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.