Our Origin
Creating a world for a video game can and should be fun for the designer. But entering that new world, without knowing anything about it beforehand, can sure be daunting for the player — and it definitely shouldn’t. That is why we knew that for Cryptic Legends we want a narrative designed and delivered in such a way as to ease player immersion into our world as much as possible, using mostly text.
To achieve this, we took a three-pronged approach: we connected the process of discovering the backstory to a key game mechanic; we distilled an art direction that gives clear visual cues about specific cultures while having a distinct look of its own; and we populated the narrative with enough touch points — motifs, tropes or hooks that players will recognize or find familiar and can emotionally invest themselves in.
In the dawning age of man, when we first scattered like seeds on the four winds around the landmass of our ancestral mega-continent, it was only the bravest of souls who pushed forward into the cold north, hot on the heels of a retreating ice age that was leaving behind a verdant belt of blossoming vegetation, ripe for settlement.
There, in the steppes and rolling hills, slowly coalesced a culture, a kinship of clans, speaking a single language and sharing the same beliefs. The people of the clans recognized as most valued and holy the bonds of blood and sanctioned the bonds of marriage. They were priests, they were warriors, they were farmers; they offered sacrifices of their cattle and their enemies to the gods who comprised all of Nature and made them who they are.
Their chief object of adoration was the sky, the sun-home, the roof of the world and the all-knowing. They called him Varuna, the Allfather, Diaus Piter, and called on him to smite their enemies and not fall on their heads. The sun, they called Agna: he was the life-giver, riding across the sky, changing with the seasons, dying and being reborn. It was he who would impregnate the Earth, dubbed Tara, the fertile, the Mother and Body of the land. And in the cold ocean at the western edge of the world, Morana awaited at the gates of the nether-realm, the ruler of waters, drowner and psychopomp, known only to magi and explorers of forbidden secrets, but whom all men eventually meet.
With the gods on their side, the clans claimed the vast lands as far as the endless Eastern Steppes, and now turned towards the West. Once again, the most daring and the most desperate forged on forward to conquer a new realm, the fabled western subcontinent. Over the course of that expansion, they would irrevocably once again change, forging new cultures, each culture creating new gods and demons, by weaving countless stories about their origins, their conquests, and their heroes into new yarns. Three distinct kinships emerged from this turmoil, into a new age, a history hitherto lost to record.
We know them today as the Kelt, the Norsk, and the Slavi. These are their stories.
