Building five nations from one playbook

Vellestria is the only nation you can play right now. It is also one of five named nations in the saga we have plotted out — Aurelae, Kinare, L'Endeem, and the Sundered Isles are the others, all sketched in our canon files, none of them playable yet. The honest answer to when will the rest ship is that they will ship when they are ready, which is not the answer that grows a mailing list, but it is the one we owe you. What we can talk about today is the question underneath: how do you build five nations that feel like one game?

1. The risk

The risk is obvious if you have ever played a long anthology. Five nations can very easily become five separate games stitched together with a thin narrative thread — a grandfather's notebook here, a recurring NPC there — while each chapter cluster quietly drifts into its own mechanics, its own UI vocabulary, its own contract with the player. Players don't always notice, but they stop trusting the world. The signal they pick up is that the studio doesn't know what its own game is, and the next nation will be whatever the studio happened to feel like making that quarter. We have read enough postmortems to know this is how anthology projects die.

The cheap fix is to wallpaper every nation with the same look and the same loop. That is worse. If Vellestria's quiet harbour-melancholy gets pasted onto a desert caliphate, the desert becomes a Vellestria-with-sand mod, and the whole reason you wrote a second nation evaporates. So the question is not how do we make them the same? It is what is the smallest amount of sameness that lets the rest be different on purpose?

2. The solution is a shared anatomy

We wrote it down. It is a document called Nation Template and it is the dullest file in the canon folder. It says: each nation has the same skeleton. The same number of chapters. The same number of named locations. Roughly the same population of characters. Roughly the same puzzle budget. Three factions, named differently in each nation but doing the same structural work — one that holds the official record, one that hides inside it, one that holds the underground knowledge. Eight secret puzzles, one tucked inside each location.

We are not listing the numbers as a marketing checklist. The numbers exist in the template; they are load-bearing. But the player should not feel them, the way you do not feel the studs behind a wall. What the player should feel is that arriving in a new nation is like arriving in a new room of the same house. The proportions are familiar. The door is where you expect it to be. You know how to start looking. You do not have to relearn the game in order to learn the place.

The skeleton is what lets the tone do whatever it needs to do. Because we know each nation will have a hub, a home-interior, a wilderness lieu, an archive, a religious lieu and a council lieu, we can spend the design budget on what kind of religious lieu Kinare has versus what kind L'Endeem has, instead of arguing every quarter about whether religious lieux should exist. The shared anatomy is what frees the variation. It is the boring infrastructure that makes the interesting writing possible.

3. Each nation has its own tone

Vellestria is a melancholy harbour town. Parchment and salt. A grandfather's notebook with one page in a cipher he never finished teaching anyone, and an absence — Theodor's, seven years of it — that the city has not stopped quietly accounting for. The light is golden nine months of the year. The work is patient. The grief is patient too.

Aurelae is louder. The Aurelae Caliphate is a desert civilisation, and its cities live at night because the day is unsurvivable, so the soundscape is the opposite of Vellestria's morning market: storytellers reciting caravan routes from memory under lamps while the day's heat finally lifts off the sandstone. Where Vellestria writes its maps, Aurelae sings them. That is the design problem the nation poses, not a stylistic flourish. You cannot cartograph what people refuse to commit to paper, which means you cannot play Aurelae the way you played Vellestria.

The Sundered Isles are quieter still — an archipelago the official maps mark as a permanent fog bank, populated by eleven clans who can read the fog and would rather no one else learned how. Kinare is high and thin-aired, plateau monasteries with prayer flags flat against the wind, and a fragmented theocracy that did not invite us in. L'Endeem is underground; there is no sky and no compass north, and the cartography is sculpted in three dimensions into the rock. One tonal sentence each in the dispatch, many more in the work. That is the budget we have decided we are allowed to spend before any of them ship.

4. The thread

The skeleton holds the game together structurally. The thread holds it together emotionally, and the thread is Cora.

Cora carries her grandfather's notebook across every nation. The carnet is the spine of the saga and the spine of the player's progression — you read what she reads, you learn what she lets herself learn, you discover the next nation's existence on a page she turns. Her grief travels with her. Vellestria is where she comes home and finds the house too quiet; the Sundered Isles are where she finally stands over her father's wreck; Kinare is where her closest companion finds out why his own family had to flee; Aurelae is the only nation she has been to before, which means the only nation where homecoming is not exactly grief. Every nation gets to do something different with the same protagonist because the protagonist is already different by the time she gets there. That is the saga's actual mechanic.

The notebook is also, very practically, what lets a player who picks the game up in Nation 3 still play it. Cora re-reads her own carnet. The summary screen is her marginalia. We did not invent that for player onboarding; we invented it because that is what Cora would do. The shared anatomy of the nations is the part you do not notice. The carnet is the part you do.

5. What Aurelae opens with

We will not say much, because there is not much we can responsibly say yet about a nation that is not finished. But the first lieu of Aurelae will not be a harbour. It will not be a market square. It will not be a palace courtyard. Aurelae opens at a sand-road — the place where the caravan reciters begin their route-songs, far enough outside the oasis-city that the lamplight has stopped, and the next thing in front of you is the desert and a stranger who has agreed to sing you a fragment of a route you are not entitled to know.

That is, on purpose, the smallest thing we are willing to tell you about it. The rest is what the work is for.

Cora's note: Branwen asked me yesterday whether the carnet would still feel like Theodor's notebook by the time I had carried it through four nations he never wrote in. I have been thinking about it since. The honest answer is: I do not know. The carnet was his when he gave it to me. It is mine now in a way I did not ask for. By the time the last page is written, it will be neither of ours, and both. I think that is the only honest way for a book like this to end.