Finally, we share the long-awaited interview with Lorraine Wilson! Today, she’s talking a little bit about the development of the visual novel Forgotten Fables: Wolves on the Westwind and gives some insight into the process behind Ulisses Spiele' first step into the digital gaming world.
What was your main inspiration for the story and characters of Wolves on the Westwind?
I don’t know that we had one main inspiration for Wolves on the Westwind’s story. We knew very early on that Ulisses were doing some work to improve and build on Thorwalian lore and we knew we wanted to write a Thorwalian story. We wanted to build something that felt like an epic so I pulled a lot of ideas from ancient mythology; Viking, Greek but also tales like Beowulf. Tales where you really feel the world closing in on the heroes as they come to the crux of their quest so that when you come out the other side you are as relieved that it’s over as you are satisfied with the end of the tale.
For the characters, the inspiration was different things we struggle with and try to bury. I don’t think it’s unfair to say Wolves on the Westwind is a very personal story about moving on, but in order for that to work, the affected characters need to be burying something deep. For Estrid it was struggling to find a sense of belonging, for Alrik it was never moving on from guilt, for Orlvir it was never moving on from shame. Every character started with something like that at their core and then I tried to build around that in different ways, a reflection on how we all process trauma and hardship differently.
What were your biggest challenges writing and designing Forgotten Fables: Wolves on the Westwind?
Personally, the biggest challenge was learning to write fun combat. I would say, when I first started on this project, I wasn’t particularly good at writing full-on action sequences. It was something I’d struggled with and never really put time and energy into improving, I was better at the physiological thriller side of things - slow pace, quick release emotional moments. With a lot of guidance from Jan (Wagner, WotW managing director and head of Ulisses Digital) I feel like I really came a long way, but it was a long road to get there. Our combat set pieces in the games were definitely the scenes that needed the most iteration.
More generally, we went into the project knowing that one of our key targets was making the player feel like they were experiencing a tabletop RPG while playing the game. One of the real challenges any GM, DM, storyteller of a TTRPG will face is players doing something completely different to what you expected, taking the story in a completely different direction. That actually meant one of the big challenges throughout Westwind was making sure the player felt like they had a range of options available. Obviously there were hard limits on that and probably places where we could have done more too, but there are a lot of small details that change depending on what you do.
That brings us nicely to the question: How complex is the story? How big is the player’s impact?
(*laughs*) I think most game producers would tell you it’s too complex. It’s honestly incredible, even to me and I wrote it. I think people who just play the game once probably aren’t going to see a lot of the nuance, though there are obvious things like: Does Estrid come with you or does Raskir come with you? Which of the other characters is available for the final fight against the Fiend? There are so many smaller things too. If you agree to Raskir’s plan on how to deal with the prisoners in Hjallvik then somehow get Estrid to come with you for the main quest, she’ll make references back to it that she won’t make if you agreed with her plan. You can learn the elf’s name (or at least the one she gives herself) straight away or not at all throughout the game.Who ends up with the Demon’s Tooth can completely change the end of the game. There are… honestly countless small consequences that change how you experience the story and the logic tree for the game is immense. It crashed the software I used to write it. More than once. The player’s decisions ultimately change the fate of their character, their companion, the elf, Swafnild, Orlvir, whether or not you ever see some of the lovely artwork that our artists put so much work into. It’s… mad. And I love it!
So do you have a head canon for how the game ends then, if you can remember all the possibilities?
Yes and no. I don’t want to put ideas in the player's head because their playthroughs should ultimately decide what the end of this story is, right? And if they use that to influence their Dark Eye games at the TTRPG table, I am ecstatic.
I’ll put it this way: I like the idea of Alrik and Nedime, particularly, going back home and actually facing their past. Same for the elf, honestly. I think it would be really cool for Estrid to go onto be the Wolves’ hetwoman but realistically if I were in her position, I don’t know that I would make that choice. I don’t know. The beauty of this game is that it ultimately doesn’t matter - it’s the journey that’s important.
How was it writing in an established world? How did the existing lore serve as a jumping off point? Or was that an obstacle at times?
I remember for a long time early in my writing career it was seen as always better to write something new and original than add to a world that already exists. I think to a certain extent we’re still there, but with the rise of massive franchises all across entertainment less so. And personally, I love it. I think there is a really interesting challenge in finding a gap and plugging your style, your perspective, your originality into that, then blending them together in a way that works well for both existing fans and new fans. So, for me, this was really fun.
The existing lore was a good jumping off point. When you are looking for an epic tale against a mysterious and magical creature, a universe that already has a well established pantheon and theology is just really helpful. Being able to plug in Lolgramoth, Hranngar, the Nameless One (props if you noticed that very subtle story beat, by the way) from both a Thorwalian perspective and an outsider perspective made it very simple to build a threat for the player to vanquish. And because Ulisses were already working on bringing Thorwal into the 5th Edition, we had access to so much history and culture we could use to really flesh out the world and bring it to life. My favorite is the prayer that Raskir and Swafnild use before they go into battle, at the beginning and end of the game. I found it in the Swafnir-Vademecum and I thought: “This is beautiful. If I don’t find a way to reference this somehow, I don’t deserve this job.”
A lot of thanks really has to go to Niko (Hoch, Ulisses editor for Thorwal) too. He was really helpful in providing a lot of information and a lot of ideas throughout development that we could weave in to make it really feel like a Thorwalian tale. He’s an encyclopedia of information and I don’t think this game would be as good if not for his hard work.
So there were gaps for you to plug into?
Oh, for sure! Thorwalian history, specifically, is full of so many heroes and so many stories that I think it was pretty clear pretty early that no one had heard all of them yet. That was our big target to then go in and say: “Well this is where the Fiend was created then.” That then allowed us to find other gaps to plug in Orlvir’s origins and Alrik’s origins and Nedime is so young that she’s barely out of her origins. It was actually a very easy process. Which I appreciate because that made my job significantly easier. I think that’s the beauty of tabletop universes, specifically. They are designed to have a large, open space where game masters can operate with relative ease. It’s much easier to do that merging of original storytelling and pre-existing universe than it is in, say, a Star Wars or a Lord of the Rings.
You wrote in a recent interview that Estrid and the elf, Darksong, are your favorite characters. Do you have a favorite chapter?
Oooooh. I mean, they’re all pretty good (*laughs*). No, let’s be serious. I really enjoyed writing Far From Home, Darksong’s first chapter, and the end of Swafnild’s story, Intervention and Swansong.
I really loved Far From Home because even though Darksong is very obstructive early on, I had a very clear idea of the vibe I was going for in that chapter. It started with the music she hummed to herself, that had the feeling of being bitter sweet, at home but devastating. When we got the track to play in that chapter, my heart both sank and exploded at the same time. Our musicians nailed it; it’s my favorite track in the game. But hearing it for the first time was the first time it really felt like things were coming together and that gives me good memories of the chapter.
Intervention was another chapter we knew we were going to include very early on and it went through some iteration, but at the end of that last editing run I leaned back and I thought, ‘This is it. This has the feeling of being the turning point where a few people get rocked.’ Not just because it’s very high intensity but also because we deliberately take a mechanic the player has been trained to believe is good and completely turn it on its head. And it makes perfect sense. I don’t want to say anymore, just in case it spoils it for someone.
Swansong, finally… is just beautiful. I love the imagery of that ceremony on the beach, the dead being carried back to the ocean. The prayer, again, came from the Swafnir-Vademecum and I think it’s beautiful. It’s the scene I would love to see most if the story were ever adapted for film or TV. It’s the epitome of epic tragedy in this story.
So away from the story and more on the game, the game feels like an interactive novel or a choose-your-own adventure. Why did you go for a game like that as Ulisses Digital’s first project?
First and foremost, text-driven games are very easy to make by video game standards. Not a walk in the park, by any means - we still had to work very hard to deliver a product we were happy with, but not having to worry about 3D character animation, extensive and complex programming for AI systems or anything like that, really just focusing on developing a narrative experience, gave us a good foundation to test the water with Ulisses’ readiness to make more, more ambitious, video games. I think the whole team learned a lot, found strengths, found weaknesses and that gives Ulisses Digital a good foundation.
But more than that, as I’ve said already, we wanted to give the player an experience akin to playing The Dark Eye with your friends away from the TTRPG table. Those old choose-your-own-adventure books were a massive deal for exactly that, at least to me. I grew up with the Fighting Fantasy series by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. I loved those experiences. Making something that felt like that, bringing that joy to other people, was really exciting to me, personally.
And honestly, interactive novels are undervalued as narrative experiences. Obviously there have been a number of dating sims over the years and that’s fine. Cool, if you are looking for that experience, but I remember playing Coteries of New York, by Draw Distance, as part of the research for this game, which was written for Vampire the Masquerade, and thinking: “Wait. Yeah! That’s so obvious! Why are more TTRPG makers not doing this?!” I hope there are more in the future. It would be great.
And obviously it’s not just text - the combat is fairly ‘gamey’ too and there are skill values you need to keep track of. What was the process of balancing that like?
It was hard. I think even in the run up to release, we didn’t have it completely right. It was an interesting challenge trying to make the game hard enough for Alrik to feel challenged but not so hard that Nedime always died. For a little while, during The Raid, Nedime never made it. And even now, sometimes it feels sketchy. But it was important to include that kind of mechanic, again, because we wanted the player to have something akin to the resource management you have at the TTRPG table. And it gives the player a much better impression of what they are doing right or wrong or well or badly than just describing it in text. It was fun. It kept reminding me that I was making a game and not a book and that was very necessary.
If you had to do the project over from scratch, or a similar one, what would you do differently from the start?
That’s a great question. I think I would change the approach we made to player decisions having consequences. I don’t think we created a bad experience, by any means, but in the long term, fixing so many things, making sure that everything is tracked correctly, is not as viable as I want it to be. There’s a reason why TellTale games had the same formula for such a long time, in fact every game that advertises itself as ‘Every choice matters’. In reality, that’s never true and I think I accidently learned why in this project. Don’t get me wrong, I never wanted to one-up those kinds of systems by making it that every choice actually did matter, it’s just what came naturally. I think, if I were to do it again, with more experience now I would probably rein myself in a little bit.
What’s your view on Ulisses Spiele’ first step into digital games? What challenges and opportunities do you see?
I think it’s an incredibly smart move! The big opportunities Ulisses has are the universes it has to offer to players. Not just The Dark Eye. The Black Cat could become a tremendous playground for different kinds of video games for a wide variety of audiences, I personally think HeXXen 1733 deserves way more of an audience than it has and has a lot of story-telling potential. Not that TTRPGs aren’t amazing. They are. I love them. But video games are such a good opportunity to share different kinds of stories in these universes or tell stories in different ways. It’s too good to pass up.
It will be a challenge though. Step one is going to be making sure the right people are in place, experienced people who know the differences between making a TTRPG and making a video game and can guide the team in the right direction. Jan is great at that but there is only so much one person can do. Moving more into the English-speaking space to attract developers and to attract more attention is going to be really key and isn’t something that happens overnight, or even over the course of months.But just because it’s a challenge doesn’t mean it's impossible so I am excited to see how it develops.
So any plans for the story of the Wolves on the Westwind to continue then?
Errrrr, maybe one day. I certainly have an idea of what happens next, narratively, and that would be exciting, but for now I think it’s not my decision to make. And until I start writing, my lips are sealed.