the doubt to both.
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