On this edition of Spotlight I have Nikki Valens, who during her tenure at Fantasy Flight Games worked on the design for Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness Second Edition, and Legacy of Dragonholt as well as pioneered their app integration, their two-rulebook system, and MANY OTHER THINGS.

A game design renaissancewoman, I dove deep with Nikki in an exploration of game design, accessibility, horror, and Overwatch - in part one we discuss Legacy of Dragonholt and the importance of diversity in gaming.

Walk down the stairs with us...

C: The first thing I would like to know is who you are and just get a very brief introduction of yourself

N: I am of course a game designer. But beyond that I believe it is our responsibility to do everything that we can to make as many people as possible happy, which it's why I fight very hard to for instance include different gender and orientation and racial characters in our games so that everyone can feel included because I think that that's very important. I just want to bring as many people together with shared experiences and our love of games as possible

C: Wow, I couldn't have asked for a better introduction. Especially that first part you said that we have to do everything in our power to make other people happy, and try and tear down the obstacles that exist between between people and happiness. I feel very strongly about that - I guess you could say it's very core to my personal philosophy.

N: Would agree.

C: Let’s talk now about how you try and bring that about through your work as a game designer. But actually here's a better question before that. How long have you been designing games?

N: In a professional capacity since 2011, which would’ve been the first time I was actually hired by someone to make games.

C: And which game was that, do you remember?

N: That was a unreleased game for a startup company that unfortunately never made it off the ground but the work I did with them did get me the experience to at least get in deeper into the the game design industry. That particular one was for a video game, actually.

My experience with professional board game design didn’t start until FFG, which was in 2013. But as far as just designing and game ideas and mechanics and stuff I've been doing that pretty much my entire life, you know, as a kid, before I really had the ability to piece together all of the rules of the thing to get someone to play it I kind of would just come up with ideas and just imagine them in my head as I didn't really have a way to convey them to anyone yet.

In middle school I started doing role-playing of various systems and coming up with my own little playing systems to kind of just tell the stories that me and my friends wanted to tell. So that's kind of the the real beginnings of my design career of sorts, was just trying to make something that me and my friends could enjoy after school.

I went to Brown College for video game design and development and then pretty much during my entire time when I was in high school and college I started doing a lot of GMing and more fully developed an RPG system that I could use to run campaigns and got it to a point that other people would be able to use it as a sourcebook to be able to run campaigns as well. I continued to work on that and develop it right up until the point that FFG hired me, at which point I needed to stop so I could focus on the things that they wanted me to do.

C: And how different were the things that they wanted you to do?

N: In a lot of ways they're very similar. So the games that I worked on with FFG - Eldritch and Mansions and Legacy of Dragonholt - are all very narrative driven, and that's one of the things I enjoy the most about games, is getting a story out of it. However FFG's catalog is heavier mechanically than what I typically enjoy playing myself or enjoy designing for, so a lot of what they wanted me to do was to find ways to simplify and streamline and make their heavy games more accessible.

Eldritch Horror for instance was a sort of spiritual successor to Arkham Horror which was a very successful narrative driven game but it was also very heavy, and it's hard for new players to get into that game. So when we were designing EH most of my focus was on how can we take all of that story, all of those mechanics that make that game what it was, why it was so popular and then put them together in such a way that new players can come into the game and learn it more easily and be able to play the game more quickly. It was a lot of trying to make very complex games as accessible it's possible. So that's what a lot of the projects that I did for FFG were, Mansions 2nd Edition is the same way where it's a revision of a previous edition but trying to bring to it a more modern sensibility of who is going to play this, how can we get them to play it, how can we allow as many people as possible to play it so that they don't need to be the type of person that is going to sit down and read a 40 page rulebook cover-to-cover before they even pick up a piece. A lot of people want to be able to just sit down and play.

Legacy of Dragonholt is a little bit different in the games that I worked on with them because it was the first time that they essentially were like “Okay we have this idea but we want you to just come up with whatever you want to come up with.” And they had already known that I had been wanting to make a sort of throwback to Choose Your Adventure Books, in a way, just something that could tell stories that were easy for the player to just pick up and read and be able to become part of the world that we were exploring. So that's what LoD ended up becoming; just my wanting to create a cast of characters and a whole story and allow players to just jump in and play that thing and enjoy that story. LoD teaches you how to play as you play it, the setup for it is very quick, the amount of the rulebook that you need to look at before you start playing is a page and a half, and it's just kind of “hey this is what's going on, here's some components, okay let's play”.

But it brings aspects of a lot of things that I've always been interested in, so it brings aspects of choose your own adventure books, aspects of role-playing games, and aspects of board games of course, being a Fantasy Flight Game publication. But it was a real passion project for me, something I've been wanting to create for years, and I'm really glad that they gave me the opportunity to do so. I was able to make it fairly inclusive, I feel, for what the industry is. I know that a lot of people were moved by our inclusion of non-binary characters, and characters with disabilities, and other marginalized or minority groups that have difficulty seeing themselves in the industry, and that's again something that I really want to to push for and make sure that everyone feels like they can enjoy these things because everyone deserves to be happy.

C: I completely agree. I think that's why Legacy of Dragonholt and other games like Android Netrunner are so important with their push for inclusion and wanting to deliberately bring in, like you said, marginalized and minority peoples.

The work that the Netrunner crew have been doing on their game is incredibly touching and it’s incredibly important to have such a high profile, quote/unquote, ‘competitive game’ They worked so hard on making that universe as deep and as rich and as inclusive and as diverse as they can.

But because they put in so much work, when the game comes out and all you have is 120 pieces of cardboard per expansion cycle, it feels effortless, like the world existed and they just took photographs and sent them to you in data packs. But the amount of research, the amount of thought, the amount of meetings and discussions and briefings and stuff that they must have sent out to all of the art people, I can’t even imagine.

African Cyberpunk

When it came to Dragonholt, I imagine the design process was a lot more... you by yourself almost? Because a lot of the game is just text, right, there’s not as much illustration as far as I know.

N: Yep, there's very little illustration and that was intentional. We wanted to kind of get the same feeling that you would from reading a novel where the characters get to be of your own imagining. And one thing that we had always kind of - not really joked about but kind of hoped for - is that people would be invested in that story, in those characters, so much that they might want to make fan art of it. We wanted to see what other people were imagining those characters to be, because of course we we all have our own visualized versions of what these characters look like and what they act like, but they... they become someone else entirely when you're not the one who's reading it. That’s also really interesting to me, is just the... how a group of people can take a setting or a group of characters and bring more life to them than the developers could have just by enjoying those stories.

C: Have you been sent any fan art?

N: I haven't seen any yet.

C: Everyone reading, you better get on this.

N: [laughs] Yeah, that’s something that (co-designer) Dan and I talked about every now and then, was just hoping that we could create a story and a cast of characters that people would enjoy enough that they would feel like they wanted to make fan art or other things of it. But we'll see if it becomes that popular or not. There's definitely a lot of people that have reached out to me to tell me how much Dragonholt means to them and that makes me really happy to know that I'm making some kind of a difference, even if it's a small difference.

C: My co-host Raf tells me that it is the most innovative game that he probably has ever played. I might be misquoting him, but the words ‘innovative’ and ‘ever’ were definitely in there somewhere. And he loves it, he can just break it out for 15 minutes in the morning before he has to go to work, and he still like feels like he makes meaningful progress. He recommended me to get it, but shipping to Malaysia is hard so I haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, but I know that Dragonholt is very important and it’s… I can't say it better than what you’ve already said.

Can you tell me what Dan, and Tim Flanders, and Annie VanderMeer, and Greg Spyridis - what were their roles in the game, because they’re listed as designers as well.

N: Yeah, BGG needs to maybe expand their credit section so we can credit all of the people that work on these games because there's just so many people that always work on these games and it's hard to get them all into a list.

So as the designer I did the system design - how the actual mechanics of it fit together, the few mechanics that there are, and they’re very light and they kind of just fall to the background and the story is the main point.

Dan and I were the two main story planning people, so we came up with the story that we wanted to tell, came up with the main characters of that story and how it branches and how it develops and and where all of those pieces of the story go and and what eventually is the conclusion - or multiple conclusions, as there are multiple conclusions - based on your choices you could end up in a very bad place at the end of the campaign or you could have done very good things for the village.

Dan was the primary writer for much of the content - The game is broken up, in case you don’t know, into a very large village book, which is I think 144 pages, and that book itself is just all of the time that you are in Dragonholt proper, mingling around and interacting with the villagers. It's kind of a hub world if you think of an open world, almost like an Elder Scrolls type of game where you can just wander around as you please and do whatever you wish. Dragonholt’s village book is the hub world of sorts where you can just do whatever you want whenever you want and interact with the NPCs there. He did the vast majority of writing for that book which is about half of the writing in the entire game, maybe even more than half.

And then there are 6 other quest books which range in size from 20 to I want to say 40 pages is the largest one? And each of those is sort of a self-contained module where you go on a quest to do some specific thing and 5 of the 6 have unique endings based on your decisions within that quest that then relate to the campaign as a whole and can affect what happens in the village and what happens in the later quests. Tim Flanders, Annie, and Greg each wrote one of those quests and then the other three quests were a collaboration of writing between me and Dan.

The very few bits of the village that Dan didn't write were written by me that was primarily, like, any of the romantic scenes. He wasn't as confident in his ability to write in romance and that is about the only thing I'm confident writing, so I swooped in to take the romance scenes from him.

C: I am not that close to Dan but I will definitely be ribbing him about this for the remainder of time. I'm struck throughout this conversation by how similar we are because I also love sappy love stories and I have everything you said so far incredibly resonates with me in a very deep and powerful way and I'm really glad we're doing this interview now.

Sorry, to bring us back on track to the game…

So my main question about Dragonholt is why Terrinoth, because I guess prior to Dragonholt it was kind of cookie cutter fantasy - you know how Tolkien sort of gave birth to so many fantasy worlds and Terrinoth was - like honestly if you sort of filed the serial numbers off and you showed a bunch of them to a different people - this is not to to hate on the games, I think the games set in the Terrinoth universe are all very good

N: No, I totally understand where you're coming from, I feel a lot the same way. Before working on Dragonholt I did not have much love for Terrinoth as a setting, it seemed very - like you said cookie cutter fantasy - it's very Tolkien-esque and it relies on many fantasy tropes that have just been done to death in the industry and in movies and books and everywhere. It has a few notable exceptions that make it different from other things but even those things weren't sort of player facing. There's a lot of stuff that’s still behind the scenes for that setting that the studio is reluctant to share with the world despite all of us wanting to share it with the world

C: And I guess you can’t talk about that.

N: I can’t

C: That’s fine, I understand.

N: But with Dragonholt at least… why Terrinoth was the first question. I wanted to create a game where could tell a story where people could become characters within that story, within that world. And originally Terrinoth was not the setting that I had envisioned, but after the first few weeks of doing some visioning and trying to come up with stories and figuring out where we wanted the stories to go and what kind of a game we wanted to make, what kind of a story we wanted to tell, what we arrived at was that we felt that a fantasy setting would be more accessible, easier for people to understand simply by picking it up, how they can relate to it, because it is so universal, so tropey in a way. People have encountered you know Tolkien fantasy or World of Warcraft or any other kind of fantasy, they all end up kind of blending together because they are so similar and we decided to use that instead as a benefit, a sort of means to allow you to be part of the world without needing to fully understand what Terrinoth is and what makes it different, but allow you to rely on those tropes and the things you know about other fantasy worlds to carry you through and understand what this world is like.

The amount of narrative and world building that went into Legacy of Dragonholt is probably more than all of the other games set in Terrinoth combined. So it was one part a world building exercise of developing that setting and bringing life to it because like you said it is very cookie cutter, it's hard for people to identify it and separate it from other fantasy settings. We wanted to at least show you a small portion of that world and what their ideals and their culture is like and even though Dragonholt is but a small village within a barony within a realm, it at least brings some amount of humanity to that setting that we didn't feel it had before. We didn't feel that it had real personable characters to relate to and the struggles that they faced.

And one at one of our goals when we decided to set it in Terrinoth - so FFG has sort of creative teams that manage the internal IPs - Dan is part of the the Terrinoth story group - but there is also an executive level control on those IPs. So when we started Dragonholt and decided that it would be set in Terrinoth one thing that we got an agreement from from the executive level was that for this small area we are in control as creative writers. That we we get to decide how what this small community’s culture and beliefs and religion is like etc. And that that doesn't necessarily reflect on the entire realm of Terrinoth but we have full creative control of this place .

C: I imagine it that must have made things very easy.

N: It was important to both me and Dan because Terrinoth as a setting has a history of - the creative aspects that developers come up with tend to get kind of pushed aside for other things to take the forefront. And that is part of what I believe results in Terrinoth feeling like it doesn't have much of an identity. So we really wanted to make sure that the identity that we were creating for this small village stayed in the forefront, that after playing this game you feel like you understand what they are about as a people, and Dragonholt maybe feels a little bit more like a home to you.

C: Anything else you wanna say about Dragonholt?

N: A sort of statement to readers and players, I guess. If Dragonholt is meaningful to you and you feel included by it or if you see yourself in it maybe for the first time even or even if it's just a rare instance of you being able to see yourself in it, tell anyone and everyone who will listen, because it's it's important that those who aren't in a minority group or marginalized group see how important this is to us. That we are represented in these games and that we can be a part of hobby and if we don't speak up en masse we might not get more games like this that allow us to really feel like a part of the community and the hobby.

Join us in part two of the interview where we discuss Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness, and how app integration became part of FFG’s game catalog.

Spotlight - Nikki Valens Part 1

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Spotlight - Nikki Valens Part 2

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