Victor Ojuel (TemTem, 1958: Dancing with Fear, Ariadne in Aeaea, Pharaonic)

As with any other game writing, how I approach historical settings varies wildly depending on the project. As a freelance writer/ND, the main factors are how much leeway do I have, and at what point in the development I jump onboard. Let me explain that with those different examples.



Arriving late, leaving early – the “Parachuted Writer” case

With fighting RPG Pharaonic, I was brought into the project post-alpha, just a few months before release. Scenarios and enemies were final. My brief was to provide lore and background the “Souls way”, by means of short NPC snippets and item descriptions.

So in this case the starting point was low-level (we had the actual game assets), but I insisted on starting with a high-level approach (back to the historical drawing room, as it were).

I started by skim-reading through some three thousand years of Egyptian History to see what general period was better suited. Wikipedia is actually a pretty good resource at this initial level, since it provides a quick overview. The Hykso invasion grabbed my attention, so I focused on it and drilled down before settling on the reign of Pharaoh Ahmosis I, credited with repelling the Hyksos and restoring Egyptian rule around 1565 BC. Three centuries later, the enigmatic “Sea Peoples” tore through Egypt and most of the eastern Mediterranean – a time of strife and societal breakdown always makes for good drama. I based my lore on the idea that Ahmosis had sealed an unholy pact in order to perpetuate himself in the throne, a rule disturbed by the arrival of new gods. At this point I knew I was going for the Egyptian New Kingdom, circa 1200 BC, framing the Sea Peoples’ invasion as a religion war. Then it was time for more in-depth research, mostly two-pronged – mythological material to pad my religious conflict and some microhistory to create plausible NPCs. I found plenty of sources for the former at the British Museum, and for the latter in the Set Maat texts.

This is the point in the process in which general concepts should start to trickle down into specifics – the unnamed Egyptian city overrun with sea-creatures became the Hykso capital Avaris, teeming with the spawn of Oannes, a deity related to Dagon (a god I wanted to avoid because of its trite Lovecraftian associations). A desert village became Set Maat, its villagers and their mundane problems inspired by the real legal cases of the Deir el-Medina texts. The “Black Pharaoh” (another Lovecraftian remnant) became the Red Pharaoh – because the colour black was associated with the fertile, life-giving Nile mud, as opposed to the red of the desert, the realm of death and demons, more fitting for a cruel, undead king.

At this step, each element of game lore needs to click in with the others, forming a little microcosmos of internal coherence, if not always complete historical accuracy. It is more important for the player to identify a khopesh as a standard issue in the Egyptian army (“yeah, that’s what a soldier would wield”) than to ensure this particular model was used in this particular war. My main regret, however, is not having had the time to learn more than just basics about hieroglyphs – I would have loved to customise inscriptions to particular objects and locations.



First in, last out – the “One Man Army” case

1958:Dancing with Fear is an interactive fiction set in a Caribbean republic on the night before revolution. It ranked among the top ten at the prestigious Interactive Fiction Competition 2017 and was praised for its sense of place and historical credibility.

In terms of creative freedom it is a diametrically opposed example, since I could choose my setting, protagonist and plot (a faded showgirl trying to navigate a deadly political plot). That means I did start with a pretty good idea of why I was using that moment in History, and what I wanted to do with it.

The process was somewhat similar, in that I started with high-level historical concepts and narrowed them down to a particular date, region and scene, but the crucial differences lay in the greater leeway when writing it, and the special issues of choosing a recent past, which cuts both ways.

On the one hand, the player just knows more about this time, so mistakes and inaccuracies are easier to catch. Hence, expectations are implicitly higher, so it requires more in-depth research – unlike that khopesh, if we have a gun it needs to be the right model – no Walther PPKs before 1935. If we are going to mention the Vietnam War, we need more than a passing knowledge of its causes and social repercussion, beyond mere dates – what it meant within the broader political and ideological conflict, and the stakes for each NPC. Language and characterisation can also be more demanding – we do have a wealth of films and music from the 50s, which means you have plenty of sources to catch slang, manners and turns of phrase, but also players will come with more definite expectations of “how people talked back then”.

On the other hand, two positives. Chances are any moderately educated writer already knows a lot about the recent past, though often it is a case of sorting what previous assumptions are applicable and which ones are not (yes, they had TVs, but only for the affluent, especially in the Caribbean). The second positive is, the player is usually much more receptive to things they are at least passingly familiar with. Put it another way, if your audience hasn’t heard about the Cold War *at all*, chances are they are not going to be interested in a game about it. The recent past has much in common with our present, so it can be easier to create characters and situations with which the player can empathise.



Ultimately, it comes down to how you use historical research to inform characters and situations. While with Pharaonic those were a given that I had to justify with an historical veneer, in 1958 the setting came first, with characters and scenes flowing from it. Two completely different jobs, using the same tool in different manners.