Making Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, part 5 - The Cog Book
I bring this series to a close with a look at a lorebook.
Welcome to the fifth in a five-part series about the making of Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, the final standalone expansion in the Too Many Bones board game series from Chip Theory Games, where I work as a writer and developer. This huge project is now being shipped to board gamers around the world, and to highlight the different facets of how it came together, I have been tackling individual aspects of its creation in an ongoing series this summer. Enjoy! Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here, and part four is here.
For the final piece in this series, I will dive into the creation of The Cog Book, a lorebook set in the world of Too Many Bones. I won’t be including any spoilers in the text below, but if you look closely at some of the process outline pictures I share, you might see a few, so be forewarned.
Each of the two standalone Too Many Bones boxes before Unbreakable also came with their own lore book, both styled in a manner to appear like an in-universe journal. In the early days of the company, Chip Theory partnered with freelance writer James Boutilier to write these books with input from owners Josh and Adam Carlson (James also did the bulk of the flavor writing for the first two games). By the time that Unbreakable came out, however, I was working full-time at Chip Theory and had already written the bulk of the flavor for the company’s last several projects, along with a few novella-length fiction pieces. Josh tapped me to write the final book in the trilogy, which was be dubbed “The Cog Book” after the steampunky cover (fun fact: since the first two books are called “The Liberation Logbook” and “The Waterlogged Book,” I wanted to continue to the wordplay by calling this volume “The Idealogue’s Book.” I was overruled).
When I got the assignment, I immediately decided to make things more difficult for myself. Josh didn’t have many directives for The Cog Book other than to tie it into the story of Unbreakable, but I had a few objectives that I decided must be accomplished for this to be a satisfying artistic endeavor. In order for me to be happy with The Cog Book, it had to…
Set up the events of Unbreakable
Satisfyingly conclude the story of the Too Many Bones characters
Tie in with the previous books, and specifically follow up on the cliffhanger at the end of The Waterlogged Book
Explain the convoluted Too Many Bones timeline
Actually, you know, be a compelling book with something expressive to say
I suppose I would split those goals out into three categories. Let’s call them Presentation, Paperwork, and Passion, because I like alliteration.
Presentation
To tie the book into Unbreakable, first we had to decide what the story of Unbreakable would be. We knew it would take place in the Break and be host to plenty of lava, but beyond that, we were free to create. Some of these story elements were necessitated by gameplay elements. For example, we knew we had to have a Gearloc tyrant, as all the other games did, as well as one other tyrant for the rest of the baddie types featured in the game. Logan Giannini and Adam Carlson designed those tyrants, and I worked them into the story. I also came up with most of their names and backstories, which I hope feel like they’re informed by the way they all play.
After some discussion with the entire development group, it was decided that the story of the game should loosely be based around the destruction, and possible reconstruction, of a device called The Great Machine, which was mentioned in previous lore and used for some nefarious purpose long ago in the Too Many Bones world of Daelore (including inadvertently forming the Break). In Unbreakable, each tyrant would be vying for total control of the Great Machine to assert dominance over the Break and the rest of Daelore.
Along with the tyrants, we had to feature the five new Gearlocs from the Unbreakable cycle of content (I also decided to write the book as if it was being recounted by Riffle, who hadn’t been featured in any of the TMB fiction up until this point). The second half of the book features a point of view chapter from each of them, and Carcass plays an important role in the first half of the book as well.
But what was in that first half of the book, and what’s with the interstitial in the middle there? That’s where Presentation intersects with Paperwork.
Paperwork
If you are a regular reader of this blog, it will come as no surprise to you that I am a huge nerd, and as such this self-imposed challenge of the book was perhaps the most fun for me to tackle. Much as I talked about when rewriting the lore of Hoplomachus, the lore – specifically, the timeline – of Too Many Bones is something of a mess, and I decided it would be a fun challenge to try to organize it all in a way that made sense.
Before Unbreakable, there were five “primary sources” for Too Many Bones lore: the base game, the Liberation Logbook, Undertow, the Waterlogged Book, and Splice & Dice (TMB’s other big, non-standalone expansion). The base game and the Liberation Logbook essentially occur simultaneously, with the latter sort of describing the events of the former. Undertow is a sequel to the first game, but the Waterlogged Book, which was released with it, is specifically a sequel to the Liberation Logbook – and it ends on a cliffhanger, despite seeming to take place before the events of Undertow. Finally, Splice & Dice (and its associated lore content) was released after Undertow but largely revolves around the machinations of evil Gearloc scientist Nobulous, who dies in Undertow.
To bridge the gaps and resolve the Waterlogged Book’s cliffhanger, I split the book in half. The first half fills in the gaps between the Waterlogged Book and Undertow, while setting up some pieces that will come back in the second half of the book and in Unbreakable (most notably, the seeds of the origins of a couple of the new Gearlocs and the tyrant Gavenkog, who eagle-eyed readers might recognize as the Gearloc Council Member the Liberation Logbook is addressed to). The second half sets up Unbreakable, and an epilogue at the end of the book is meant to be read after all Unbreakable tyrants have been defeated by the player/reader, concluding Tamriel’s story (at least for now).
I also wanted to make sure Splice & Dice (and the Gearlocs that were released at the same time as that game) got its due, despite us not releasing a book to correspond with its release, so in the middle of the book, I included an organized timeline of the history of the Too Many Bones universe, as well as a cleaned-up version of Nobulous’s journal entries, which were written by Josh Wielgus and I during Splice & Dice’s Kickstarter campaign. These journal entries recount the origins of the Gearlocs Dart and the Lab Rats, thus bringing all the remaining playable characters into at least one book.
Passion
Splitting the book into halves also gave me permission to spend much of the book writing about the character of Duster, who has always been one of the most narratively-interesting Gearlocs to me. She starts as a tyrant in the Too Many Bones base game and becomes a playable character in Undertow, thanks to her secret knowledge of the sins of the Gearloc Council. It always seemed to me that deep down, the story of Too Many Bones is really her story. I wanted to bring that story to a satisfying conclusion.
To that end, I also knew it would be important for me to include Mirawatt, a non-playable Gearloc who is frequently referenced as a figure who has been secretly fighting the Gearloc Council. As I wrote in part three, I originally intended for Mirawatt to be a playable character in Unbreakable, but when that became impossible, I decided to make her a central figure in The Cog Book to bring her journey to a close as well.
Making Mirawatt, who comes from a generation or two before most of the other Gearlocs in the game, a pivotal figure in The Cog Book also allowed me to explore some ideas I’d been thinking about a lot in my personal life. Mirawatt functions as something of a parental figure, if not always a fully positive one, to several of the other Gearlocs, and I tried to use that space to discuss the ways in which parents by necessity fail their children, and what that means. A thing I grapple with a lot as I age is the idea that all parents screw up their kids in some way they don’t intend, and that I’m almost certainly doing something I shouldn’t to my kids right now that I’m not even aware of, but that the best you can ask for is that your parents tried their best – that their intent was good, even if the results weren’t always ideal. Not everyone can say that about their parents, but I’m happy I can say it about mine, and I hope my kids can one day say the same about me. I tried to funnel some of that anxiety and frustration into The Cog Book, and I hope it comes through.
And that, at long last, brings this miniseries of my part in the making of Too Many Bones: Unbreakable to a conclusion. It was a really fulfilling creative process, and I hope everyone who picks up the game or checks out The Cog Book enjoys it. For what it’s worth, The Cog Book has been beset by delivery delays beyond Chip Theory’s control, but it is free to read at this link. Thanks for sticking with me on this journey.
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What else is good on the internet?
This isn’t new, but it was new to me: a loving obituary written by Ryan North, one of my favorite internet writers, for his dog.
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From the field
I gave you a whole book to look at this time!
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