Dwarves!

Anyway, enough design nonsense, let’s talk about Dorfs! First, some groundwork.

Blah Blah Lore Nonsense

Hey folks, Matt Colville typing at you. This game we’re making comes with its own setting. Three of them, technically, but they all exist in the same universe. I think all y’all already know this, but it never hurts to bring everyone up to speed. If you already know all this, you can skip to the next header.

Orden is the name of our fantasy world. It has several regions that are like continents in the same nonsense manner Europe or North America are continents.

Vasloria is our Western European Medieval Fantasy analog. It’s big, about as big as Actual Europe. People are always surprised when they see this map and discover that’s just one country (Aendrim) and there are seven countries in Vasloria. Vasloria is where Count Rhodar von Glauer is from! (Technically eastern Rhole.) And where my novels are set (Corwell, the country just to the east of Aendrim, about 300-500 years after the events of the Chain of Acheron.)

If this game does well, we’d love to do box sets for lots of different regions, work with people who are from or experts on their real-world analogs. You know, doesn’t matter how many NativLang or Ancient Americas videos I watch, I’m never going to be an expert on Mesoamerica. If we were going to do an Ix book, we would need to find folks who know more about that part of the world.

Vasloria is very 12th century Europe. It is not High Fantasy, you would not meet an Operator or a Time Raider in Vasloria. I tend to think of it as “low fantasy but the PCs are exceptions.”

I sort of define High Magic or Low Magic based on how common magic is. Normal people in Vasloria have very limited access to magic. Basically they have as much access to actual magic as real medieval people thought they had. Hedge witches make potions and curatives, priests offer minor prayers to heal and bless. But these are all very low-level spellcasters with a real, but very limited capacity to change people’s lives. It’s way more Dragonslayer than Krull. I mean…it’s a little Krull. A good medieval fantasyland can have a little Krull, as a treat.

So Vasloria is one setting, the default for us, our version of the classic medieval Western European Fantasyland.

To the west, across the Bale Sea, is the city of Capital, the City of the Great Game, the Greatest City in This or Any Age. It’s our High Fantasy, Late Renaissance/Early Enlightenment mashup. Heavily inspired by Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld series, but Ankh-Morpork is itself a mashup of many things, chiefly Victorian London around the time of the Ghost Map. Capital is that, but more Venice/Florence.

At the time our game is set, the city in Vasloria from which the local baron, duke, or queen rules is called ‘The High City,’ or the ‘Seat of The Barony’ or Duchy or whatever. In a few hundred years (the timeframe of my novels), all those places will be called capital cities, because of the enduring fame and legacy of the actual City of Capital.

It’s the city you saw in The Chain of Acheron, we already did some work on a sourcebook for that and we’re eager to get back to it. It is VERY High Fantasy, but that has more to do with class. The average citizen of Capital doesn’t have much more access to magic than the average peasant in Vasloria.

Rich people have crazy access to magic though, and there are tons of different ancestries living and working together in Capital, along with all the prejudices you get when people from wildly different cultures all come together in a giant metropolis. So to someone from Vasloria, Capital seems incredibly High Fantasy. But people in Capital are poor, get sick, worry about making a living, just like everyone else in Orden. The peasants from Vasloria and Capital have more in common with each other than either do with their ruling class. Even though cosmetic differences might obscure that fact.

So! We have your classic Fantasyland, Vasloria, and then we have your typical High Fantasy Metropolis, Capital. Those both exist in the same world, Orden.

But Orden is only one world in the Timescape!

The Timescape (an anagram for Spacetime. Basically: what might a fantasy Einstein call their universe?) is our multiverse, but in the classic Moorcockian sense of “many different fantasy worlds” not the modern “alternate realities” sense.

The Timescape works sort of like the galaxy does in A Fire Upon The Deep. “Lower” planes have lower energy levels and therefore less access to easy high-tech nonsense like FTL and Laser Blasters. So they use magic to break the rules and achieve many of the same results.

“Higher” energy-state worlds have different, more flexible rules and so you get a lot of cool Space Fantasy nonsense and this covers everything from 70s Retrofuture stuff to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Now, for context, I no longer strictly view “FTL and Laser Blasters” as Science Fiction. I used to! I was a little kid in the 70s when stuff like Chris Foss and John Berkey art seemed not only plausible, but inevitable! Lol. Now it’s clear to me; those were just different flavors of Fantasy, all equally impossible, just one flavor has lasers and FTL and the other has wands and teleportation.

So the Timescape is much more Guardians of the Galaxy, or the Starjammers than Middle Earth or Malazan.

Because I don’t think there’s only one audience for our game who all want the same thing, we intend on supporting all three of these settings to whatever extent our income will allow. Vasloria for Medieval Fantasy, Capital for Urban High Fantasy, and the Timescape for Space Fantasy.

Dwarves Though Right?

All of this is just to get everyone on the same page and provide context for the REAL topic of this post, which is dwarves! Now you are about to get some real, actual Game Dev Nonsense by which I mean…my art director and I have different ideas about how dwarves should look and feel and as of the writing of this post…it is not settled! So I figured now is a good time to show you how actual collaboration works. Warts and all!

Anyway, Dwarves. There were, once, three distinct but related dwarven ancestries. “Dwarf” by the way, is the normal-person term for these people. Sages refer to them as “Elementals.” Just like no one seriously refers to humans in everyday speech as homo sapiens, no normal person in Orden refers to dwarves as elementals even though that is more technically accurate.

Of those three species, only one is extant in Orden; the Stone Dwarves. These are medieval fantasy dwarves, but like all species of dwarf in the Timescape, their biology is a silico-organic hybrid. They’re not just meat and bone, but also literally rock in a way that doesn’t make any literal sense but is super cool. 😀

Neither of the other two dwarven ancestries can be found on Orden any longer. The Fire Dwarves left Orden millennia ago to found Alloy, the City At The Center of the Timescape. A big (but not as big as Capital) fantasy metropolis on Quintessence, the Plane of All Elements. Remember “plane” here is just another word for “world.”

Alloy is sort of the hub of the Timescape, because Quintessence has a positive (but only just) energy state, it’s the lowest of the “higher worlds” whereas Orden is the highest of the Lower Worlds. So when someone from the Lower Worlds discovers the Timescape? The place they end up is almost always Alloy, so Alloy is both the major trade hub and a crazy metropolitan city.

So you can meet a Fire Dwarf! There are always a handful somewhere in Capital, but that’s the nature of Capital. But otherwise they belong to another World. The Fire Dwarves are the dominant ancestry of Quintessence and therefore Alloy the way humans are (currently) dominant on Orden.

Finally the greatest (in terms of accomplishments and technology) of these three species were the Steel Dwarves. They were proper Space Fantasy Dwarves and because they were eldest and most advanced, the Stone Dwarves very much looked up to them and sought to emulate them in terms of art and artistry. There are no more Steel Dwarves though, their species was deliberately exterminated by the Shadow Elves millennia ago (note, I think Shadow Dwarves are our Drow, we'll see).

Now, at the end of the day, none of this matters. Just like I’ve never run a game in the Forgotten Realms, I suspect many of you will never run a game in Orden or the Timescape. You’ve got your own worlds! But since your world almost certainly has dwarves and elves and wizards and priests and all that, so does our game and we imagine a LOT of people are just gonna use our rules and their world. So mote it be. We LIKE this. We WANT people to take these rules and make their own everything. New worlds, new classes, new ancestries. We want it to be fun.

But in the meantime, we want our own worlds. 😀 And that means our own dwarves and elves and everything else. So…what is a Stone Dwarf?

Talking to Jason, our Art Director, I said I wanted them to be more obviously Not Human than your standard Warhammer or Middle-earth dwarf. And that means Alien. More Alien. More obviously Alien. But…not TOO alien. This is a very tricky problem.

Jason did a lot of noodling on different designs, different proportions, different looks. But I think he felt like starting with their bodies wasn’t productive. He started thinking “if these folks are sort of the little siblings of the Steel Dwarves, maybe I should start there. How do they make armor and weapons to emulate the space dwarves? What if I start with their art style, literally the style they choose to make their armor and weapons, and let proportions follow from that?”

And like…I dunno, two or three days later? This drops in the discord.

Hnnggg. Holy CRAP! Wow! I had a very positive reaction to this. In fact, here’s exactly what I said in our company Discord. Warning: grown-up language!

I basically fell in love at first sight and didn’t hide that fact. I think this is genuinely brilliant. I gave Jason an Impossible Task (“Gimme a dwarf that’s obviously an alien, not just a short human with a big nose and long red braided hair…but not TOO alien”) and he comes out with this. Genius.

But you may notice…this is a very weird looking dwarf. It looks…really alien! But does it? I mean, it’s self-evidently humanoid, it’s head is in the right place, it’s got the normal complement of eyeballs and they’re in basically the right place? It’s got a mouth and nose and fingers. It's differently proportioned than a human, which dwarves in fantasy need to be. And I can see how those proportions make it "short and squat" compared to a human, even with no human in the picture to establish scale.

It’s not THAT alien in other words, but WOW it’s super different from every other fantasy dwarf I’ve ever seen. And…I had an incredibly positive reaction to this. So did James!

So Jason sees this reaction and thinks “well, that’s obviously a solved problem!” And, hopefully feeling really good about himself, because I think that art is brilliant, he moves on to figure out what our High Elves look like (more like Classical Tolkien High Elves than aliens we think).

Well, the next day I’d slept on it and came back to it and I felt very strongly “That is not a Stone Dwarf. That is a Steel Dwarf.” That is an example of someone from the civilization the Stone Dwarves are trying to emulate.

I just couldn’t see anywhere to go from that piece of art! If THAT is a Stone Dwarf…what on Earth could a Steel Dwarf look like??

It’s important to note here: I have always, like from…1994 onward, thought it silly that Elves and Dwarves and Vulcans are all Basically Humans. Not that they have identifiable thought-patterns and mores and folkways, that doesn’t bother me. You CAN make an alien that is really alien but then people don’t recognize it at ALL. This is fiction, it’s art, we are humans and we need to see ourselves in these things. Even if the “our self” we’re seeing is very different from the person we think we are.

It’s just…if these creatures can all interbreed, then they’re the same species! Like, homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Both human! BOTH human! Just two different flavors of human. In fact we live in a very weird time in the history of life on Earth when A: there are humans but B: only one flavor. For most of human history, there were LOTS of different flavors of human!

Well, I don’t think elves and dwarves should be just different flavors of human which is the underlying assumption of basically All Fantasy. They are by definition alien species who just happen to share the same planet and that makes sense to me, and is interesting, and inspires me.

You might prefer the classical fantasy attitudes toward these things. Well, I love those too! I grew up with it, and am happy to play a Classical Dwarf in my friend Phil’s “Oops All Dwarves!” game.

All creative endeavors are a conflict between the novel and the familiar. If a book, a movie, a tv show, a comic, is TOO familiar? We reject it. “Seen it, boring.” If it’s too NOVEL? We reject it. “Bounced off it, no idea what was happening.”

That’s the struggle all artists in all media wrestle with all the time. If you just accept a genre’s tropes unthinkingly, then I think you’re not really making art you’re just screwing around. Nothing wrong with screwing around! Can be a lot of fun! Not as rewarding or fulfilling as actually making art though.

Here we are firmly entrenched in that conflict. Is this too novel? I thought so. I still do. Perfect for a Steel Dwarf! Needs some work before it’s a Stone Dwarf.

So I committed a terrible sin, it's one of the first things I learned as the lead writer in video games where I’d often be in the recording booth, working with actors. Sometimes directing them! (Spoilers, the writer should not be directing the actors, unless that writer has a LOT of experience working with actors and treats their performance, and not the writing, as the end-product).

I would sometimes say “Perfect, awesome, great, let’s do one more take.” Well, a real actual voice director set me straight. “Never tell an actor ‘that was perfect, lets do one more.’ These are working professionals, they are trying to give you what you want. Because that’s what you are paying for. You are the customer. If you tell them it was great and you loved it, but then you ask for another take? They quite reasonably want to know: ‘If it was perfect, if you loved it, why are we doing another take?’”

Good point. Really, I was just using “Perfect, awesome, loved it, it was better than Cats” as a kind of social lubricant (blimey). I was not confident in my own voice as a director, and so I was padding my real feedback with meaningless pleasantries, instead of getting on with the real work of providing useful feedback. Once I stopped doing that and took the job seriously, giving direct, actionable feedback to the actors (which took months of doing this every day to learn) I got enormously better results, and I got those results way faster.

Having learned my lesson in Voice Acting, I then proceeded to commit that same offense with our Executive Art Director. “Great! Brilliant! I loved it! Now change it.”

Well, this is sort of the worst thing you can say to someone like Jason. He left video games for exactly this reason. Managers routinely said “Great, good job, perfect. Now throw it all out and give us something else.” Often, because they didn’t know what they wanted or, alarmingly often, they were just bored and had power and asking Jason to start again, after praising the work, made them feel useful.

So; I ask for something pretty challenging, a Fantasy Dwarf Who Looks Alien But Not Too Alien. Jason takes this idea seriously. That alone is worth praise. I know a LOT of artists who would have said “Yeah! Sure!” and then drawn whatever dwarf they were going to draw anyway.

Jason produces something astonishing. And I loved it. And I told him so.

Then I thought about it some more and said “Actually, it’s not perfect.” This is abuse! And Jason wasn’t shy telling me so. “Matt, this is why I left [Huge Video Game Company You’ve All Heard Of].”

Yeah, fair enough, mea culpa. But hear me out. I didn’t think the feedback I was giving was bad. I think I was being reasonable. I just needed time to think.

We had a long and good meeting. One of the things I said was; the face is too weird but this is just the T-pose (literally just the person standing there, arms outstretched, in a kind of T shape.) I think part of my reaction is the lack of expression. If I could see this guy emoting. Sulking on a throne, screaming in battle lust, I might like it more.

But also Jason had said “Don't worry too much about this guy's face. I just focused on those heroic dwarf proportions, and I can go do a bunch of different head/face designs later. Right now he's just a beardless dwarf man with stone skin.” Fair enough. The face is not necessarily final. But it might be! And I really like it! But gosh that’s an alien face.

In the end, this is what I told Jason. “You gave me three things. You gave me a Morphology (i.e. the basic shape and body proportions). You gave me a Technology (the fact that this Giger-punk armor looks like extruded plastic in a way no medieval blacksmith could do with metal) and you gave me an Art Style (the aforementioned Giger-punk look. Holy crap).

“I think I only need to see the Tech different. Everything else is a home run. Gimme that same shape for the body, and that same art style for the armor, but show me the Stone Dwarves can’t work metal like that. They lack the techniques and artistry of the Steel Dwarves. So their version has seams with rivets and is held together by leather straps.”

Jason said “Ok, sounds good, I can work on that, but for now I’m gonna keep working on the Elves.” In other words, you may not see that revision until after we go to Crowdfunding. That might be a 2024 problem. We got lots of other 2023 problems to work on, and this is Close Enough. 😀

So! Now you know what’s up with Dwarves in Orden! We have a prototype art style. It may be the finished style, or there may be some revision. We’ll see. It’s a process.

It may be: I don’t like it and Jason does and I’m telling you right now, in that mode Jason wins. Now if you’re reading this thinking “No! Matt you’re right! And your version would be cooler! He’s your employee! Order him to do it right!” Well, I could order him! But I wouldn’t be ordering him to do it right I would just be ordering him to do it different. And then I would be a bad boss! And…I don’t want to be a bad boss!

I don’t mean a bad boss as in “an asshole who just stomps his feet until he gets what he wants” I mean “a boss who does not understand the value of the people who work for them.”

I once hired an actor for a trailer. This was the announcement trailer of a huge video game we’d been working on for years. I wrote all the dialog and I was proud of the result because a: I thought it was good and B: it came out of a VERY arduous process where like 12 different people all wanted input on the finished result, because this was the announcement trailer. Millions of people would see this and you only get one chance to make a first impression. And we came up with something we all liked and seemed to make everyone happy and I should have bought a lotto ticket that day because that almost never happens.

We needed a temp audio track for the animators and I recorded it myself. Me reading the actor’s lines. Now, I am not an actor. I had SOME acting training in college and I once thought seriously about going pro, but not THAT seriously. I’m not even an enthusiastic amateur! But I can hear the character’s inflections in my head the way no one else can and that helps sell it.

We finally bring the real actual actor in, they do a great job, I love it, and they go home. Job well done.

Then the Project Director sees the final result with the Real VO in and freaks out. He hates it! Why? Well, because the actor had their own take on my writing. This was the main character in our game, this actor had not ONLY been voicing them for dozens of hours in the recording booth across two different games, but had basically invented the character with their unique take on my writing.

It was one of those instances when I had to scurry away and rewrite everything now that I understood this character better, because of the creativity the actor brought to the performance. That’s a good actor.

So I ask “what’s wrong?” What doesn’t he like? Listening to the feedback I realize, he didn’t say the lines the way I did! He literally said to me “Bring him back and make him do it right. The way you did it.”

I explained; he did do it right. He did his job. His job is to act. It is to interpret the character and he did that. So…I said no. I was the author of the dialog, I picked that actor, I directed them in the booth, I was happy with the final result. No. I’m not bringing them back. And I paid for that decision. 😀

But, the trailer was a huge hit! Everyone loved it. Bringing the actor back and forcing him to say the lines like I did in the temp recording would not have improved it.

The whole point of me running this company is learning from all the lessons I accumulated in game dev. Jason is a pro, an expert, he has his own vision. One I happen to like quite a lot. If, in the end, our dwarves look exactly like that guy above? Well, it’s gonna be pretty challenging for a lot of people, and it’s not exactly what I was imagining, but it’s still cool as hell and I really like it. And "what I was imagining" is just this vague cloud. Not a clearly drawn illustration!

And some people will like it BECAUSE it’s unique and that has enormous value to us.

This is collaboration. I am not an artist, I do not clearly see these guys in my head, it requires an artist to interpret my ideas. Jason has his own vision, he listens to my ideas and takes them seriously. The result, whether this is our dwarf, or we get another dwarf that looks a lot like this but maybe a slightly more human face, and more low-tech take on that armor style, will be the result of real collaboration. Neither Jason nor I would have made exactly this dwarf on our own.

And that has real value to us. You want Gimli Dwarves? Well guess what? You have the entire rest of fantasy gaming to play with. We’re trying to create something new and if all you’re looking for is “D&D But Not From WotC” or “5E But Fun” you’re gonna have to go elsewhere.

We’re trying to make something new. And whether that’s a Space Dwarf or our Fantasy Dwarf, it will be a New Dwarf. We hope you like it! :D

Peace, out!