I said I’d talk about why I was rewriting some of the backstory/intro for SoW, so let’s do that.

I’ve made a mistake, you see. That mistake has been bothering me and I’ve decided to do something about it, on two fronts. But before I talk about that, let me illustrate the mistake with a simple exercise.

If you read this site, odds are you’re probably interested in my game/looking forward to it. For this exercise I want you to imagine you’re describing Scars of War to a friend. No reference to pictures or the web. You’re trying to convey to him why you’re interested in the game. You want to try to ‘sell it’ with a simple phrase or sentence describing the core idea, the foundation, what the game is about. Can you do it?

Probably not, or at least not easily.

My mistake is that I haven’t done enough to convey the core idea of the game clearly and concisely, in a way that allows a new person to immediately ‘get’ what the game is about. I’ve talked about game systems and showed random concept art and lore. But ‘The Message’ is fuzzy, unclear. If you’re a hardcore roleplaying enthusiast then what I’ve talked about may be enough to interest you. But not conveying the Core Concept of the game in a clear manner is a weakness I need to remedy.

I’m not a marketer, you see. I’m just some amateur stumbling around, stubbing his toes on rocks. ‘Marketer’ and ‘PR’ and ‘Salesman’ might seem like dirty words to some people but they are important roles. They’re really about communicating with your audience, your potential clients. I haven’t done a good enough job of telling you why you should be interested in my game. I haven’t done enough to sell it.

So I’m thinking hard about that, looking at ‘The Message’ that I’m presenting to the public, to you. Working to present the Core Concept clearly, strongly, to present that hook for people’s interest and attention. It would be easier if I was working with an existing licence. I envy Scott of ITS a bit, just say the word ‘Cthulhu’ and you invoke a vast library of context from the public consciousness. Tell people you’re working on ‘a Cthulhu RPG’ and they get it immediately. A Zombie Survival RPG? Again, people immediately get it, the Core Concept is strongly evident, obvious.

For me, that means working to present the Core Concept of SoW more clearly, to focus on it, what it means for the gameplay and setting. It means working to create concept art that captures the mood clearly and immediately, writing copy that conveys this theme directly. It’s a tightening of my focus from the rather haphazard manner I’ve gone about things. I am looking at what I’ve shown in public with a critical eye, asking myself ‘If I was completely unaware of this game and stumbled onto the website, would I ‘get’ it?’

The Core Concept of Scars of War, the single sentence which sums up the premise is thus :

In the uneasy aftermath of a devastating war, a scarred veteran will find themselves drawn into a web of intrigue, conspiracy and betrayal. The scars of war are slow to heal…

Hell, to put it even more simply :

Intrigue, conspiracy and betrayal in the aftermath of a devastating war.

Pick out the keywords to understand where my focus should be when presenting ‘the message’.

Aftermath
Devastating War
Scars
Intrigue
Conspiracy
Betrayal

That line, those keywords, those are what SoW is about. The PR I create, from the website to the concept art to the text copy, they should paint a picture of those things, emphasize them. When someone thinks ‘Scars of War’ these are what should spring to mind, just as ‘Sanity-Rending Horror from Beyond the Stars’ springs to mind when thinking ‘Cthulhu’.

I’ve got my work cut out for me. I’m going to need to grow a few more heads to support all these hats I wear. Oh, for the days when I thought like a programmer and only a programmer.

I said there were two fronts of attack in regards to this problem, yeah? Yeah. The other is the introductory part to the game, the initial plot. I’ve committed the same mistake when it came to the story. There is a complex story to SoW which is, I think, interesting and engaging. But you don’t come on it directly, the game starts with the player doing Stuff which leads to Other Stuff which draws you into the core plot.

The problem is I kinda hid it too well. Games these days all talk about being ‘cinematic’. I don’t think that it is a good idea to completely emulate cinema in an interactive medium but we can take away some of the lessons. One of them, and this applies equally to books, TV shows and games, is the idea that your story should try to immediately grab the attention of the viewer/player. Generally you do this by presenting them with a scenario which immediately invokes questions in the viewer’s mind and which ties into the core idea/story. I’ll give an example.

I’ve just started reading Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series, starting with ‘The Blade Itself’. How does it start? Not with a lot of exposition. It starts with Logen Ninefingers in desperate combat with Shanka, who he calls ‘Flatheads’. The combat is frantic and ends with him sliding over the edge of a gorge, a Shanka clinging to his leg. He hangs there for a moment before falling into the chasm below, praying he avoids the rocks and lands in the water.

Identify the questions. Who is Logen Ninefingers, and why do we care? What happened to his tenth finger? Who are the Shanka, and why are Logen and his men fighting them? Will he survive the fall? Just what the fuck is going on here?

Another great example is the TV show Flash Forward. It opens from the view of a man crawling out of an overturned car. He’s dazed, bleeding. He stumbles out into chaos. Everywhere around him are crashed cars, people crying. He sees a man on fire. He calls out to someone, doesn’t see him. Moves to help some people, finds his friend. Hears a crash, turns around to see an explosion coming from the side of a skyscraper where a helicopter flew into it. It’s clear that whatever happened, it affected the entire city. You’re immediately wandering what is going on. The show then rewinds 4 hours, shows the characters and introduces their storylines leading up to that point. The core concept of the show, the chaos of this Event which disrupted the lives of everyone on the planet is presented to the viewer right from the start.

Mass Effect 2 does it well too. You don’t faff too much with character creation. You’re simply thrust into the Collector attack on your ship, the desperate evacuation and then that moment as your character gets sucked into space, flailing in panic as his oxygen runs out. AFTER that happens you go through standard character creation and are then thrown into another scenario which presents the player with another ‘what’s going on here?’ question. I thought it was excellently done. I didn’t really like ME 1, nor did I really care for Shepard, but going through that sequence that gave me chills, I very much wanted to chase the plotline from that point.

Ironically, RampantCoyote even wrote about this recently, pointing to tips from a successful writer of pulp stories. While I wouldn’t suggest creating plots from a formula, the idea of immediately putting your protagonist into an intriguing scenario is solid. Most RPGs fail at this, mucking about with tutorial quests and “Now equip your training helmet!” help messages.

I’m rewriting the intro plot because I don’t think I succeeded in that goal. It was ok, but I need it to reach out and grab the player by the balls. I need to present some of the strength of the Core Concept to the player right from the beginning, to sell the storyline to a player within the first 20 minutes of playing. That doesn’t mean giving away all my secrets in one go. But it does mean creating a stronger and more direct ‘hook’ to the story in the intro plotline. Look at that list of Keywords again. I need to hit the player with as much of that as I can in a short space of time. Not clownishly, obviously, but I need the starter plot to provide a strong introduction to the themes. I don’t think what I had did that adequately, hence the rewrite.

(One of the ideas that came out of these thoughts is that character creation is going to have you pick a war wound that your character carries, a wound that carries with it some penalty. A bad leg, facial scarring, deaf in one ear or blind in one eye, that kind of thing. This will be mandatory and serve as a literal reminder of one of the core themes of the game, that the characters, nations and societies are ‘scarred’ in some way from the war, no matter which side they were on. )

And now you know why. Carry on about your business then.