Hi. I’m Stew Wilson, the guy behind Æternal Legends. I’m going to be blogging here at Malcolm’s request, talking about game design, emergent features, and whatever else I can relate to the topic of modern fantasy roleplaying.

The First Pillar: Open Design

What is open design? It’s me talking about game design as it happens, making decisions and presenting a rationale at the time. That way I have a better record of why I made any given decision, and you get to see some cool stuff that’s coming down the pipe.

Since I’m working on Spheres already, let’s dig down into the past: Why Spheres?

First of all, because I like games that have inbuilt factions that characters can be a part of, but that don’t proscribe too much; organizations, rather than classes. This comes out of playing and writing White Wolf games. I also love organizations that are archetypal in some way. When the game that would be Æternal Legends first showed up, I wanted to work some of my knowledge of various occult traditions into the game. Oddly enough, Alan Moore’s Promethea covers much of the same ground; telling a meaningful story using the Sephiroth. It wasn’t until I saw John Coulthard’s representation of the Qabbalah as the London Underground map that the idea of blending “sephira as splats” and “modern fantasy” really clicked.

From that, I threw myself into research. And now, we’ve got Spheres. Which are reflections of the Sephiroth, but they’re also philosophies and paths for Legends to follow and archetypes for channeling magic into the world.

Naturally, that leads us to the Qlippoth, which informed the Shells. But more on them later.

The Second Pillar: Emergent Features

An emergent feature is something that isn’t ever stated in the book, and is perhaps something that I never intended to happen, but that ends up being a selling point. The opposite, of course, is “Errata fodder”.

Another example: each Clade is flavoured with one of the classic Western alchemical elements. This, again, is because it’s a bit of occultism that I’m fairly familiar with; I’m nowhere near as au fait with other systems like the Chinese. Classical elements include a fifth alongside {earth, air, fire, water}, commonly Void, Æther, or something similar. I knew I didn’t want five Clades, because traditional fantasy has four core “races”, so I didn’t have to worry about what my fifth element would be. Score.

An unintentional benefit of this choice is that humans got their own one of the classic four (which is unimportant), and thus became just as empowered and naturally funky as elves. Given that most roleplaying games featuring dwarves, elves, and the like treat humans as an uninspired baseline, being able to say “But our humans are just as unique and funky!” is a nice benefit. Humans play a role in the Clades, and through that people playing human Legends have a real kick that other games don’t always offer.

Other bits include the nature of (and interplay between) the Light and the Dark, but again that’s something for a future post.

The Third Pillar: Miscellany

I’m reserving the right to talk about anything else I can relate to Æternal Legends in even the most tenuous way. This includes answering questions that people pose in the comments, reviews of books, movies, and the like, commentary on other games, and whatever else I can come up with.

If you’ve got a question, fire away!

-Stew