Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1175: Duskmourn Worldbuilding with Emily Teng

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with Emily Teng, the Duskmourn: House of Horror worldbuilding lead, to talk about the creation of this brand-new plane.

I'm not pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work at home edition. A lot of times I use these for interviews. Today I have Emily Tang with us who led the creative team for Dusk Mourn, the world building team and so we're going to talk all about the making of Dusk Mourn. Hey, Emily. Hello. I'm totally not driving while I'm doing this also.

It's a very stationary drive to work. OK, so let's start at the very beginning. So when did you first get involved? What's your earliest involvement with Dusk Mourn? So I was brought on during the vision phase. So Doug Beyer was leading vision, but it was already planned that I would take over as set lead once this moved into the point where we start

to write the world again and everything. So I was in there during vision just sort of like a lot of it was really just like listening in and helping brainstorm at that point and just like double like just being an extra I, mind in the room while we tried to come up with how exactly we're going to terrify you. So the one thing that I know from when we got greenlit, meaning when we officially got the approval to make this set, the two things we knew were kind of a 17 and 80s horror, kind of a modern horror, and house that is infinitely big. Those are the two things we knew.

So how did you guys approach those? Those are both very different things for Magic. I mean, so we started with like the 70s, 80s aesthetic and I think like for the most part we kind of, well, I don't know about the most part, but like I think we stuck to that as a base, but we definitely expanded on it too. Cause like, as you can tell't know about the most part, but like, I think we stuck to that as a base, but we definitely expanded on it too. Because, like, as you can tell from looking at the cards that we're not just doing like the 80s and 70s tropes. It's not just like the campy horror of

that time. It's like we are, we're, we did get a little more modern out with our inspiration. So we're pulling up some of the more like, I guess, we went into like video games, also for inspiration and then like creepy fazzas and like, that sort of stuff. Because the thing about horror is like, it's what is terrifying to people is constantly changing and evolving. So we'd stuck with like 70s, 80s inspiration. Like it was, it was scary at the time, whenever you were watching those movies back then. But like you show that to someone now, they'll be like, I can see the ropes and wires pulling the monsters.

It doesn't faze me. So it's like horror is constantly evolving. So we wanted to use the 70s and 80s as an inspiration, but we wanted this place to be genuinely terrifying too. So that's why we like went more modern with some of our influences also. As for Haunted House, it was... I don't remember where the inspiration... I don't remember how the decision to make the entire plan of Haunted House came about, but I do remember just like there being a lot of discussions of like how exactly we would manage it.

Like, how do we make sure this still feels big enough and expansive enough to be a plane even though, even if it's all like, if there are walls everywhere and windows and it's all supposed to be indoors. I think that actually grew up, grew pretty naturally. It was, yeah. The thing that's to me very interesting about the set is we took some premises from the very beginning that Magic just never does. The idea of being indoors was like, hey, could we make something that just has a very unique,

the claustrophobic feel, like you're never, and the interesting thing is, what I thought was cool, what you guys did was, even though we never went outside, we kind of went outside. Do you wanna talk a little bit about how that came about? Like how you ended up having external things that were still inside?

Yeah, I mean, I kind of, mentioned a little bit just now, but it's like we wanted this to still feel like it was expansive enough to be an entire plane. So that meant like when we started out, we were just listing off a bunch of like places you would expect to see indoors. Okay, we get kitchen, we get living room, we get dining room, all those all the usual expected rooms. But then we started thinking, but then like, as we were imagining this place, it's like, this place does not feel big enough. Like, you walk into a living room, it's just a living room. Where is the sense of how big this plane is, of the scope of it. So then we were like, okay, so I guess we do need,

so it was like, yeah, we do need some outdoor spaces, but we don't want it to actually be outside. Part of the feeling of this plane is just, you can't escape from the horror. It's just horror everywhere. There is no reprieve. You cannot open the door and step outside and be safe. So we took all the places that should have been outside, brought it inside, and then we tried to reinforce that just by making sure there were structures

everywhere, like house fixtures. Even if you're outside in the forest, there are doorways, there are windows hanging in midair, just all these things that you would typically see around your house that tell you this is not a normal place, this is not a normal environment. And we just, we had them like, we wanted them to be sort of like surreal and like make it very obvious that there's something wrong with it, which is why you get like the doors inside of trees, windows that don't, are not fixed to any wall that you can tell, but you can see clearly through them that there is something else on the other side. It's just adds this level of disorientation.

It's kind of it was kind of a joke while you're making this set, too, that the art director of video is never going to work on a set with a proper sky because the sets he did before this were. I was lost, Kevin's excellent. Yeah, lost, Kevin's of Exelon all under, all underground. And then, uh, all will be one, which is just like the impressive Brexian skies. Yeah.

Well, that's funny. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about, so the core, there's an origin story to this plane. Um, uh, so let's talk a little bit about the big bad and how, like, how'd you come up with the story of how the plane sort of came to be? Oh, so that was, that was someplace

where we were deliberately trying to lean into, like, I guess, the like, classical demon, demonic pact or like, the like the classical demonic pact and then like the classical loner in loner in school who makes it. Well, okay, I don't know if that's actually possible, but it's like the, you know, the whole, the whole trope of like the loan, the bully loner in school. Um, so, uh, like for, for anyone who doesn't know the backstory, it's Marina Ventrell. She's a bullied in school. She makes friends with an entity in her basement who offers

to solve her problems for her, just like a friend would do, right? She unwittingly makes a pact with this entity who turns out to be Valgevoth, and that is the key to unleashing his power and letting him just start devouring the entire plane. He's still bound into the structure of the house. He can't break that binding. So he just sort of subverts it by expanding the boundaries of what is defined as the house until it comes to encompass the entire plane. So where did you get the idea of Elgvath? Like I mean obviously you're playing some demon tropes but he has a lot of I don't know he's an interesting character like where did you get the idea? What's the core? I mean that one was just leaning hard into the malevolent demons, just like the really

classical malicious demons that you have in horror media a lot. I think magic sets a lot recently have subverted a lot of the tropes or humanized them or blended them with other creatures or give them different motivations. This one it's like, we really want to go back to the classic demon. Okay, so we have our classic demon. We let's talk a little bit about the story. So you guys spend some time making the environment,

but part of your job, you know, the team you guys have to do also is set up the story. So how do you guys do that? You mean like, how did we, what's the process for it or? Well, what I mean is for the audience, because you guys have to both build the world and you have to make sure you're, the story is done by a different team.

You guys don't, you're not writing the story, but you are setting up the world so that the story can be told. How does that process work? How did you guys interact with the story part to make sure that the world you're building was telling a cool story? So part, so while the world guide is being written,

well hold on, that's not exactly okay, I guess it's like, well, so I will start writing the world guide and then first draft of it or whatever I'll share with Roy Graham, the story lead. Roy Graham, the story lead. He will take that and start, he took that and started as a starting inspiration for the outline for the set story. And then there was a lot of back and forth from that point as I was refining details of the world guide, making sure it matched up what was in the outline. And we were both trying to stay like, like the thing the story tries to do is try and stay true to the essence of the world building. So he leaning super hard into like the horror tropes. There we like we worked together to figure out the heroes of this of the set you know Typhar, Nico, the Wanderer, Kaito, all the rest of them really leaning into like the

80s tropes of you know horror movie I guess victims the jock, the nerd, all of that. And then after that, Roy sent the outline to Shawna McGuire, aka Marigrette, who is she actually is, in case anyone didn't know, she's a huge horror fan and a somewhat well-known horror writer. And she just takes the outline and runs with it at that point. Okay, so in world building, I know that a lot of your responsibility is, hey, we have to make a whole set out of this, right? There has to be, we make the creature grid and all the stuff that we're like, here's all the things that set will need. What were the

challenges? Like in any one set, there's some challenges as far as what did the set not naturally lead that you guys had to sort of consciously make sure you added? So we definitely had to make sure we consciously added some like non horror creatures in here. The beasties, the glimmers, we had to have a little bit of hope a little bit of comfort for the people who are trying to stay alive in here. For the survivors in the house, but also like for the

players who are not super fan of horror, we wanted to make sure there's like, oh, there's still like some card art that we'll be able to look at without wanting to just like not touch it physically. We also wanted, we also had to consciously make sure like, we were, wait, let me rephrase that. We made a concerted effort to figure out what could be horror representations of what are generally benevolent effects in magic. For example, life gain.

That's typically a good thing, typically seen as healing. Well, what is a horror twist on this? Maybe you are being healed by the cult of Algovoth. Maybe it is like spores growing out of your skin or something like that to knit you back together, but of course it horribly infects you at the same time. We didn't necessarily use all these ideas but we definitely wanted to brainstorm them and had a bank of them just in case to make sure that we had all the options we needed for hitting the correct amount of horror we wanted. So that's interesting that the things that are positive were the tricky thing.

The negative things are probably pretty easy in a horror world. It was pretty funny. It was like, well, what does black do in this world? Everything. Okay, what do all the other colors do? Like white and green were definitely the hardest to solve for.

So another big part of this that I know we did on the mechanical side, but you guys had to do on the creative side was Magic has done horror before. This is not the first time we've done it. Probably the most famous is Innistrad, which does gothic horror. And then we have New Frexia. I call it like alien horror,

but it's sort of like an unknown quantity to it. So one of the things you guys wanted to do was not just make a horror set, but make a unique thing that didn't feel like it was just a retread of what we'd done before. How did you guys do that? Well, one of it was definitely the inspiration we're pulling from other horror sets,

like in A Strong Note is notably pulled from more of the Gothic horror. We are definitely more modern in our inspirations. The aesthetic wise too, Duskmore obviously has a more modern look to its visuals. There's also an element of, I guess, religion to it. To gothic horror, there's this element of like, you... Here, let me... Can I... Yeah, for example, the Church of Avacyn was a very, very important part of Innistrad.

Because a lot of things of gothic horror is like as you said earlier, the horror is based upon the time that it gets made. And at the time that Gothic horror was made, one of the driving forces was the church. And so there's a lot of religious imagery that's really embedded in a lot of Gothic horror. That's why we made the Church of Avacyn. That's why there's an Avacynian symbol, you know. And so modern horror, I mean, not that it doesn't play into different aspects, but it's

more about the psychology because modern horror is a lot more about like inner fears than external fears, where Gothic is a lot more external fears. Yeah, we definitely went way more personalized with Duskmore and personalized in the sense that the fears are getting more tailored to the people living within it. It's not just like there are some whores populating this place and you're surviving behind them,

surviving alongside them. This plane is, has it out for you specifically? I mean, it has it out for everyone specifically too, but it will create whole new monsters that you that that are your specific terror, just to hunt you down and kill you. And I think that is like that was a big way we differentiated from a lot of the other a lot of other horror that magic has done to because like even even for Innistrad Phyrexia all those it's like the horror just exists and you exist alongside it this one is it exists because of you it exists for you. Right, it's custom made for you. But the thing that's interesting to me from Innistrad is the great, the driving force of the whore of Innistrad is that all the monsters were once human, right?

The idea that you could become a monster. But here, none of the monsters were, none of them were human. Obviously they come born of, well, I mean, maybe one or two, but most of them were human. And then you become, it's more that the whores come from the fears of humans rather than they were once human.

Yeah, well, I mean, the razorkin were definitely former humans. Okay, okay. Or, I mean, they're still humans. So that's the thing, it's like the razorkin are still human, they just are definitely not nice humans anymore. Yeah. Like, like they're, it's not like evil is, it's not like some horror is

being enacted upon them. It's they choose to embrace horror. They choose to embrace evil. Explain the Razorkins. Who are the Razorkins? Oh, so the Razorkin are former survivors who have given in to the malicious influence of the house and have now devoted all their lives, all their existence to hunting down other survivors and inflicting pain upon them for their own amusement. Did you have any rule about what the survivors were with any sort of guideline? All the survivors are thing X or thing Y? I think the one that comes to mind immediately is visually, all the survivors had to be a

very recognizably human or humanoid silhouette anyway. So like humans, core, elves, anything that because we wanted them to have a more I guess human typical silhouette just so that they stood out against all the other silhouettes of the monsters within the house. I think that it might actually be yeah that's probably the biggest one. Okay so what other I mean you made the razor again what are the creations did you make for the house? What other, like unique to this world beasties are there? Well, the beasties for one. The beasties are these big shaggy creatures who always wear a mask over their face who are, who try and help and protect the survivors of the house. Their driving motivation is they just want to be loved. They want to have friends and companions, which they find in the survivors. Let's see, what else did we make? We didn't make horrors and nightmares specifically for this house,

but I think we implemented them pretty uniquely here. So horrors, nightmares, and glimmers, which I'll talk about too, they're all enchantment creatures, which we used to represent as like creatures that were, that are physical manifestations of people's thoughts, emotions, ideas, given form by the pervasive psychic quality of Valgeboth's influence on the house. Horrors are cellar spawn, which are all Valgeboth's daydreams. So they are beautiful to him and they're utterly terrifying to everyone else.

They represent his hunger and his desires for people to eat people's fears. Nightmares are, well, nightmares. They're these surreal dreamlike entities that are birthed from survivors' heads, their actual fears and nightmares. And the I mean, the inspiration for them was real world nightmares. Like we went through and we and we listened out a bunch of like really common real world nightmares that people actually have, like the like a nightmare of falling or a nightmare of your teeth falling out things like that

and then we built these creatures that incorporated the symbols or like evoke or try to evoke them and then glimmers is a new creature type that we created for is a creature type or enchantment type enchantment creature type I believe it is a creature type only because there's a card that says glimmers you can't be blocked by glimmers which implies they're creatures. Alright, glimmers are manifestations of survivors hopes and dreams and anything that keeps them going in the house and keeps them from succumbing to Valkobots influence. They're these, they're basically spiritual protection, psychological protection. The thing I like about glimmers is that they take the shape of the thing that, like, the thing that brings you comfort, they take the shape of that.

And so they're, just like the fears are trying to scare you, these are trying to comfort you that they show up in the form of things that mean something to you. Yeah, I think in the story, we did see like the wanderers glimmer as a mini-kyodai, which I thought was just like, oh, that's adorable. So what were, in building this environment, what did you feel was like, what did you get to do that you, like I talked about the things that are hard to do, what did you get to do

that just other sets don't get to do, that sort of like, what did it lean into that was kind of cool because most sets don't let you do this. Oh man. I got to go dark with some of the story, with some of the details of this world. I really enjoyed going super dark. And it's definitely like like when we built this world we were definitely like populating it with our own fears the things that terrifies the most so like mine would be probably the wicker folk okay because it's the whole backstory for them is they wanted to, they wanted to, the original Wicker Folk were,

I guess, I don't, magic users who tried to enact a ritual that would protect them from Valgevall's influence and it transformed them into these beings of living wood, where they are trapped within, they cannot sense, they cannot feel, they are just consciousnesses unable to sense the rest of the world, which is a situation that absolutely terrifies me. So a monkey-paw sort of thing. Exactly. And, I don't know, just being able to like go super hard on some of this was really, really fun.

Yeah, like one of the things that's really interesting that Magic, I mean, and the last two sets are kind of the epitome of this, which is that we really get to do different things and we change, you know, and I don't know if ever within a period of two sets gone from the extreme of Bloomberg to Dusk Mourn. And that's something that I really enjoy. I mean, I assume that's fun for you too, is that, hey, every set's different. So, you know, this time you really got to delve into your fears, which is not the average magics that you're making. It's like we bottled up all the horrible things that we didn't get to put into Bloomberg and we just unleashed them in here.

Yeah, I don't know, that kind of means to me is super fun. I love the idea that the magic can be Bloomberg, but magic can be Duskmore. And those are both part of a larger thing, but obviously extreme from each other. So what is your favorite? Do you have any like favorite creative touch that we haven't talked about yet of Dusk Mourn? Something you're just very proud of like this was a cool

thing that my team made. Oh man I think it would be Val'Gavoth and the cult of Val'Gavoth, just how much we were able to pull. Val'Gavoth is based on a moth and then just how much of that influence we were able to pull throughout the entire set. There's moths on the wallpaper, the cultists bind themselves into cocoons to feed themselves to the house. Some of their names of their ranks call back to Moth imagery. There's a rank among the cultists called Imagora, which Imagora, which is it was inspired by the by Imagos, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. And then you and then on individual parts, you get that touch to like the I forget which one, there's one creature that has like a little bow tie, which is actually if you look closely enough,

it's a moth. So it's like, how many times can we sneak moths into everywhere? There are a lot of moths. That's a little game for people at home. Find all the moths. I had a, when I talked to a video, he talked about like the wallpaper pattering, you know, there are moths everywhere. I thought that was really cool. Okay, anyway, well we're almost out of time. So I just want to say that you managed to creep me out. The set is super creepy. And I am not a super big horror fan personally. But I, I'm a huge fan of genres. And like I, as a writer, I just like appreciate like, there's something really cool to me about what horror is

and the idea of, it's the genre that sort of brings fear to life, right? Sort of says, what are humans afraid of? And there's something really cool about that. And so I really, really appreciate the psychology you guys imbued in this set, that it really is, so many people, we've previewed a card and their answer is okay I just can't deal with that card like that that's just tapping something way too close for me excellent and I find this

interesting that like it's different cards it's not like everybody's freaked up by the same card it's just this one card hits that one thing that freaks me out and I I find that really cool so hats off to you and your team for freaking everybody out. I'll be honest when the Jolly Balloon Man got like, like whenever we were the art for Jolly Balloon Man was coming in, I was, I was just looking at it being like, yeah, that's cool. That's neat. So that speaks to a little of what my horror threshold is, maybe a little higher than normal. Yes, I learned that like sort lovers of horror, because they experience a lot more, can handle

a lot more horror, and I kind of avoid horror. I watch trailers on TV and go, I'm out. The trailers do much for me. Okay, well thank you so much for being with us here today, Emily. It was fun to talk about world building and all about Dusk and Mourn. But I'm now at my desk, so we all know what that means. So, it's my... Sorry. First off, thank you for joining us. I should say thank you before I exit. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

And now I'm at my desk. We all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for us to be making magic. So thanks guys, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.