The history of Eidolon and how I got into indie development is a bit circuitous. It might have started in 2006 prior to the release of Changeling: the Lost, but in reality it started all the way back in 2003. For a number of years I was billed as ‘the number one fan of Fading Suns’. The website was called Fading Suns: Renaissance, and it contained a large extended canon of the setting, all of my own creation. So I was spilling my creative juices into a work of passion, not because I hoped to get money out of it, but because I loved the creative process. Somewhere along the way I managed to make some contributions to Fading Suns as one of the writers for Arcane Technology.

However, I think the process truly kicked off with Changeling. I have always been an intense fan of anything Fair Folk or Faerie (old school faerie and not the Victorianised or Disneyfied diminutive type). There was a rumour circulating that there was not going to be any new World of Darkness Changeling game. So I somehow decided that I would take it upon myself to write one, in the vein of Dark Ages: Fae. One year later, I revealed my 130,000 word mock up of Changeling: the Delirium. However, throughout this process, Changeling: the Lost was announced. I was kind of annoyed because it meant that I missed an opportunity to be part of the design and writing process of Lost. However, Ethan Skemp assured me there never really was an opportunity to get on board as most of the key decisions had been made long in advance.

Eventually, I pulled Delirium out of respect for WW and remodulated what I’d written into an unofficial expansion book for Lost called Dreams of Delirium. It was only a mere 75,000 words but still a worthy accomplishment. None-the-less I learned a lot from those experiences including the type of work required to draft character ideas, and all manner of intriguing things with game design. It was a self-teaching exercise in the end, but I was sitting on top of a mound of my own creative ideas and no way to do anything with them, or so I thought.

In 2008, I was involved in a number of creative activists projects, that used artistic flash mobbing and street chalking. I called the group the Kingdom of Hearts, and there is still some vestige of it around the net. Through it, I generated a persona as the ambassador of this Kingdom, here to bring social change through random acts of artistic frivolity. Part of that process saw me begin to sketch out details for this mythic place that I was to represent. I think it hit me then that I could make this Kingdom of Hearts that much more than what it was. I saw that I could use my creative skills to truly create an original world of my own (or as original as something can be when you acknowledge and embrace your influences). What started off as a world-building exercise and cannibalising my own writings would be the first true seed of Eidolon. Though it bore very little resemblance to what it is now. Over the years it has evolved from straight up fantasy, to steampunk, to something more Edwardian leaving many of the true tropes of the Victorian Era behind and embracing some modernism. Though I call the setting a Dreamscape Opera, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t just call it an Electrodyne Opera to place it correctly as a subgenre of steampunk.

Throughout my writing period, I have been exposed to a number of ideas and many of them have shaped how I’ve perceived the world. A lot of this is not a deliberate attempt to appropriate ideas, except perhaps one instance where after reading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the idea of a world where fiction and physics were both “real” suddenly made the world click. It dramatically changed the setting and a lot of Eidolon’s history and geography was reconfigured to reflect ‘an alternate Europe, only if all the myths were true’ – for a given value of compatibility with my vision’. I can tell you now, the creative process has been one third writing, and two thirds reading: reading other fiction, graphic novels, literary novels (classic and contemporary), TV shows and film, but most importantly academic literature. One of my best purchases ever was a comprehensive history of Europe that most historians consider a definitive work. I have no qualms with allowing my work to be influenced by other ideas. In a setting where stories are ‘real’, then I must acknowledge to a large degree the stories that exist in the real world. In some ways, this work has become something of a Wold-Newton pastiche (much like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). However, in many places I have taking large creative licence to refit ideas together (one example being trying to combine the Ottoman Empire with an idea of Arabian Nights and the land of Oz).

It is a truism of writing that a writer should write what they know. So one of the questions that I asked of myself is what can I offer this setting that is uniquely true to myself. There were three answers that I came up with:

The first was to create a setting that draws upon my university degree in politics and international relations. Of all the various settings I have read, none of them give a reasonable treatment of politics, diplomacy, and international relations. However, this is clearly an area that is a realistic drama that all of us can relate to on some level. Also, political games are great for player interaction. I am happy to acknowledge that Vampire taught me that lesson. However, I also realised that a game that reflects real world politics doesn’t tell a good story, so I decided to emphasise the performative nature that politicians have. Statecraft and stagecraft being two sides of the same coin means that the central figures of the story are inherently theatrical. The two concepts melded together far more easily than you might at first imagine, particularly when you consider how much of modern politics depends on engaging with a mass audience.

Second, as an atheist, one of the particular tweaks that I sought to bring to this setting was a world where faith in a supreme being was not an important part of the spiritual tapestry. For this reason, while there are supreme beings, they are not referred to as gods, but described without receiving reverence or acts of faith. In fact, there is a strong correlation between the more celebrated an individual's story and notoriety, the more likely they undergo apotheosis. It was my decision that in a setting where myth and story become real, there is no need for faith because rather than humanity using myths to create beings in their own image, the narrative forces of mythology are real and make gods out of individuals – there is an element of Unknown Armies in here, but it’s not quite post-modern magic. It’s possibly a bit derivative of Campbell. Naturally, this posed one of my most interesting challenges, as I had to try and reconcile the influence of the church throughout Europe's real history in order to create a similar shape to Eidolon. There needed to be an institution like the church, but one whose fundamental premises were familiar enough to capture the ecclesiastic flavour but distinct enough not to be a monument of faith. Instead I have build the Auspice, which are something like the Bene Gesserit from Dune, but with a few modifications. I guess in my setting, the ‘church’ knows they are peddling myths and stories to the masses, only this time they’re genre-aware of it.

Perhaps my most ambitious challenge was the decision to write a highly complex and detailed setting. I was going to write a game and write it to my satisfaction. Not write a game I felt would appeal to the masses. This means that some of my language is going to be dense and obtuse, because that’s how I write. It also means that there is a vast detailed exploration of the setting’s society, history, and all manner of its existence. In some respects it was an exercise in sociology, because I wanted to create a society that was genuinely complex, rather than a shallow echo that people play at. Rather than a few clear cut choices of factions that people join it creates a myriad of potential allegiances that can plague a single character at any given time. Effectively, they can have a nation, a creed, a race, a house (family), an estate, and all number of attachments that might pull at them from different directions, and hopefully create genuine character dilemmas when they face competing obligations. This, I feel, reflects real life and real complexity.

Perhaps my favourite distinction is the mechanics. Right now the setting material has hit 160,000 words. Not a single word of that is game mechanics. There are ‘rules’ in as much as a real world has physics. So I’ve spent time and detail explaining any non-conventional physics with as much detail as possible. I intend for the ruleset to be perhaps only 10,000 words. My rule of thumb is if you have to look the rules up, they are already too complex and are getting in the way of game. Rules for telling stories should be intuitive, should be streamlined, and for me should not involve dice (if possible). Using dice or a random chance generator means you are far too dependent on statistics to define your character and conflict resolution becomes about number crunching, and worse character development becomes about stat buying and XP. So, I image the rules-set when available will be a narrative based one. I’m already looking into systems like Falkenstein, Amber diceless, Fate (and Houses of the Blooded’s Aspects), the Munchausen game bidding system, as well as Ways and Means (you can have a big win, where you win the conflict and narrate its outcome, little win, win the conflict but the opponent narrates, little loss, and big loss are the inverse).

Will this make my setting accessible to everyone? No probably not. However, I hold in my thoughts a statement by Alan Moore in response to accusations that Promethea were little more than a primer on hermetic magic disguised as a graphic novel. His response was something to the effect that there are numerous stories that aren’t primers about hermetic magic, and that he thought there was sufficient room for him to create one that was. My thoughts ring true to this. This is my creative project, I’ve spent 4 years writing this on and off, so by the time the project is finished I want to be able to turn around and feel like I have an object that is a mirror of the world as I see it. Hopefully that will be appreciated.

If there is one lesson I can probably share from all of this, is that by making this a project I wanted to see become a reality, by doing something that was meaningful to me, I ended up having the inspiration and motivation to sustain myself on the same project over four and more years. Passion for your creation will drive you beyond those fatigues and those moments where you feel like quitting. More importantly, it becomes something you can turn to when other things in your life become stressful. It is a huge release to change mental gear from work to writing something creatively.