Thank you all for your support, both those of you who were with me from the start and those of you who joined me after Seedship! My first game had a successful launch, and I’ve been really gratified seeing what people have been saying about it in the two weeks since it went live. There was even a review of it on BoingBoing!
I’ve started work on my next game, and I’m confident enough about this idea that I think it will be my next game, so I think it’s time to let you know what it is.
When I made this Patreon I said I would be creating “Twine games and interactive stories.” Seedship is very much a game, with stat tracking and even a numeric score at the end. I want to showcase the breadth of what I can create by making my next piece towards the “interactive story” end of the game-interactive story spectrum. It’ll have a more complex narrative structure and more character development than Seedship, where the structure had to be fairly simple because most of the game was based on random events. It’ll be a story with player choice and multiple endings, but a story nonetheless. It may also have RPG elements such as stats and an inventory, but I’m not sure how much of this it will need.
The story I’m working on is inspired by two things. The first is the Lone Wolf series of fantasy gamebooks by Joe Dever, in which the player takes the role of a warrior monk whose monastery is destroyed by evil forces and who must then go on various quests to defend the land. The second is a passage from the Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook:
“For many thinking creatures, alignment is a moral choice. Humans, dwarves, elves, and other humanoid races can choose whether to follow the paths of good or evil, law or chaos. According to myth, the good-aligned gods who created these races gave them free will to choose their moral paths, knowing that good without free will is slavery.
“The evil deities who created other races, though, made those races to serve them. Those races have strong inborn tendencies that match the nature of their gods. Most orcs share the violent, savage nature of the orc god, Gruumsh, and are thus inclined toward evil. Even if an orc chooses a good alignment, it struggles against its innate tendencies for its entire life. (Even half-orcs feel the lingering pull of the orc god’s influence.)”
Wizards of the Coast, D&D Fifth Edition Player’s Handbook, p. 122; also in the basic rules, p. 34.
Now that passage is obviously meant to let the players slaughter hordes of orcs and goblins without moral dilemmas, while allowing for individual orcs etc. who have turned away from their evil races, and providing a ready-made source of angst for half-orc player characters. But I started thinking, what if the non-evil orcs aren’t all loners who leave their society? What if one of them learned not only how to resist the voice of the evil god in their head, but also how to teach other orcs to do the same?
What if, to link it back to Lone Wolf, the orcs had their own monastery?
So the premise of my new game is that the player character is a member of a species that was corrupted by an evil god (right now I’m calling them orcs, but I might change it to an original name later), but is a warrior monk order that uses meditation techniques to resist the evil god’s mental influence. The monastery is destroyed, and the player must decide what to do next. Unlike in the first Lone Wolf book, in which the destruction of the monastery is accompanied by giving the PC an urgent mission with a single end-point, in my game the player will be free to choose from multiple paths and end up at multiple endings.
I don’t have a title for the game yet (working title is “Untitled Orc Monk Game”). I have a feeling this will be one of those projects where I don’t think of a title until I’m well into the writing. Right now I’ve got about 1,500 words written, most of which is the player exploring the ruined monastery, and a rough plan for the overall story structure. I’ll write more dev blogs as I progress.