In 2018, for no particular reason, I decided to write a game every month, based on a weird monster from Dungeons and Dragons. Each game would be from that creature’s perspective, about what they did when they weren’t being stabbed by paladins or whatever. Some of these games were silly, like the hollyphants or flumphs. Some were more serious, like the githzerai or belgoi. Some of those games just fell apart the first time we played them. Some of them were pretty good. The best game that emerged out of that was Rusalka, though.

I’d always been fascinated with fairy tales of all sorts, and this wasn’t even the first game I’d written based on the fairy tales of that region. So I read whatever I could find online or in the local library on rusalka and Eastern European fairy tales in general. A lot of that research became background texture, but I don’t know how much directly translated onto the cards itself. But they helped me get the tone and style right, or at least as correct as I needed the game to be. (I think the idea that rusalka are the spirits of drowned women might be a Victorian era creation with no basis in folklore, but it made a good basis for the story, so I kept it.)

Around the same time I was exploring how you could take mechanics from board games and turn them toward more narrative purposes. In this case, I was interested in the card passing and drafting from Seven Wonders by Antoine Bauza and Sushi Go by Phil Walker-Harding. What kind of stories could you tell using that card drafting technique? One where the characters didn’t know what they’d be capable of from moment to moment, I suppose. And that felt to me something like the uncertain ebb and flow of water, like the cards were a whirlpool the characters were all part of. So it felt thematic to me, somehow.

I always make games overly complicated at first. So early drafts of the game would have had you gaining resources which were needed to play certain cards in later rounds. But as I worked on the game, I realized those bits weren’t necessary. The only important thing was giving you reasons to play one card over another. And the narrative gave you plenty of reasons why this card would feel more correct and that card would feel wrong.

As I worked on the game, it became clear that this should be a game that was more driven by the narrative aspects than by any game mechanics. And those aspects were largely inspired by Jason Morningstar’s The Skeletons, whose influence should be fairly clear on the game. The flashbacks and mapmaking parts of Rusalka come from The Skeletons pretty directly, for example.

Once I realized that memories and magical gifts would be on the same cards, that allowed me to create thematic parallels between the two halves, which is I think one of the reasons the game works so well. 

Rusalka also owes a debt to Archipelago by Matthjis Holter and A Penny For My Thoughts by Paul Tevis, and every single other game I’ve ever played, every story I’ve ever heard, every piece of art I’ve ever seen. And the biggest debt I owe would be to the people who’ve been willing to sit down at a table with me, play the weird game I made up, and see what happens.