World-Gardening: Building a Home for Growing Stories
For the last ten years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about stories as intellectual property, and I’ve been reflecting on this as Stonesaga’s Kickstarter phase has gotten rolling. By intellectual property (IP) here, I mean the conceptual sprawl between a “story,” a “setting,” and a “brand.” I don’t have any answers on how to optimize a profit from an IP, but that’s OK. Instead, I’ve considered how stories expand and grow as IP. Working on Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay (Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy 2nd Edition, etc) back in the day, this was one of the first lessons I learned: “good for the story” and “good for the IP” are often at odds with one another.
What I mean by this is that a plot beat or detail that reinforces the themes of an individual work can easily clash with the wider themes of the franchise. Look no further than the Black Library novels to see how this happens. The adventures of Colonel-Commissar Gaunt are fun to read and good books, but they often soften the 40k universe into a place that feels dangerously plausible. This is intrinsically kind of contrary to the excesses that define 40k as an IP. If 40k isn’t absurd, space starts to grow for someone to ask: “Wait, are some people in this setting justified in their actions?” To which the answer is a firm “No.” 40k is about atrocity. 40k only works if it’s clear that every institution is terrible, and every individual is either complicit or powerless. This doesn’t make for the best storytelling within most individual works, and it can be very frustrating when you’re the one trying to balance these needs while telling a good story. But the whole tapestry is woven around this idea, and every incidental work that strays from it loosens the threads. The more stories that make their own best choice in a vacuum, the worse the health of the overall IP.
I saw this play out again and again over the years: on Star Wars RPG products, X-Wing ships, and more. Not in the same ways, of course. Star Wars is made of different stuff than 40k. And I got to sit on the other side of the fence when I was on the Legend of the Five Rings Story Group for a number of years, helping to guide other creators on how to fit their works into the core themes of L5R. To be clear, none of this is to say that you can’t tell good stories while cleaving to a predetermined core IP. But it’s definitely harder, and some IPs make it easier than others.
So today, let’s talk about a few trends I have noticed that help set an IP up for successful growth through supplemental storytelling. This can be licensed works, but it starts with (and often remains) fan works that drive the growth of an IP through secondary storytelling. As I go through, I’ll also try to discuss how I’ve tried to weave each of these into the narrative DNA of Stonesaga. Have I succeeded? It’s too early to tell, but I’ll be tremendously pleased if someday, people are writing secondary works about this world, so I figure I might as well make it easy in case that ever happens!
Since Spring is on its way (slowly, as I live in Minnesota), I’m going in hard on the gardening theme.
Highlight Paths to Your Core Themes
Keeping to the path should be easy and intuitive.
Or, make sure people know your IP’s core themes as distinct from the mechanics and aesthetics of the origin work. I link to my article about the heart of a game experience a lot, and I’m going to do it again. Similarly, it’s important to remember that your IP also probably has a core kernel of something that makes it special. And ideally, that kernel aligns with what you intend the IP to be about.
It's undeniably easy for people to latch onto aesthetics but miss out on the underlying themes. If you want the IP to be able to expand organically, though, it really does need to communicate the underlying themes effectively. One of the great challenges of Star Wars is that a lot of people have latched on to its military science fiction trappings over the years. And sure, “war” is in the title, but is Star Wars about war? I would argue it isn’t. This isn’t to say that a war story can’t exist in Star Wars—Rogue One is one of my favorite installments, and it’s definitely a Star Wars war story, as are the strongest arcs of the Clone Wars TV series. But, importantly, both these succeed because they bring key themes of Star Wars (interpersonal connection overcoming oppression, individual responsibility to combat societal evils) to a war story. Merely making something a sci-fi war story wouldn’t make it feel like Star Wars.
Stonesaga’s Core Themes
In Stonesaga, we’ve made an effort to really center a couple of themes, and one is the connection between people, place, and time. When a society inhabits a place, each will inevitably shape the other. And time is the dimension along which this change occurs. In Stonesaga’s mechanics, this appears in its generational play and the epochs over which the campaign takes place. But in a stand-alone Stonesaga outing of some kind, the idea that the past is closely connected to the present and shapes the future would be important to express. In a story, this could take the form of a character connecting with their history or learning something about the past from their environment that helps them to overcome a conflict in the present. The stone saga—the story that becomes part of the land itself, and recorded artistically upon the stones by the inhabitants—should be in some way key.
Set Out the Tools for Original Creation
Leave them the right tools, and people will build whole worlds around two characters who once exchanged a longing glance.
One of the best ways to prime an IP to grow is to guide people to a little corner of it that they can call their own. And one good way to do this is to set out “gardening tools,” guidelines to help people get started within the themes you’ve established. The most concisely articulated example I can think of this is in RWBY, the animated web series created by Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth a decade ago. One of the show’s core, recurring themes (established fairly directly via monologue) is how individual expression is vital to a thriving society. And this is supported directly by the simple rules of character creation for the setting, shared early in its run via social media: each character in the setting is named to evoke a color and derived from a real-world myth, story, or legend of some kind. It’s a brilliantly simple guideline with just enough restriction to create a clear pattern and more than enough freedom for people to use it to make virtually anything. For both secondary works like the novel tie-ins and fan creations, it makes a RWBY character immediately recognizable to anyone who knows the pattern, and because it dovetails with a key theme of the work, it means all stories about original characters start from a point of considering that theme.
Stonesaga’s Tools to Encourage Creativity
Stonesaga’s RPG roots make encouraging original creations a pretty natural step. The fact that you’ll be creating your own characters and society makes some of this automatic, even. But how does Stonesaga bring the themes of the game into this walking path? Well, another of Stonesaga’s core themes is around the importance of cooperation. A simple theme, but one of the great strengths humans have in facing problems prehistoric and modern alike. The character creation process encourages cooperation by rewarding players for building a set of characters with diverse abilities and traits. The more widely varied the group’s competencies, the better it will fare against the generation’s challenges. This gives each character enough of an identity to see them as an individual, and start to wonder about their personal desires and motivations as distinct from their companions. Any given generation in Stonesaga could be the subject of an RPG adventure or short story, and the way the events play out will be different for many groups based on the characters they had at the time.
Leave Room to for Things to Grow
Ask yourself “If it weren’t my garden, what spaces would seem best for planting?”
Just as important as setting out clear instructions about core themes and encouragement to create along preset paths is leaving people the space to create something meaningful of their own and bring their own ideas to the work. This is a delicate balancing act, and some IPs support it better than others. Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere is an excellent example of setting a foundation that can be built upon in a variety of ways. While the interconnected worlds of the Cosmere have a few strong recurring themes, each world has a distinct feel, from war-torn Roshar to the intrigues of Scadrial. And perhaps most importantly, the stand-alone stories feel weighty in their own right. This means there are as many imaginable worlds as there are genres of fiction, most of them are open for exploration, and it isn’t necessary for a work to address the “big events” of the setting to feel meaningful. A galaxy is a big place, and equipped with this idea, it’s easy to find spaces to imagine a new story fitting alongside the existing material without contradicting core ideas or events. This stands in contrast to another galaxy-spanning IP: Star Wars. While Star Wars certainly can be expanded in fun and interesting ways as discussed above, the Skywalker Saga tends to loom large over any story. Exceptional efforts must be made to escape its shadow, such as the Old Republic stories or the High Republic stories. This method does work, but it underscores the core issue that a single story so thoroughly dominates the IP that it’s hard to fit anything else in edgewise without going into the distant past.
Stonesaga’s Spaces for New Stories
Stonesaga has a major advantage here, too. Every campaign will be unique, especially in the details of how it plays out. This means that, when considering future expansions of the IP, there aren’t a lot of hard lines that would interfere with other storytelling. There isn’t really even a single timeline, since events can occur in a semi-fluid order based on player choice. So anything that wanted to take Stonesaga’s core ideas and spin a linear narrative would have space to make the best choices without “contradicting” the game. On the flip side, this does mean any work in the setting either needs to commit to a single vision of how events played out (as the Mass Effect tie-in novels do, for instance), focus in so tightly on single events that it isn’t an issue, or assume a (textual or metatextual) multiverse approach. This is also a place where, were Stonesaga to expand beyond the single board game to other works, there might be important choices to make. Perhaps the best thing for the board game (fluid, flexible story development) wouldn’t be the best rule for the IP moving forward. The board game attempts to express the IP’s themes effectively, but, like anything else, makes concessions to its medium.
Of course, as I like to say, we’ll burn this bridge when we come to it. If we get to the point where Stonesaga needs an IP bible, I’ll just count myself happy that we’ve gotten that far! In the mean time, if Stonesaga catches your interest, check out the ongoing Kickstarter!