by Tiago Bonifácio, Loremaster

How do you create a faction that checks all the boxes you need, while still feeling real, alive, and complex enough?

The Order of the Shattered Throne was the first faction we explored more deeply when worldbuilding for Relics Untold, and there were two main reasons for that. The first one was that it was the faction we had the clearer artistic vision for, so the art team was going to start with the Order and branch out to the other factions. Since we work side by side with the art team, starting with the Order just made sense. The second reason, and the most important for our discussion here, is that the Order has been, since the very first prototypes of the game, the “baseline” faction. What does that mean? Well, let’s get into it. 

When we did our first-ever internal playtest for the game, before even the Seekers and the Relics were a thing, we had two armies duke it out. At that point, they were nothing but the prototype of the game’s mechanics wrapped in a very basic flavor blanket. It was something like knights versus the undead. The knights didn’t really have anything all that special going for them, because they were supposed to be the basic units. The undead had a little bit more going on in terms of abilities and were a little bit harder to understand. The role of the Order as a faction in the game, even before it had its name, was to make it easy to understand the fundamentals of the game. Without adding too many bells and whistles, it should be as strong as the other factions and provide a baseline against which they could be tested. Now, notice that I did not use words such as “vanilla” or “generic”, because at times the Order can “break the rules” of the game in some very fun ways, just like the other factions. What makes the Order special is that it can take those very fundamentals of tactical gameplay and use them to their utmost. It’s easy to start playing the Order, but hard to master it. I’m sure we will eventually have some articles discussing this, but the bottom line for us here is that before we ever started to discuss worldbuilding, we had set up expectations for this faction.

Some time passed after that first game, and the factions grew from those basic concepts to something a lot clearer. We knew this faction would have fairly good units for their cost, meaning average to good stats with a special focus on defense. At this point spells had been introduced to the game, and the ones that fit the theme better were healing and defensive spells. Seekers were also part of the game at this point, and we knew what kind of seekers each faction should have, or at least what types of characters fit the themes better. With all of that information, we started to design the faction along with Tracy Hickman.

The Order is supposed to be the beginner-friendly, relatable faction, so we decided that it should be the human faction as well. Mostly human anyway. It should have the familiar trappings of knights, priests, nobles, kingdoms, and all of the other things associated with a classic fantasy setting. The spells told us what kind of magic was common within this faction, and also what kind of magic was not allowed. From all of this, we landed on a faction that has militarism and religion at its core, and for whom their magic is sacred in some way. We knew that they organized themselves in a kingdom, with a very hierarchical social structure. Like many kingdoms from real life, they trace their origins back to a fallen realm that once ruled most of the world, and they aspire to bring back the “old glory days”. They see themselves as “the good guys” (because who doesn’t) and see it as part of their sacred duty to fix what was broken and bring order back into a world taken by chaos. So far we seem to be checking all the boxes, but doesn’t it feel like something is missing? Well, although this faction checked all the boxes we needed, it lacked the depth we wanted. So, how did we solve this?

The first thing we need to remember is that this is the faction that is supposed to be easy to understand, so we don’t need to change it a whole lot, and in fact, we shouldn’t. What we need to do is give this faction unique twists on the archetypes we just discussed and organic, realistic interactions between all of them. Tracy helped us out a lot by coming up with most of the original ideas that make the Order and the other factions what they are, and my team and I made sure that everything fit together nicely in an organic, if not always logical manner. We know religion is important for the faction, and we are taking inspiration from both the Roman Empire and medieval Europe for the Order, so what if we give it a super complex religion, that has the trappings of a medieval religious system, but with multiple gods at the top (the Everlasting), and a healthy cult to heroes as well? Nobles tend to be given their rule by divine right, but what if our nobles are considered to be chosen by the representation of the gods in the world, the Relic? What if the nobles and the clergy don’t see eye to eye and are, in fact, two great forces within the faction, locked in a thousand-year-old struggle for power? These are just some of the details we added, and while a single one of them is not enough to call this faction unique, we made dozens and dozens of decisions like this that allowed us to weave this faction into a beautiful and complex tapestry.

Now we have a faction that is ruled by a council of seven representatives. Part of them belong to the militaristic nobility while the other belongs to the clergy. Notice the odd number of rulers, so we can make sure there is never a true balance between the Knights of Charn and the Valcarist Church. This is only one of the internal conflicts and contradictions we introduced, but it’s not the only one and there’s a reason for this. Even for this “baseline faction” we wanted to make sure that it felt real, even alive in a certain sense, and complexity and contradiction are a part of life. Knowing nothing else about this faction but what you may have read here in the introductory text or elsewhere on the website, consider the following:

“The Order believes they are fighting for the good of the people, that the world has fallen to chaos, and that only the blessed can save it by imposing their own will upon the faithless. As harsh as life may be within the walls of Dynas, the world outside is perilous beyond measure and must be made safe.”

Are they correct in those assumptions? Don’t try to logic your way out of this one, answer by feel. Some of you may not have made a decision yet, but most of you will probably have picked a side, because what I really asked was something like: is this the faction of the good guys? You may have assumed that the Order is composed of either tyrants or holy warriors. The truth is a little more complex than either answer, but either interpretation should be possible depending on who you ask in the world of Agnar. That’s what we wanted. We wanted the immediate visceral reaction that comes with familiarity so that those among you who like to play the cleric and paladin archetypes can find your home in this faction. Those who don’t like that kind of stuff will know to pick another faction. Now, if you do like the kind of faction that the Order is, we do give it enough depth that your love for this faction can be challenged. None of our factions is free of infighting, and the characters who compose them are as flawed as real people tend to be. This is important for us because we want to tell stories in this world, which means the world needs to allow these stories to take place. A good example of this are the Seekers.

The Seekers are going to be our “main characters” for a little while. You’ll be hearing a lot about them, and we will often show the world through their eyes. All of them are going to have their own stories, based around their distinct playstyles. From a game design point of view, we knew quite early on that we wanted to allow for multiple playstyles within each faction, and having the Seekers as a cornerstone of those playstyles meant that their personalities would be very much informed by what we wanted out of them during gameplay. If we have a Seeker who is direct and blunt on the battlefield, capable of using her magic to bolster the defenses of her allies and save them from certain death, we should have a faction that allows for this kind of behavior. If one of the themes of the deck is choosing to sacrifice a resource to save a unit on the battlefield, maybe that choice should be part of that story. As we wrote the tale of Sigrith we had to consider that she is part of the Order, and the Order is part of her, meaning we had to bend the in-world workings of the factions so that they would fit around the Seekers. For the other Seeker in the Order, we had to figure out how to make it so this isolationist faction would accept the influence of chaos as part of itself… This was a challenge that I’m sure we will discuss in the near future. 

This is the general gist of how we created the first-ever faction of Relic Untold. A lot of the puzzle pieces were already there, having been put down by the art and game design teams, and we had to draw in the blanks and expand on the general vision for the Order so that it could fit with the other factions we were about to develop. But these are stories for another time.