Making Characters History and Neverwinter

I'm not sure what bought this essay on as such, just that I've run into the subject a few times in the last few weeks and it struck me as an interesting subject. The basic principle, is that in a work of fiction, if after one episode, issue or entry to a series, you have a significant time gap within the setting between the two, the one set before becomes historical and in some ways part of the setting, but to achieve that you end up sacrificing most if not all of your characters to dying in the gap between.



The most famous example I can think of off the top of my head is Narnia. While it's a slightly odd case in that the real world children function on a different timescale to Narnians and Aslan is decidedly timeless, the characters that live in Narnia are all usually dead later on with the odd exception of Reepicheep. Prince Caspian appears as a boy in the book in which he is a titular character, is a few years older in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but then, in the Silver Chair, he is an ancient man on his deathbed. Even more extreme is how the great court of Cair Paravel that the children had been Kings and Queens of is an ancient forgotten ruin when they next visit Narnia during the events of Prince Caspian. There is the interesting contrast that something we have been reading as "current" five minutes ago is now ancient history.


This is more pronounced when there are no timeless or time detached characters present. Terry Brooks Shannara Novels and Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books both have significant gaps between the groups of books. Now contrasting this with the Narnia books we have the sad realisation that that essentially means that between the stories every single character you've grown to associate with has died. Some of them die within their own stories, some (like the protagonists of my favourite Mercedes Lackey book - the Black Gryphon) just tail off into some ambiguous future where their specific fate is never mentioned, yet their lives were so distantly behind the present that you are pretty certain they died a millenia or so a go related to the most recently set story. Shannara is in many ways worse because it eventually ties in to our time and it's a lot more heavy handed with mortality within the stories themselves. Only about one character off the top of my head actually gets to be a protagonist of two sub-series.


The plus side is that with such large gaps in between, creating a broad history by itself becomes unnecessary - previous stories become that history and define the present in the same way that real world history defines the present. This is also quite interesting as with newer iterations you have much more material to define your world and with every entry the world gains more nuance which you'd struggle to fit comfortably within a single story without it sounding like a novel about a history lesson.


I actually ended up using this technique recently in the latest iterations of an forum RPG series I created. The original was a bit of an exercise in silliness with the players gratuitously travelling about and fighting some evil "Lords" and semi intentionally helping another character rise to absolute power. The second never really went anywhere, but was dealing with a great menace of evil power that was seeping into the world a few hundreds years after the long reign of the ascended character of the first disappeared. They were only vaguely in a consistent timeline with one another, and the gap between them was mainly supposed to just offer a blank storytelling slate.


However as I recently decided to create the third entry to this series I saw ways to tie the third entry into the previous two while still being an independent story in its own right. The first became, retrospectively the closing days of a great war of unification and the second, abortive though it was, became about the world as it collapsed into feudality and disorganisation after having become over reliant on the Lord who had taken control in the first. The third now becomes a story about a villain trying to take over the world using the powers of that ancient lord thousands of years ago. Admittedly its not Tolstoy, but with the grounding of the previous stories it means the most recent one flows better - things weave together more satisfyingly and concepts don't have to be explained constantly. Effectively, each iteration further cements the world in its own reality - it's history is further defined, which is a very useful tool.

I suppose you could argue that it takes place to some degree in any medium with the slightest bit of continuity... *technically* episodes of Neighbours are affected by episodes on Neighbours from years ago (if only in determining the dozens of dead characters!) but it's not the same. But it's not quite the same in that its very much a small section of the world rather than global history.

In games however, I think it becomes particularly interesting - unlike books you can to some degree let the players themselves define that history - in a self run RPG such as the forum one earlier, or indeed any other one, you can let the players themselves define what becomes history. If you then follow it with a sequel where the reprecussions of the original are strongly visible it is potentially a strong tool to give player interest to the world. It's of course harder to do such a thing in computer games because that requires finite number of choices and relatively similar reprecussions to avoid a massive hassle at programming, but even so it does raise some interesting possibilities even if the game is more or less linear. Perhaps importing data from previous games, even including character appearances to put little pointers into the world to be explored. It might seem a lot of effort, but it'd probably be very fun.

On the flip side, what I don't particularly care for is "blank-slate" timeleaps. If you are going to utilise an established setting, say for example, the mythical land of Ipswich, what you don't want to do is suddenly say, now it is a hundred years in the future, Ipswich is in ruins, and everyone is dead, monsters patrol the streets and all the ancient lore of Ipswich is forgotten. There is of course some merit to the concept if you handle it well, but you are risking casting away a powerful tool if you ignore all the existing legends of Ipswich and don't hint at them. Name dropping events the player might have taken part in in other games is an easy way to give people a quick buzz of "I knew them!" or "I did that!" because realistically, if done well it can work as a pat on the back for those players of previous games by reminding them of past experiences.

Which brings me to Neverwinter Nights - 2 was good for this in that it not only managed to reference characters from the original (Fenthick, Deekin, Nasher) but also dropped names relating to Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. If it had just managed to get some Icewind Dale references in there... But the neverly announced "Neverwinter" seems to be gambling a bit here. Admittedly, its the fault of Wizards of the Coast who moved the Forgotten Realms setting forward a hundred years anyway, but when you move that into a sequel to a successful game series it means that pretty much everyone human of the slighest familiarity is going to be dead. A single generation gap sure - it worked well for Icewind Dale II where you'd meet men who were children in the original, or longer, so that the historical ramifications of the first two games can be seen. A hundred years for a fantasy setting is really just in the awkward position between people being alive and history having formed.

I hope I'm wrong and it's going to contain plenty of references to the original and perhaps even the other Forgotten Realms games as well as playing brilliantly, having an intelligent story and otherwise just being a good game. However, at this point I remain apprehensive...