I didn’t make nearly as much progress this month as I did for my previous updates (December, January and February), but that’s because I was occupied with the two things that inspired the game most: Travel and conventions. Specifically, I spent two weeks in New Zealand, and then attended Pax East!
As I write this now, I’m exhausted, but at the same time my mind is buzzing with ideas and motivation. But as I talked about last month, I have to let myself rest, too. This month has been a whirlwind, but it’s done so much to refill my creative well.
So I want to take this chance to talk a bit about the specific trip that inspired Far Lands in the first place.
Olympics National Park, 2021
Five years ago, I went to visit Olympics National Park, to the northwest of Seattle. The park is home to three very intensely varied landscapes: the rugged coastline, featuring beautiful jagged rock formations; one of the only temperate rain forests in the world; and spectacular mountainous alpine forests with meadows of wildflowers.
It was hiking up Hurricane Ridge when the idea first struck me. I was talking with my brother about diceless games.
“In a diceless game,” I remember saying, “The source of randomization for each player is the other players. You never know what they’re going to say. Like in a game of Microscope, you have to adapt to the other players ideas on the fly.”
“But I feel like you need some direction,” my brother said (Paraphrasing significantly- I don’t remember exactly who said what). “If you’re just dropped in without guidance, it can be really hard to come up with good ideas on the spot.”
(you may recognize this idea from my post about white space in game design)
“Yeah, I think that’s what random tables are good for,” I said after some thought. “One of my favorite things in worldbuilding games like Microscope and The Quiet Year is justifying stuff that seems contradictory. It’s what I love about random tables too, especially when you combine multiple elements and explain how they fit together.”
(This idea would eventually become the core of the way regions are created in Far Lands!)
The Distance
As we continued to hike, I mulled over that idea and looked out over this view:
I remember distinctly the feeling I had. I looked down into the valleys and wondered: what’s hidden by those trees? What would it be like to wander through that forest? I realized that, in theory, I could go find out. But the splendor of the view put into me that feeling of the sublime, that combination of awe and terror of the power and beauty of nature.
The snow-capped mountains across the valley seemed so large as to be unreal. They dominated the skyline, their presence a physical weight on my mind, as if their mass exerted its gravity on me across that distance. What would the world look like from their peak, I wondered. What would I see on the other side?
And for a moment I felt as if I was looking in a mirror. If I were to stand on that mountain peak and looked in just the right direction, I would see the very spot I was standing on now.
And as I imagined looking back at myself from that mountaintop, exhausted from the climb, I realized I would feel the same awe and curiosity about the land I was traveling through now. Everything around me would blend together from afar into one landscape, and the same drive I feel to climb that mountain would push me to explore here.
That thought spurred me to look closer at the landscape immediately around me, and what I saw was nothing I had expected.
The Details
This trip happened to coincide with 2021 Western North America heat wave (a horrifying and tragic extreme weather event precipitated by climate change). At the time when we were hiking up hurricane ridge, it was 80 degrees. We were hiking in shorts and t-shirts or even tank tops, and sweating profusely in the heat and sun.
And yet… there was snow on the ground.
The temperature gradient between our heads and our feet was unreal- I could feel the cold in the air up to the level of my shins. One clever hiker scooped up fistfuls of snow in a shirt, tied up the ends, and hung it around his neck to slowly melt and cool him off. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced then or since.
And with the heat wave came an unseasonably early bloom of the wildflowers on the mountain.
And we encountered a black-tailed deer quite closely!
A Discovery… and a challenge
As we hiked through the snow, our feed freezing and our heads sweating, we noticed something that made us worry:
We had heard rumors setting out that one or more mountain lions (cougars) had been spotted in the area. I would learn years later that only a few weeks after our visit, a hiker was attacked and badly injured by a hiker on that very trail. I don’t believe we were ever in any danger, traveling in a group as we were. The threat felt real in that moment, but it was also exciting to know that there was so much more going on in that place that I couldn’t see, revealed only by hints and clues.
The next day
The rest of the trip was just as incredible. I’ll gloss over the details, but the temperate rain forest felt utterly surreal and alien to me, and we encountered countless surprising moments that caused me to re-evaluate the world around me. A stray beam of sunlight illuminating a duckling. A waterfall producing a double-rainbow as it cascades into a crevasse, utterly invisible until you’re right upon it. A row of cairns built on the beach where they would be swept away by the incoming tide.
I came back from this trip with a large part of the game already formed in my head: a GMless game about building a map first by what you see in the distance, and then by what you discover when you actually set foot there. I wanted a game that let you wonder what will I find there, and then go find out. And I wanted a game where you could talk with your companions along the way and learn more about eachother as you discover the world around you. That’s what Far Lands is to me.
And as we approach the five year anniversary of starting to work on this game, it’s nearing completion- at least of the first draft of the layout!