Hello everyone, and thank you for the warm reception you've given to Mandrake so far! We're doing a Q&A on Discord this Thursday if you have any questions for us. Until then, here's Chris Gardiner, lead writer on Mandrake. -- Hannah
When you arrive in the village of Chandley at the start of the game, Rosen – the village leader – greets you. "Welcome to Chandley! It's small, it's complicated, and everyone's got an opinion."
Chandley is one of the most important places in Mandrake. It has the densest concentration of characters, and because it's where many useful services are available, you'll spend a lot of time there. It acts as a window onto the wider world – this is a whole new setting, with its own mysteries and secrets to uncover. And it gives context to your arrival and actions as its residents react to them.
After all, the Mandrakes were once the overlords of Chandley, and everyone knows they're sorcerers. Some even say it was Mandrakes that turned the world upside down. So it's impossible not to have an opinion on one turning up at your doorstep. Nessa, the village smith, knows what it's like to be an outsider. She wasn't born in Chandley but arrived as a child with her father, fleeing a curse that befell their old home. Old Eseld, on the other hand, comes from fallen gentry, and insists on treating you with the archaic courtesies due your lineage (whether you want her to or not). And Kenway has a healthy scepticism of aristocracy. Chandley has got on fine without the Mandrakes, she reckons, maybe they should have stayed gone.
To manage this, Chandley has to feel authentic. Not realistic – we're not creating an accurate economic simulation, here, or depicting a specific place at a specific time in history. But it has to feel plausible, to have a convincing level of detail and, frankly, messiness. Our inspirations here are actual traditions, histories, and experiences.
At this point, I would like to talk about the duck race.
The duck race doesn't exist in Mandrake – it is a real actual thing that happens in the real, actual village I live in.
Every Boxing Day – crisp, cold, and at a frankly unreasonable hour given that we're all still recovering from Christmas – the locals deposit one thousand individually-numbered yellow plastic ducks into the river, and accompany them in an ambling procession as they wind through the village. This takes some time, as the river is actually a stream, and the ducks don't move very fast. Wellington-booted volunteers wade through the waters behind them, picking up straggler-ducks and hurling them towards the front, in what I presume is the historical origin of rubber-banding in Mario Kart.
At some point, the village's actual ducks try to muster a last-ditch defence of their river, only to flee, disgraced, before a yellow tide of inevitability.
The first plastic ducks to reach the bridge outside the church are hailed the winners, and the people who sponsored them get prizes. At this point, the village's troupe of Morris dancers begin their performance, clashing sticks and jangling bells, their costumes a-flutter with rags. They do this right in the middle of the main road, causing extensive traffic jams. When they deign to allow cars through again (that is, when it's time to go to the pub) one of them accosts the drivers, claiming that they have driven over his "invisible rat" and must pay for a replacement (the proceeds left over after acquiring a new invisible rat all go to good causes).
The rest of my family all grew up around here, and regard the duck race as something essentially mundane, rather than the sacred institution of glorious British eccentricity that it clearly is. To me, it embodies the best of village strangeness: communal, preposterous, utterly admirable and immaculately-organised; an immense effort that runs like clockwork every year and has become, by repetition, normal.
But that's only the tip of the local peculiarities, many of which speak to a more difficult and complex past. A bridge over the same river the ducks pass along each Boxing Day is named after the local 17th-century rector who was almost swept away while fording it in the rains. He had to be rescued, and the bridge was built to insure against future rector-attrition. In the churchyard there's a grave of another clergyman – a reverend – who died young, and the trauma of his parishioners is clear in the gravestone they raised to him: a monumental broken column of marble, upon which is engraved the warning 'BE YE ALSO READY.'
Within the church itself is the Witchcraft Tomb, on which two marble effigies of children kneel, each holding a skull. It contains the remains of two young 17th-century heirs of the local duke, supposedly killed by witchcraft. Two local women were hanged for the crime. Village life isn't always nice. Sometimes there are atrocities, or tragedies. In the last few years, peregrines have come to nest in our church spire. A camera has been set up, and a closed-circuit TV and chairs laid out at the bottom of the belltower. A dedicated cadre of residents come to watch them – every time we've been to the church the last few months, someone has been there watching the nest and hoping all will be well. Tragically, this year none of the fledglings reached adulthood.
These are the sort of details and textures, sorrows and celebrations that have inspired Chandley. Its rook-crowned tree, under which ceremonies are held and promises made. The long-running rivalry between its two largest families: the Iveys and the Isbles. The tragic loss of Rosen's first husband to the night. The secret Nessa keeps in her forge. The empty, broken, weed-ravaged cottage that belonged to the last resident to practice the forbidden arts of horticulture…
So this is Chandley: small (in the sense of dense, and detailed, and intimate), complicated (by the knotty relationships of its inhabitants) and opinionated (because its inhabitants have a lot to say for themselves). We hope you'll enjoy it there.