How Now, Clio?

This question came from the beloved spouse. “Has being a scholar of history and a professor of history impacted my game writing?” The answer is…yes, absolutely!

The title is poking gentle fun at the muse of history, Clio. As a grad student in the 1990s, we plunked her name into every paper, punctuated by a colon. Clio’s Toesies: An Overview of Shoes 1890-95 in Manchester; Clio’s Ego: A Manifestation of the Feminine Prime in “Her”Story Discourse during the Terror in 1891; Clio’s Fine Bum: A Subversion of the Female Gaze via Reflective Practice within Puritan Literature. You get the picture, ad nauseam. (Yes, these are all made-up titles).

One of the first things you learn as a history major is that an endless series of dates is irrelevant. What matters are core events (intellectual, scientific, political, social), or as Kuhn (1962) calls them, paradigm shifts. He wrote specifically about scientific changes in thinking, but I like applying his ideas in broad brush strokes and asking a specific question: If X had happened (or did not happen) at Y point in time, how would history have changed? This speculation is part of the fun for me in game design.

So, let’s look at the genesis of Rustwater. Despite being a mountain lady, I love and respect the sea. When Wayne and I were brainstorming, we asked, “What would have happened to 18th century Rotterdam if aliens from another dimension dropped four awful curses into the world?” The follow-up question then became: “What happens a hundred years later, when the population and land begin to recover?” To answer the first, we codified the curses over time (Redthorn, the Monstrous Nativity, the Elemental Riot, and Wordwyrms). We wrote down lists of events that would follow each curse (Redthorn—destruction of structures and farmland; the Monstrous Nativity—appearance of new species; the Elemental Riot—steam engines and broken machines coming to life; and then Wordwyrm—the loss of all accumulated written knowledge in a matter of hours). Extrapolating from there, and going down endless rabbit holes about Chernobyl, European folklore, and cultures eschewing a written language, we had the foundation for our setting.

Wordwyrms, of course, changed our approach more than any other curse. How do people communicate using symbols and drawings? How do they keep records? What does it mean to have an oral tradition? The questions kept coming, and we want to give a special shout out to our play testers, who pushed the envelope on thinking about Wordwyrms and game play.

From there, we developed a rough timeline and (full confession) used Midjourney to develop some concept art that would not be in the book, nor sold in any fashion. We used it as a tool during play testing and found that the visuals helped our players. If you’ve gotten this far in the blog, you’ve earned an easter egg: I also developed a longer timeline that goes forward about 500 years (so, yes, as far as that branch of reality, I have a pretty good idea of what happens to the denizens of Rustwater. It’s not all bad.

So, give us some details on how you create the history of your gaming worlds. Do you start with an inciting event? How do you decide what happens? Do you do non-linear storytelling? (I am a huge fan of the writing of Cam Collins and Steve Shell). What other tools do you have in your world-creating vault? Give us some comments.