You may or may not know that I’m making a video game. It’s called Spellblade: Vengeance of the Witch Sisters. It’s a retro-classic CRPG inspired by games like Ultima, Might & Magic, and Wasteland, and you can totally go play the free demo right now.

Okay, obligatory preamble out of the way, I recently made the decision to do an unscheduled update to the game that adds a new, fairly substantial feature: race selection.

Previously, you had to be an elf, no matter what. There was a choice between being a wood-elf or a desert-elf, but you were basically always a slim elf with long hair.

Now you can also choose to be a human, ork, or dwarf, with corresponding effects on your stats and how NPCs treat you in the game. That second point is what made this such a big deal–it was trivial to code different stat adjustments based on race (wood-elves get poison resistance and a bonus to Perception; dwarves resist magic; etc), but that means that now I need to write NPCs and quests with the knowledge that the player might be one of five possible races.

Today I want to talk about why I made this change, the benefits and challenges arising from it, and also pontificate a bit about game design, character creation, and fantasy races in general.

Why Race Selection?

Race (or “ancestry” or “species”) selection goes back to the very foundation of RPGs, with the very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In those early iterations, it came with heavy tradeoffs–being a non-human race came with pretty significant bonuses (especially for elves), but also imposed very oppressive level caps to make up for it. One gets the sense that Arneson and/or Gygax (more likely Gygax) didn’t really want to have them in there, but recognized the demand from fans of Tolkienesque fantasy, and this was the compromise. (Gygax was more influenced by classic sword-and-sorcery à la Conan the Barbarian, which did not usually feature different fantasy races.)

The Basic line of D&D actually had different races function as different classes, making them feel extremely distinct, if not always well-balanced. This way of doing it is interesting from a game design perspective, but doesn’t seem to be fondly-remembered by most gamers and you rarely see it in modern fantasy RPGs.

In modern D&D and most games like it, race/species is a fairly simple decision point during character creation that comes with minor stat adjustments and a kit of abilities and modifiers (darkvision, your general size, etc). I don’t want to overshoot and say that it barely matters, but certainly its impact is much lower than, say, class selection.

And I think that works because, at the end of the day, it’s far more of a roleplaying choice than it is a mechanical one. If you’re playing an elf or dwarf, it’s probably because at one point you thought that Legolas or Gimli were cool. These fantasy species generally have a set of commonly-understood traits associated with them, and something about those traits attracts or interests you–elves are lithe and sexy; orcs are big and monstrous; dwarves are silly little bearded guys with giant axes; etc., etc.

That doesn’t mean you can’t break from these tropes, or that there’s not a ton of variation within–dwarves can be more Viking than silly little garden gnome, and the Elder Scrolls did a good job portraying a nation of Nazi-coded elves in Skyrim.

The point is that, if you play roleplaying games to roleplay at all, you probably aren’t basing your ancestry selection merely on whatever mechanical bonus it conveys. You’ve got a character in mind, and you see that character as an elf, or dwarf, or orc, or fae, or what-have-you.

(I strongly believe, by the way, that mechanical effects of race selection should highlight and support this theme. I gave my wood-elves a bonus to Perception because someone playing a wood-elf probably wants to be a good archer; I gave my orcs a bonus to Strength because orc players probably want to be warriors, etc. You can break out of those archetypes, but then you are specifically playing against type, which is the desired goal.)

So if all that’s true, then why wasn’t this feature in the game from the start?

Why Elves?

As stated, initially your only choice was what kind of elf you wanted to be. (And the difference was really just whether your sprite was white or black; NPCs would react based on this occasionally but there was no mechanical difference.) There’re a few reasons for this, but at the end of the day, it boils down to simplicity and convenience.

Spellblade started as an ardent attempt to make as simple a CRPG as possible, while still containing everything I personally love about CRPGs. Simplicity was a design pillar.

It was so simple that I was using 2-color graphics. I was going to eschew companions entirely and have it be a single-character party from beginning to end.

And, I was going to limit character creation to just elves.

I’ve talked before about how I like traditional fantasy races, and elves are my favorites. I know I’m far from alone in this, but whatever–disliking things because they’re popular is just as reactionary as liking them because they are.

So if I was going to limit race selection, it was going to be elves.

Now, I actually think this doesn’t make much sense. If you’re not going to give players race selection, but fantasy races do exist in your world, then you should probably just limit players to being humans unless another race is in some way the central focus of the story. (Which, to be clear, is not the case for Spellblade.)

It feels weird for the game to assign you an elf as a character, drop you into a kingdom mostly inhabited by humans, and then also show you orks and dwarves and not let you be any of them.

Ultima IV and onward didn’t let you choose a race! I coped to myself when these thoughts would nag at my mind. But the Avatar in the Ultima games is always a human, and after III: Exodus, the fantasy races mostly disappear from Sosaria/Britannia. So that was a bad excuse.

Legend of Zelda forces you to play as an elf! I mean, kind of, but that’s also not an RPG.

I was coping. I just didn’t want to do all the work it’d take to implement race selection in a game that was supposed to be super-simple.

Thing is, as development went on, I broke my own boundaries on many things. The graphics became full-color. I added companions. Multiple game modes. I put the game on Steam and started to think about doing a Kickstarter. I got emails and comments from people asking why you couldn’t be anything other than an elf. And so, this hole started to feel more like a mistake, more like sloppiness, than an intentional choice.

Maybe race selection could be a Kickstarter stretch goal, I thought foolishly. Asking people to pay money to see a feature that is ubiquitous in a genre is just disrespectful.

So, I bit the bullet and did it. If I wanted people to give me money on Kickstarter, I needed my best foot forward–I needed to get this feature into my game.

The Work

I was correct, of course, that it would be a ton of work. The first choice was pinning down which races, and this was a no-brainer–just the obvious ones, in the spirit of my K.I.S.S. design pillar. I already had elves, so I just needed humans, orcs (which I spell with a ‘k’ in my universe), and dwarves.

Then came the most laborious part–the art. I needed to create new sprites not just for every race option, but also for each body type (masc or femme), and an additional set for humans so you could choose between European/white and African/dark skin tones. So, if you’re keeping score, that’s 8 new base sprites.

But wait, there’s more! Spellblade has several dozen clothing/armor options, and I also needed to create sprites for each of these on the new bodies.

Including the base (naked) sprites, and discounting the ones that are the same for every race (e.g., plate armor where you can’t see your character’s face at all), this meant 32 new sprites for each race and body type. Doing some quick, back-of-the-napkin math, this meant…

256 new sprites needed to be created.

And that’s not even touching the time and effort it spent to actually implement them into the game–not only tagging the sprites to the different choices, but also going through every dialogue to look for instances where the game assumed you were an elf and rewriting it, or creating new branches so the game actually reacts differently if you’re an ork or a dwarf. I’m sure there’s still a few instances I’ve missed, so that work will have to continue.

So, yeah. That was a fun couple of evenings.

Look, making a game is hard. I’ve already spent hundreds of hours on Spellblade, basically any time that would otherwise be leisure time, alongside a day job and all the stuff that goes into writing and publishing a book (buy Seed of the Black Oak September 1st!).

And in addition to actually making the game, you have to market it! I have to write posts, edit videos, create devlogs, curate screenshots, and do much, much more to get even a few people to care about this game. Just the simple act of posting an update on Steam is convoluted and takes a substantial amount of time.

So, the rotten truth is, I resisted putting this critical feature in my game because it was a lot of work and I was procrastinating.

I’m glad I’m over that hump.

But it was Worth It

Now that the feature is in the game, I can’t imagine playing without it.

I am a consummate roleplayer, even in CRPGs with very few actual roleplaying mechanics. I ignore all the nonsense about the Avatar being from real Earth in the Ultima games’ framing story and pretend I’m just a hero in that world. I craft backstories for my Might & Magic characters based on their attributes and imagine how they react to different situations and combats. Fallout 2 is possibly my favorite game of all time not because it’s the most profound or polished, but because to this day it is the CRPG that I feel supports the widest variety of roleplaying styles. The first time I played it I consciously tried to roleplay as the protagonist of an unpublished novel I’d written, and it felt natural and validated the entire way through.

If I’m approaching a new CRPG, one of the first stress tests I put it under is to try to make a very specific fantasy archetypical character and see how well the content supports it. The elf archer, the dashing rogue, the dumb warrior, the eccentric wizard, the bloodthirsty dwarf fighter. I don’t even need to do a full playthrough–just a couple of hours to see how well the game actually facilitates roleplaying. Are there equipment choices that support that? Are dialogue options flavorful? Feats or perks that allow me to recreate my favorite scenes from fiction?

But a lot of games fail this basic stress test fairly early on. Daggers are treated as weapons-of-last-resort, so my backstabbing, dagger-wielding thief is unfairly handicapped. Hide and leather armor are treated as uniformly worse than plate or chain, so my ranger is basically playing on an unofficial hard difficulty mode. Dialogue options boil down to endless minor variations of “Yes,” “No,” “Yes (Sarcastic),” and “No (Evil).”

Race selection, if it’s well-integrated into the game, is critical for having a possibility space wide enough to pass this stress test, and support a wide enough spectrum of gameplay that any strange or bespoke variation within is also possible.

Because I should also be able to make a less archetypical character–a dwarf who’s a genius wizard; an elf who’s a big, dumb barbarian; an ork who’s a soft-spoken ranger in touch with nature.

It’s going to take even more work going forward to make sure that Spellblade actually uses the different races to support all these kinds of characters (from the archetypical to the gonzo), but it’s also necessary for achieving the goal of making the CRPG of my dreams.

Writing Fantasy Races

Some of this advice will be applicable to writing fiction in general, but some will apply more specifically to games.

Spellblade takes place in the same universe as my fantasy novel Seed of the Black Oak. I’ve also written another, unpublished, novel set in that universe that’s a whopping 250,000 words. So I’ve been living in this world for quite a while.

Different fantasy races exist in that world primarily because I think it’s very interesting to explore through fiction how different sentient species might coexist together. I’m fascinated by anthropology, and learning about all the different species of hominids that once walked the earth excites my imagination like few other subjects. The what-ifs are endless–what if Neanderthals had continued to evolve alongside homo sapiens to the present day? How would that have affected human migration? The development of civilizations? Our conceptions of “race”?

So that’s how I approach elves and dwarves and orks. They’re different species who live alongside humans and have physical, biological differences but are all, fundamentally, sapient–all human in a metaphysical sense.

I like to think that this helps me avoid some of the sticky issues that come with writing about fantasy “races.” The linked article, for example, states that Tolkien’s world of Middle-Earth “does not play by the same rules as our own (equally on matters of dragons or genetics).”

Well, my fantasy world does, making allowances for magic to intervene. So if orks are, on average, stronger than humans, it’s because they are a different species–it’s the same reason that gorillas are stronger than humans.

But that example highlights the problem–gorillas are animals, with less-than-human intelligence.

I shouldn’t need to explain why comparing what are supposed to be sentient people to apes to explain biological differences is fucked.

So it’s a bad comparison. Orks are a different species from humans in my world, just like jellyfish or chipmunks are, but orks are fundamentally people, exactly as intelligent and thoughtful and capable of humanity as homo sapiens.

And unfortunately, in the real world, we simply do not have a frame of reference for what it’s like to live alongside beings like that.

(Some animals such as great apes, cetaceans, and corvids might arguably qualify, but unfortunately they are not treated that way by society at large, which is what matters here.)

So when writing different fantasy “races,” you (or I) cannot understand those archetypes I’ve been talking about as racial archetypes. They must in all cases be cultural archetypes, and portrayed and justified as such.

Culture is not independent of biology. We as humans fundamentally value things based on our ability to sense them–visual art would not make sense if our species could not see. If we could smell as well as dogs, then we might value scent much more highly in our cultural products. Etc., etc.

Now, imagine if the average human lifespan was 200. Or 500. How would that change our perceptions of time, of the value of life and death, of aging and youth? Every story humans have ever told would be different, right?

You can apply this to almost any genetic trait humans have. We don’t have tails, so tails are associated with animals. We see poorly in the dark, so darkness and night-time are associated with the unknown, with mystery, with fear, with liminal spaces.

Keep it pushing.

Elves in Tella, my fantasy world, are not immortal like in Middle-Earth, but they do live for centuries (I’ve intentionally left it vague, but they start being considered “elderly” at around 350).

So they don’t see life, or aging, or history, the same way humans do. They can’t. It wouldn’t make sense. They take their time–they react slowly to crises, knowing that the world is always changing no matter what they do. They don’t breed as much, since they have much more time to do it, explaining why they don’t dominate the world in terms of population with their long lifespans.

Humans, on the other hand, are acutely aware that their lives are fleeting as compared with their pointy-eared cousins. So they are much quicker to dive into life, to learn new skills, to make their lives matter. Thus, the extra skill point you get at character creation.

But that’s an easy one, right? What about orks?

Well, they’re slightly bigger and stronger than the other species. That obviously makes them well-suited to becoming warriors, but they are also fully-realized people with their own personalities. Not all of them will want to be warriors. Some will want to study magic. Or be fishermen. Or be rogues, prizing agility and sneakiness over strength and martial talent.

And, this is a world with magic. A +1 to Strength isn’t going to save you against a Fireball. So it’s not like the orks would be incentivized to think that their slightly larger-on-average builds mean they’re some kind of master race destined to subjugate the “weaker” ones.

Besides, orks may be slightly stronger on average, but there are still humans, elves, and dwarves that are just as strong as the strongest ork.

So, people in this world will naturally develop beliefs based on that reality. Some humans or elves might stereotype orks as stupid out of jealousy or insecurity that orks are physically bigger. Others might fetishize them for the same reason. Some polities or societies might pigeonhole them as manual laborers, or highly respect them as warriors.

All of these should exist in a good fantasy world side-by-side, expressed by different characters at different times for different reasons.

In something like a novel, this is easier–you know your characters, they have set personalities and motivations, and you write them. Cool.

In a video game, however, especially an RPG, where the player makes their own character, you have to tread carefully.

A few NPCs being racist to your ork character is interesting and lets you roleplay–especially if you get the chance to punish those NPCs for it. If it happens all over the game–even if it “makes sense” diegetically–it’s going to become tiresome, offensive, and exploitative.

The bottom line is that, when writing a world with fantasy races that are both believable and create space for very traditional, archetypical characters, you have to make those archetypes make diegetic sense.

Elves tend to be good archers because they have better eyesight. Orks tend to be good warriors because they have, on average, a higher muscle mass. Humans have a shorter lifespan, thus have a cultural tendency to live life to its fullest. Dwarves…

…oh shit, dwarves.

Races and Game Mechanics

Dwarves in Spellblade are naturally resistant to magic, and here comes the problem.

Why? What biological or genetic process makes them resistant to magic, something that operates independently of biology or genetics?

There really is no easy answer–I can devise one and make it a part of my world, or I can ditch that mechanic for a different one.

But I don’t want to ditch it. It’s how I conceptualize dwarves in fantasy.

So how to bridge the gap? How to make dwarves resistant to magic in a way that A.) doesn’t break the fundamental metaphysics of my universe; B.) isn’t dissociated from the game world; and C.) isn’t problematic as hell?

Well, I have to create a new rule for my universe, basically, without violating point A above. Magic is a process by which higher powers can break the laws of physics–create a fireball, heal a wound, raise the dead. What would make an entire species resistant to that process?

Some fantasy worlds handwave this with some nonsense about dwarves being “more technological. But that’s turning what should be a cultural trait into a racial one, and also setting up a dichotomy between magic and technology that I do not like. (I love Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, but its magic/tech dichotomy is among its weakest aspects).

Some lean into the cultural aspect of such rules and embrace a completely dissociated explanation, such as that dwarven culture shuns magic. I’ve already talked about why I don’t like this.

The only real way to do this in my world, given its constraints that biology and physics have to work the way they do in the real world but also magic can bend or break those rules, is for a magical explanation.

So, in the world of Tella, dwarves have a magical resistance to magic that is hard-coded into their DNA. They don’t understand this process–they don’t know what DNA is because they haven’t invented chemistry yet–but it’s there. Deep back into their prehistory, before the dwarves even spread throughout the world to form distinct clans and tribes and then kingdoms, their patron deity (the existence of gods is another can of worms we’ll save for an article about fantasy religions) quite literally inscribed this protection into their DNA.

There’s a similar thing going on with my Sadra, or desert-elves, who gain a bonus to their magic points, allowing them to cast more spells. Magicka in my world is like aether, or quintessence, a fundamental element found in all living things that makes magic possible. People use it to cast spells, which drains them until they are able to rest.

So the game mechanic of “magic points” or MP is directly associated with the game world.

But why would one “race” of people genetically be able to hold more of it in their bodies?

Well, I asked myself when creating this aspect of the world, how would they have evolved to live in the desert? And not like nomads who travel through the desert or live on its outskirts, but an actual civilization that builds monumental cities right in the middle of a real-life barren wasteland?

Well, there’s a natural font of magicka/aether/quintessence under their desert, of course. When the prehistoric ancestors of the desert-elves discovered it, it also rewrote some of their DNA to allow them to more effectively channel and store magic.

They’d need a lot of magic to create water in the middle of the desert, after all.

I think you actually need these kinds of magical explanations for game mechanics related to magic, honestly. It’s easy for me to chalk up a wood-elf’s +1 to Perception to normal biological evolution, but magical problems require magical solutions, so to speak.

Final Thoughts

I guess this post has been a bit of a ramble, but oh well. I needed to sketch out my thoughts on some of these things, and I also like having posts like this as a record of what I’m thinking and why I did certain things. If Spellblade ends up having legs, the way so many of my favorite CRPGs of all time do, then it’ll be a nice historical record of when the game became close to feature-complete.

Also, you should go play the demo and follow our Kickstarter.