We'll be talking about the development process and reviewing design updates from the alpha, distributing PDFs live on YouTube, and then creating prompts in collaboration with the chat.
Me sharing my biggest regret from Deck of Worlds (hint: I still get emails about it).
A behind-the-scenes look at the challenges and opportunities of adapting Namesakes from Deck of Worlds.
A walkthrough of the changes to the deck since the alpha demo during the BackerKit campaign.
A live prompting session where the chat helped us create the reckoning raven, also known as the woolly raven, a bird that grows thick plumage in response to sudden environmental changes.
You can watch the replay below!
How the Emblems Expansion changed during development
The Emblems Expansion began as an experiment for us, and grew into one of my favorite lore-weaving tools.
Our original plan was to release 60 Emblem cards that could be shuffled in with Modifiers. As with the Namesake cards, we realized that would flood the Modifiers draw pile with too many expansion cards. We also had a similar challenge to the one we faced with the Namesakes Expansion, where some cues worked well for particular card types, but not for others.
There was also the added challenge of showing new users the different ways they can use and interpret the emblems and icons we'd curated for the deck. Purely visual cues are new tools for us, and for many worldbuilders, and we wanted to balance:
giving people guidance about how to think divergently about symbols and images in their worlds.
giving people the freedom to interpret those symbols in a manner of their choosing.
Our solution involved a few changes:
We cut down from 60 to 32 Emblem cards, and we made them their own dedicated card type so we could be deliberate about how and when to use them.
We added 28 special variant lore cards of the 7 primary card types.
We used symbols in place of text cues on the the primary side of the expansion's lore cards.
To the secondary side of the lore cards, we added short cues that require players to draw Emblem cards to complete them. These offer a variety of ways to think about how symbols can connect to different elements of lore.
Here are a couple of examples!
You can also draw an Emblem instead of a Modifier card any time you expand a lore cluster.
The mistake we ALMOST made with the Emblems Expansion
I've talked before about why I think sensitivity readers are a crucial part of the development process. We worked with three sensitivity reviewers and an educational reviewer on this project, all of whom offered a bounty of insight and editorial recommendations on the main deck and expansions. Their notes and perspective helped flag potentially sensitive material and provided guidance about how writers and worldbuilders can approach that material in thoughtful and respectful ways.
The review of the Emblems Expansion was particularly revealing. We sourced a wide variety of icons, symbols, glyphs, and images for this expansion, and were careful about our selection. This included a small number of runes, including some dwarven-style runes based on Elder Futhark.
It turns out that specific Elder Futhark runes have been co-opted by white nationalist groups as either coded or overt hate iconography. While these runes are authentic pieces of culture predating these groups by thousands of years, some are currently being weaponized by white supremacists to further a deeply damaging cause.
On the advice of one of our sensitivity reviewers who flagged the algiz rune during their review (along with a couple of other symbols), we did a careful cross-examination of our symbols with the Anti-Defamation League's database of hate symbols.
Philosophically, this process raised some interesting questions: who decides what a symbol means? What happens when the meaning of a symbol changes over time? These are the questions that made the Emblems Expansion so fascinating to work on in the first place.
Practically, we knew that philosophy takes a back seat to making sure people from targeted communities feel safe and ensuring we don't inadvertently empower hate groups by deploying symbols they also use.
We cut the small number of symbols that resembled anything in the ADL's database and overall reduced the number of Elder Futhark-inspired runes, introducing instead a wider variety of runic styles. This ended up bringing more variety to the deck and improved it as a resource!
Symbols are powerful. For good and for ill, they evoke an immediate response and become containers for so many different kinds of meaning. I'm grateful we had such diligent sensitivity reviewers to help us shape the final lineup of symbols and think about how to provide guidance on using symbols in lore-weaving.
I'm excited for you all to dig into the Emblems Expansion with us today, and I hope you'll join us for the livestream!
