Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1071: Wilds of Eldraine Story with Roy Graham

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

In this podcast, I sit down with Roy Graham, the person in charge of overseeing Magic Story, to talk about Magic storytelling and the making of the Wilds of Eldraine story.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I love having guests on when I'm at home. So today's no different. We have Roy Graham. So Roy is in charge of story. So behind the scenes, Magic has a story and somebody has to be responsible. That person is Roy. It's me. Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me on. is Roy. It's me. Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so the goal today is I want to talk about how we do story. We're going to use Wilds of Eldraine as our example. So we'll talk about the Wilds of Eldraine story, but I'm trying to give the scope of how exactly story comes together. So let's start. So when in the process do you get involved first? What's the very first thing

you'll do in making the story for a set? So, while it's Eldred being an example. Right. So, this has actually been something that's changed a lot over the history of Magic Story, and there have been a lot of different timelines at which the story people come in. Sometimes it's been earlier, sometimes it's been later. Right now,

I come in pretty far in advance without talking about any specifics. We're doing some story building blocks way far in advance right now, out to the things that you talked about

actually at, gosh, where was that? Was that the? Oh, at MagicCon in Barcelona. Yes, exactly. So, I mean, we're talking about those building blocks of story all the way out to 2026, 2027. For Wilds of Eldraine, I came into the process um i would say pretty early on in the vision design process so people were our design was starting to uh toss around like new ideas for um the design like the mechanical direction for everything uh and uh me and the other world building people on the team started bandying around ideas

about what an interesting return to Eldraine might look like, especially after the Phyrexian invasion had, you know, just wrapped up. So, to give us some idea, when we go into vision design, what is known? Like, what part of the story is a known thing at that time? Like, what do we know about Walt Eldraine and vision design?

What did we know? Well, so if we went into vision design right now for a set that's coming out in, like, two years, which, again, I mentioned that we've been, like, doing some story thinking on, we would know, we would have a one- to two-page rough outline about what we expect to happen, what the sort of major set pieces are going to look like, what the major characters are going to be. We didn't quite have that for Wilds of Eldraine. So when we went into Wilds of Eldraine, figuring out the story, we knew Will and Rowan were going to be the sort of main focus of the set, but we also knew that we wanted to introduce a lighter hearted story, something with more room for whimsy and less sort of darkness, since the Kenriths were by necessity pretty messed up by the Phyrexian invasion, considering that they lost their parents. We knew that a trip back to Eldraine would have that sort of fun and whimsical nature that we saw last time we went there, while balancing that with doing justice to the existing story by taking the Kenrith siblings' experiences at face value seriously.

So just to give people the idea, at the time you started doing the story, were you aware that Will and Rowan were going to lose their spark? Did you know that yet? Yes, yes. At that point, we knew. And personally, I was very excited about that because to me, Will and Rowan are such perfect, like, Eldraine face characters. They're everything that the plane wants to, like, do in storytelling, in a storytelling sense. And I also had a good sense going into this story that this would be Rowan's, breaking bad as it were I I knew that she had to she had

to have a villain turn in this story because that was something that we had been setting up for a long time and and we didn't know when we were going to see yeah so real quickly just behind the scenes stuff I happen to know this that and this might even be pre-Roy so when we first made the character of Will and Rowan way back for Throne of Eldraine and they ended up showing up before that in Battlebond, but we made them originally for Throne of Eldraine. The plan was she goes

bad and kills Will, like in the very first story, and then we didn't do that, and so they didn't, she didn't go bad and Will didn't die, and so anyway, it's so funny, like we her going bad has been part of her story for so long, but it didn't go bad and Will didn't die. And so anyway, it's so funny. Like we, her going bad has been part of her story for so long, but it didn't happen. They took years to happen, so.

Yeah, I mean, magic is funny in that way because of the way that we travel so quickly between settings and Switch focuses on characters so much that it can be tough sometimes to deliver on like a full character arc when we only get to see a character you know once every year at most right so another thing that's interesting to point out is so when we made original Thorn of Eldraine there was a lot more focus on the Arthurian part of the set than the fairy tale part of the set. You can listen to my podcast on Thuring Melodrade for all that story. But we knew when we were going back, we wanted to have the fairy tales play a larger role

than they had the first time. And we knew that we had the Frexen War right before us. So talk a little bit about how the focus on the fairy tales meant we could sort of beat up on the Thuring part of we could sort of beat up on the the Arthurian part of the world. Right yeah uh so we knew that uh like you said we knew that we wanted to focus way more on the the fairy tale component uh of of Eldraine that's kind of where the like wilds of Eldraine uh comes from and the like sets very uppermost uh thematic ideas is is that it's you're moving away from the the courts and the knights and the kings and queens and the things that you'd expect from

an arthurian influence story and you're moving into uh the you know thorny tangled strange wilderness of eldraine which is of course where uh in that like boundary place that's where fairy tales happen uh and that meant that during the world building, we knew like, okay, the courts can be well and proper messed up, right? Because we know that we're not going to need to see them as much. And this sort of like reflects a little bit about uh what i was mentioning earlier with the kenworth story by necessity being a lot darker uh not only being you know rowan's villain arc but having them both lost their parents uh we we knew that like the the world would have to reflect that also uh so in

you know behind this the uh scenes of eldraine the courts are incredibly messed up. Embereth is most of the knights. All but a few died in a glorious three-day fight against the Phyrexians that claimed tons of lives. Lothwain was entirely completed. was like entirely completed. The floating castle was turned into a horrible flying death machine that rained oil and monsters down on the citizens of the plane and so on and so forth. But that meant that like there was, you know,

we'd cleared out a lot of world building space. As long as we, you know, we'd cleared out a lot of, a lot of world building space, as long as we, uh, you know, made references to the courts and, and, uh, made clear through like flavor text and titles and, and, um, occasional mentions in the story and stuff, what had happened to them, uh, we were really freed up to delve way more into the fairy tale side of things. And the other thing that's important is one of the things that we, the reason we had done the, I mean, there's a bunch of reasons we did the Phyrexian War, but one of the things it did was it really allowed us to have this gigantic

event that would affect a lot of worlds. And that one of the things that we wanted to make sure people understood was the Phyrexian War is not a minor thing. It is not like, you know, I mean, I understand we had one set that was the Frexian war, but as far as the multiverse is concerned, like this is one of the most traumatic things to ever happen in the history of time. Right. Yeah. And we're going to be feeling that, uh, like if,

if you're keeping up with the story, you're going to be seeing the ripples of that for the next, for like over the next year, right? Like, the next year of sets and beyond. Okay, so, so we knew that the protagonists of the story were the twins. Yes.

So, okay, so another interesting part of the story is you guys wove in a very fairytale element to the story. The wicked slumber, right? That's straight out of Sleeping Beauty. So how did that come about? Yeah, so that was an interesting sort of, you know, I think anyone who is familiar

with the creation of stories and writing and all of that, the nitty gritty bits, certainly, will know that it's not always a progression of, like, well, first you write the beginning, and then you write the middle, and then you write the end, and you pretty much just take it in chronological order and see what happens.

There's a lot of discovery that happens along the way. You do a lot of realizing at a certain point that, like, oh, for this to make sense for this character, this other thing needs to happen earlier. Or they need to have, you know, a motivating factor that isn't present enough in the early part of the story. And the Wicked Slumber was something that we... So when we started doing vision and like early world building and figuring out the narrative for Wilds of Eldraine, March of the Machine obviously wasn't out yet. And the cards were still being developed. And the stories were being written.

And we had a lot of outlining and a lot of early drafts and stuff, but they weren't quite final yet. Uh, and in the vision design for, uh, Woe, it came up at a certain point that we were really interested in having this, uh, problem across the whole plane of this, uh, you know, pervasive sleeping purse that could affect anyone from royalty to peasant, fairy to human, whatever. And that meant that at a certain point, when we were figuring out, well, how might this have come about? Why would this have struck the plane now of all times? We stumbled upon the idea of, oh, this is a countermeasure to the phyrexian invasion that got

out of hand uh so we like to me this is a fun uh behind the scenes look at like the way that all of our sets are are creatively uh tangled up and and i can you know uh and how we can like jump between the kind of like siloed barriers of like, oh, the people working on mom are just working on mom and the people working on Woe are just working on Woe. We went back to Emily Tang, who is one of the world building people for March of the Machine and said, hey, can we get a card set on Eldraine that's about like a big sleeping spell happening? And then that showed up too at the end of the Eldraine side story

that Jenna Helland wrote, where most of that story is about like Rankle going around being a goofball in the middle of a terrible Phyrexian invasion um but then you have this mysterious uh sleeping curse sweeping in at the end which uh again that's like a side story it's it's not uh it's it's a hook uh that or it's a long throw for us right like we uh we can pick it up a couple months later later and immediately have this element of mystery. That's not even a long throw, though. That's a short throw.

You're right, yeah. I guess that's a topic. We've done long throws. We've done, like, original Mirrodin to New Phyrexia. That was a little bit of a longer throw. Fair enough, yeah. Yeah, so we got that stuff in sort of in the middle of development for March of the Machine to help set up what we thought would be a cool direction for Wilds of Eldrian. So one of the things that I know we talked about pretty early in vision design is the idea of taking the 10 archetypes, the two-color draft archetypes, and tying them to specific stories? And once again, our version of the story, but different fairy tale archetypes, if you will.

How much did that tie into how the story got crafted? Oh, yeah, largely. So very early on, my goal was to try and make it so that all 10 of these fairy tale archetypes came up in the main story. So we would have like Will or Rowan or Kellen, our new sort of protagonist. We'll get to Kellen in a second. We'll get to him in a second. We'll get to him in a second. We would have someone, one of our protagonists encounter

like, and then they end up lost in Sweet Tooth Village, and then they like, while put to sleep, they meet Neva in the sort of dream space of the Wicked Slumber and all of that. And that very quickly proved

foolish. That made things way too difficult and it made what was already a story with a lot of demands on it being both fun and whimsical, but also dark and about

the trauma of war. It proved too much of an ask. But I still. I do want to point out, my article on Monday, I actually go through the 10 stories and you did take five of the 10

do take place in the main. So that's, that's, you did half. That's not too bad. It's not too bad. Yeah. I mean,

we, so we, that was my compromise was half, five out of the ten show up in those five episodes of Wilds of Eldraine. The other five are sort of implied as, like, happening in the background. And when I read the story, my favorite take is, you Into the Woods-ed it. So there's a musical called Into the Woods that mixes all these different fairy tales. And

the through line in that is the main character has to get three objects that are tied to three different stories. And so, I mean, that itself comes from fairy tales. I mean, Into the Woods and you were borrowing from the same source material. But it's kind of funny, like, how do we reference it? Well, we need three objects from three different stories.

Yeah, I mean, that seems to me the most obvious structure to base the story around. There's this great maxim. I can't remember who originally introduced it to me, but I think I read it in a Jeff Vandermeer book called um a wonder book that's uh like a craft craft book about writing fantastical novels it was mentioning how uh when when you're introducing uh something that of us like a certain level of complexity you have to choose where you're putting the complexity whether it's uh in structure um in prose or in like context setting or building whatever uh and so i think about that a lot where it's like oh man there's there's so many things going on there's at least two plot lines there's like two separate tones that have to be hit at the same time so i'm offloading the

like i'm uh cutting back on some of the complexity by structurally going with a really basic uh familiar setup of like there are three objects uh our we gotta boot our hero off onto the road of adventure and have them find all three. Yeah. No, it's nice and simple. Okay, so, now, tied into this, one of the reasons, I mean, there were multiple reasons, but one of the reasons for the disparking, the sparkening, if you will,

is the Abil, or the Omen Path. I guess the Omen Path's a part of the big thing. One of the reasons for the Omen Path was it allowed us to have characters that weren't planeswalkers that could have some continuity of story. And so we'll be careful here because we're not giving away future story. But I will say the following. Kellen plays an important role in this year's story. Yes. And part I know of building your story was Kellen plays a role in this year.

So like in the sets of this year, Kellen plays a role. And so we had to introduce him. And, you know, that part of this story was setting up who is Kellen. And, you know, another big thing that you do that we won't get too much in today, but like, hey,

all the different sets have to go together. So like the story has to be like, it's not just this story, this world, but like, okay, after we have, you know, fairy tale world, we're going to underground, you know, Mesoamerican world, and then we're going to, you know, murder mystery Ravnica, and then we're going to wild west villain world, you know, so.

And you have to make a story that makes all of those work together. Yeah, I mean, it's, so, I've talked about this in a couple other venues but um the ideal magic story is so like take wilds of aldrin right uh on its own it should be you should be able to read all five episodes of that story and come away with it feeling satisfied like having not read march of the machine having not planning to read Lost Caverns of Ixalan. You should still feel like you, well, I'd say get your money's worth, but they're free.

So you should feel like you enjoyed your time in that story, right? That's one level of it. You also want the whole year to feel not like reliant on story to story, also want the whole year to feel not, not like reliant on story to story, but, but interconnected, feeding off of each, you know, the story that comes before the story that it's leading to.

You want them to feel like by the time you get to our Wild West world, and this, I guess I'm just, I'm not talking abstractly anymore. I'm being specific about like the next, you know, when you see Kellen, and I can, I think I can say he will, he, because canny story readers will have just figured this out from what we've already given them, Kellen will be making an appearance again on the Wild West world. And when he, when he does, and when you see him there, you should feel like you've had, you know, you've been on this journey with him,

that he's had a real arc. And that arc feels continuous, even though we have fairytale world into underground Mesoamerican world into murder mystery world. And yeah, threading, threading like a needle through all of that is always like an interesting creative challenge. And also, so the audience understands, each set has to have its own contained story. Each year long has its own contained story. And then usually there's a three or four year

larger story we're telling like there's just like Russian dolls here there's like stories in stories yeah I've sometimes I think of it as the jawbreaker system because there are multiple layers and all of it must be good and delicious and satisfying

okay so we have a character, Kellen who I believe is forever his codename was Jack and satisfying. Okay, so we have a character, Kellen, who I believe his, forever his codename was Jack. And so I always think of him as Jack, even though his name is, I mean, like, I always know the codename, but his actual name is Kellen,

but I know it was Jack. And so we needed to introduce him. And so, you know, like a lot of the story was introducing Kellen. So what was, without giving away where things are going, because there's secrets and stuff to come, what did we need to learn about Kellen. So what was, without giving away where things are going, because there's secrets and stuff to come, what did we need to learn about Kellen in the first, in Walls of Eldraine? Right.

So like everything that the, and I know I keep going back to them, but it's an important way to, I think, understand where we needed Kellen to land as a character. Everything that the Kenriths were dealing with at this point, Kellen needed to kind of be the

opposite of. So while they were war-weary and very sad and experienced and all of these things, Kellen was not someone who had... He had an interesting heritage, right? He,

we, at the end of the Wilds of Eldraine story, you learn that Kellen's father was the planswalker Oko. So, so he has a interesting, interesting heritage, like, you know, a blood that is not entirely human. He's half fae, but he himself has not, he's not coming in as a like brave, experienced, badass adventurer, right? He's, and that's actually out of the ordinary for a lot of magic characters. Normally, when we meet a new legend or something like that, they are at the height of their coolness. And Kellen was an interesting line to walk where we knew that we wanted him to have this youthful uh idealistic uh sort of golden-hearted optimism um that hadn't been that only feels possible a lot of the time when when you haven't uh you know had your heart broken by the world yet uh and that's why by the way the reason he had the name jack i think is

he is a lot archetypally like jack of Jack and the Beanstalk, who starts the story very optimistic and, you know, like he hasn't experienced anything yet. And it's sort of like, and I don't know if those know the story, but the Beanstalk's the beginning. Like there's a whole bunch of Jack stories. That's just probably the most famous story with that character. But he goes on to many, many different adventures and stuff. Yeah. And similarly, this – Kellen is, you know, intended for the same sort of fate.

But starting off this story is really this – like, he didn't even – there's a great line in the first episode of the Wilds of Eldraine story about how, like, even the Phyrexians never came to Oranshire, which is the town where he grew up because there's just nothing there but sheep. So having Kellen be this, like, he's not a blank slate because he has a lot of personality that is, he has a lot of like character. He's not coming in just ready to be molded by the world. Uh, but he's, he's this having him be this like, you know, very youthful, uh, young, uh, character. So early on in his, uh, sort of hero's journey, uh,

means that we have, we had a lot of room to grow with him. We can really take him somewhere over the next year of stories. So here's a question for you. When did you decide to make Ruby his sidekick in the Wilds of Eldraine story? Oh, interesting. Um, so, uh, Ruby, initially it was, um, a, a marriage of convenience, uh, in me trying to cram in as many of these fairy tale archetypes as I possibly could into the main story. Um, but then, uh, when I was talking to our writer for Wilds of Eldraine, Kira Arsenault-Rivera, we pretty quickly figured out that Callan needed a foil while he was out on this, you know, plain-spanning adventure fighting witches and nearly freezing to death, having all sorts of other misadventures. He really needed someone who had a more down-to-earth idea about what the world was and what to expect

and wasn't purely operating on, like, fairytale protagonist logic most of the time. Yeah. And Ruby sort of came out of that. yeah um there's a and and ruby sort of came out of that um along with you know i think uh with all of these 10 um storyteller story archetypes that you know your article is going to talk about in more detail uh we were trying to put like whatever we saw the the magic spin uh on all of them. And having Red Riding Hood be not a sort of like helpless victim, but be a, you know, savvy, cunning, smart, tough, you know, like a young girl, but one who has her feet very firmly planted in reality and refuses to be pushed around by Wolf or otherwise became really appealing to us when we were figuring that out. So since we're almost done here, any component of the story that you haven't talked about that you thought was like sort of a fun component that you're glad you got into the story uh there was so this

uh hmm oh man there's there's so much there's so many little things there's a lot of stuff that our uh author uh kira sort of slipped into these early drafts that we hadn't talked about and and that uh end up being like so so fun there's like a one-off character named royce who's like a weird spider spider uh she she appears as a weaver in the daylight and then when rowan uh meets her again at night uh she sees that she's like some sort of strange spider creature. And that feels like that wasn't in any early outlines, that wasn't in our, you know, 10 story tale archetypes, but it felt so appropriately fairy tale-ish and strange. It felt sort of almost like it belonged in The Green Knight or one of those sort of old Arthurian stories where magical events just sort of come about if you're sufficiently deep in the wilderness. that the author can come up with stuff and make stuff.

And, you know, that the part of the whole process of working with other creative people is you don't want to tie their hands. You want to give them some ability to sort of do some of their own magic and make some own stuff, you know? I mean, there's some parameters that we give to make the whole story work, but we do want to give them a lot of freedom

to sort of come up with cool stuff. Exactly, yeah. And, you know, the story is made better by more hands touching it. In this case, yeah. And, you know, the story is made better by more hands touching it, in this case. It's not, it's sort of the opposite of the, like, designed by committee problem. It's, in this case, it's improved by, you know, the creative work of multiple people coming in with great ideas. So I will say, just to the audience, if you guys have not read the story for Wilds of Eldraine, it's

all online, it's all free, and this is so I think we're calling this the Omen Path arc, I believe it's the first year. Yeah, that's it. And so the stuff here matters, we're going to see more of Kellen,

anyway, there's a lot of things teased at that will come to be, The stuff here matters. We're going to see more of Kellen. Anyway, there's a lot of things teased out that will come to be. So if you've not read it, I just want to say that part of having Roy on is to those that listen to my podcast that aren't story people. Hey, there's a story. And I know sometimes you just play and read the flavor text, but you actually can read the story. But anyway. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Mark.

And yeah, I just want to second that. If listening to the story is more your jam, there are like audio versions of it coming out now that are so you can like put it on while you're driving to work if Mark doesn't have a new podcast out. There's a story podcast led by Harless and Natalie, two wizard people who talk about the story and kind of geek out over it in a fun way.

So there's a lot of fun ways to get involved in the story if you don't want to necessarily just pull open a browser and read it. Well, I just want to thank you for being with us, Roy. And guys, we are at my desk. So we all know what this means. It 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 once again, Roy, thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks, Mark. And to all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.