Writer's Guide

All about writing for Wildermyth!

Lore

The Yondering Lands

The world goes through cycles. Civilizations rise and fall, and threats to humanity wax and wane. Building ruins, powerful artifacts, the memories of great deeds all fade into myth or are lost to memory and are rediscovered time and again. The history of the lands are repeated patterns that are still never quite the same.

The Yondering Lands are sortof vaguely American. Or at least, if you have a choice between American and European, lean American. This applies mainly to flora and fauna, but also to little things like, we don't talk a lot about nobility, kings and queens, and we don't use a lot of the strongly-flavored medieval-fantasy words. No British accents or isms, unless it's a particularly foreign character. (People have been known to fall into the lands from time to time from other places, so.) But then also, we don't quite do banjos and cowboy hats. Guitars are maybe right on the edge. Fiddles are probably cool, right? I don't know.

Monsters!

Deepists are a cult that likes rocks, minotaurs, and fungi. Read some in-fiction lore here.

Drauven are lizardy folks who like dragons. Read some in-ficiton lore here.

Gorgons are corrupted tentacular beasties. Read some in-fiction lore here.

Morthagi are clockwork undead. Read some in-fiction lore here.

Thrixls are dreamlike and insectiod. Read some in-fiction lore here.

All monsters are indeed monstrous. There may be shades of gray, but in aggregate monstrous life is incompatible with human life. Humans fight monsters to survive.

There are no demi-humanish creatures in the Yondering Lands: no elves, dwarves, orcs, or their kin. But I mean, we COULD have some badger-people or some other weird stuff. I mean, Drauven are kinof on the line, aren't they? But certainly none of the "stock fantasy races."

Magic!

Human magic is performed by mystics who interfuse with objects to manipulate them.

But also, some monsters can perform magic and/or ARE magic.

Equipment!

There's lots of equipment in the game. Generally procedurally generated, but its history grows over time. Every piece of equipment has a description, some narrative insight that follows some general rules.

Tools

Set up your work space

How to use Source Control, how to run Scratchpad, how to submit files.

How The Game Works

Heroes

Heroes are generated with History, which drives Aspects, which drive Stats.

Effects

Effects use a system of targets and outcomes....

Using The Editors

• Setting up new events
• Codestuff
• The comic-writing tool
• tags and targets
• plain text please

Making Panels

Use <panel> tags to separate text into panels. It's pretty easy to specify panel sizes and add actors with facial expressions and basic functionality.

<panel>Use panel tags to separate text.
<panel|bookish>if there's an actor, they will speak the line.
<panel|poet thinking>Or maybe you want them to think it instead.
<panel|goofball joke>Or make a funny face!
<panel sixth left|bookish grim size:1.75>
<panel half left|snark sad >Nobody actually likes your face.

Everything about a panel is stored as text, in the panel tag. These examples show how to use panel styles (left, sixth, half), how to add actors ( |rolename ), and how to add actor styles (thinking, joke, grim). Panel styles are convenient for quickly making panels, but panel tags can get cumbersome fast. Good thing is, we have a visual editor so you don't need to edit all this stuff by hand.

To open up the panel editor, click on a panel in the Comic Editor display. You can use the visual panel editor to do almost everything, including adding actors, setting their facial expressions, really everything except creating new panels and modifying the text that goes in them.

Protip: Panel tags can be copied and pasted around as a quick way to duplicate a scene.

Using Tags to Control Text

Each event can specify a number of targets, which are often heroes, selected for a particular personality, relationship, etc.. These targets are assigned to roles. Roles are easy-to-remember words like leader, target, hero, hothead, friend, etc..

Once you have a target assigned to the role, you can insert the target into your text using a role tag like this.

<panel twoThirds |leader narrating|hothead pained>
<leader> takes a long, appraising look at <hothead>. 
<leader.mf:He/She> wipes a fleck of bluish ooze off <leader.mf:his/her> nose.

This is a simple example but we can get a lot more sophisticated, and tags can be nested as well. That can get really confusing. Maybe we should build some better tools?

One of the key uses of tags is to give heroes different lines depending on their personalities. This works by embedding the stats you care about in the tag.

<panel |leader talking>
<leader.goofball/bookish:
Surprise everyone! It's fightin' time!
/Ahem. Our foes appear to have arrived.>

You can embed tags within tags. The most common use case will be putting gender tags inside personality tags. But you can go further if you want to. You can even use tags to select whole panels, like this:

<bookish.poet/snark:
  <panel|bookish joy>
  This will make an excellent song!
/
  <panel|bookish skeptical>
  What is it about me that attracts trouble? Is it my hair?
>

This can get out of hand very quickly, but might be useful for reaction panels, or whatever? I don't know. Be careful out there.

Tags can do a lot more! For a full list of available tags see : Tag Reference.

Style Markup

Text in a comic panel gets a style automatically depending on if the TextBox is set up as narration, speech, thought, etc.. The Style can be modified using square brackets. Generally, text-style markup is similar to html markup, in that you have a starting and ending tag, BUT! our style format doesn't require the end tag to have anything in it.

It looks like this:

 [bold]bold text [italic]Bold italic text[]bold again[] regular again.

TODO add some pictures of styled text here

You can set the size, color, and font of the text. See Main article on Text Styles for a full list of available fonts, styles, and colors.

Tone, Style, Voice, Visuals

hey what's a good story?

What's our "bar" for comic panels?

How many personality-specific lines should there be?

Each character in an event can fulfill a particular Story role.

An example event and the thinking behind it can be found here.

Scope

What can a story do?

Story Inputs

What can you rely on? What can a story know about the state of the game, and how can you incorporate that in your writing?

Story Outcomes

What results are possible? What's desired? A lot of this will vary based on event type, but.

Grant Gear

Gear gotten from an event may include augments, weapons, off-hand items, or (rarely/epically) a new type of armor.

Body Modifications

Heroes' arms, legs and heads can be replaced with exciting things. These replacements may happen as the result of a choice in an event (e.g. a hero gets a wolf head after agreeing to join the wolf god), or they may be gained as rewards for quests that become available after the hero loses a limb in combat (e.g., after losing an arm, a hero discovers an abandoned Morthagi who offers to build them a mechanical one).

In addition to replacements, modifications like wings, scars, or tattoos may be added.

Most body modifications will affect the hero's stats or abilities in some way (e.g., our hero with wings can now ignore obstacles when moving during a battle).

Stretching and Establishing new Content

How far can stories range from the existing material and game assets? Spoiler: quite far!

Because we are using 2D art and no animation, certain things are incredibly cheap for us to do, which would be prohibitively expensive for other games. Here are some examples which should give you an idea. In general, we are looking for writing to stretch and grow our content range as much as possible.

Here are few but if you have a particular idea, run it past!

Comic Art is very cheap. If you need a prop or a background to tell a story properly, ask for it!

Special Gear Weapons are maybe the second-cheapest asset class in the game, specify as many as you like. Augments are also pretty cheap. Armor is fairly expensive, but we can do it if it feels really special.

One-Off Monsters if none of the existing monsters make sense, you can call for a one-off monster to appear in a story or a fight. Most stories probably won't need this, but it's relatively inexpensive, so let's do it when it makes sense.

Body Modifications are where our character rig really shines. Any limb, or the head, can be swapped out for something monstrous or more awesome. Hair styles, skin patterns, scars, tattoos, bring it! It gets a little tricky if it modifies the face, because the different facial expressions

Playable Characters might be monsters or weirdthings that you can recruit or get transformed into. Fairly cheap, and we really want these. One thing to consider is whether they will be able to use weapons or armor. The default approach is that non-humans don't use gear, but we could possibly make an exception for weapon-wielding, since that is relatively easy to rig up.

In-game Scenery is cheap, and could double as comic props?

Map icons are very cheap if you need something specific.

In-Game Environments are expensive, since they require a lot of art to work together, and a deal of programming too. But, bring your ideas. We might be able to make something work.

Combat Abilities Do you need special abilities, as rewards, for one-off enemies, playable characters, or whatever? They are pretty easy to make! Say what you want and we can talk it over.

Buffs/Debuffs are relatively cheap, particularly if they are similar to an existing effect.

Combat Avantages/Disadvantages are not totally implemented, so let us know what you want to see.

Event Types

For a list of Event Types that we need, see Main Article: Event Types.