Writing the world · Road to Redemption

One sentence, one concrete image, and no explanation.

This page is for anyone, person or agent, who writes for Road to Redemption (still Emberdeep in the code): lore pages, flavour text, the names of items, monsters and places, the words on a loading screen. The pages of this site are the source of truth for the world and its names, and the overview is the canon. When the game ships something that contradicts a page, the game wins and the page is changed. Every page says how sure it is in its status: in game, decided, or concept. Anything you invent is concept, or a proposal block on a decided page.

Lore serves the game

The story was made to give every system of the game a reason, and new lore should do the same.

Every rule of the world explains something you do. Monsters attack anything because pieces don't know their players. Loot drops because the dead drop what they carried. Friends share kills because kin share a fire. When you add to the world, ask what it explains in play, or what fight, item or place it sets up. The story in play is the list.
Plug holes; don't open them. If a new idea makes a system harder to explain (why do my own faction's troops attack me? why can I trade with friends?), it needs an answer before it goes in. Most of the rules on heaven's war exist to answer one such question.
The game decides; the lore follows. A design choice is never bent to fit the story. If the game needs something the world forbids, the world finds a reason.

Tone

It starts in the dark and climbs toward something worse. The deep where you wake is cold and dark, and your ember is the only warm thing in it. Velmarch has daylight, orchards, a market and people who laugh: a place worth saving, and a home, not a place already lost. Heaven, at the top, is the most beautiful place in the game and the most wrong: white, colourless, and at war. Each act gives back a little more of you, and a little more of the corruption with it.
White is evil. In this game white is the colour of evil, decided. Heaven is white, the true forms of angels are white, the mark on every monster in play is white. Never write white as pure, holy or safe. Warmth and colour belong to the world, and to what is left of you.
Mythic and terse. Short sentences about concrete things. No winking humour, no modern idiom, no exposition dumps.
Never nihilistic. Even at its darkest, small human things endure: a market, a song, a mended coat, a fire kept for someone who may never come.
Nobody is right. Each of heaven's factions is right about one thing and wrong because of it (see the factions), and any two that beat the third fall out. Below, fire remembers, the tide forgets, and neither is good. The world never tells the player which side is right, and nothing written for it should. See Fire, tide and white.

Who is telling it

The world does not know heaven. Its people have only their religions. Lore told below says the Hearthfolk say, the Coalwrights say, Maudra says, and never names heaven, angels or the board: they see the white, and bar the door.
Angels never explain themselves. They tell a fallen what they want it to believe. Each faction has its answer to every question, and none of them is the truth.
The fallen don't remember. On the first climb you know less than anyone you meet. Memories come back with the height, one per act boss, and none of them reaches the blow that felled you. The exact cause of your fall is never told, by anyone, ever.
Tellers disagree. No two singers put the middle five kings in the same order, and the first Gilded Embers were struck in the fifth reign, or the sixth in some songs. That is how the Hearthfolk would tell it, and it leaves room to change things later. They date things by reign, not by year, and count the years since the drowning in notches on the Last Hearth's cradle.

The mysteries stay open

The questions on Mysteries are deliberately unanswered. Some are decided to stay unanswered for good: who cut you loose and why, whether anyone is in the House. The others are the hooks for future acts and leagues. Add rumours around them; never answer them. A rumour is one specific line that nobody can confirm, and the pages end with two or three of them.

Flavour text

One sentence, built on a concrete image, that never explains itself. The uniques in the game set the bar:

The ground remembers every fire.

He ruled the tide until the tide ruled him.

Still warm, long after the fire went out.

Flavour in the game is canon. A page can tell the story behind a line. It never changes the line.
No lore in tooltips. A tooltip says what an item does, with one line of flavour at its foot. The story belongs on its wiki page.
Every page opens with a flavour line, as a blockquote: one sentence, one image of the place or thing, like the line at the top of this page.

Names

The names already in the world follow a few patterns. New names should fit them.

Heaven's words are plain and few. The House, the City, the court, the gate, the board, the law, the trade, the white. Heaven has had one name for each thing for an age, and capitalises almost none of them. Its factions are named for what they do or claim: the Wardens, the Heirs, the Apostates.
Angels have old Hebrew names ending in -el, taken from scripture or its margins, with the meaning and the source in mind: Ithiel and Abdiel are proposals. Their epithets are what other angels call them: the Listener, the Doorward.
Places in the world are old compounds of plain words that say what the place is or was: Hearthold, Saltreach, Harrowwood, the Gloamroot, Greyhallow, Lowmouth, the Tidewall, the Kingsdelve. The Hearthfolk name things practically: the Bilge Market, the Plumb, the fogline, candlecap, false lamps. The miners named theirs for what they found: the Ninth Shaft, the Long Bellows, the Slow Gold.
People of the world have short, old-European names: Aldric, Hadrec, Orrin, Maudra, Sereth, Ilse. Their epithets say what happened to them or what they keep: the Drowned King, the Hearthwarden, the Ashen, of the Stilled.
The game's systems have the world's words. A fallen does not die but gutters, and is relit rather than resurrected, at the last fire it touched. Its party is its kin, who share warmth rather than experience. It grows by the white that comes off the dead. Its hideout is its seat; in the endgame it works its champion from there, and fights in person only at a pinnacle. Lore uses these words; the rules on the wiki use the plain ones. The glossary pairs them. What the players and the passive tree are called is still open.
Uniques name a person, a place or an event of the world, so the loot tells the story: the Crown of the Drowned King, the Ashen Heart, the Grave Mantle.
Currency is the coin of old Velmarch, minted from the fire, so every coin but one is a form of fire: Shard of Kindling, Ember of Growth, Shifting Ash, Gilded Ember, Crowning Flame, Wildfire Orb, Sovereign Spark. The last is the sea: Quenching Water. A new currency that adds is fire. One that takes away is the Tide.
Rare monsters take a one-word name joined from a grim beginning and an ending, like Gorefang or Murkspine; the wiki lists the parts the build uses. The angel who moves a rare gave it that name. Titles after the name, such as the Patient, are concept.
Sayings are short and practical, and about coals, the sea or the white: "Keep your coal covered." "The sea is patient." "One coal dies. A heap of them burns till morning."

Writing a page

The game is two climbs of three acts each, then the endgame in the contested world. Which regions fall in each act is a proposal on the overview, shown on the Journey; take act numbers from there rather than typing your own.
A region page keeps one shape: what it looks like, who or what lives there, who holds it in heaven's war, how strange it is, its place in history, what of it is in the game, and rumours.
Say plainly what is in the current build and what is not, in an In the game section. Game numbers are never typed in: they are expressions on the game's data, so they stay true. The page format is in www/README.md.
British spelling: colour, grey, armour.