Hey Josh. What was the worldbuilding process like on Pillars of Eternity?
This could be a very long answer, but I’ll try to be succinct. In my mind, there have been three worldbuilding phases for Eora. The first one occurred during the Kickstarter for Project Eternity. The second occurred during the development of Pillars of Eternity. The third was during Deadfire.
The first phase was quite ad hoc and a little unfocused due to the extremely fast pace of the Kickstarter campaign. In that phase, the goals were largely to create something that felt generally comfortable and familiar for people who wanted a Baldur’s Gate-style experience. I would not consider it unfair if people thought of this as cynical or uninspired; I was specifically trying to meet general audience expectations. So we had folk (humans), elves, and dwarves, but also godlike (aesthetically genasi-esques), orlans, and aumaua.
There were a few shreds of integrity in me at that point, because I didn’t want to have an “evil” player race like orcs or to directly take hobbits/halflings from Tolkien.
I also pulled at various bits of historical inspiration, e.g. the Drummer of Niklashausen for St. Waidwen. I thought it would be interesting (to me, at least) to push the setting toward the equivalent of Earth’s 16th century in terms of technology and social expansion. So we had trans-oceanic exploration and colonization, firearms, mercantilism, and a lot of cross-cultural contact and conflict. Aedyran, which is effectively contemporary English, was conceived as a colonial blend of two imperial/trade languages (Eld Aedyran/Old English and Vailian/Italian-French-Occitan) with a local language (Glanfathan/Cornish-Welsh).
The second phase of worldbuilding was more structured, though I still had to deal with whatever decisions I had hastily made during the Kickstarter. Eric Fenstermaker (who wrote the main story for Pillars 1) and I worked through the implications of the Hollowborn Crisis on social trends and daily life in the Dyrwood. This phase of development was also more fundamentally materialistic in its methodology, though not enough in retrospect. I would have liked to have put more thought into the relationships between the various erldoms, their communities, and the duc in Defiance Bay. The disconnect between rural and urban Dyrwoodans does largely come out of this materialistic approach: rural communities are affected by the Hollowborn Crisis more than urban communities. This is both because more children were affected (due to proximity to the machines Thaos was using) and because rural communities’ labor pools were more dependent on local family members.
There were also certain limits I placed on technology during this phase, like limiting the ability to teleport material (including people) due to the incredible effect that would have on so many aspects of trade and culture. Its inclusion in Deadfire was only allowed after a lot of discussions of its limitations (e.g., requiring a Watcher linking adra pillars and the use of massive, expensive Vailian technology).
