I'm not sure how apt the RRG guys are at writing (well we know Walker can do puns =P) Chances are they'd really need to bring in freelance writers, so it's important to find the right people, and work just as hard creating a consistent, quality world, as it is picking the right sculpters and producing quality miniatures. And it's not just RRG who need to do their resarch, but the writers too.
Just because we often call it fluff, doesn't mean it's any less complicated and time consuming to produce, so I'm happy to let RRG take their time with it. They've said they want to focus on establishing a great game atm, which makes sense. At the moment the game looks like it'll be great, and while it feels a bit like a boardgame translated to the tabletop, that's in many ways a good thing, because that chess-like simplicity makes it really easy to get people playing. But without background text and narrative elements, it will struggle to establish itself as a core skirmish game.
Honestly, one of the best methods is to encourage people to post stories on the forum, and recruit talent from within the community. Wyrd have done a pretty good job at that, and it's always nice when you can get feedback on your own story from one of the game's writers.
As for how RRG should handle the fluff, I would like it to be more world-driven, than character or story driven. Create the world, and convey it by placing different characters in different contexts. I want stories, and I want to know the characters better, but I don't want it to be a continuous narrative. Malifaux is great, but it's main story is rather weak and disjointed, because it has to escalate, it has provide characters with tougher challenges, without being allowed to kill them off, and the result feels like a comic rather than an engaging journey (which is hard to do when the characters start out as badass). So you can have a ton of stories detailing Hermes' rise in the arena, even have contradicting stories to create the effect of him being mythologised, but that's mostly in his past, yet provides depth for who he is now. You can still do story progression, but it would be world progression, like a new emperor, or a war breaking out, and we see how that effects the characters (who have limited control over their own fate) rather than the world revolving around them and making them out to be more than what they are (though perhaps they have more influence on some things than they know).
I could probably ran all day on this, but I'll stop there. I might try and write up a short story or two.
_________________ Bentley Hunter from the Kickstarter.
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