Devlog #3 - Setting the Tone + The Wastes

Pillars: What Remains is the first game I’ve put on itch.io – really it’s the first time I’ve put anything that I’ve created onto the internet for other people to look at. Well, other than that video of me dancing from 2006 that will remain un-linked here...

Anyway, doing so has also provoked another internet first – talking to people about game design! That said, I had a great conversation with the good people over at r/RPGdesign about some of the challenges I’ve faced with “tone” throughout the development of Pillars. Early playtesting revealed that, while the world of What Remains was crystal clear in my head, I hadn’t done enough to translate that world’s presence into the games of these playtesters. I’ve worked on this issue since then - making some mechanical language more evocative, adding the short fiction piece, Another Step, to the beginning of the rulebook – but I got some great advice from redditors on how to continue to improve on this aspect of Pillars. In a game as unusual as Pillars I’m determined to make the tone really sing, and I can now see a little more clearly how to balance poetry and prose to do so. I want players to feel the world, but I also want them to understand it.

One of the most interesting comments from the thread snuck in right at the end, when someone shared that, when reading a new rulebook, they often skip right to character creation! This was a great reminder that the “beginning” of a rulebook isn’t necessarily where every reader “begins”, which has given me an idea that I’m particularly excited about threading through the next iteration of the game. Stay tuned for that, though.

Check out the conversation here. Thanks to everyone there for the feedback!

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Last time, I detailed the creation of the lone protagonist of Pillars: What Remains – the Courier. Today I want to talk about the game’s ultimate antagonist – the Wastes. Once I knew that the action of delivering messages across a treacherous landscape would be the focus of the gameplay, I needed to create a landscape that required that this be done in isolation. An obvious first influence here is Death Stranding, also a game about a solitary messenger in a foreboding wasteland. While the broken United States that Sam Porter Bridges traverses is bleak, dangerous and eerily beautiful – all things I wanted for the Wastes – what it is missing is forced isolation. Death Stranding’s apocalypse may have left its world inhospitable, but people still do travel it together.

If the players were going to embody a single character, I wanted there to be a darn good reason that their Courier didn’t have a travelling party. The Wastes needed to be the result of a different kind of apocalypse, not one that upended the natural order of life, but one that reoriented it against humanity itself.

It was somewhere in this thinking that it clicked for me – a classic high fantasy world where humanity has exhausted the world’s magic and the world is holding a grudge. Nature would bend towards misanthropy, but more importantly, it would actively resist the foundation of human flourishing – connection – by inflicting madness on those who travel it together.

I initially conceived of this as the Wastes’ hatred of humanity seeping into these people, causing them to turn on each other. Over time, though, this idea matured and became more nuanced, especially as I leaned into how cultural references like Annihilation and Returnal played with pairing the external and internal journeys of their protagonists. The Wastes’ curse couldn’t just inflict rage, it needed warp the past in order to inflict dissonance. This became so central to the concept of Pillars: What Remains that it is honestly hard to imagine the game without it. With it in place, the game is thematically whole and actually takes full advantage of the many players, one character idea.

Yes, the game is about a Courier delivering messages through a post-magical wasteland, but that could easily be a solo game. Many players play as this Courier, not just because it’s neat, but because it highlights the Wastes’ attempts to fracture the personalities of those who travel through it. Now, the game was really about something – the cohesion of identity in a world determined to pull it apart.

Next time, I’ll talk about one half of the meaning of “What Remains” – the surviving pockets of humanity that eke out life at the edges of the Wastes, along with the importance of hope in a bleak setting.

-HM