I was really interested by something that may be surprising to you, and that is the constraints that I had. I find that good creativity commonly comes from having really interesting limitations. I often say this about magic—the best magic comes from what the magic can’t do—and the best characters are the ones who have really interesting limitations. In the same way, a lot of times the best stories come when you have some really interesting constraints. You can’t have too many—but let me give an example.
I saw that they have healing magic in this world, and it works like standard video game healing—boom, you just drink a potion or cast a spell and you’ve been healed. If you look at that from a real-life perspective, that is way too easy to be interesting narratively, and it also has all kinds of wacky ramifications for the way society works. So I took this and said, “How can I make this work in the actual framework of a story, in a way that’s interesting, different, that people haven’t seen before, that does not contradict the video game, and yet also doesn’t break the economy of this world?” So I built things so that drinking a potion or using a magic spell heals you but it also accelerates your metabolism and ages you for as long as it would have taken you to heal naturally from that injury. So what we’ve got here is something that doesn’t really affect the video game at all, but if you look at it world-wise, yes we’ve still changed the world somewhat, but now there’s an enormous cost. You don’t want to heal every time you get a little cut, because you’re taking weeks off your life. Taking the chance to heal yourself is only going to be something you’re really going to do if it’s life or death for you.
One of the fun things about this was that the developers of the game had some really great ideas, but the medium of the story that they were doing in the video game just didn’t let them get very many of the ideas across. The game let them ask some very interesting questions, but give very few answers. I don’t want to say this was in a frustrating way, but at the end of the game they drop this bomb on you that wow, this isn’t a fantasy world—this is science fiction. They didn’t really know how they were going to be able to explain this in the sequel, because of the sparse nature of the storytelling in the games. So we sat down and had a lot of fun brainstorming.
I have a little more experience in storytelling and worldbuilding than they do, and I was able to actually take the bounds that they had given in the game and rebuild the story and setting from the ground up. We find out much more about the nature of the Deathless. We actually get to see through the eyes of some of these immortal creatures who used to be human. One of the things that I really wanted to explore, and that I was happy to be able to bring to the games, was the nature of the protagonist who was going to be going through the second game. Rather than just having a faceless knight, I helped make him someone that the player and the reader can get to know.