Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #515: Building New Worlds

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

This is a companion podcast to one I did about designing sets that revisit worlds we've been to before. In this podcast, I talk about designing for a new world.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so a while ago I did a podcast on returns, so how to design a world when you're going back to it. So I thought it only fair to do a companion podcast on designing new worlds. So how exactly, what do you have to do when you have a set where you're going to the new world for the first time? Turns out that this part is harder. I mean, returns have their own challenges. I'm going to say returns are easy, but returns at least you walk into it with something defined. So the big thing with making a new world is that you have a lot of undefined space.

So the first thing you have to figure out is one of two things. Sort of the top-down versus bottom-up issue, which is, is this world you're building based on some pre-existing thing that's going to be sort of a top-down influence? Are you trying to capture some pre-existing thing? Examples of that would be like Innistrad. We were trying to get a Gothic horror feel. Theros, we were trying to get a Greek mythology feel. Amonkhet, we were trying to get an Egyptian feel. You know, those were examples of worlds where they were new worlds,

but we were trying to sort of, there was a certain amount of resonance we were trying to get out of them. Then other worlds are more what we call bottom-up, in that there's some mechanical element that you're starting with, that there's something that you're trying to capture. So Tarkir, for example, the original point of Tarkir was we had an interesting draft strategy where it was large, small, large, and you drafted the small with both larges, but the two large sets didn't get drafted together. So the first thing, when you have a new world, the first thing you're trying to figure out is,

what is your starting point? What are you going to build around? And so here's the important thing to remember is, we're at a point now, in the way we make worlds, I mean, if you go back to early Magic, worlds were just dressing to some extent. But now, we really want the mechanics of the gameplay and the flavor of the worlds to be intermeshed. That it's not just like,

oh, you're doing X and Y mechanics and, ah, whatever, it takes place in whatever it takes place. That's long ago. Early Magic sort of went in that space. But now it's sort of like, oh, you're in this place and these mechanics are because that's where you are. And the big thing about making new worlds is you need to have some sort of hook to what it is. What is defining the world?

What is making the world an interesting thing? And so there are a bunch of different ways to do that. I mean, one of the things I find in general is a new world is very much a blink page. And a lot of people are really scared of blink pages. Blink pages scare people quite a bit. I like blink pages. But even what I realized is you have to start with something. You know, I've talked a lot in the past about the technique they use in art classes where they have you make a little scribble on the, you know, just make a scribble and then that scribble becomes something. You have something to build around on your blank canvas to start painting. So in some ways, when I start a new

world, I want that scribble. I want to figure out what it is exactly that I am trying to do. Now, like I said, some worlds, I know that there is something I'm trying to capture. And so that gives me a sense of feeling to start with. A good example was in Innistrad. Okay. I mean, the way that most top-down designs start is me sitting, you know, coming into the first meeting and just saying, okay, guys, let's write on the bulletin board everything expected. Okay, we're doing Gothic Core. Well, what would people expect?

And from that, we're like, oh, well, they expect monsters. They expect vampires and werewolves and zombies. They expect darkness. You know, we startedwolves and zombies. They expect darkness. They expect, you know, we started getting all the tropes that people expected. And then a lot of the design was shaped around us figuring out how to make that work mechanically. And Innistrad, as a good example, you know, once we understood that we had a conflict between monsters and humans, once the crux of our world was about the idea of, you know, humans surrounded on all sides

and this idea of dark transformation, we started piecing together what we were trying to do. But when we started, we didn't know. And so usually when you're doing top-down stuff, it's a matter of, well, I should say, if you're doing top-down resonant things, meaning I'm doing top-down that the audience already knows, and it's kind of hard to do top-down if it's not resonant. So I guess now that I say that, I don't really do. I mean, in theory, we can make our own worlds and then top-down design off of it. That's not how we tend to do it. Usually, if something's top-down, yeah, well,

actually, I don't prep these. I just talk as I walk through. Normally, one of the prerequisites for doing a top-down world is that the audience knows enough of it that by if you make mechanical connections they will seem connected by the world. And what I mean by that is that a lot of how Top Down works is that you are making choices like in the end in the end you want when someone steps back that all your mechanical choices feel connected to each other. And there's two ways to do that. One way is that you're following something that's your guiding point, your top down, and that the top down is well known enough that the component pieces feel connected because the audience understands the sort of resonant connection of them.

because the audience understands the sort of resonant connection of them. Oh, I get it. You are doing Egyptian. Oh, well, this mechanic and this mechanic and this mechanic will seemingly make sense together. They will come together. Now, some top-down sets are straight uh, I'm just trying to capture the feeling the Innistrad was. And something like Amonkhet, one of the things we found is, um, some worlds are more resonant than others.

For example, um, a lot of what we were trying to do in Amonkhet was capture some sense of Egyptian mythology. Um, but what we learned is the audience, most audience members don't know that much of Egyptian mythology. But what we learned is the audience, most audience members don't know that much about Egyptian mythology, so we had a lot less to work off. For example, in Theros, when we were doing Greek mythology, the audience in general that we're dealing with, which is a Western audience mostly for our game,

has a lot more knowledge of Greek mythology, meaning we could do actual characters from actual stories and go much deeper into the lore because the audience knows that. That I can do something like Icarus, and even if the audience isn't necessarily super familiar with the story of Icarus, that it's such a famous story that's been told through other medium that even if you haven't read the story itself, the idea and the themes that run through Icarus, Icarus is the story of the boy, his father makes him wings,

and he's warned not to fly too close to the sun because the wings are held on with wax. But of course he flies too close to the sun, and the wax melts and he falls to his death. That story is something that's so ingrained kind of into our culture that even if you don't know this particular story, it is something in which those themes have been woven through stories you've seen. So Greek mythology, for example, it is something that's very core to what people understand

and know, at least in Western mythology, in Western society, that those things are a lot easier for us to build around. What we found with Egyptian was the audience had less general sense of it. And so we had to lean on a little bit of historical things, a little bit more of the aesthetic of sort of Egypt. a little more of the aesthetic of Egypt. And because of that, we supplemented it with some flavor that was our own flavor, which was Ebola's flavor.

So we said, oh, well, Egypt in a vacuum has some problems in that it is hard to use in mythology. There's a lot less individual recognizable pieces that the audience knows. So we're going to supplement that with some of our own material. So that's another big thing with New World is, a lot of times I talk about how, like, as if it's just, it's top-down or it's bottom-up. And that's not quite the case. Really what it is, is you want to have a cohesive world,

you want to have a thematic world, and you want to, I talk about this too, you want your world to evoke something. You want an emotional response. I did a whole podcast on emotional responses. In the end, when the dust has settled, there's a bunch of things that your world needs in order for set design to go build a world off it.

So number one is it needs a general feel. It needs some mechanical cohesion. And it needs an emotion. What are you trying to convey? Now, some properties sort of lend themselves to an emotion. Like it's, for example, just because I'm using Innistrad a lot today, gothic horror is trying to scare you.

Horror is about fear. That whole genre is very much about fear. Okay, well I could build into the gameplay more suspense than normal. I could do that. In Greek mythology there was a lot about accomplishment. So I really pushed toward the idea of the joy of achieving things, of becoming something. But other worlds, you know, when I'm trying to sort of get an emotional feel,

that doesn't always come right away. Sometimes, like, here's another important thing about building new worlds you have to understand, is that there's component pieces I'm explaining you need. When the dust settles, when you're going to hand off your, you know, your vision is done,

it's handing off to set design, I need a bunch of things. Let me walk through this in a little more detail. But my point real quick before I walk through those is how you get those things and the order by which you get those things is not the same for every set. Like right now, I'm training some people in vision design. And one of the messages I keep saying to them is, notice how each set, in the end,

we have the same responsibilities, we have the same handoff hooks and things we need, but how we get there is just not the same. You know, that some sets start with one area and have to build another, and some build with one, you know, nothing ever starts in the same place. So let's talk a little bit about what you're building toward, and then I'm going to walk through sort of like how different sets start in different places to do that. Okay, so number one,

you have to have what I call a target. And what that means is one of the things that makes set design thrive is that the set is doing something, that there's a focal point to the set, that you're trying to do something. The set is doing something, that there's a focal point to the set, that you're trying to do something. The set cares about something, that there's some sort of essence

to what the set is doing. What that is from set to set can vary, but one of the things I've discovered is the key to successful design is that all the audience, all the team members are going in the same direction, that everybody understands what the set is about the team members are going in the same direction.

That everybody understands what the set is about and what they are trying to do. Like one of the challenges in general, like one of the things that I think is important is you can make challenges for set design. You can do things where set design has to solve things. Nothing, vision isn't necessarily solving all the problems. It's solving some of the problems. But really what it's doing is it's providing a sense, it's providing a vision. It's a vision

design. It's saying, here's what we see. Here's the idea of the set. Here's the thing we care about. Good example. Indistract seems to be my go-to example today. I really wanted each of the monsters,

or each of the, there were five tribes, right? Four of which were monsters. So there was vampires, werewolves, zombies, spirits, and humans. I wanted each of them to have a feel.

Overall, I was trying to create an emotion, we'll get to that in a second, but also, I had a general sense of what I wanted, that it was a world in which the monsters were attacking the humans. And I wanted each of the monsters to have a feel that was scary and oppressive, but its own unique feel. That all the monsters weren't the same. That what made the werewolves scary was different from what made the zombie scary, which was different from what made the vampire scary. And that what I did is I conveyed,

not this is old school design development, but similar process. I conveyed what I wanted and then I didn't correctly solve all of the problems. I didn't execute everything wonderfully. For example, the vampires, I wanted the vampires to act a certain way. The way we tried to do it wasn't quite right. For example, the vampires, I wanted the vampires to act a certain way.

The way we tried to do it wasn't quite right. But because we conveyed, Eric Lauer was the lead developer, because we conveyed what we wanted, they were able to solve that problem. And it's still true today. I'm trying to convey what I want. Set design can figure it out. The metaphor I've been using for vision design is the idea that we're building a house and vision is the architect. It is building the blueprints for what you're doing.

It's not building the actual house, but it's figuring out what the house is going to be, what it's going to look like. What style of house is it? How many floors is it? How many rooms is it? You know, what is the essence you're trying to do? Now, when you go to actually build the building, you might find problems you didn't know until you were in the act of building them. You know, oh, I want to do this. The room wants to be this shape. But oh, wait a minute. There's a foundation issue. And if we want to do that, then in order to have that bearing wall,

you know, the room has to be a foot smaller or whatever, you know, that there are issues that as you actually come to solve problems, you might solve problems, you know, you want to understand what the goal of the house is. You want to know the vision, you know, you want to see from the blueprints the essence of what the builder is trying to do. You will solve problems, the end state, as you're building a house, things will happen, things you didn't expect, and you will solve for those. And that part of the process of making new worlds is not that I'm solving every problem. I'm trying to solve some problems, but that I'm at least saying this is the essence of what we're trying to do. This is the point of what we're trying to do.

So with that said, first and foremost, the goal of a vision design is providing a vision, providing a bullseye so that the team's all moving in the same direction. Another thing you're trying to do is what I call mechanical heart which is every set so the way to think about this is what makes magic magic is when you play a game when you play a brand new set that most of what you're doing just feels like magic that 90% of a new set is just it's magic yeah yeah yeah there's twists and tweaks, whatever, but it's magic as you know it. That the things that you worry about are the things you worry about. But there's like a 10% where we get to say,

hey, you don't normally worry about this, but we're going to make you worry about it. Like one of the interesting things about Landfall from Zendikar and Battle for Zendikar was you play land every game. You always play land. But you don't really care too much, you know. I mean, pretty much at the beginning of your main phase, if you have a land, you play a land.

There are reasons you might not. You know what I'm saying? There are reasons occasionally in normal magic that you don't play a land when you can. But as a default, like when you're teaching someone new to play, the default is, beginning of your

main phase, do you have a land? If you do, play it. You know. And like I said, yeah, yeah, in advanced play, there's reasons occasionally you won't do it. But as a general rule of thumb, there's, without some external reason, you don't care. You don't think about when you play something. All of a sudden, landfall comes along and landfall says, hey, your lands matter in a way they've never mattered before.

So now when you're playing, it's a resource that you manage that you don't normally manage. The when and how you play a land is not something that you care about. And the have you played a land, the caring about land, it's similar, for example, with raid, which cares about, hey, did you attack? Or cares about morbid,

you know, did you kill something? What you do a lot of times is there's something going on where you mechanically care about something and that thing, that 10%, that thing that you don't normally care about can really define what's going on in the world. Now, sometimes that's a mechanic.

Sometimes it's a theme. Sometimes, you know, there are a bunch of different ways to make that matter. But part of what you're doing when you're building your set and building a new world is figuring out what about this world is going to matter. How is this magic play experience? You know, what is the mechanical heart? Which says, how is this experience a little different from normal? And once again, I've stressed this many, many times, but usually to make something feel unique, you don't have to change all that much of it i it's one of my lessons uh for my uh gdc talk um and that really the key is that what we've learned is what you want from a mechanical heart is something that is going to help make the set tick that just adds something to it that is unique to this world. Now, sometimes that element is something that multiple worlds do, and your take on it is different.

For example, Artifact Matters. That's a theme we've done multiple times. And how Mirrodin treated Artifact Matters was different from how the Esper Shard of Alara cared about it, from how Kaladesh cared about it, from how Skarsgård and Mir Alara cared about it, from how Kaladesh cared about it, from how Skarsgården cared about it. Skarsgården was a revisit, I guess, to be fair. But in each case, we were making a brand new world.

So I'll skip over Skarsgården since that's a revisit. So Mirrodin is like, artifacts matter, artifacts are plentiful, you want lots of artifacts. Play a lot of artifacts. The world was defined by the fact that just the world wanted you to play as many artifacts as you could. And there were mechanics and things

that really rewarded you for playing lots of artifacts. Esper cared about artifacts, but it started blending into the colors and started making artifacts the identity of artifacts more intermixed in what was going on and so the idea wasn't that I was

you know playing fewer colors and more colors things it was more about how the artifact identity was built into my colors and like I said while there were some overlaps between the two, there's a lot of artifact matters between the two, between

the Esper part of Shards of Alara and Mirrodin. The identity of how you played and what you did and the ramifications of what it meant for the set. Another reason, the mechanical heart has two reasons.

One is internal and one's external. Internal, it'll define how you build your set. It defines what matters. It defines what you're doing. You know, if we're putting landfall on a set and caring about when you play lands, all of a sudden things that let you play lands again or let you replay lands or let you have some access to how you interact with lands matters because that's the world. So some of the mechanical thing is internal because you build a set around it.

You make choices on how you put the set together to play with the mechanical heart. Externally, it's the thing that gives the set its feel in gameplay. It's the thing that makes people feel like, oh, I'm not just

playing any world, I'm playing this world. So it's important that you understand what your mechanical heart for the set is. The other thing that's really important is the emotional feel. What am I trying to get? When I play this world,

what sensation am I trying to get? For example, Kaladesh was an artifact world. And one of the things I really played up with it, and this is a good example where the mechanical heart and the emotion can interact, is I wanted a sense of wonder. You were an inventor. And that what I wanted was, I wanted when you played that you had more possibility for how things combine together. That I wanted to make the combinations to be a stronger part. And once again,

sometimes a mechanical heart is taking something that's in the game and dialing it up. It's not that you're adding it, it's you're making it more relevant than normal. You know, landfall makes you care about land. It's not that land doesn't matter. Land does matter. But it says, oh, I'm going to care about land in a way that I haven't. In Kaladesh, for example, it's not that combinations aren't part of magic. Yeah, magic has plenty of combinations. But I raised the variance a little bit so that there was more choices you had to make, that there was more choices you had to make,

that there were more combinations you could make than average in the game, so that you felt that you were making clever choices and clever combinations, and that I got the sense of inventor-ness from it. And a lot of that, like I said, is trying to understand the emotional part of it sort of says, what am I trying to make the players feel? Both what emotion am I trying to make them feel and how am I trying to make them feel? What aspect am I trying to play into? Which ties into the next thing, which is the fun.

Basically, one of the things I'll ask designers when I see them working on worlds is, where's the fun? What about what I'm doing is something that people want to do? And ideally, since I'm trying to craft a new world, what about this world is fun in a way that's different from other worlds? You know, where's the uniqueness of this? So we'll take Zendikar for a second. of this. So we'll take Zendikar for a second. So Zendikar, one of the things with Zendikar was playing around with the idea that we were going to take something you already did, that you already, and just reward you for it. You know, it's saying, hey, what if we gave you a cookie when you did something you normally had to do? Like, I put on my shirt, here's

a cookie. I always put my shirt on, Still get a cookie. Yay, I get a cookie. You know, you play lands. Lands is something that's part of the game. But you didn't get rewarded for playing lands. And all of a sudden, you know, there's this little rush because I get to play the land and I get a reward for it. Kaladesh was a lot

of combinations is fun. Intermixing things is fun. The cleverness of magic is fun. So we were just like, let's just up the cleverness a little bit. Let's make you feel a little more clever than normal. Now sometimes what we're trying to do is, like for example, both Ravnica, Ravnica is the best example,

but sometimes we're trying to do an identity thing. Sometimes we're trying to sort of say, hey, you've got to make a decision, and that decision will define you in some way. That, hey, pick a shard. Who are you? What shard are you? And that there's self-identification there. Sometimes the fun is in sort of pointing out who you are or making choices that say something about you. You know, a lot of times I talk about the psychographics and sometimes it's sort of

every single player has a little Timmy and Tammy in them, a little Johnny and Jenny in them, and some Spike in them. One of them is more than the others, but everybody sort of likes the visceral thrill of things. Everybody likes the sort of showing something about themselves. Everybody likes proving something, showing what they're capable of. Everybody has all these aspects in them. It's not as if the psychographics are not basic human emotions.

When we talk about them, it's sort of which one are you turning up, which one matters more to you. Not that they don't all matter on some level. So when you're building a world, there's also that when you're trying to find the fun is what are the natural things? What are the emotional rewards that we're playing into? And sometimes it's something that's always there that we're playing out more. Sometimes we're introducing something. For example, let's take Innistrad. One of the things we look at is what we call the splash value.

And the splash value is, what am I doing that I don't normally get to do? Where is there like... And how much splash value you have varies from world to world. In general, what you do when you build a world is you look at the different components you have and you lean on certain components. So splash value is all about oh, what's new, what's different,

what makes me go, oh my goodness. And some sets get to have a high splash value. Innistrad, for example, had double-faced cards. You know, up to that point, Magic had a back, had a face and had a back. And all of a sudden we're like, well, that thing that every card has a back is not true anymore. And that is really, you know, when we break a rule that we've never broken before, that especially when it's super visual, is a big splashy moment. Not every set necessarily has something as splashy as double-faced cards,

only because, you know, there aren't infinite things that splashy. But we do try to look and figure out where we can do something, you know, where we can find the splash that adds something to it. where we can do something, where we can find the splash that adds something to it. So, to recap, we have your vision. We have your bullseye

that's directing where you're going. We have your mechanical heart that's saying, how is this gameplay different? What is the gameplay built around? We have the emotional element of what am I trying to pull out of it? What do I want my audience to feel, the players to feel as they play this?

We have the fun aspect. We have, like, what exactly is making my audience happy? You know, where in this is something that's enjoyable to do? And the splash is what makes people go, wow. You know, what makes people sort of sit up? Now, the trick is, makes people go, wow. What makes people sort of sit up? Now, the trick is of these five things, the level of each of them varies from time to time. All of them need to be there.

You know, every set we're going to do is going to have these different components. But you will lean on different things depending. So, for example, just to talk about the contrast here is in a top-down set where I'm trying to hit resonance, you play more into the general feel of things because, oh, I'm doing a Greek mythology set. I want this to really feel like Greek mythology. And a lot more of the experience and a lot of the fun and even some of the splash comes from getting that feel to it.

Where another set that's a little more mechanical-minded might be more about, okay, I'm doing something cool, but I want you to sort of get the feel of it from what the mechanical feel is. Different sets will have different focal points. So before I talked about how when you build a brand new world, you've got to figure out where you're starting from. And a lot of that has to do with what kind of world you're building. And that different worlds, each of these components I've talked about,

in the end will have all the components, but where your focal point is, where's the thing that's going to drive you, has a lot to do with the kind of world you're building. Now, the other important thing to remember is, when you're piecing a world together, there is two different elements that you have to sort of figure out

how to graft them onto each other. And that is flavor and mechanics. In a lot of ways, when I talk about top-down versus bottom-up, it's a lot of like, which one takes the lead? But there's a different aspect of building a world that's also super important,

which is that I want to make sure that my mechanics themselves are reinforcing flavor. So let me explain this, because this is an important point. That when I am... When you look at a magic card, it is very clear that the name and the art

and the flavor text are there to convey flavor. I mean, that's the main role of all of them. I mean, there's some functionality for them. I'm not saying they don't have other jobs, if you will. But the main function of them is to get you to go, okay, I got it. This represents this thing.

It's sort of helped build the world and build its place in the world. But the thing that's just as important is that I want you, when you play the card, that the feel you get when you play the card itself is flavor. That I want you to, you know, the home run for us

is when the card plays exactly how you expect the card to feel. Now sometimes that is hard. Sometimes, you know, flavor has a lot more nuance to it than mechanics. For example, Champions of Kamigawa, I've talked about this as being

one of the bigger failures of magic. And one of the problems in looking back is that one of the plans was that we would get the flavor all nailed down before we started the mechanics. And what we found was, because we didn't have a back and forth, because flavor was sort of chosen and locked in, it really made it hard to do the mechanics without being a little bit ham-fisted. We did a lot of like, all samurai do this. That's what samurai do. And, you know, we had a lot of sort of, we made them have a flavor because we sort of just linked them together.

And I'm not against, I'm not against sort of lockstep one for one connections to play things. But it really sort of made the samurais a little more one-note. It's like, okay, samurais are good fighters. Okay, I mean, and that's good, and samurais are supposed to be fighters. But did we get any larger sense? Did we get a sense of their drive for honor? There's a lot of aspects to a samurai. And really, we kind of boiled it down to samurai fight good. You know, like, it didn't, it didn't really, it left a very sort of, a more hollow feel.

Like, one of the things you want when you're making your world and making your cards is you want the cards to feel bigger, to feel, you know, when I'm playing with them, it's adding to the larger picture. And so part of building your world is figuring out how to find a flavor and find the mechanics that can overlap. So that's another big part of building a world is, and my analogy here is building a house

of cards. So that very first thing you do is you have to take two cards and you have to lean them against each other that they balance, that they make a foundation that you can then build around. Once you lay those first two cards, then all the other cards are laying against those cards. And that when you're building a house of cards, it's that first sort of moment of self leaning where you're trying to make sure that each card is leaning on the other at the right measurement that it balances. That's a lot of what building worlds is. It's figuring out your flavor and figuring out your mechanics and making sure that the two lean on each other in a way that balances out what

your set is doing. And like I said, the thing about returns is that balance has been figured out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll change up worlds a little and there'll be new twists. And I mean, I'm not saying, obviously I did a whole podcast on returns. Returns have their own challenges. But it's a different animal than a new world. A new world is kind of figuring out

how am I going to make this place into a magic set. And like I said, I walked you through all the components today. I'm almost at work. How am I doing on traffic? Oh, not too bad.

The real trick when you're building a new world is trying to understand what it is you want to do, where you're leaning, where the set is leaning on, what is it trying to do, where does the strength come from? And of all these different components, you're not going to make all the components at the same time.

You will make them gradually together. I'm not saying you make one and then make the others or something. But you have to lean somewhere. So part of building a world is figuring out what is unique about this world that then you can hang your hat on, that then you can push toward. And that's the trickiest part, is how to give a world an identity that is something that will make a unique magic set,

that will make a unique, like I said, we want a unique flavor, and the creative team spends tons of time building that out. The idea that I'm trying to do really is, in vision design, is get enough of the flavor of the world that the flavor text team can flesh it out and make a really compelling, exciting world, and make enough of a mechanical sort of definition that the set design team can take that and flesh it out.

Really, what I'm trying to do is figure out, and this is where sort of the bullseye setting comes from, is what is the essence of this world? What is this world about? And that essence has to have a flavorful and mechanical element to it. What are we doing that is sort of defining what the essence of this world is? And then a lot of sort of building a world is fleshing out what are those things? How do I make those things happen? Okay, this is inventor world.

What does that mean? This is gothic horror world. What does that mean? You know, that in each case that I get an identity and then it's how do I maximize that identity? How do I take the components I have to do that? But anyway, that topic is a topic for another time. So to sum up, since I'm pulling right now into the parking lot, you're going to build your own world. Make sure you set a bullseye so you know where you're going and that the team is going in the same direction.

Make sure that you have a mechanical heart, that there's something about the set that's different from other magic sets. That is something that defines this set mechanically. That there is an emotional response. What are you trying to get the audience to feel? What are your players trying to feel when they play it? That each set has its own unique feel to it. What emotion is going to define this feel? You need to find your fun center. What exactly is what you're doing? What's fun about this? What plays in an area either the players already want that you're focusing on or something new that players don't even know but now you're going to make players sort of interact with or

care about? And finally, your splash. What makes people sit up and go, wow, what about this world is doing something new or something, you know, it's doing something that people haven't seen before. You've got to figure all that stuff out, and you've got to figure out sort of how they

balance with each other, how they connect with each other. And when you do that, that, my friends, is how you make a brand new world. So anyway, I hope this was interesting for you. This is the kind of stuff that I do day to day, but I don't always get to talk about it, so it's fun sort of delving in deep. But anyway, I'm now at work,

so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.