Debts & Dragons

Concept & Ideation

Concept

We were provided with the game's genre of a trading simulator, along with a theme, "Collection".  The team aligned fairly quickly on having a low-magic dark medieval theme for the game.

Towns, Characters, and Shops

Each member of the narrative team was tasked with creating some ideas for towns and characters to fit in with the larger world.  My initial ideas were for "Thalwen of the Hollow", and a trio of enterprising orphans who had set up their own marketplace.

Thalwen of the Hollow

Although she was ultimately not selected for the game, Thalwen went through two iterations.

In her first version, Thalwen was a werewolf who was kept hidden from society while her parents worked tirelessly to find a cure.
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Thalwen's second iteration was a bit more tragic: her mother was a fae, tricked into marrage by a cunning hunter.
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The Styx & Stones Market

In the village of Thronwilde, three three enterprising young orphans operate the Styx & Stones is a market-- located suspiciously close to the town's cemetery.

Styx & Stones is an allusion to the mythical river of the dead combined with a reference to the graveyard's tombstones.

There were initially three characters in this marketplace: Verella, who trades in "preowned goods", Sylla, a medium and spiritualist, and Arvin, a young boy who is able to crawl into tight spaces.
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The Dragon

The dragon plays a key role in the story.  They are the "collector", and provide the main motivation for the player to engage in trade.  Cyndermaug was loosely inspired by a character that I had used in a D&D campaign for my son: Initially a BBEG, I made them a "smart" villain who decided to hire the party to be their minions, seeing as they had already defeated their previous minions.

I wanted the dragon not to be deliberately evil or destructive, but rather a creature who was misunderstood-- she was just a dragon being dragon, but had a non-obvious motivation.  She is a mother who needs to accumulate a hoard of gold in order to hatch her egg.  This revelation is a key point in the game's plot, where the character needs to decide whether to aid the dragon to bring a new magical life into the world, or help the kingdom destroy it.

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Additional Contributions

Spreadsheet Organization

In addition to writing, I helped keep the team's work organized through spreadsheets. Not only did this allow us to keep track of narrative decisions, it also helped us visualize the effects on game balance.

Using conditional formatting and dropdown list features allowed for a highly visual way to track work and progress.