Immersion is Just Drowning By Choice

In preparing for the release of the first update of the reimagined Princess on the Run, it became clear that the world of Aerth needed to be updated and explored. The problem with most sandbox games is that they either become a grind, grow too quest-heavy, or distract from the story.

I’ve always felt that well-made stories - like well-made people  - are a product of their environment, and how they fit within it. While avoiding that dirty, dirty term - worldbuilding (ugh) - I decided that a story about a princess running away from the only home she had ever really known needed some background.

There’s a lot of writer-y gobbledygook that talks about how to develop backstories for characters, and I won’t bore you to death with the process. The main thrust is that the story for each character is informed by the world around them.

Case in point: players of the previous version of the game will note that most of the people in the game are pretty young. There aren’t a lot of parents, or crotchety old men or ancient washerwomen, etc. doing that Charlie Brown-esque (mwah mwah mwah-mwah, etc.) sort of talking.

Why not?

The truth is pretty simple; there aren’t a lot of assets for older folks. As well, most folks don’t have Lemon Parties as part of their kink (for the love of His Noodly Appendage and the preservation of your soul, please do not google ‘lemon/lemonade party’). 

So, how to account for the lack of older folk? Well, I don’t know if its a perfect solution or not, but I decided to fold the absence of older folk into the overall background and plot of the game. Most older folks have every generation’s older members decimated by a mysterious plague that wipes out a lot of the intricacies of the historical record, sowing political strife and chaos. Like the Black Death and the Dancing Plague of 1518 meet up in a fancy movie theater to watch ‘’Miri’’ (an old ST:TOS episode) before doing things that will eventually get them kicked out of said fancy cinema.

This major event informs the personality, behavior and actions of most of the characters.

Now that I have shared a bit of How the Sausage is Made, I will quickly step away from the subject and just share an image of Joan by Steve (I'm calling it, Joan the Badass, Chapter 27) and a snippet about the Murmur from the game.

(excerpt from Woes Upon the Pyre, as sung by his bardic excellence, Smithone of the Russet Hills)

In Taboa,

when the town guard had completed their labors

bodies of the dead were lain outside the walls

an unplanted crop

never to grow, 

never to seed,

never to harvest,

were piled like new-fallen pine

The Murmur

took most, but the children; it left them all be

but stole still from them - 

their childhood

their boyhood

their girlhood

they wandered, aimless.

They wandered

and in wandering, neighbors and strangers;

became brothers,

became sisters,

became blood.

Families broken made whole.

Memories

remade anew in the only way the young can.

History lives,

endures still,

in old faces.

in old bards

as the young begin anew

The Murmur

never perishes but only sleeps until

the young grow old, 

planting seeds

watching them grow

until the Murmur comes to reap again.