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.