Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1012: Working with Worldbuilding

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

One of the teams I work closest with is the Creative team. In this podcast, I talk about how the Vision Design and Worldbuilding teams work hand in hand.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay guys, today I'm going to talk about what it's like to work with world building. So, one thing about being in vision design is I'm way sort of upstream of most people who work on the set. So, you know, when we work on the set, we're mostly working by ourselves. You know, when you get into set design, there's lots and lots of different parts of the company you have to start interacting with. Most of those I don't need to interact with. There is one exception.

Vision design has to work very closely with world building. So I'm going to talk through today sort of new worlds, returning worlds, what all is entailed from the design side working with world building. And like I said, they're the one partner that we have to get involved with very early. And the reason is we are trying to build a world in which the creative of the world and the mechanics of the world feel ingrained. Now, I've talked before about like top-down, bottoms-up, you know, top-down is you sort of start with a creative idea, bottoms-up you start more mechanically. But regardless of whether the set is top-down or

bottom-up, you, the audience, really at some level shouldn't be able to tell. I mean, unless, unless, I mean, if you're really into it, maybe you can tell. But, you know, on the surface, it should seem like every world is super flavorful, you know, and the mechanics and the creative all interact and seem like one seamless whole. That is our goal. So the question is, how do we do that? Now, my equivalent on world building is Doug Beyer. I worked with Doug for a long, long time.

And usually Doug or, not always Doug, sometimes it's somebody else, but there's always a representative of world building who's on the exploratory team and the vision design team. And the reason is, so what's going on is, roughly the same time, maybe exploratory world building starts like a month before we start exploratory. They have to figure out all the stuff they need. And so world building is saying, okay, what do we need to build the,

so the thing that world building will build is they'll make a style guide, right? They'll make something, So the guide is something that has, it shows off the world visually. It shows all the aspects of the world and it talks about various things. And it's the, it's the tool they give to artists to make sure that all the artists are drawing the world similarly and to give to writers to make sure that, you know, all the, the writing about the world, you know, is, be it the short stories, flavor text, like everybody who's involved in the making of the world understands the cosmology. So

it's all speaking in the same voice. But basically, the big thing is, we want to understand the world in a way that everybody working on the world is saying the same things about the world. For example, if we didn't have a style guide, and we just said to two different artists, draw this thing, each of them is going to imagine what they're supposed to draw, and the chance of it looking like it's from the same world is very slight. But with a world guide, we say,

here's what they look like, here's what the costume looks like, here's what the weapons look like, here's what the creatures look like. Then the people start to say, okay, and they're drawing from the same source material, and it feels like a unified world. But in order to do that, we have to make one. So the thing that the creative team is most concerned with is, what do we need to do

to properly build the style guide? What needs to happen? So, a little timeline here. So, exploratory world building goes on. It starts slightly before exploratory design, and then it goes through vision design. They're working on trying to build the world. And then, after vision design ends, usually there's what's called a world push. And the world push is where we bring in artists for like, I think it's like three weeks usually. And it's a constant iteration of what do these look like? And, you know, usually the reason that we talk to vision is we want to have a rough sense of what we're looking for before we bring the artists in to sort of do the first concept push. Because we want, or the concept push, usually there's one world push. We want to have a sense of what's crucial to the world.

So part of that is, as they're building the world, they're trying to understand the needs, like the visual needs, the cosmology needs. You know, there's a lot that goes into shaping a world. But, and here's the key thing, they're not just building a world in a vacuum. They're building a world to make a magic set out of, right? They have to have the tools. So, for example, there's something we call the character grid. So, what a character grid is, is it shows all the colors, all the sizes, small, medium,

and large, and flying or not flying, and you have to kind of fill in the grid, meaning, okay, what's a small flying blue creature? What is a big ground red creature? You have to answer all those because magic is going to, we're going to use the curve. Like we're going to have creatures of all different sizes and we're going to have flying creatures and such. And so the creative team has to have answers for that. So like one of the things they're doing is figuring out their creature grid. But also just trying to figure out what's unique about the world. You know, you want each world to have a feel of its own.

Part of that is usually there's some influence from a real world thing. Not that the world's exactly what the influence is, but there's something that says, here's something that can speak to maybe architecture or speak to some certain visuals. So the thing they do early on when they're trying to build a world is they make, I think they call it a mood board. And what a mood board is, is they take pictures, existing pictures, that they think matches the mood and tone they're going for. Now, it depends on, like, sometimes we do more top-down stuff where, like,

we're trying to capture a genre. So let's say we're trying to do, you know, gothic horror world, like, sometimes we do more top-down stuff where, like, we're trying to capture a genre. So let's say we're trying to do, you know, gothic horror world, like Innistrad. Okay, but they're going to go look at a lot of horror movies, and they're going to look at a lot of things and get a sense of, ooh, what exists that has the vibe we're going for? Let's say

we're doing something like Ravnica. There was like, okay, we need a real-world source for the architecture, so they picked, I think, Prague or some eastern European city. And it was, not that Ravnica was that city, but it was something that was reminiscent

of it in a way that allowed them to sort of design it. And that is something, no matter how fantastical the world is, there's always some element of things that we're using as inspiration. Some worlds are more derived from things than others. Like, Streets of New Campana drew a lot from the 1920s, like America 1920s. You know, Theros drew a lot from sort of Greek architecture.

Like, whatever it is, there's some source they're looking at to try to get a sense. You know, Theros drew a lot from sort of Greek architecture. Like, whatever it is, there's some source they're looking at to try to get a sense. And sometimes we build from a certain section of the world. So, you know, Tarkir was very much about elements of Asia. So we went and looked from, you know, those, the different things we were trying to copy and use those. Nothing, we are building our own worlds. We're not recreating worlds on Earth, which means we use things as reference to sort of give it a feel,

but then we get to be fantastic and we get to do our own thing. Okay, I bring all this up to explain what happens on the design side. So I'm, let's say I'm leading a vision design team. The first thing I'm doing is we do exploratory design first. So we're doing exploratory design. I lead actually most exploratory design teams. Vision teams, I lead some of them, but there are a lot of other people. I don't lead all the vision design teams.

I do tend to run mostly exploratory. So the idea in exploratory, if it's a new world, is we're trying to figure out what's the essence of the world, right? So let's say, for example, we're going to Ikoria. Okay, well, Ikoria, the inspiration was monsters, right? And so we creatively were trying to figure out what are monsters? What are the monster tropes? What are we trying to do? And so, for example, we got the idea to build your own monster. That's where Mutate came from. Companion came from the idea of you're friends with a monster. Like, a lot of the mechanics

came out of us trying to hit the tropes we wanted to hit that matched that world. And so it's a brand new world. It's a matter of sitting with the creative team, and usually what happens is on the design side, I'm just, we're trying to map out what design space matches the tone of the world, right? You know, we're doing Greek mythology.

What is that about? Well, that's about gods and heroes and monsters was our outline, right? We need to represent the gods in some way. How do we do that? We need to represent the monsters in some way. How do we do that? We need to represent the gods in some way. How do we do that? We need to represent the monsters in some way. How do we do that? We need to represent the heroes in some way. And usually the idea, part of exploratory vision, is to fundamentally get a vision to say, here's the essence of what that world is.

Just to use Theros as an idea. Gods, heroes, and monsters. So we had gods. We defined gods by the enchantments. So the enchantment subtype represented the feel of the gods. We had devotion. We sort of get the feel of what the gods were. We then used the heroic mechanic

and an emphasis on ores and things, bestow and stuff, to, like, build up your heroes. And then for the monsters, we had monstrosity. Your monsters get ferocious, but it's a one big time transformation. And then once we looked at all the component pieces, we realized that one of the themes we had was this idea of adventure and growth.

The gods, as you got more things out, got more devotion, got more powerful. The heroes, as you targeted them and enchanted them, they got more powerful. The monsters, you could spend this one time upgrade, they got more powerful. So there's a sense of evolution and of adventure that happened. You were going on quests and stuff like that. Likewise, something like Innistrad, it was was, okay, we're trying to capture the essence of what a gothic horror is. A lot of that was around fear.

How do we do things that make your opponent afraid? Okay, well, what if there's transformation? What if things can turn into much scarier versions of things? What if, uh, you know, death matter, where Morvid came from, where you always have to be worried that something dying might be bad for you, you know, death matter, where morbid came from, where you always have to be worried that something dying might be bad for you, you know. You know, we use flashbacks so that the graveyard had this relevance and that you were constantly, things were returning from the graveyard. And so we, whatever we're doing, we want to, on the mechanical side, figure out the essence.

Usually I want to figure out the emotion we're playing into, and I want to figure out what about the world is unique. Now, on the flip side, as we're trying to figure that out, the world building is trying to figure out, okay, how do we build from there? How do we make something? Now, the thing the world building needs, world building needs to have a conflict. Like, we're a game about combat, right? So we need conflict inherent in the world. It's kind of true.

I mean, if you're telling any story, you want conflict. So, I mean, what we're talking, I mean, we do environmental conflict more than sort of interpersonal conflict because of the nature of what we're doing. Meaning, if I want to show a conflict, I need the whole world to reflect into that conflict. And that the more environmental that's going on, the better.

For example, I like the Phyrexians as villains because they shape and reflect the environment. That if the Phyrexians are invading one world, they're different than if they're invading another world because they're reflective of the world they're invading. They are turning things of the world into themselves. And so, and there's a lot of mood and tone that go into making like the Phyrexians.

So the world building team is always looking for a conflict. Who's fighting who? You know, oftentimes what happens is it's elements of the, usually what happens is there's multiple elements of the set that are fighting each other. Oh, we're making Eldraine. Well, here's the courts. This is where most of the people live.

And here's the wilds where the non-humans live. And, okay, there's conflict between the courts and the wilds. That's the conflict. Or, you know, in Indusrod, there is this... There are the monsters, because obviously we're doing a horror, so we need monsters. And there's the humans, so it's the monsters versus the humans. You know, in Ravnica, we built a guild structure around, like, Ravnica is a good example where we started from a very mechanical place. We wanted ten two-color identities, and we ended up making factions with them that ended up becoming guilds.

And then the conflict was between the guilds. So the key in general is the creative team is trying to figure out what is unique about this world, what is visually distinctive about this world, what kind of creatures are in this world, what kind of conflict is in this world, and the other thing that always goes on is as mechanics are trying to reflect the essence of what the world wants, the world is also making sure that they reflect what we're doing, right? So for example, in Kaladesh, we decide that we want to do energy. Okay, well, that's a pretty

big deal. So the world building team for Kaladesh said, okay, what is energy? We have to understand what that is in the context of the world. It's a major new mechanic. It's very indicative of the world. And they came up with ether and said, okay, here's a world in which is defined by its access to this raw magical energy known as ether. And that very much helped define what the world of Kaladesh was, right? That's the give and take. It's not as if creative is making a world and then design

is just making something to match that world. It's not as if design is making a set and creative is just making a set to match that design. In the past, in magic's far past, some of those things were done. In fact, early magic, we didn't really work together.

Like, we would make a set and they would make a setting, and sometimes they contradicted each other. The classic example was when we made the Urza Saga block, we were all about enchantments, and the story was all about artifacts. In fact, it was called the Artifact Cycle.

So here's an enchantment theme in which everything about the story says, well, enchantments aren't important, artifacts aren't important, except that's not what we build. And so what we realize is when you're not in harmony, when you're disconnected,

it's just not as strong when you're driving in the same place. The first time I think we were totally connected was when we did the original, ironically, Wrath. Things deviated a little bit from there. But when we originally did Tempest, I and

Mike Ryan were in charge of the story and working closely with the creative team. In fact, Tempest had our first sort of world-building team. And I was also on, I was leading the set. It was my set. So,

I was working very closely with both groups so that the thing, like, you know, the main mechanics of the set

were slivers and, well, I don't know if buyback was reflected in the story, but there were stuff like, how do we reflect the slivers in the story?

And we did. Slivers were part of the story and the different aspects were part of the story. So shadow was part of the story. It was woven into what the story was. And that came from us working close together. Now, back then, working close together was I was doing both things. But now, we bring them in. Interesting thing is, so I talked a lot about building new worlds. So return worlds, a big aspect is we always, whenever we return to a world, we want to have new aspects we haven't seen before.

And we also want to refine. Usually there's a gap between visiting a world and going back to a world. So some of the time, like Dominaria is a good example where, yeah, we've been there many times before, but we hadn't really built a world in the modern sense of how we build worlds.

So going back to Dominaria was, okay, we've lost the source material, but how do we collect it together? You know, Kamigawa was something similar, where the last time we'd gone to Kamigawa, it really hadn't gone well. Mechanically, it hadn't gone well. And it's like, okay, how do we build something that is reminiscent of Kamigawa, that we can call Kamigawa,

but at the same time would forge its own identity and be a world in a more modern sense than how we had made things back when Kamigawa was being made. And so a lot of that is, like, the Kamigawa is a good example where, okay, the original conflict of Kamigawa were the humans versus the spirits.

There was a war, the Great Kami War. Going back, we decided we wanted to do something different, partly because the original Kamigawa hadn't gone that well. We wanted to try something different. And we were trying to bring in a whole new aspect. We really wanted to bring in the Japanese pop culture sort of aspect. Mostly what had happened, and this is a good example where when we started, we weren't even committed to being Kamigawa. We knew what we wanted to do was we wanted to do top-down Japanese pop culture and see where that got us.

Meanwhile, working with, so I think Emily Tang was, for that set, was the liaison for the creative team. So one of the things we were working really hard with is trying to understand the conflict. And then very early on, we got to the idea of modernity versus tradition, right? That one of the interesting things, one of the themes you see throughout Japanese pop culture, and even Japanese mythology, but more so Japanese pop culture, is this idea of a fight between trying to be up to date and modern and trying to withhold the traditions of the past.

And one of the tensions that was in the set was, if we went back to Kamigawa, we felt there was some obligation to honor Kamigawa as it was. That if we just completely changed and said, oh yeah, this is Kamigawa, but nothing about it felt like Kamigawa, the audience would sort of go, what? This isn't Kamigawa. But once we figured out that there was a conflict we could weave in then I was able to say

oh this is a neat thing what if what we're trying to do that's the new thing is on one side and Kamigawa as people knew it as they remember it was the other side and that way we could take the two elements of the set that we were trying

to build and rather than being sort of a bug, make it a feature. What if, you know, one of the big things, for example, in building Neon Dynasty was in my heart of hearts, I wanted to go back to Kamigawa. I knew that there was an audience that really wanted to see a return to Kamigawa. I knew that there was an audience that really wanted to see a return to Kamigawa. And I respected, you know, the world building team was really excited by this new version that they had. And so a lot of that was trying to figure out how do we make those exist. And that's a good example where it ended up that the set had two components. We let them fight against each other. That is a normal thing, by the way,

is you're going to have elements of your set that... Oh, the other thing mechanically, which is interesting, is we want synergy mechanically, even if the things that are synergistic, like Kamigawa is a fine example of this. We needed to represent the two sides. But whenever you represent the two sides from a gameplay standpoint, you need those two sides,

even though they're representative of enemies, playing well together. Because if you're playing limited, let's say, or even casual constructed, you're going to take whatever you want and build, or whatever you open up and build, and we need to make sure that we don't want to silo you. Scars of Mirrodin is a good example where it's a little more siloed where

oh well you could choose to play the phyrexians or you could choose to play the mirrans but it's hard to mix and match the component pieces and so part of the uh building the world is figuring out mechanically how to reflect both sides, represent both sides in a way that actually plays well together. So the thing we did in Kamigawa was one side, the modernity side was represented by artifacts, representing technology, and the tradition side was represented by enchantments representing you know the magic and the way things have always been. But artifacts and enchantments structurally are very similar.

So the things that make one work, that's how we can make something like modified work. Oh, well you can modify with an aura, or you can modify with equipment or with counters. And so that allowed us to take component pieces that felt like they were fighting each other, that they were in conflict, but it let them work together.

And so on new worlds, we're trying to build that from scratch. On returning worlds, well, sometimes we're returning to a world that we haven't really figured it out because it's long enough ago and we have to figure it out. So that's Dominaria, that's Kamigawa. Sometimes, though, we're going back to a world that we know. We're going back to Innistrad, we're going back to Ravnica, we're going back to Zendikar, we're going back to Theros. You know, we're going back to Innistrad. We're going back to Ravnica. We're going back to Zendikar. We're going back to Theros. You know, we're going back to a world that we have been to before, recently enough that it's got a sort of modern style guide to it. And then the aspect there is, you know, we want to sort of build on what we have.

And the nice thing about returns is a lot of the style guide can be actually art that we used before. That we can take the best art from the first visit and use that as inspiration for the artist for the second visit. And so we can build on that. And sometimes what will happen is, some artist did something we really liked, or maybe a couple artists, and then we incorporate that into larger elements of the world.

Like, oh, you saw a glimpse of this, but that was really neat. What if we saw more of that? elements of the world. Like, oh, you saw a glimpse of this, but that was really neat. What if we saw more of that? Now, one of the things that goes on that's sort of a back and forth is sometimes

creative says, here's an important part of the world, and then mechanics go, okay, how do we support that? And sometimes mechanic says, here's an important part of the design, and creative goes, okay, how can we support that? Both are important. You want creative that will be reflective of what the mechanics are.

You want mechanics to be reflective of what the creative are. The thing we've learned over time is creative is a little more flexible than mechanics. Because creative can kind of be anything. You know, creative mechanics are a little bit limited to these things within the context of the game mechanically work. And sometimes we have neat ideas in concept that when you go downstream and you talk to play design

or set design or digital or organized play or editing or rules, like there might be things that sound good in concept, but once you actually try to execute on them, don't quite work the way you think they will, or are too hard to work. So, the rule when working with creative is, we try to be reflective.

Like, creative always comes up with something that's a cool aspect that we, as the mechanic side of things, design, try to see if we can bring to life. But, one of the things about what goes on in vision design is we figure out what actually can work, what we can do. And that's when vision design, it's not that creative can't influence vision design. It does all the time.

We are constantly trying to bring it to life. But what will happen sometimes is is in bringing it to life the classic example is Innistrad so okay we're doing top down gothic horror world monsters are important monsters are key that was a big theme that kept coming up monsters so we said okay

monsters are so important we want to build them into the structure and that's when we came up with the idea we realized that we had three monsters and humans, and they covered four of the five allied color combinations. And we're like, okay, well, what's another monster we can add? We ended up adding spirits. And then we fit them into the color combination that wasn't taken yet.

So what we realized is, okay, we have four monsters and the humans, which are the victims, and that between them, we could set them up so they overlap two ally colors. Nice structural design. The problem was, when they had originally built out the monsters, werewolves had not been in red. But in order for our structure to work, we needed werewolves in red.

And I sat down with the creative team. Brady Domermuth was the head at the time. And I'm like, look, here's, you know, a lot of the sort of theme of werewolves is you're withholding something, you know, and that becoming the werewolf is bringing out the natural thing that you're sort of, you know,

in your human form not coming true. And I said, you know, there's a lot of very red about being a werewolf is bringing out the natural thing that you're sort of, you know, in your human form, not coming true. And I said, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of very red about being a werewolf. There's a lot of sort of letting go and not having restrictions and just living in the moment. And then I showed the structure and Brady understood what we were doing. I mean, we have to make a magic set. And so Brady and his team figured out, okay, how do we put werewolves in red? You know, that part of us working together is each one of us can say, this is important. Can the other side try to figure out how to incorporate this? Every once in a while, we'll try to incorporate something. And the note from creative is, this is really hard for us. Every once in a while, creative wants to do something. And our note to them is,

this is really hard for us. But we're very reflective of what the other one needs and wants. And so that way, you know, like I said, a lot of working with world building, it's not like one dictates and the other follows. It's a lot of here's an idea. Well, here, your idea spawns this idea. Well, that idea spawns this idea and you go back and forth. For example, a very common thing that'll happen in design is the world has some essence to it that we're trying to capture, you know, I use Kamigawa, Nian Dynasty. So they're trying to capture this new element of the world. trying to capture this new element of the world. And I was trying really hard to figure out, like, I wanted to be Kamigawa. And so, you know, they invented all this new stuff and that's me coming back and saying, okay, can we make this part of the set? You know,

and then, like, the idea of, like, a lot of the conflict was in trying, like, sometimes the conflict comes out of the world building, and the set reacts, um, like, um, the, the courts versus the wilds, what sort of came out of the set design, I mean, that set design, the, um, world building, um, but sometimes the, the But sometimes the structure we set up sort of defines... Not all structures are built around the conflict, although most are. And so

it's just a matter of how core it is. Usually the more core the conflict is the design, the more it is reflected mechanically in named mechanics. And that's one of the big tools we design the more it is reflected mechanically in named mechanics um and that's one of the the big tools we have at our disposal is um the loudest thing we can do in design is a named mechanic whether it be a keyword or an ability word something in which there's a name to it that

that's very loud and um so a lot of time uh we try to use that as a tool to help determine structure. For example, we're doing a faction set. It's commonplace in most faction sets to give each faction a keyword mechanic. Why? Because it speaks really loudly that, oh, this matters. It matters enough they got a keyword. And so part of building out the mechanics of the set is figuring out where keywords are most efficient. Likewise, on the flip side, the world building

team, and it's not just world buildings, I should also mention this, they're also in charge of story, right? Usually at the stage where we're doing world building the story is in outline form it's not we don't bother sort of doing the details of the story to understand the details of the world but usually there's a larger story going on and for example with Kamigawa

we knew that we knew that Tamiya was going to get completed and we knew Jintaxius was going to be there, and he was going to do the completing. So, like, we knew, like, that was one story point that had to happen. We knew that happened. But then there's a lot of, okay, let's build out the world,

knowing that that story is there. Something like War of the Spark, or as you guys will see, March of the Sheen, is built more around the essence of the story. Like, the story is the structure you're building around. We do that, and we call them event sets. We do that from time to time. Anyway, I'm almost to work.

The point of today is that we have to work very closely with the world building team so that we're working in conjunction and that the design that the vision design is making and the world that world building is making are reflective of the same thing. And so that's why we work so closely

to go back and forth to make sure that there's the reflectiveness. The thing I didn't mention, by the way, is while we're having exploratory meetings and vision design meetings, creative is having their own meetings as well. And so, oftentimes, someone from design will be in those meetings.

So there's back and forth. And the thing that's interesting, now that we've done this so long, now that this is very ingrained in our system, sort of how I design, or how we design in general, is baked into the idea of the integrating with world building is a

core element of how design happens. And so, anyway, that's why I talked about it today. It's a pretty, you can't really, there's no way to, there's no way to do,

there's no way to do design without doing the world building. So, anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it today. I'm now at work. there's no way to do design without doing the world building so anyway I hope you guys enjoyed it today I'm now at work I drove onto the parking lot so we all know what this means it's the end of my drive to work

so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic so I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast and I'll see you next time