Hello to all 7599 of you!

Thank you again so much for all of you who keep coming in to back our project. You’ve gotten a little bit of a taste of Incarna and how it works from last weeks' updates, so now we bring you more details on the creation and development of Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate! Our Customer Service & Community Manager Bailey was lucky enough to sit down with Spirit Island designer R. Eric Reuss to ask for more details. Here is their interview!

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Eric: Sure! My name is Eric Reuss. I’m a father of two, I love games, and I designed Spirit Island. I also enjoy reading, RPGs, Dance Dance Revolution, LARPing, and a whole bunch of other stuff, though between the pandemic, parenting, and Spirit Island work, many of them have fallen off. For the moment.

B: What was the inspiration specifically for Nature Incarnate? How did you get the idea for Incarna?

E: For Incarna spirits in particular? The concept of “a Spirit that’s incarnated in a single form in one place” is a thing a fair number of folks come into Spirit Island expecting. The idea of “this Spirit is spread through the land existing simultaneously in many places at once” may be the less intuitive one of the two, really. But that spread-out nature is how most Spirits work, though exactly what it represents in-game can vary. Say River Surges in Sunlight adds presence to a Sands: that might represent that the river which River Surges in Sunlight is is now also flowing through that Sands; or it might represent a growth in scope to include sunlight and/or water that was already there in that Sands; or it might represent something else altogether if River has enlarged and changed its nature by gaining new Power Cards, particularly any which interact with Sands.

But getting back to Incarna: the idea of a Spirit that had a “primary form” is one that’s been around since the fairly early days, certainly since before the base game was released in 2017. That being said, it wasn’t something I’d specifically planned on being in this expansion, or for that matter any expansion at all! I have a lot of “hey, a Spirit could do this thing, or that thing!” ideas, and most of them never go anywhere for one reason or another.

The first set of Spirits for Nature Incarnate didn’t have any Incarna Spirits. At that point, the plan was still for this to be a small 4-Spirit expansion, and Ted had some concerns about the composition of the handed-off Spirits for filling those four slots: there were either 0 or 1 Spirits that I estimated around Moderate complexity, the others were split 50-50 between High complexity and Very High. Ted felt we should have at least two Moderate-complexity options in the mix, and asked if I could do some more designs.

One Spirit in that second set was a moderate-sized rework of a Spirit that hadn’t made it into Jagged Earth, and part of the reworking I did was giving it an Incarna - it felt right, for reasons I’ll get into in its update, which I think is not too long after this interview. The developers really liked the Incarna concept, and noted that “how does an Incarna work?” could just be part of the expansion’s rules rather than something on the Spirit panel, especially if the expansion had more than one of them. Ted floated the idea of a big stompy Incarna Spirit, which sounded fun, but the thematic-and-elemental details didn’t come together quickly in my head, plus the expansion already had a bunch of very offense-heavy candidates. So the second Incarna Spirit was more about board control and defense of a sort. But after I finished that design, the stompy-concept finally clicked, and we got Ember-Eyed Behemoth, which is not just stompy but pleasantly straightforward all-around.

“This Spirit or Aspect could or should be an Incarna” cropped up another few times over the development process, and when it came time to name the expansion, it was really clear that the name should reflect the presence of the Incarna, what with half the new Spirits using the mechanic.

E: Oh, sure. Half the Spirits had some sort of origin prior to the start of design for Nature Incarnate, anything from “just a name + thematic concept” to “this was a candidate for Jagged Earth that was dropped from testing once we decided what the 12 published Spirits would be”. And Ember-Eyed Behemoth shares part of its name and concept with a pre-publication playtest Spirit from 2012-2013, though not much mechanically.

This isn’t all that surprising; while making Jagged Earth, I never really stopped designing new Spirits. I slowed down over time, because I was running the development for Jagged Earth, and because past a certain point it became clear that we had enough viable candidates, but sometimes my headspace would be better suited to new designs than to iterating on existing ones. I think I ended up with about 27 designs that had a panel + Unique Powers roughed out? Which, to be clear, is still the very early stages of design, the Spirit might not even ever have been played, but they’d gone beyond “concept” to some sort of initial implementation. So if you go by that metric, Jagged Earth produced more unpublished designs than published ones.

I don’t think any of the Spirits in Nature Incarnate can really be said to be two prior concepts merged together, nor split apart, for that matter. There’s definitely been evolutions, though: the first Incarna Spirit had this one piece of its design - just a single Unique power card - that testers really found appealing, and the dev team said, “well, why don’t we lean into that and make it the center of the Spirit’s gameplay?” So it ended up metamorphosing in a really interesting and thematically-appropriate way, it’s great!

B: Where do you get your inspiration for spirits that aren’t reworks of unused spirits?

E: All over the place. Sometimes I’ll think of a natural thing - or observe one, or be reminded of one - and run with that. But not every spirit is a tangible hill or river or storm, some are more subtle or abstract concepts. I mean, I try to give a distinctive and unique viewpoint to the Spirits that are tangible things like hills or rivers or storms, but, for instance, Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares is not a bit of the physical world you can point to in the way you can “the ocean” or “a volcano”.

So there’s also Spirits like Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares, or Finder of Paths Unseen, maybe even Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble, which you can sort of think of as action or task or happening-based Spirits? A Spirit defined more by what it does than by it being a particular thing, though that’s kind of a human-viewed distinction to make, Spirits would see both as expressions of fundamental nature. But even from the human point of view, it’s not a sharp dividing line. Fractured Days Split the Sky is both a Spirit of the sun + moon + heavens (things you can point to) and the eclipse (a happening) and a number of things intertwined with the concept of fractured time (recurrence, disjunctions, stasis, might-have-beens).

And then there’s also Spirits which are harder to pin down, it’s less easy for a human to point to what they “are”, because Spirits are beings and can be complicated, or simple along lines that aren’t readily visible to humans. Thunderspeaker is like this. It used to be Bright Thunder Roars, a specific thing in nature, but it’s grown and changed from that starting-point. It still partakes of its former nature, but it’s not quite that anymore. Just like other beings, Spirits can grow and change over time. Shifting Memory of Ages can be thought of as a Spirit of memory, but it’s also much more than that: it’s a being with a long and complex history, and that history has shaped what it is now. This is also true of more directly representative Spirits, I should add!

In Western culture, we tend to draw this very strong line between what is the landscape and what is sapient. In Spirit Island, that’s just not true - the Spirits are the land, and Spirits are sapient. But Spirits are not only the land - they are many other things as well, richer and more diverse.

Not all Spirit concepts first spring from that “what is this Spirit?” direction, though - the seed of a design might come from something elemental, or mechanical, or play dynamics, or play experience, or the setting’s lore, or the game’s themes, or even “what Spirit might consider this Major Power as an ‘ultimate’ of sorts, at least for its starting nature?”

B: Getting more into that, which does come first - lore or gameplay? Is there ever anything that you have to redesign for lore over gameplay? Is there a priority?

E: Lore in the sense of “the text on the back of a Spirit’s panel” can come at any point in the process - sometimes as a part of the initial concept, sometimes not until a good ways through development - but that’s different than the thematic concept of a Spirit. I can know “this is a lightning Spirit, also of swiftness and wind and storms; it is sparking and bursty and dangerous to buildings, but gets along decently well with the Dahan, though it’s more of a ‘swoop in, swoop out’ sort than living side-by-side with them” without knowing the Spirit’s exact appearance or the full text of its lore blurb.

It rarely matters whether a Spirit’s thematic concept or mechanics or something else entirely forms the initial seed of an idea, because whichever arises first then gets used to fill in the other very early on. If a Spirit’s theme suggests certain mechanics, those mechanics will absolutely then loop back and influence the theme. Often it’s more of a three-way dance between thematic concept, elements, and mechanics, sometimes including other things, too. All the things that can prompt Spirit ideas can also be parts of a Spirit to fill in during design, and once filled in they may exert force on the other parts of the design. There’s a lot of ping-ponging back and forth early on, elaborating more on one facet for a while then circling back to see what those elaborations imply about the rest of it.

One of the challenges we tackled with Nature Incarnate was that since I wasn’t running development, there was more opportunity for changes to drift a Spirit away from what I considered its core thematic nature. I could only braindump so much about a Spirit’s theming to the devs (there’s always little details and feelings that are tricky to convey) and since I wasn’t running playtesting I didn’t have as strong a sense of the mechanical pressures on a design as they did. But the devs were great about pinging me when they weren’t sure on theming, and I did periodic reviews to be a touchstone on thematic elements. When we did find any drift, it usually wasn’t hard to address.

You can’t really say “X is more important than Y” as any sort of blanket rule about lore, theme, mechanics, or anything else, it’s all tradeoffs and balancing-acts. Whether a particular bit of mechanical complexity is worth the thematic boost it gives isn’t something you can reduce to mathematics, not just because how do you quantify theme?,, but also because it depends so much on other factors: how complex is the Spirit already, in what ways? Does this bit of theme come through through other parts of the design? What does this set of Spirits need in terms of complexity and play experience? Etc. The truism in game design is “experience is paramount”, but even the experience of a specific Spirit may need to flex in service to more holistic considerations of the game as a whole.

E: Thank you to all of you to all of the people who are excited about Spirit Island! Seeing people being happy about the game online is immensely gratifying and makes it even more fun to work on.

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Thanks to Eric for sitting down with Bailey to give us a little more information about the creation and inspiration of Incarna. We’re going to round off this update with another card preview!

Spirit Island is great at creating moments where players work as a team to decide what to do. Here’s a blight card that does just that:

Like the Aid from Lesser Spirits Blight card, the players must divide a set of Power cards. And since they each gain a Major Power, players also get a burst of energy to help play their new power. But! This leaves only 2 Blight per player, so you've gotta either act fast, or have a solid plan for defense and/or recovery.

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There we have it! Some fantastic insight to the creative and practical process of putting together Spirit Island from creator R. Eric Reuss, and a glimpse at one of the new Blight cards for Nature Incarnate! We look forward to bringing you more content on Wednesday! See you then!