The latest update for Fallen Gods is rather large but interesting and is titled Mappa Mundi.

You walk in the gloom of old firs, lost in thought, the world still but for your shuffling steps, the low-growing rowan blown by the breeze, and far-off birds softly purling. When at last you shake loose from this wood-spell, you find the path long gone, and the day’s last span is spent in merely getting back.

Fallen Gods is a game focused on exploration. While that includes mechanical and narrative layers of exploration, the first and most basic layer is simply walking the land, seeking opportunity and avoiding danger.

The promise of a wonder-filled world to explore is one of the great pleasures of fantasy novels and RPGs. As civilized pleasures go, this one has a long pedigree: medieval maps purporting to depict the real world, such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, look much closer to a Might & Magic map than what we would find in a contemporary atlas. In fact, even modern tourist maps retain some of this breathless excitement, a kind of simultaneous streamlining and exaggerating of the world to emphasize “points of interest” and tantalize the traveler with the adventure to be found at them.

This “point of interest” concept is, literally, used to describe map features in RPGs and strategy games. As I discussed in the “Days of Yore” update, one of the key inspirations for Fallen Gods was the old board game Barbarian Prince, a single-player board game that used a large, hex-celled map. And you can see such “points of interest” here: the Ruins of Pelgar at the end of the Lost Road beyond the Kabir Desert; Branwyn’s Temple at the crook of the Nesser River; the town of Angleae that sits just south of the pass leading into the Dead Plains. Even a jaded and weary old timer like me still feels a certain tug of wanderlust when looking over that map.

Very early incarnations of Fallen Gods had a hex map (using some free-for-use tiles) that looked quite a bit like an uglier version of Barbarian Prince. But the addition of the wonderful Daniel Miller to the team meant that we could do better than that. And, as Arnold Hendricks himself discovered when making the jump from his board game to the cRPG Darklands, pixel art can create a more natural feel to the world: it looks like a land in which you’re adventuring, rather than a map over which you’re moving a token.

But while Darklands’ pixels furnish an attractive landscape that underscores the game’s well-researched realism, they seemed to lack a certain pizzazz when I first played the game. The reason, I think, is that I had spent formative childhood years playing console RPGs, and Chrono Trigger’s beautiful world maps had left a lasting impression on me.

So, with Fallen Gods, the impossible marching orders I gave Dan were to create hex tiles (which are useful for defining the game’s rules for world generation, movement, and the like) that fit together into a seamless pixel art world with distinctive points of interest. I’m pretty sure I used some word as unhelpful as “pizzazz,” perhaps with a wave of a hand. Dan, busy with his bowl of greasy phở (nothing but the best for our artists!), merely shrugged.

And then gave us this:

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A new blog post for Fallen Gods explains all about them.

Before you stands a man warped by time and wrath, crook-backed and bitter, barely able to heft the sword in his hand. Others crowd about, like and yet unlike the first, each twisted in his own way, smeared on stones so smooth and bright that they are like looking glasses. It is a maze made of you, and staring into it, you seem to see into your self.

The titular hero (or anti-hero) of our game may be fallen, but he is still a god. And even when cut off from Orm's great soul-hoard in Skyhold, a son of the Cloudlands has many gifts that set him apart from mortal men.

The first is that he is very hard to kill for good. Only a few things are strong enough to make his soul abandon his flesh and bones. Most deaths merely mangle his body, and a few days and a bit of soul-strength are enough to heal even the ghastliest wounds. (Of course, every day is precious to a fallen god who must make it home within three months.)

Indeed, Ormfolk are very hard to kill at all, for even the most bumbling of them has a strength and skill with the sword that outstrips most hardened earthly fighters. And a god can grow even greater in might and wits by drawing on his soul-strength-"leveling up" in RPG parlance, though here at the cost of the same hard-won "mana" (i.e., soul) pool that feeds his greatest skills.

For a god, even a fallen god, has skills beyond swordplay. The player's god has two out of the following five such skills: Soulfire (by which he can kindle souls into a holy blaze that can burn away curses or burn up foes); Healing Hands (by which he can heal wounds and cure sickness in himself and others); Death Lore (by which he can speak to the dead, calling on their wisdom or driving off restless undead draugar); Wild Heart (by which he can bend beasts to his will or cause the woods themselves to hasten him on his way); and Foresight (by which he can see what lies in distant lands or times to come). These too draw on soul-strength.

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The latest update for Fallen Gods reflects on the design inspirations for the game.

Your fire's gleam seems to dim in this great room, swallowed by shadows that swim and loom like whales in the dark sea. Blacker than light's lack, the hall must hold some lost, last scrap of the unmade world. Bats flap through this false night on leather wings, their shrill songs ringing softly off the far stone walls. It is an uncanny cleft, one which waits with unwelcome dread.

I'm old enough that when I was very young, we had no computer at all. And the computer we did get, when I was around six or seven, was an Apple IIc that plugged into a black and white television. This gift came from my grandfather, a NASA engineer who rightly anticipated that facility with computers would be essential for my generation, and using this machine he taught me basic (literally, BASIC) programming. Essential or not, it wasn't much for gaming, and even when my brother and I pooled our allowances, we never managed to get our hands on much more than a two-sided floppy with David's Midnight Magic and Choplifter. The formative games of my childhood were thus not computer games but board games, video games, "narration games" (rule-free RPGs in which whining and punching replaced rolling dice and tracking stats), and gamebooks.

There are two games from that era that loom large not just in my memory but in the design of Fallen Gods: Arnold Hendrick's single-player RPG board game entitled Barbarian Prince (Dwarfstar, 1981) and Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebooks (1984 and onward). Arnold Hendrick is a name any RPG fan should know because he was the genius, the seemingly mad and insatiable genius, behind MicroProse's Darklands. His earlier work shows the same genius. And Joe Dever has rightly ascended into, if not the pantheon of renowned game designers, at least the ranks of "designers with longform Wikipedia entries." His recent untimely death at 60 robbed the world of a generous spirit and a tireless pen.

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Wormwood Studios have a new update on Fallen Gods which serves as an introduction to the game.

Update #1: Introducing Fallen Gods

Once, the world was better, the gods greater, the wars over, the end farther. You were born in the Cloudlands during those days, one of the Ormfolk, forever young and strong, worshiped by those below for your forefathers' deeds. But all is not well. Now, wolves and worse haunt the night, the law holds no sway, and men's hearts grow hard toward your kind. Fearful of their dwindling shares of souls, your brothers turned against each other ... and against you. And so you were cast down from the clouds, a fallen god broken upon the bitter earth. You rise, still free from death, with only the slightest hope of winning your way back to the heavens that are your rightful home.

Fallen Gods is an RPG inspired by the board game Barbarian Prince, the computer game King of Dragon Pass, and the sagas, eddas, and folklore of the far north. With a dark, wry tone, it tells the story of a god trying to survive in a dying world ruled by beings with great might and wits, but without the wisdom to heal the wounds left by their wars. The game has been in production for about four years, and its concepts have been building in my head for decades.

At the core of Fallen Gods are interactive events, choose-your-own-adventure vignettes in the spirit of the Lone Wolf gamebooks. Throughout the game, the player will enter towns and tunnels, meet strangers and friends on the road, face earthly and unearthly foes, and witness wonders of all kinds. Each of these events, accompanied by a hand-painted illustration, consists of a series of nodes, each a paragraph of text followed by several choices that depend upon the skills the god knows, the items he bears, and the followers he leads.
A forest village quest.

These events, like Fallen Gods itself, are about exploring the game's world, mechanics, and story. In every session, dozens of the hundreds of possible events are spread across a procedurally generated landscape in a way that creates both surprise and coherence. Events are both destinations for the player to seek out and obstacles to bar his way. They provide the landmarks and characters that bring the world to life and make geographic exploration rewarding and dangerous.

Events also provide a laboratory for mechanical exploration. Just as the world is unique in every session, so too is the god, with different skills, strengths, supplies, followers, and gear. These things, alone and together, are powerful tools that can open up new paths, some obvious, others requiring thought and experience. Thus, for example, the Death Lore skill (allowing the god to speak to the dead) and the Wurmskin Cloak (allowing him to understand the speech of birds) can together unlock a new path through the "Windfall" event, which begins with the god finding a field full of dead starlings. Or, in "The Whale," the player might use the Wild Heart skill (allowing him to bend beasts to his will) along with Nail (a magical spear) to draw back and harpoon his titular foe. In another example, the screenshot below shows a few of the possible forks at the start of the "All Is Lost" event.

As the player passes along these different event paths, he uncovers more about the world and what has befallen it. This "narrative exploration" reflects three values (aside from the basic goal of engaging writing). First, what the player learns should be relevant to the game's mechanics and thus of practical value. As in the wonderful King of Dragon Pass, an understanding of the setting's laws and lore helps in handling both friends and foes, in making informed choices rather than guesses. Second, while Fallen Gods involves plenty of words, reading should lead to doing: there is never more than a paragraph of text before the player is back in control, either making a choice with strategic consequences, fighting foes in a tactical battle, or exploring the world while managing resources. Third, the setting should be uncanny and unsettling, rooted in the same rich soil from which modern fantasy springs, but growing along different lines.

That setting grew from my fascination with Iceland and its marvelous Commonwealth, a nation of silver-tongued skalds, quick-witted warriors, troll-women, and land-wights, a land haunted at night by the Northern Lights, where some men still worshiped the beautifully flawed Norse gods. Where but in that Iceland would they compose an epic about a man who "was so great a lawyer that his match was not to be found"? This is Njal Thorgeilsson, the 10th century hero of the hauntingly titled Saga of Burnt Njal, a man who warns that "by the law alone will our land be built up" in a saga that vividly shows the other path, as scenes of farms and families give way to an endless blood-feud that brings Njal his fatal epithet. Where but in that Iceland would men dream up nabrok, wealth-bringing pants stitched from a dead man's skin, or tilberi, milk-sucking worms shaped by witches from wool-wrapped ribs? What other land, so tiny, so remote, so poor, could bring forth not just Snorri Sturluson but Leif Erikson?

But Fallen Gods is not a "Norse" or "Viking" game; neither is it a Tolkien-inspired fantasy setting. Rather, like Tolkien's own setting, it is drawn from the old lore and poured into a new glass, hopefully yielding something familiar but also strange.

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Chris Picone has interviewed Mark Yohalem, writer from Wormwood Studios:

Mark Yohalem

Mark, the writer from Wormwood Studios, joins me today to talk about what it’s like writing for game developers including Bioware and inXile including his work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, and how his career in law had an impact on the world of Primordia. He also talks a bit about Wormwood Studios’ upcoming release Fallen Gods and even gives us a cheeky sneak-peek into an as-yet-unannounced project called Strangeland.

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CSH: I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone describe the law as “fun” before. Mark, what can you tell us a bit about your upcoming RPG, Fallen Gods?

Mark: The basic gist of the game is that the player is one of the eponymous "Fallen Gods," who must win his way back to the Cloudlands—our Asgard—by hook or by crook. Basically, it is a bleak game that blends Norse mythology and Icelandic folklore (and European folklore more generally) with a dark worldview that fell upon me when reading a series of books about the aftermath of various revolutions (Russian, French, Bolivarian, and anti-colonial wars of liberation in Africa). The current pantheon of Fallen Gods successfully overthrew the indifferent, and even cruel, primordial gods who ruled before them (a blend of titans and animistic prehistorical gods). Despite this signal and perhaps noble victory, the new gods, led by Orm the Trickster, have proven fairly inept as divinities and catastrophes have befallen the world: political, ecological (I was also reading, among other things, The Earth Without Us and The Sixth Extinction), and spiritual.

Here's a video.

The game is inspired by Barbarian Prince and Lone Wolf, which are respectively a single-player board-game RPG and a series of game books from when I was a kid. Also, King of Dragon Pass. But it probably most closely resembles a Norse FTL. You explore a procedural map, have little text-adventure events, grow in power, and win or lose. You have 90 days to get back home or it's game over.

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Thanks Chris & Mark!

In an end of the year blog-post Wormwood revealed their new RPG project Fallen Gods:

Auld lang syne

Notwithstanding the continuing lack of any new games, 2015 has been an amazing year for Wormwood Studios for a couple reasons.

First, Primordia sold about 50% more copies in its third year than it did in its second, received a beautiful French translation, and rose into the top 15 user-rated games on Steam.  It also crossed a significant threshold: over 100,000 copies sold.

Second, I fulfilled an adolescent dream of being able to work on the closest thing to a second Planescape: Torment -- namely, Torment: Tides of Numenera.  It's been a humbling experience to be just one of many writers, with only a small part to play in the greater scheme, but all the same, the 70,000-odd words I've poured in so far seem to me to be among the best I've written.  As I've said many times, Primordia was heavily inspired by the original Torment, so this feels like closing a circle.

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Finally, Fallen Gods continues creeping forward.  I'm hopeful that as Torment work wraps up in early 2016, and I'm able to give full attention to FG, the pace will pick up.  In the meanwhile, let me tell you a little bit about the game.
Its roots lie in two old, non-computer games from my childhood: Barbarian Prince and Lone Wolf.  I rediscovered these back in around 2006, and I was simply blown away at the things they accomplished without the assistance of a computer.  I loved the ways in which BP created this reactive, complicated game with very simple tools.  And I loved that choices and skills in Lone Wolf felt meaningful.  I was coming off having played a lot of computer RPGs where improving a stat, gaining a feat, picking an option really did not feel significant at all.  In Lone Wolf, by contrast, each of the special abilities just felt . . . well, special.  And you got to use them in these great ways, with great frequency.

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