Betterblog

As usual, we've garnished your Friday with a generous scoop of additional content:

• Recent escapees from New Newgate may find they have a patron in Fallen London: several possible patrons with several very unusual agendas. We've taken some pains not to rule this out for existing players. If you're unlucky enough to find yourself imprisoned again, you may be able to make contact.
• A number of the less celebrated Connected possibilities have a little more life in them. Be careful who you annoy.
• There is a place behind mirrors: just the borders of that particular territory...

A steaming tray of fresh content turned up a few days ago. This update boasts some sparkly new narrative structures that we've not used before. Alexis has described the whole Echo Bazaar project as an expedition into the narrative jungle for specimens. So, here for your edification and delight are a fresh batch of twelve-eyed beasts straining at their cage doors. Today we have the Midnight Buffet, the Carousel and the Grandfather Clock! If you've not come across our narrative structures before, you might want to have a look here.

The Midnight Buffet is a variant on the Midnight Staircase. That probably helps nobody, so let's recap. The Midnight Staircase is a structure where a single storylet with a large number of branches gives various options for raising a progress quality. So, if you're training for a fight, all the 'do some exercise' and 'spar with a partner' work is increasing the same 'getting ready for a fight' quality. Once the progress quality is high enough, options start appearing to use the progress up to various ends. The fight training progress might be used to duel an easy mark or a fearsome opponent. Some of the options require more preparation than others. This is where the 'staircase' comes in. A player is heading up the stairs, but chooses which floor to get off on.

So, that's the staircase, which has been seen in the wild for a while now. The Midnight Buffet is slightly different in that there are a number of progress qualities, instead of one. Rather than just 'preparing for a burglary', there might be 'casing the target', 'preparing tools' and 'hiring villains' as separate qualities. The easy option ('burgle a half-blind widow's savings') might only require one of these progress qualities at a set level, but a more ambitious storylet ('raid a bank')  might need three or four of them at that level. So, the player's choice is, rather than how far up the staircase to go, how many plates to load up on before they sit down to eat.

The Carousel is a bit simpler. There's a timing quality like 'the passing of the Society Calendar'. Every storylet in a chunk of content increases the timing quality, which represents time passing. This rises and rises as the player goes through the content. As the timing quality rises, some content is locked off and other stuff opens up. This leads up to the final set of storylets for the content chunk. Any of the final storylets resets the timing counter to zero. This resets the Carousel, and allows the player to see the early content of the Carousel again. To let players see most or all of the content, they get to go around the Carousel a few times before going to other content. We used the Carousel to represent time passing in a term at the university, but I can see it being used in other places where there's a repeating calendar and different things can happen at the beginning and the end. The Carousel was an interesting one to write. It's a very concentrated form, with a lot of storylets for its 'size'. It also makes significant use of implied storytelling. I'll be fascinated to see how it is received.

The Grandfather Clock is a fairly straightforward structure. There's a significant narrative in a simple chain - one storylet, then the next. But, to move along the chain, the player must build up a progress quality. This is done with a multi-branch storylet like in a Mignight Staircase or Buffet. Whenever the progress quality gets high enough, it is reset to zero and the player moves along the big chain one step. This is called a Grandfather Clock because the progress quality is like the minute hand of a clock, and the main chain is like the hour hand. The progress quality whizzes about at speed, but the big narrative moves more sedately. As it happens, we complicated the form immediately. The first Grandfather Clock in the game actually has two independent hour hands. That's how we roll.

Aaand the content we mentioned is live: another tier on each of the major highways, and some other delectable scraps you may come across elsewhere.

Some of the new material is among the most ambitious in structural terms that we've done so far. Among others, we've employed what we call the Carousel pattern, the Grandfather Clock and the Midnight Buffet. We fully intend to run up and down the scale and spread some of this more elaborate love on mid and lower tiers too...when we have time. All, as the man and the lady both said, shall be well.

The Nemesis Ambition is now up to date with the rest of the game, taking you through the Chambers of the Heart to the Cage-Garden where the bees do their work and a confrontation in the tomb-colony of Venderbight. You may have noticed your companions have got friskier, and there are a couple of menacingly playful devils about the place.

Other things are coming on the first Friday [no longer Tuesday] of August:

• the opening acts of the Wars of Illusion
• the diabolical freethinkers of Benthic College
• the bloated prayermongers of Summerset
• the Empress' Court. Wit or beauty?
• the difficulties of caging a fungus-colony

(and the Mirror-Marches? surely that's superstition.)

 [This is a guest post by Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat of Two Scooters Press, who produced the much-admired indie tabletop RPGs Mist-Robed Gate, It's Complicated and more recently Blowback. Anything Elizabeth says about EBZ below is her own opinion and involved little to no bribery.]

My family takes friendly games of charades entirely too seriously. This is to be expected: my siblings and mother consider themselves to be A) extremely observant; B) excellent actors; C) exceedingly clever and fun. I was inclined to agree with them, more or less, until one fateful game of charades where someone got a little too pleased with their own cleverness.

We’d write things to act out on pieces of paper, and draw them randomly. I drew “The Berlin Wall.”

If they gave out Academy Awards for charades, let me tell you, I would have won. I stood on one side of the couch, looking sad and forlorn; then I leapt to the other side, looking happy and free from the tyranny of communism. I did this a few times to establish situation, and then jumped triumphantly atop the couch and began throwing pillows and cushions, dismantling the comfy symbol of my oppression.

No one guessed it.

I was despondent. After I explained that I had been the Berlin Wall, everyone agreed that my portrayal was quite good, very soulful. My brother (who was the culprit behind making “The Berlin Wall” a choice) asked one question: “Why didn’t you try ‘Sounds like, 3 syllables?’”

I made up some nonsense about how “sounds like” is the crutch of the amateur, but seriously, I just blew it. When you’ve only got a minute or so for people to guess your intent, you’ve got to choose what you show them very carefully.

Echo Bazaar— casual gaming in general, really— gives you more than a minute or two to make your impression, but there’s never a moment to spare. The idea, as Alexis mentioned in a previous blog entry, is to make the world feel vast; as if you’ve only explored a small section of what there is to see. And you’ve got to drive home the feeling that the undiscovered territory is worth the effort to see.

The idea, then, is to give the players enough context to figure out what to imagine. If you don’t give players appropriate clues, then they’ll either imagine the wrong things entirely and become upset when your game doesn’t fit their preconceived notions, or else be too uncomfortable with their knowledge of the game to imagine at all.

In the indie tabletop RPG world, this is sometimes referred to as “Right to Dream.” Sometimes, when you sit down to play an RPG, you want to change the world you’re playing in, or redefine the prevalent themes of the narrative, or kill your friends and take their stuff. When you want the Right to Dream, you want to simply be in the world, imagine the world, and experience it with the people around you. When you’re sitting around the table creating the story collaboratively, the group is able to throw out all of the stuff about the world or genre that doesn’t matter to them and the Dream, and just focus on what they love. If you’re playing a game about being mermaids, you can throw out water pressure and decompression sickness. That’s not what the game is about.

When you sit down to play a computer game, however, you’re not allowed to throw out any of the contributions to your experience that the game makes. If you’re playing the mermaid game, and there’s a water pressure meter and you’ll die if you surface too quickly, there’s no way to ignore the way that encroaches on your Dream. Which makes for disgruntled players.

In games with a contained narrative— games in which the player affects the world of the game minimally, if at all— a good designer acts as a curator, selecting only the finest and most appropriate elements of story and genre for the players to consume. A great designer allows the player to act as a curator as well, and Echo Bazaar’s card structure does just that. If I don’t feel like increasing a particular type of nightmare, or don’t feel like connecting to the orphans, or desperately want to be BFFs with bohemians— EBZ allows all of that. It is the first casual browser RPG I’ve played that begins to support the Right to Dream, and that makes EBZ very special indeed.

- Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, Two Scooters Press

****WARNING: this post contains SPOILERS for the Comtessa storyline in Echo Bazaar, found in Ladybones Road at Watchful 25+. READ NO FURTHER if you don't want to know what happens. SRSLY.****

The other day, EBZ's writing team sat down over breakfast in a posh central London hotel spent a day or two creating one of those multicoloured email 'conversations' in order to have another look at the Comtessa storyline. It's a popular story and its conclusion, especially, has been the subject of quite a bit of player feedback. Alexis thought it was worth thinking the ending through again. (He was right. As we add new content and tease out ideas about exactly why people play EBZ/what they get out of it/what we want to put in it/&c, we need to go back to some of the old stuff and see how and if it's all still fitting together (in the loosest possible sense of 'fitting' and 'together', of course).)

The last storylet in the Comtessa arc presents the player with a stark choice. You've been hired by her father to find the Comtessa; you've followed the trail she's left behind and found her down in the Clay Quarters. You are now confronted by her Clay Man lover, who explains that he's in the process of turning her into stone, so they can be together always. The important information you get is a/ that the process is irreversible and b/ that you can see her frightened green eyes looking out from her half-made statue. And you have just two options. Smash the statue; or turn and leave.

If you've read Alexis' post on decisions, you'll know we define the resolution to the Comtessa's story as a reflective choice. That is to say, it's a choice you make based entirely on how you view your character, and what you think your character's priorities are. To make the decision, you first have to decide what kind of decision you want to see it as. Do you see it as a moral choice? (What would be the right thing to do? Do I want to do the right thing?) Or a pragmatic one? (You're here because her father paid you, after all. What's the sensible thing to do?) Or is it purely an internal choice? Do you want to be kind or cruel? (and is this because you've defined your character that way and you want to remain in character, even if you don't like doing it?) Or is it a (possibly conflicting) combination of any/all of the above? We don't want to tell you. We want you-the-player to have the freedom and the space to be able to make these decisions in the way that you prefer to make them.

We started talking about the fact that there was a problem with this concluding storylet. The problem was that if you chose to leave the Comtessa and her lover be, you got a quality bump for Heartless. This struck people as unfair, because it could just as easily be seen as a kindness, just as it could be heartless to smash her to smithereens or it could be the humane option. We don't know whether her fear is of becoming stone, or of being dragged back to her father, after all.

And the basis of the player's decision is not, (or, at least, I think it can't be) anything the game has already said about high society ladies or Clay Men or Victorian morals or mixed marriages or true love or cruelty or kindness or rewards or deceit or just deserts. There is no judgement here, because in making the choice, you bring to bear everything you think about these things. (Or everything you've decided your character thinks - the subject of the overlap between player and character is one for another post or several). This storylet invites the player to play God for a moment. And that's why I think the two choices work: because either one of them could be humane or cruel or lazy or greedy or spiteful or generous or whatever you feel, and what the player does is decide their motivation and then pick the option they think fits it. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' and there is no 'correct' or 'incorrect' either.

Anyway. What we discussed over freshly baked pains au chocolat and delicious grapefruit juice email was a/ whether or not to remove the Heartless bump from the 'leave her be' branch and b/ whether to add a third branch, in which the player can decide to accept the Clay Man's bribe (jewels stolen from Daddy Comte, naturally) to turn a blind eye to the situation. A/ was pretty easily agreed on - as discussed, it could be a heartless move, but it isn't necessarily. Bump removed.

B/ was trickier and took some discussion. It was argued that a third way might allow the player to act more 'naturally' - to avoid, in other words, making the difficult decision. And this is perfectly plausible - what if you've decided your character doesn't care one way or the other, but is as mercenary as they come and just wants to take the cash?

Alexis mentioned poetry at this point. Poetry and game design would give us different answers, he said. And again, he was right. (He usually is). My 2p worth was that I think there's a pseudo-tragic thing going on here in that both choices, kill her or leave her, are nasty, both feel extreme and both feel like sacrifice. I argued that allowing the player to say 'none of my business' diluted that - if you don't know what you'd do, you just take the easy way out. You're not forced to define your own motivation. And maybe that's OK, at other times. But as Paul pointed out, the ambiguity here and the bleakness of the choice is what makes the story memorable. So - no third way, not this time. The game won't tell you your motivation - but you need to have one.

Hi folks. We've got a big wadge of content coming your way this Friday. We're just putting the finishing touches to the next episode of Ambition: Bag a Legend (of which more in a bit) and Nigel's brand new Cheesemonger stories are ready to launch too.

We've been adding new content all week: You'll find opportunities to extend your acquaintance with devils. Your companions may become a little more active, and there is a good chance that you'll be dreaming of thunder. Enterprising players may discover a few more of Mr Eaten's footprints.

Any Nemesis players out there who are cursing and thumping the furniture, be assured: your new content is coming along veeerry soon. Next Friday, in fact. We know it's been a long wait for the next installments in these stories, but we need to spend a little longer on ambitions because they're tied so deeply into the secrets at the heart of the game, and we have to get them right.

With regard to the Vake, I've been trying to think of a good name for these big ambition updates, and I'm going to open myself to ridicule right now by calling them Seasons. As we develop the ambition stories, we've tried to borrow some of the tricks of those weighty US TV shows that turn up on HBO - long and short story arcs, recurring characters, cliffhangers, and a slam-bang season finale that sets up the next season. So with that in mind, here's a glossy, high definition trailer for Bag a Legend: Season Three...

Carnivorous plants! Deadly stalagmites! Battle nuns! Madness! Creepy crawlies! The true identity of the Scarred Naturalist! Experimental blank verse! And much, much more!

Tune in Friday, delicious friends.

Fallen London is full of secrets. Full, full, full. You may already have guessed the price that was paid for the city, or the original names of the streets of Spite. If you've got far enough into the game, you may know who the Topsy King used to be, or what the Correspondence is. If you've been paying close attention, you may have some idea why the Masters cover themselves or what the Church does with all those candles. But everything in the game is due a reveal eventually - the real nature of the Bazaar, the source of glim, why death is different. Whether warm amber is actually something unhygienic.

So there's an ocean of backstory, secrets and continuity material. And we add to it all the time, God help us. Here's some of the ways we keep it straight.

Keeping it all inside. One thing I brought away from software development is this: information in documentation is OK, but information is most valuable when it's in the team's heads. So we have as many meetings as is practical with a distributed team, we have a bunch of specific techniques (more below), and above all we work collaboratively.

Final repository of truth. Of course we do need something less volatile than our brains. Another software dev thing - DRY, don't repeat yourself. The actual content database (250,000 words and counting) is the final repository of truth in the game. Where practical, we use that as our reference point. Where content hasn't been implemented yet, we have a deliberately limited number of secondary docs, including...

The view from above. We have one really big Google spreadsheet with more or less every important secret in the game. There's a row for every subject, and the columns run from very shallow to very deep to [REDACTED]. So a shallow secret about the Masters is that they're all only five foot high and wear platform shoes, a medium one is that they're made of balsa wood, a deep one is that their secret motivation is to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And so forth. The advantage of organising it this way is (i) we can scan and remind at a glance (ii) we can make strategic decisions about how much info to release when.

Coloured lights. When any of us adds new content to the secrets birdseye or another doc, we do so highlighted in our own heraldic colour. We may kick it around a bit. Then I come along and black-and-white it if I'm happy, and it's canon. It doesn't allow for fancy version control, but it's a very simple at-a-glance way of handling additions.

Email discipline. Email discussions about ideas and plots easily get bogged down in half-formed ideas and interleaved discussion with too many loose ends. We have a specific protocol we bring out for these occasions: no interleaving, only clear and specific suggesions with no 'perhaps something like...', 'I propose...' as a clear flag for suggestions so people don't feel their ideas are stepped on, that sort of thing.

Three gates. Everything we write gets subbed by another team member to weed out bloopers and typos and game imbalances. We have a set of guidelines and house rules for that, plus the birdseye. It then gets reviewed by me, as a final check on continuity and so I can mess with the prose if I think it needs messing. (When I've written it, the process is a little murkier, but it should always get a sub.) The key thing here is that we don't sub as a hierarchy - anyone can get assigned to sub anything. This has the added, big, advantage that we're constantly keeping abreast of each others' work: which takes us back to the very first point, above.

Any of you folks build or maintain worlds - for fun or professionally - as part of a team? What tools and techniques do you use?

Nigel talks about how well his experience as a writer & player of tabletop roleplaying games fits with writing content for Echo Bazaar. I ought to admit right now that I don't have the first clue what a tabletop game even looks like. I'm a classicist; Echo Bazaar for me has always been (amongst other things) about genre, reception, intertextuality and the creation of landscape architecture in the imagination.

That sounds terribly pompous. Erm, it's much more of a general approach than a way into the actual writing. I don't sit down and think, 'Right. I'm going to do a story about what happens when a Grubby Urchin gets hold of a trumpet. What tropes shall I weave in and how might the player understand which genre(s) the story may be attempting to emulate or redefine or subvert?' That would be stupid. (And that stuff's out of our hands, anyway.) What I mean is that I don't see what we do with Echo Bazaar narratively as being limited by its status as an in-browser casual social game. The player doesn't need to pay attention to it for more than a few minutes a day if they don't want to, but we can be as ambitious with our vision for the story as we like.

I'm not saying we're writing Ulysses bit-by-bit here, but it's not hubristic to say that EB contains entirely valid responses to and arguments about, for example, Victorian enthusiasm for Gothic literature, TS Eliot, contemporary film portrayals of serial killers, misconceptions about Victorian morality, ideas about what Freud might have meant, constructions of alternate histories, blah blah, &c, blah. And when we sit down to advance the story, be it writing little individual plots or long narrative arcs or weaving in bits of the overarching secrets about Fallen London that you don't know about yet, we're working from within a cultural and intertextual context that is rich and complex. It doesn't have to be conscious, and it probably shouldn't ever be too self- conscious, but it can't help but inform the writing and give it depth, not any more. We're stuck with it now. It might be barely visible in an individual storylet about robbing the lead from a church roof and nearly getting eaten by a spider in the process, or flirting outrageously with an impoverished artist in order to annoy a social-climbing rival, but I think it works a bit like paint; thicker and darker in places, more transparent and barely-there in others, but there's always colour.

Nigel's dropped tantalising hints about the Cheesemonger. Me, I'd like to say to those of you that are wondering where your nightmares might be leading you - please keep dreaming. You'll find out.

There are great steaming puddings of content coming. Students of a certain eye-watering alphabet will be gaining academic respectability, of a sort. Connections will be more rewarding than they have been. And  there’s a struggle brewing in Fallen London. A battle in the shadows that’s barely been hinted at so far.

So, I’m going to talk about other stuff related to how this content comes about. Writing content for Echo Bazaar is a strange old thing.  With the basic unit being a storylet or opportunity card, we have to write a compelling bit of narrative in three or four chunks, each of which is shorter than this paragraph.

Writing something complete and interesting in 200 words might be a worthy writing exercise, but it’s not what writers generally do. And as it happens, a set of different skills is relevant to this kind of narrative. The methodology of ‘think of an interesting situation that allows choice, present it quickly and see what the player wants to do’ is a familiar one from a different medium: tabletop roleplaying games.

It’s easy for me to think in terms of running a tabletop: I’ve been throwing dice and running games for decades. But the thought processes in creating content are very similar. Although setting and theme and colour are important, the goal with writing a storylet is to present a compelling situation that the player has to do something about, and do it quickly. Finding out what the problem is rarely turns out to be as interesting as deciding what to do about that problem. This is all stuff I learned to do at the gaming table. And in a muddy field. Here’s a shout out to my live roleplaying homies. 

Content in Echo Bazaar is united by themes rather than by tone. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Black humour, I think, is a constant feature. But other than that we jump about merrily between slapstick, tragedy, action-adventure and all sorts of other stuff. We even do the occasional bit of cheap scare-horror. That’s probably me, I’m afraid. If a story is flagging, my first thought is often to have something unsympathetic leap out and try to pull the protagonist’s face off. Anyway, if you’re in for a long haul, like a tabletop game or Echo Bazaar, you can support different moods. As long as the units, like a single scene or an arc, work individually then there’s room to do very different things with them.

As time goes on we’re getting more choice into the narrative, writing longer story arcs and introducing more chance for expression of player character identity. I think that this trend will continue, especially given the results of this week’s informal poll. Players seem to want long, messy, complex stories. And more sex, but that goes without saying.

Well, thanks for sitting through that. If you’re still here, you can have a new content teaser. While the Melancholy Curate and his sister came out as the most popular story (damn you Kennedy and your threesomes!), I was glad to see a few people mention the Cheesemonger. There’s a whole lot more cheese to come. At the time of writing this, only part 1 of the Cheesemonger arc is out. I should be finishing part 5 next week. Apart from the ambitions, it'll be the longest arc we’ve done so far.