Drawing Maps - June 2020 - Sangfielle Characters #1: Chine

This episode contains discussion of violence, death, and cannibalism.

Welcome to a brand new set of Drawing Maps episodes! Unlike past iterations of Drawing Maps, this new series of episodes won't just be me by myself. Instead, over the next couple of months, I'll be joined by members of the cast to talk through their early Sangfielle character ideation. To be clear, these recordings predate character creation by... well, actually, let's get ALL the way into it, and walk you through the process a little bit...

The very earliest, very brief conversation about Season 7 was all the way back in 2018, when I linked a video of a secret mini-boss encounter in Bloodborne, The Suspicious Beggar, having been compelled by the juxtaposition of his bestial transformation and loquacious admonishment of the hunter. I was still pretty sure I didn't want to do a horror (or even horror tinged) season, but it was something... maybe dark fantasy, I thought? 

My feelings changed on that after the Bluff City season 1 finale, Catch the Devil in Bluff season 2, and the Auspice arc in PARTIZAN, all of which played with tension and horror in different, interesting ways. Along the way, Ali and I occasionally dropped some inspiration or other into a group folder, but that was about it. Unlike something like PARTIZAN, COVID putting such a stranglehold on our productivity meant that we did basically no prep for it until it was knocking on our door. 

Normally, we have a game decided and basic setting stuff outlined about six months before we start recording a season, which gives us a lot of time to decide on characters, sketch out parts of the world we're interested in, explore musical directions and themes, etc. In contrast, we didn't even have a real, full-group Season 7 discussion until early January of this year, before we'd even finished PARTIZAN's post-production stuff! At that point, we still weren't even decided on what game to play.

By the final week of January, we had decided on Heart, and we were scheduled to do The Ground Itself in the first week of February. That only gave me a little under two weeks to put together a "setting guide" for the players, to help them not only come up with characters but have a shared sense of the world and tone of the series. To build that, I knew I'd have to do some lifting on my own, but I wanted to keep the collaborative spirit central, and so I scheduled conversations with every one to do one-on-one conversations not only about their characters, but also about the various parts of the world their characters were especially relevant to. (So, for instance, in this episode you'll hear Dre and I talk not only about what a "Cleaver" is in this word, but also what "Cursed" and "Wild" things are, since those Domains are especially important for Cleavers).

These conversations happened over the final week of January, and using them (and some additional work with Jack) as inspiration, I put together the setting doc (which Mapmaker backers can find in this update). Then, only days later, we recorded our first session of The Ground Itself, which was finished after a three evenings of recording that week. The de facto character creation episode, which dropped into the main podcast feed last night, was recorded about ten days after that, and our first real Heart session came three days later.

All of which is to say, in order to hit that March 5th trailer date, we had to complete a process that normally takes us six months of work in only six weeks. Thanks COVID. (Oh, also, I had COVID throughout mid-January and during all this, so, lol).

One result of this schedule is that these conversations are really fascinating both for their importance and, sometimes, their inaccuracy of what the final product is. You'll hear Dre and I talk about a species that just didn't make the cut here, and in a future episode you'll hear how we wound up going in a different direction! Likewise, this early ep is great because SO MUCH foundational stuff about the setting is just entirely unclear to us at this point, and you can get a sense for how broad thematic ideas are going to coagulate into something a little more specific.

I hope you enjoy this first of these episodes. I'll be trying to release one a week over the coming weeks, and they'll be released in the order they were recorded. Today's was Dre and the character who would eventually come to be called Chine. Next time: Ali and Marn Ancura!