Like most red-blooded oversized ogrefolk, I spend a great deal of time thinking about Bridgerton. Not long ago I paid homage to the very fine writing of the recent revision of Planet of the Apes, and today I’ll offer my regards to the excellent writing bullpen of Bridgerton, especially Geetika Tandon Lizardi and Daniel Robinson, who were entrusted with bringing it all home this season.

Spoilers will follow, so avert your eyes, dear reader, if you would like an unsullied viewing experience.

I won’t dwell on the whole of the current season overmuch. Suffice it to say that the first four-episode segment delivers on some of the critical preliminaries. Our heroine, Penelope Featherington, has all but given up on landing her longtime friend/infatuation, Colin Bridgerton, following an insult she overheard at the end of the prior season. In response, however, she decides to engage with the marriage market earnestly, giving herself a makeover funded in part by the monies she’s earned as the obscenely popular Lady Whistledown.

Penelope confronts Colin with the stinging remarks she overheard, and he apologizes and offers to help her negotiate the market to find a suitable match. We get a glimpse of his sincere regret–a precondition of all that follows–and a gradual elaboration of his increasing regard for her. By the end of the first four episodes she’s entertained and rejected an excellent offer of marriage from Lord Debling. The cleverness of the situation is threefold. At one level it reveals the attractiveness of Penelope, which even the folly of Eloise (who revealed her odd arrangement with Colin to Cressida Cowper, the season’s second-place villain) can’t mess up. It introduces Lord Debling as a genuine prospect, a decent man who really sees Penelope and holds her in high regard, but who also comes with an unusual period defect (he’s a natural philosopher who won’t often be around for Penelope if they wed). And it allows Penelope to confess that someone else holds a place in her heart. And what’s key here is that we, as the reader, love Penelope enough to want what she wants, even though we know Colin, the man she would choose, can be kind of a knucklehead. He’s been on the Grand Tour of the Continent, however, and thinks himself pretty worldly. The first segment ends with Colin all but foisting a marriage offer on Penelope, which she happily accepts after a steamy encounter in a carriage. All seems to be well.

But hovering over it all is Penelope’s secret: that she has been Lady Whistledown all along, an author who has sometimes written teasingly (but always tactfully) of the Bridgerton family. Colin makes it clear that he hates this Whistledown character, and he looks forward to seeing her exposed and disgraced.

The first two episodes of the second segment circle around the issue, with Eloise in particular insisting that Penelope reveal her secret to Colin before they wed. Penelope tries her best, but circumstances intervene again and again, right up until Eloise gives Penelope a midnight deadline to come clean. (For those not in the know, the chief sticking point in this situation is that Penelope was obliged to spill some honest gossip about Eloise, noting that she was spending a little unseemly time in the business district, though in truth she was trying her best to put Queen Charlotte, who suspected Eloise of being Whistledown, off the scent.)

And the Queen emerges as the primary villain in the second half. Though we’ve been given a prequel miniseries to make her seem sympathetic, in Season Three we see her bored and petulant, angry that she hasn’t been able to identify Whistledown so far and that her newly anointed “diamond” bachelorette, Francesca Bridgerton, does not seem at all interested in the vapid marquess she’s picked out for her. (She prefers a fellow named John Stirling, even though he’s not prone to the dramatic course of courtship the Bridgertons usually follow.) Confronted with the insuperable problem of Lady Whistledown, she throws money at it–she promises £5000 (about $100,000 in modern dollars) to whoever reveals the secret to her.

So we’re in a pickle, but one that the mores of the time easily accommodates. Colin, having made the offer of marriage (and having engaged in sexytimes with Penelope) considers it his duty to follow through as a man of honor, even though he’s angry about Penelope’s double identity. Penelope, alas, exposes her secret by rushing to the press to send out a new edition of Lady Whistledown’s hottest gossip. The poor timing, however, is an issue forced by Cressida, who confessed that she was Lady Whistledown in order to avoid a horrid arranged marriage to the repellent Lord Toolbox. She writes a hasty column because she knows that Cressida will be forced to publish her own as proof that she deserves the £5000 bounty, and both she and Eloise (whose cold shoulder has begun to thaw) realize that Cressida-as-Whistledown could do a lot of damage.

The plotting on the whole is pretty complex and neatly managed, but what impresses most about the close of the season is the stretch I like to call the Shondaland Showcase, which involves a set of conventions that ends most seasons of the show. In the Showcase each of the featured players is given a chance to shine, to show themselves off in their most authentic light. It’s a tricksy bit of narrative engineering, in that (per the romance genre) the writers have to know what they can withhold till the end. A good example is the sincerity of Colin’s love. Penelope’s mother, Lady Featherington, asks Penelope if Colin actually said he loved her, and she is thunderstruck, because at that point he hadn’t. About two scenes later, however, he owns up to that love fully–tells her he loves her as a dear friend, as a delightful mind, and as a superhot sex bomb. Deferring that admission for a full four episodes would be a bridge too far, so the writers give us what we need and then add the complication of Penelope’s secret.

In the showcase, however, we get what we want to hear beautifully expressed. Penelope’s mother admits that she neglected Penelope for too long, and that she always wanted her daughters to fare better than she did. Penelope, in marrying a Bridgerton that she dearly loves, is the first of her three daughters to fulfill that wish. Queen Charlotte barges in to the marriage morning breakfast of Penelope and Colin like the Kool-Aid man, sending everyone home and insisting that she’s nearly figured out who Whistledown is because the issue defending the Bridgerton family was so neatly timed. (Cressida, helped by her mom, indeed produced an issue, but it featured nothing but the toxic “I’m just asking questions” rhetoric we’ve all come to identify with bad actors. Cressida wonder aloud why the engagements of the Bridgertons were so short, suggesting that they might just be a bunch of trollops. Compared to Penelope’s edition, which was quite gentle to Cressida, it was instantly recognized as a fake.)

Along the way Cressida tries to blackmail Penelope with the threat of revealing her secret, demanding twice the Queen’s bounty. Colin, being Manful McManley, tries to talk sense to her but botches the effort; she demands a full £20,000 to keep the secret. But Penelope has already written Lady Bridgerton and the Queen with her confession, and she promises the Queen a full explanation for her to judge at the ball her sisters are throwing (and which Penelope has secretly funded with her Whistledown earnings). Penelope delivers her speech, and the Queen (via several reaction shots) is duly swayed. It’s a brilliantly-staged set piece, made up primarily of truths about a woman’s situation in society and a promise to write even more responsibly. Colin (who in a prior scene all but pounced on Penelope in public despite refusing to sleep with her on their wedding night and the night after) recognizes and admits that he loves all aspects of Penelope, even the Whistledown thing, and not just because the Queen has all but insisted that she keep writing. So we get what we want, which is simply what Penelope wants, and we get to see her more beautiful and brave than ever.

Even John Stirling gets his own moments in the showcase, first dancing with Francesca at the wedding breakfast to help countenance Penelope’s choice to do so and to prove to Francesca that he can do the unexpected) and later delivering a toast to the whole Bridgerton family, which has accepted him despite his cold brew mode of courtship, so unlike the hot and frothy Bridgerton standard.

The MVPs of the season are, to my thinking, Eloise Bridgerton, who has to subdue her usual sparkle in order to play the devoted daughter and aggrieved friend from whom Penelope kept her secret. For us to be happy with the Showcase we need to see her and Penelope reconciled, and we finally get that reconciliation at the eleventh hour. And Lady Danbury, who scores a rare romance hat trick by a) reconciling with her brother; b) allowing him to pitch woo to Lady Bridgerton, her bestie; and c) by gently prodding the Queen, wondering if she has any plan for what she’ll do after Whistledown is exposed, wondering how she’ll live without all the town gossip Whistledown provides. And of course Penelope, who hits all the notes in her transformation over the course of the season. She was always charming and lovely, but we get to see her ravishing, despondent, and fearless as well, running us through the full array of emotions that come with the travails of the romance heroine.

And the writers stick the landing, not only teaching us what to want but delivering what we want in precisely the way we want it.

This week, in addition to another sizable project I plan to tackle, I intend to write a short historical preface to introduce the Drifting Kingdoms, the setting for my game Chancers. It’s a tricksy kind of writing, in that it can quickly become labored, dense, and stale. Because it will inform play directly and indirectly, however, I need to get at least the basics down on paper.

In broad terms, there’s not much to it. There is an Old World era, which shares much with our common property Classical mythology of Greece and Rome. I can shorthand much of what that world looked like, since folks who play high fantasy games will have at least some of that content in their brainpans. I’m less interested in the big-picture efforts to make sense of the world (in the way that a Poseidon embodies fears about capricious oceans, for example); I just want to get down some sense of how those premises operated at the human level.

Recorded history in Chancers begins with a figure named Hereson who was, to his own thinking, a pretty dang important feller. He rose to become king of the main island in the game world, and he felt that many of his doings and decisions deserved recording. That chronicle, of course, is a partial, biased one, and it’s one that will become more and more pressurized in the rule of his heirs. There’s also a prophecy in the mix–belief that, if the line of succession lasted long enough, his progeny would rule and be remembered forever. But when the game begins his line has effectively ended, and a new line of rulers, the Orians, have replaced the Sonians. They’ve ruled for about sixty years and made plenty of changes, devising some new things, preserving some old things, and repairing much of the damage Hereson caused.

As you can see, there’s not much to the skeleton of it. I’ve got a wee bible of names to mix in, a few events sketched out, and some bits and bobs that will add color to it all. The most important thing is to pin down for players and GMs why the chancers themselves–practitioners of chancing magic–were persecuted by Hereson and his line for about 250 years. And why those chancers saw fit to bail on the Kingdoms near the end of Hereson’s life, severing the game world from everything else through the power of their magic.

In my mind the whole shebang will take about 3-4 pages of the core book, but I think it’s important to keep in mind the game within a game that most designers and writers are playing–a game players themselves are encouraged to play, too. Christian Donlan remarked on this phenomenon just the other day, reflecting on From Software and Shadow of the Erdtree. He offers a pretty vivid discussion of the piecemeal and partial experience of history we all have, which in Elden Ring is an elaborate bit of business.

As I’ve mentioned before, the outlook of Chancers is positive, optimistic, hopepunk. That means players will arrive in a world that’s functional, that isn’t in the midst of some ongoing dystopian calamity. (But there will be low-key evidence of past tribulations just about everywhere.) I’ve noticed that in most games of that grimdark nature questions about what players actually want are tabled. They can fight against injustice in limited ways, strive, and survive–they might even amass a little power of their own with which to resist the sordid prevailing order of things–but not much thought or time goes into realizing ambitions beyond that. Is there villainy in the Drifting Kingdoms? You betcha. But it’s not of a systemic, institutional kind, not a foregone conclusion, nor is it presented to players as a totalizing vision of violence. Think of the Daleks in Doctor Who, the Borg in Star Trek, or Zod in Superman; once you have those cards on the table, the kinds of stories you can tell are at least circumscribed, if not overdetermined. Hereson was maybe that kind of king, but Chancers plays out what happens when people have a chance to build stuff (or try to) instead of trying to keep it all from being razed to the ground.

In some ways the prospect is daunting, as murder is a time-honored mode of everyday problem-solving in many fantasy games. I’m not sure how folks are going to respond to a game world where they can think about a future that involves more than fending off death one day at a time, where the game within a game is tracking rations and water. I’d like to think, however, that there are gamers out there looking for precisely that kind of design. With a little luck they’ll give Chancers a look.

Today I’m taking a bit of a break. Last evening I completed an excellent course on crowdfunding with Jason Furie of BackerKit, a class coordinated with GenCon, and I think I’ve more or less caught up on sleep after a rocky long weekend. You can still follow along with the crowdfunding campaign for my game Chancers over here, and I’ll be tucking in to about a solid month of work on the game tomorrow.

One of the things I’m especially going for in the game is the reduction of ludonarrativistic dissonance, which is the extra fancy way of talking about the tension we sometimes feel when we’re playing a game and the game asks us to do things that add a bit of grit to the system. I feel this way about grimdark games to a meaningful degree, since many of them simply position the player as a doer of grim things in order to prevent some other critter from doing things we might consider grimmer. Ideally–and in an equally fancy way–we want to engender valuative abdication in the reader or player, a willingness to let go and abandon themselves to the spirit of the story, even if it asks us to do things we might not do as our everyday selves.

One of the first lessons I learned about game design at the level of formal instruction is perhaps the most commonsensical one–design, really design, the sort of game you would want to play yourself. I had that concept duly reinforced in a prior GenCon class with Eloy Lasanta, who taught us plenty of ways to guide players at the level of mechanics. In the case of Chancers, for instance, I’ve never been particularly inspired by the Murder Is Learning model of progress in most games (which I say after about two hours of murder to get ready for the release of Shadow of the Erdtree). Because I want a game that is more hopepunk than grimdark, I designed a scheme for Reputation that opens up quests based on the prosocial behavior of the characters. Rather than navigating a world of corruption, decay, rot, and ruin, they find themselves in a world on the upswing, where their positive contributions give them a chance to encourage the outcomes they want to see in the world. I think that’s a sort of role-playing prospect we don’t see all that often, as the game sphere likes to pit good against genocidal evil in fairly stark zero-sum terms.

What does this have to do with apes? Quite a lot, really. I think the sort of distinction I have in mind is vividly realized in the difference between the first reboot of Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton’s 2001 edition, and the narrative arc that begins with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which might feature some of the best screenwriting I’ve ever come across. Spoilers abound in the paragraphs to come, so reader beware!

Burton’s film features Mark Wahlberg as Captain Hotshot Contemptington (I’m pretty sure), an astronaut who is currently awaiting for simian testing to conclude so he can ply his maverick ways in some hardcore space flight. We’re introduced to him as he does the classic jerk move with one such ape, Pericles, who is meant to pilot a shuttle to probe an electromagnetic storm. He pretends to have a treat for Pericles and asks the ape to guess which hand it’s in, but of course he has no treat. If we didn’t understand how to read that sort of game, one of the primatologists on the mission tells Wahlberg that it was an uncool thing to do. Pretty soon, of course, Pericles is lost in the aforementioned storm, and Wahlberg hotshots right in there to find out what happens.

What happened, as it turns out, is deferred until late in the movie. What happens, however, is that our hotshot pilot crashes on a planet which, luckily enough, has an atmosphere he can breathe. He soon learns that the planet he’s on is run by apes, and–for reasons Burton or the writing team don’t dwell on–the apes in question have taken on a simplified form of speciesism that looks a lot like racism. The script is a mess, but suffice it to say that the writing team wants us to side with Wahlberg but gives us no reason to. He rejects the smug superiority of the apes because he’s smugly superior himself, and even though he seems to take a shining to the progressive ape played by Helena Bonham Carter, it’s awkward and not especially believable. He finds himself caught up in what seems like a scheme to liberate the humans, but in reality he just wants to get to the site where his sensor picks up a beacon from his old ship. Some of the folks who accompany him thinks he has their welfare in mind, but it seems all he wants to do is skedaddle.

I did my best to buy in, but ultimately I ended up playing a game on my phone for most of the movie’s runtime. At bottom I simply didn’t care what happened to Wahlberg’s pilot, nor was I invested in the writing team’s awkward exploration of race relations through species relations. Burton’s apes arrive at racism as if it were a logical extension of apes possessing intellectual gifts and not a very specific cultural formation of our modern era predicated on a number of catalyzing historic conditions. It’s a time-saving move but a dumb one, as we don’t get to see how the apes formed cultural sensibilities that made them all militaristic racist jerkbags. There’s a basic line of desire in the film–we want to see apes relating to human in a non-exploitative way–but we understand that Wahlberg’s pilot is poorly equipped to usher that age into being.

The more modern arc is brilliantly realized in the new sequence–Rise of, Dawn of, and War for the Planet of the Apes. Instead of clumsily exploring racism via an underqualified white savior, the movies instead center on the moral formation of Caesar, the ape leader played by Andy Serkis. At every step–and I do mean every step, almost literally–the screenwriters, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, teach the viewer what to want. The lines of desire are vivid and sensible. When Will Rodman, a chemist, wants to move from animal trials to human trials for his Alzheimer’s treatment, he meets with disaster. The chimpanzee on whom he’s pinned his dearest hopes, Bright Eyes, erupts in violence on the day when the pitch for the next stage of the experiment was to be made. We soon learn, however, that she’d given birth, and that her violence was little more than an effort to protect her newborn. (I like to think the failure to notice Bright Eyes was pregnant was a bit of snide commentary on the myopia of the techs, but there’s not much meat on those bones.) All the other apes in the trial are euthanized, as the pharmafolk assume that the violence was a side effect of the drug, but the lead veterinarian can’t bring himself to euthanize the newborn. He hands off that job to Will, which is the first domino to fall. Of course we don’t want to see the adorable wee chimpanzee killed, and the next scenes find Will taking the chimp home and teaching him, caring for him like a doting father. We also get to see Will move on to human trials with his own father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s himself. It’s the sort of recklessness the viewer can roll with because we want to see the father recover; it’s not recklessness justified by a pilot’s desire to do cool pilot stuff.

Things go reasonably well until the chimp, named Caesar, gets some exposure to the wider world. He is effectively a rebellious teen who wants his freedom, which goes against the grain of Will’s need to keep his illicit experiment a secret. Soon that secret gets out, and the writers hit us with two whammies: we learn that the father is becoming resistant to the drug, and we learn that the updated version of the drug (which the pharmafolk hasten into production) has more disastrous effects on humankind. An assistant dosed with it gets sick, and he soon coughs up blood on a pilot. The cleverness of the film is that we’re deeply invested in the welfare of Caesar and later Koba, the test chimpanzee for the new drug variant. Even though we realize that the effect of the drug is contagious and will likely eradicate humankind, we’re still on board as long as things turn out well for Caesar. Serkis’s performance, coupled with our awareness that the problems were ultimately man-made, yields a rare apocalytpic mulligan.

And what happens in Dawn of and War for doubles and triples down on the lessons we’ve learned and desires we’ve hatched. At every turn the writers strum the strings, letting us see how Caesar’s nobility is worth preserving and exploring. What Caesar wants, at least initially, is a benign separation, a distance from the humans he quite reasonably mistrusts. But he’s not wholly averse to humans; he just prioritizes the welfare of his apes. And though the story entangles his fate with the fate of humans again and again, we arrive (by the end of War) at a glimpse of something that looks wholesome and optimistic–a second-generation wave of illness for mankind that arrives just before the apes make their way to a glimpse of their own promised land, well away from the arena of human conflicts.

This post feels overlong, but even so I’ve overshot about fifty subtle and unsubtle inflection points, places where the writers let us know what we might want and why we should prefer certain outcomes over others. And it’s seldom a simplistic picture–they make clear that Caesar’s nobility is not a trite, trivial thing, but a batch of qualities that is challenged and tested. The home stretch of War is especially astute, as Caesar overcomes his desire for vengeance after struggling with the impulse for the lion’s share of the film’s duration. And at day’s end he’s shot by a human to whom he showed extraordinary mercy and rescued by an ape that had aligned itself with the humans, convinced he had chosen the winning team.

Understood in that light, what I’ve done with the design of Chancers seems simplistic; I’ve created a mechanic for Reputation that opens up hundreds of ways for players to realize the ambitions of their characters but discourages violence and mayhem as a recourse of first resort. The scale only goes up, with a dozen tiers; going below zero, as it turns out, puts the players on the radar of the authorities and causes some sociocultural doors to close. In a game world that is, as it turns out, largely functional, it seems deeply problematic to encourage a play style that centers on murder and looting. There’s genuine peril to be had, of course, but it’s out in the wilds of the game world, where different principles hold sway. And even in the safety of the capital city there’s adversity to be had, enemies to fight, and danger to face. But there is stuff worth fighting for, too, which is I think where most of the grimdark games miss the boat.