I Fought the Lore and the Lore Won: How Battle Systems’ Lore Is Created

Welcome, traveller! Interspersed with your regular updates will be this new, ongoing series of articles taking a deep dive into the lore of Maladum and Core Space. I’m Wayne from Battle Systems, hello.
This week we’ll be looking behind the scenes on how the lore is created, what its principal job is in regard to our games, from concept to final print, with particular examples from our game Core Space: First Born.

LORE! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

In many ways the lore is really for us, the creators. It gives us a coherent framework to hang the game on, gives us rules that we can follow and allows us to expand on the world when we need to. Refining the rules can get dry but writing the lore never does. Ideas are formed and weighed for their merit, expanded on or left fallow in a dusty folder on a hard drive. A lot goes into the lore, far more than ever makes it to the final print.

The lore is also for the players. Simple games don’t need lore but anything with identifiable characters will need a story. We need to know what motivates those characters, and how they affect the world they’re living in. And ongoing games with a campaign absolutely need a narrative, to propel the player onward. When we wrote Core Space our full intention was for you, the player, to care about the Traders, to nurse them through difficult times, upgrading their skills and equipment then – Bam! – when they get brutally crushed in the fourth mission you feel genuinely distraught! If the characters were cardboard cut-outs, nameless grunts, you’d just shrug and line up the next victim. But when you’re invested it’s a whole different (board) game.

At heart all stories are the same, they’re about people, and that’s what people are really interested in. We think of our games in the same way, we want you to enjoy the ride, not just tick off a task list. People often tell us how cinematic our games are, like movie set pieces and we love that, because that’s what we intended. For example, we wrote the civilian character Butler as a pompous elite and a coward and tweaked his stats to show that. Even now we have people report to us about what a backstabber Butler is!
That character, along with many of the characters from Core Space were created in the short story, Rescue on Daedalus. They were based on early character sketches and the story greatly influenced the final game. Let me talk you through the process…

CREATING A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

Back in the mists of time (about 2012) Battle Systems was but two men, Colin and Wayne. We made and sold terrain for tabletop game systems, print and play at first, then the card and plastic connector system that we still use today, albeit much refined. By 2018 we wanted to make our own games and created Core Space, a sort of dungeon crawler set in a sci-fi universe.
Deep down Colin is a frustrated movie director and I’m a frustrated writer, and the Core Space universe gave us a perfect excuse to create anything we wanted. I remember the intense joy I felt when I asked Colin what we could do with our IP and he said, anything, it was ours.

The initial concept was Colin’s, he wanted an exciting game that followed a band of misfits, some would be trained soldiers but most of them would be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Instead of war the game would be about stealth, one where the characters would do anything to avoid a fight, to go in shooting was a guarantee to lose, you had to think around a problem.
The bones of Core Space are actually based on a solo game Colin created 30 years ago! I have a very clear memory of the hand drawn cards with Colin’s distinctive art-style and occasional spelling error. That and a scale model of Hadley’s Hope from Aliens that Colin made from white card.

Core Space allowed Colin to make movies without needing a film crew of hundreds. And I was free to explore some weird or dark ideas in the full light of day, no one would stop me! That means, deep down under the adventure and the cinematic action, Core Space is a horror story. The universe the Traders live in is dystopian, full to the brim with corrupt politicians, power mad corporations and an uncaring police force. Behind that is the existential dread of the Purge, murderous killer robots dragging you to a horrible end, their masters unseen eldritch creatures on the edge of reality. What stops it from actually being a horror are the characters, human beings and aliens who live and breathe, have hopes and dreams, who we can relate to because they struggle to make a living, they’re not rich and powerful, they are everyday people but ones that are able to do the things that we can’t do but wish we could.

With that solid base Core Space virtually wrote itself. Colin would draw a cool character, I would write their story, suggesting their strengths and weaknesses which Colin would incorporate into the rules. I cannot over-egg just how much fun this stage is. Core Space is our creative outlet, even without Battle Systems we’d have made this just for us anyway. We have a story to tell and the medium we’ve chosen happens to be a game.

Anyway, in the real world Core Space was a success so we followed up with a number of expansion sets and a new campaign book called Dangerous Days, set a few years later in the same universe. Dangerous Days introduced a tougher version of the Core Space universe, ideal for veteran Traders. We then wanted to further ramp up the excitement, make the galaxy bigger, introduce a more fearsome enemy and make resources scarcer. We ended up with so many ideas that we then created Core Space: First Born.
Powerful factions don’t just pop out of the woodwork fully formed so we decided that this new enemy must come from outside of the Pegasus Arm of the galaxy where Core Space is set. The idea of the First Born jumped into my head, of a species that predated all other species in the galaxy. Alone, they had gone into decline and entombed themselves for millions of years. Then they were awoken by the Traders and they were not happy.

With this initial idea Colin started doing some character and terrain designs. I wrote the short story, Borrowed Time, which would establish what the First Born were and how they sat in the Core Space universe. This is often how we start any new game or expansion, we brainstorm ideas and then Colin will design characters and terrain, I’ll write their back story and a treatment on what to expect in the game, often with a short story to make the ideas more concrete in our heads. Then we go back and forth refining the ideas until we’re able to bring in others, such as our 3D sculptors, and Nick, our artist who takes Colin’s character sketches and brings them to life.

Lore-wise Colin wanted the First Born to be technologically superior, a type 3 or 4 civilisation on the Kardashev scale (nerd alert!). So we made the home of the First Born a Dyson Sphere (which would eventually become a Dyson Swarm rather than a solid structure). The remoteness of the First Born star meant that no one knew that the First born existed and their discovery was by accident, with the Traders stumbling on the First Born in deep sleep.

The stasis booths that the First Born slumber in are in part inspired by a book I read years ago, by Peter F. Hamilton, where they were known as zero-tau stasis booths. These were similar to the stasis booths in Red Dwarf except that the occupants could still feel the passing of time (I may have misremembered that but that’s what I went with). So in stasis the First Born were still partly conscious, dreaming for millions of years. An already paranoid and fearful people were driven slowly mad.

A huge amount of the lore comes entirely from Borrowed Time and it affected the game directly. For example, the True Born, the senile but formidable leader, was able to riffle through different versions of reality, an idea that hadn’t been suggested at all, but one that Colin dived head first into, the First Born were now masters of time and space and reality.

The First Born are technologically superior but their tech is different from what we would normally experience. Much of it is biological, even the clearly robotic machines would have living nervous systems, an idea that most of us would find creepy in our more machine oriented cultures.

Particle transmitters and Warp gates existed in the Core Space universe and the First Born had their own, earlier versions. For no real reason other than I thought it was interesting I decided that the teleporters, the Gates of Ry’sa, would be brain driven – the user would make the calculations unconsciously in their head rather than use a computer. The First born, being immensely intelligent had data storage to spare but human users? They’ve got smaller brains, so the chances of failure are much higher.

Meanwhile, Colin had worked on the terrain and it was a banger, completely different to our previous Core Space terrain, alien but familiar, a sort of futuristic Aztec terrain. At that point I had imagined the setting as derelict and alien but still a pretty routine ‘futuristic’ type but then immediately altered the lore to fit in this new look. It gave the setting a more haunted house vibe, somewhere between a spooky forest and the film Event Horizon. The setting would feature heavily in the game with characters able to mine for precious materials, a game mechanic that had been introduced in the Dangerous Days expansions. This was partly because Colin really enjoyed the crafting element but also because you couldn’t just pick up guns and ammo as you could in Core Space, there was no BS-mart to pop into to buy shoddy vending machine guns!

At the same time Colin had worked on the character designs for the First Born, an imposing, tech-heavy bunch of fanatics that would give our Traders a hard time. Just a small number at first, but the ranks would swell quickly. (An interesting aside, both Colin and I imagined the First Born as having an extra set of front arms for delicate operations but neither of us had mentioned it, we each came to the same conclusion separately. Mind meld succeeded!)

So now we had a species who were physically imposing, fanatical and xenophobic, technologically superior and driven slightly insane from their long nap. The perfect setting for our Traders to turn up! The Traders themselves would have to be a step up to deal with a more powerful enemy so Colin designed the crew of the Eidolon and the big game hunters for the main game, the bounty hunters and the miscreants populating Trading Post 5 would come later. Colin drew them and I made up the back stories, sometimes I will write the back stories first and Colin will use them for ideas or I will design some of the characters myself.

By this point Stew, our Dread Overseer, intruded on our fun with some sensible business pragmatism. He had a big list of stuff he wanted for the game expansions so we needed to expand on the lore further – much further. The expansions are designed to be played in any order, not just after the end of the campaign so I had to allow for that, chronologically. Colin then went overtime on the character designs and I filled in the details.

Now humans and aliens were thrown into the mix with Trading Post 5. What were they doing there? I had to figure that out. Then there was the Big Bad, what was it and what was its motivation? Colin showed me some sketches and I came up with the Insane God, a mortal god in theory, in reality a genetically engineered super-soldier, driven mad by its powers and controlled by cynical politicians. That naturally led to a refinement of the lore, suddenly there were factions within the First Born and the faction we meet, The Godly, are dangerous fanatics, part driven out by their own people, part in self-imposed exile. Of course this suggests that they may be other First Born out there, somewhere in the galaxy, and if so what had happened to them, would they appear at some point? No one knows. Except us of course, we totally know!

SO WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS FROM? REALLY?

I’d say it’s a hodge-podge of influences from childhood and current things we’re into. Also, Core Space is a game, so it has certain limitations and expectations. But we mostly just write stuff we’re interested in and hope that other people will be too. For example, the First Born were in stasis for three million years because I thought that was enough time for younger races to become space-faring but mostly because I like Red Dwarf and Dave Lister was in stasis for three million years.

When Colin pointed out that we needed a powerful enemy but one that was unknown I immediately thought of the Krikkit people from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. The Krikkit race were a fanatical bunch of xenophobes who terrorised the galaxy and were eventually sealed away in an ‘envelope’, their entire world displaced in time and then forgotten. This fitted beautifully with the First Born, taking an idea that was initially comedic and making it into a borderline horror because that’s how my brain works.

Colin will often have ideas for characters and settings that he’s had brewing in his head for a while but he also practises a loose sketching technique where he randomly doodles lines until something interesting pops out at him. He’s also a big advocate of ‘silhouetting’ where you can identify a character just by their silhouette.

Some of our inspirations are a bit more immediate, stuff that we happened to be watching or reading at the time. Jace Dolman from Core Space was inspired by Tom Cruise after I’d  watched Oblivion, and Arianna was two-thirds Charlize Theron because Colin’s sketch brought her to mind (our artist, Nick would later run with this and base as many of the Core Space characters on famous actors that he could get away with!).

Colin drew the mild mannered Roykirk as his dad although unconsciously (I realised that when I presented a different sketch showing Roykirk as much tougher looking and Colin hated it) so I actually wrote Roykirk as Colin’s dad, or at least a version of him that happened to live in that future. He’s a good natured and patient man whose integrity survived even in troubled times, a perfect counterpoint to the cut throats and mercenaries you’d expect.

At the time Colin was the sole designer of the terrain and mats, but I would add graphical elements such as the shop signs. I made up a drinks company, Slurp, blatantly ripped from Slurm in Futurama, and although this never saw the light it’s direct competitor, Chug, did. At the time I’d learned that a chihuahua and pug mix was called a chug which I thought was hilarious. I peppered as many bad taste jokes and puns into the terrain as I could including a large billboard in our Urban terrain which was based on a running joke in our Kickstarter campaign about killer giraffes on stilts!

As a final note I’d say this tongue in cheek attitude suits us well. Core Space and Maladum are dystopias with horror backdrops but they know exactly what they are.

They are games and they were always meant to be fun.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

In future articles we’ll be touching on the super-dense lore of Maladum, a lore so thick with chewy goodness only half of it made it to print. Expect some deep dives into the characters of Core Space and Maladum, and the world building needed for both.

Finally, is there anything you want to know about? Something you’ve always wanted to ask, or maybe something you’ve always wanted to suggest? We know many of you create your own scenarios and your own characters and we fully encourage it.

Let us know in the comments below.

Can’t wait for the next one? here’s some further reading: