Fallen Gods News

Today would have been the 69th birthday of Joe Dever, the late amazing writer and creator of the Lone Wolf series of game books (among other things). Anyone who has followed the long development of Fallen Gods knows that Lone Wolf was one of its core inspirations; not once, but twice, it had an important influence on me as a game designer.


I first discovered Lone Wolf in the 1980s when I was a kid, and I was enthralled. Dever’s writing and Gary Chalk’s art brought the world to life with spare, vigorous prose and evocative ink drawings.

As an avid consumer of all things fantasy, the books could have held me if they were nothing more than novels. But what really sank the hook was that they were structured somewhere between a Choose Your Own Adventure (which I loved) and Dungeons & Dragons (which I had struggled to connect with). If you haven’t played these gamebooks, you should because they have a particularly special quality seldom captured in computer games: the options you don’t take—whether the Kai Disciplines (super powers) or gear you forgo at the start, or the choices you opt not to take as the adventure progress—are as evocative as the ones you do take. Even after you’ve “won” a book it’s impossible not to pick it up and play it again and again. Over time, the character sheet was shredded from erasures, the spine broken, and nearly every page dog-eared... in book after book.


In fact, the first game I ever designed was a dice-driven gamebook called The Road to Doom’s Castle, made using The Print Shop on our Apple IIc and a borrowed thermobinder. (I imagine the clip art will be familiar to anyone of a certain age...) As homages to Lone Wolf go, it is a poor one (given the limited abilities of an 9-year-old), but it was one of my first steps on the road of game design, with Joe Dever pointing the way.


And then, video games and computer games caught up to Lone Wolf in storytelling, and I drifted away from gamebooks and into Gold Box and later Infinity Engine cRPGs, Sierra and LucasArts adventures, and every jRPG I could get my hands on. My designs and stories for Primordia, Strangeland, Infinity, and other games have their roots in those adolescent obsessions of mine. I probably never would have spared another thought for Lone Wolf, and never would have launched the great undertaking of Fallen Gods, except that Joe Dever did something else that showed what an amazing person he is.

In 1999, Dever authorized Project Aon to republish the Lone Wolf books, for free online. He wrote:

I would be especially pleased if my granting of the rights to distribute my books in this way was seen as my ‘millennium gift’ to all those devoted readers who have kept the Kai flag flying high, through all the good times, and the not-so-good. It would make me very proud indeed if this enterprise laid the foundations of a lasting legacy, securing the longevity of Lone Wolf by making my creation freely and readily accessible to current and future online generations.

(Gary Chalk, naturally, showed the same generosity and allowed his illustrations to be used as well.)

As a result, in 2005, the games were waiting for me to play again—without wearing out erasers or pages or spines in the process—and I consumed them avidly, enjoying that rare double-vision delight where you look through jaded and youthful eyes at the same time, and through both sets see something splendid. “Nostalgia” doesn’t explain it. The gamebooks are just damn good. The choices still have their impact. The balance remains excellent. The writing is still lean and muscular. The art is still fantastic. The world of Magnamund and the nation of Sommerlund remain as enthralling as ever.

Joe Dever’s generous heart is as much an inspiration as his creative mind—it’s one reason I’ve enjoyed releasing free games (and free content) to our fans whenever I can.

In whatever summerland his soul rests, I hope he knows that the lasting legacy of Lone Wolf left its DNA in Fallen Gods. “Blessed is the giver, richer through the giving of a gift.”

As 2025 begins, we wanted to take a moment to express our gratitude for all the incredible support we've received this year -- a big thank you to our amazing friends, fans, players, testers, translators, and teammates! Your enthusiasm and dedication have been crucial to everything we've accomplished. Here's a quick overview of some of our major achievements this year:

Fallen Gods

This year marked a significant milestone for Fallen Gods, our longest-running project, now approaching its 11th year! While we're not quite there yet, we're in spitting distance. The core content and engine are firmly in place, meaning 2024 was about refining and adding the finishing touches. That included features such as the tutorial, ending slides, world map, quest log, scoreboard, and run summaries. Art-wise, we completed a major UI overhaul; refined, replaced, or added dozens of illustrations; and added pixel art for new combat animations, diagonal movement sprites, and map details. On top of that, we expanded the game with more events, music tracks, sound effects, and voice-over nodes, while enhancing the ambient soundscape.

There's still a bit to go, but we're committed to ensuring Fallen Gods is as polished as possible before we cross the finish line. One nice thing about the development of the project is that we're not beholden to any timetable.

Primordia

The big update for 2024 was Marauder Film exercising the option we signed years ago, which gives Marauder the right to produce a Primordia movie. While this doesn't guarantee the film will get made, it's an exciting development! At the outset, I was very hesitant about agreeing to an adaptation of Primordia, as the world, characters, and story are so near and dear to my heart. Still, after seeing my teammates' enthusiasm and Bastiaan’s evident excitement for the project, I was persuaded. It's going to be interesting to see someone else's story and take on our creation, and the Marauder team seems excellent.

Meanwhile, James has continued to polish and support the game, the proverbial Man the All-Builder returning to perfect his creation, with a number of small bug fixes and improvements.

Strangeland

Late in 2024, the lead on Strangeland's Turkish translation reached out to me and James to let us know that he had gone back through and revised it, line by line, because he wanted the translation to do the game justice. He sent us a touching note, explaining how much video games had meant to him growing up, and adding:

This perspective is what makes meeting individuals like you such a joy for me. Learning about your journey as developers and reading about the experiences that shaped your creative vision has been profoundly moving. It’s clear that your work isn’t just about making games but about creating meaningful art that resonates with people on a deeper level.

These kinds of messages mean so much... as I've said for years, the connections our creations make with our players is like calling out into the void and hearing a friendly voice answer back. Knowing that something we poured ourselves into matters to someone else is the whole reason for creating indie games.

Strangeland also got a first pass at a Spanish translation right at the end of the year, and we're hoping a final, integrated version will be ready by May.

These translations spring from the incredible generosity of our fans. I've enjoyed working with the translators on both Primordia and Strangeland to make sure the "voice," themes, and wordplay come through as much as possible -- a daunting task. There's always a fair bit of technical work for James in implementing them, and given this time commitment, these may be the last translations we do for a while. Still, it's satisfying to look back at the many translators and translations we've had the pleasure to work with and on over the past decade!

Website Overhaul

In collaboration with Nicolas Dekaise (developer of Enoch: Children of Fate) and superfan James Boehme, we finally gave our website, www.WormwoodStudios.com, a much-needed overhaul. I'm not sure how much traffic developer websites even get these days, but we wanted to present our games in a cleaner, more attractive way.

Sundries

Finally, in Wormwood-adjacent news, the amazing Carbonflesh (which James has been working on forever) got its reveal and a demo, as did Infinity, the very first commercial game I ever worked on as a writer/designer (a quarter century ago!). And Iron Tower's Colony Ship, which I had the pleasure to consult on, had its final content patch, the culmination of many years of development. As anyone who's been through it knows, RPGs take a long, long time to make. I just hope that when Fallen Gods finally crosses the finish line, it's as great as these three games are!

- Mark

I’m pleased to continue our team introductions with two of the more recent team members—which is to say, they’ve been working on Fallen Gods for many months rather than many years. Hailing from the Czech Republic and Argentina respectively, Jan Pospíšil and Marcelo Orsi spread our team even farther across the globe!

I first crossed paths with Jan way back in 2018, not long after he began work on Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, when he generously offered to contribute some art to Fallen Gods. Since King of Dragon Pass was one of the important inspirations for Fallen Gods, and since Jan’s art is (and was) phenomenal, it was a wonderful offer to receive! Unfortunately, conflicts on both ends kept intervening, and it wasn’t until late 2022 that we finally were able to connect, and not until late 2023 that Jan had time to dig in more. Now he’s taking on one of the critical pieces of our art: the illustrations the player sees in the game’s many different endings. He also contributed a couple of event illustrations.

Marcelo and I met on Twitter, as his striking artwork for There Is No Light and Inscryption kept catching my eye (as well as James’s). It turns out Marcelo is as much a fan of our games as we are of his art, and we were all glad to find an excuse to collaborate. (Marcelo’s also helping on Carbonflesh with James.) Very quickly, we bonded over our shared love of Borges (an Argentine author who influenced Primordia’s characters and worldbuilding) and asado. So far, Marcelo has worked on assembling a lorebook for Fallen Gods from other artists’ material—an assembly process that benefits from Marcelo’s excellent artistic skill—and we’re looking forward to sharing The World of Fallen Gods soon. We also are looking forward to additional contributions from him in the game itself, such as beautifying the items, and in its manual.

Both Jan and Marcelo have amazing galleries that shouldn’t be missed!


[h3]Jan Pospíšil[/h3]

Mark: You’re best known for your work on Six Ages, another game that is grounded in mythology, folklore, and history—but a different set of influences for each. What steps did you take to make your Fallen Gods art capture the different setting?

Jan: I played the game for a bit and looked at the existing art a lot. The overall visual language actually felt quite familiar, the challenge was mostly in adjusting my tools and process to produce similar-enough results. I definitely simplified my drawings compared to Six Ages, which was in a way quite liberating. There isn’t as much need for a ton of culture-specific details and other than the god there aren’t many recurring characters. Then it was a matter of keeping the color palette more muted than I did in Six Ages, as well as leaning into strong lighting setups rather than flat local color.

Mark: Initially, you did a pair of event illustrations for Fallen Gods before taking on the ending illustrations. Are there any differences in approach you’ve taken to the endings?

Jan: The endings definitely require more flash and drama—using both lighting and composition they need to feel impressive and final. It obviously depends on the nature of each ending, but the player should typically be feeling big emotions while looking at the painting. We meet strong important gods, prevail in battle over terrible monsters and see bright bridges of light shoot up into the heavens—the art needs to deliver that spectacle. In other cases we get just a landscape that has to communicate a certain mood, or half a character facing away from the “camera” or cut off by deliberate composition that needs to get their relationship to the god across.

In the end I think I just planned a bit better before I started and tried a little harder while I painted. ;)


[h3]Marcelo Orsi[/h3]

Mark: What first attracted you to Fallen Gods?

Marcelo: I think the atmosphere of the game was the first thing that hooked me in. It was something beyond just “retro,” which would imply something created now that wants to emulate something old... no, this game felt as if it was actually created in the past, in a period where I think games were truly magical. The art, the music, and the narration just transported me to that awesome era.

Then, the gameplay loop sealed the deal for me: it wasn’t just the atmosphere; this thing played as a classic game, too! It wasn’t obvious; I had to figure out how to win this thing. It was like a puzzle, something I kinda miss with the standardization of mechanics these days. That’s what I mean when I say it felt from that classics era: it was fresh, as games from back then were. After a few runs, I went from being interested in it to actually loving it.

Mark: As an artist yourself, what do you look for in creating a book to showcase the diversity of illustrations within Fallen Gods?

Marcelo: Well, the first thing I looked for was an element that would help me achieve some kind of cohesion. That’s when the UI of the game came into the scene: just had to adapt it and it would give me the forms I needed to link each illustration together, as well as the type for the text. This of course had to be modified to suit the new format, but the game already has that “book” feel, so it was an easy adaptation.

Now, for actually compositing everything, I treated each page as if it were an illustration that will now include the frames and the text: it needed focal points, and a flow. And most importantly: it needed to be clear to the reader... so even if I added some effects here and there to spice things up, I always tried to keep them subtle. The illustrations and text had to do the heavy lifting, my work just needed to frame them and enhance them without getting too much attention.

After a hiatus, I’m pleased to continue the team introductions! Next up is Jamie Campbell, the narrator of Fallen Gods, is another of its longest-running contributors and another teammate who brings both amazing talent and passion to his work. When we set out to cast the narrator for Fallen Gods back in 2016, I expected a few auditions—instead, dozens upon dozens of voice actors put in, each with his or her take on the text and the speaker. (One of them, Steven Kelly, would fittingly go on to voice the scribe Fimbul Fambi in Strangeland, bringing the same skaldic personality to that role.) We ultimately chose Jamie, who not only delivered what I had heard in my head, but also drew out qualities that the written words had only hinted at.

Jamie’s distinctive delivery—sometimes wry, sometimes epic, sometimes disgusted, but always warmly, wisely human—brought the language to life, and inspired the approach I took to the many thousands of words I wrote over the next eight years. Throughout it all, he has remained a rock of reliability on the team, steadily working through the hours upon hours of voice acting. His answers testify to the thoughtfulness and sophistication with which he approaches his work.

After reading what Jamie has to say, go listen to his stuff on SoundCloud, including a fabulous reading of “The Raven” (anyone who played Strangeland knows how much I love that poem) and a performance as Kefka, a villain who left a lasting impression on me.

- Mark Y.

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Mark: Within hearing just a few events’ worth of voice over, it becomes apparent that the narrator has a personality of his own. How would you describe that personality, and how did you construct it?

Jamie: One of the things that drew me to the project in the first place was that I read that one of Mark’s influences in creating Fallen Gods were the Lone Wolf game books by Joe Dever, which I collected and absolutely devoured as a kid. These were grand fantasy adventures told in the second-person, and once I understood this as an inspiration, I had that type of backdrop in mind, and I remember how my inner voice would hear those books as I read them. They were like Tolkien meets Choose Your Own Adventure.

The skald introduces every event node that the player comes across, and because the player is accompanied by his voice so often, I wanted to establish a sort of “baseline neutral” as a launching off point. Unless there’s an emotional or dramatic start to an event, the skald generally approaches it with a similar level of calm and interest in whatever’s transpiring. However, when the action is punctuated by something dramatic or unusual—an ambush or an environmental peril—I wanted to get right into it to make the player sit up and take notice so that they’re emotionally tuned in when it comes time to make their decision as to how to proceed.

The narrative takes stylistic inspiration from ancient epic poetry, and the fact that this sort of luxuriant language and poetic structure is woven into the writing presents a unique challenge, but also makes it ridiculously fun to read. (I majored in Classics, and I absolutely love this stuff.) Because of that narrative tradition, and due in large part to much of Mark’s wonderfully-paced writing, it felt natural to deliver the lines with a sort of ‘round-the-campfire, oral tradition vibe. Some of the lines are more prosaic than others, but the skald’s lines often lend themselves to a bit of a rhythmic, metered delivery, so I’ve tried to inject a bit of poetic flair and musicality into them where appropriate.

Regarding the personality of the skald, I see him as something between a conscience, a co-conspirator, and occasionally a judgmental observer, like a bemused St. Peter (or Valhalla’s equivalent) taking notes in his Big Book. At times lofty and serious, heavy with gravitas, and at times conspiratorial and sly. He’s concerned about the player-character when their life is in danger, and relieved and content when things are going well, or when some boon materializes. Because the skald spends so much of the adventure “over the shoulder” of the player and spinning their song, it strikes me as a fairly intimate relationship – with a caveat.

When I was brought on board as the skald, I remember thinking back to how much I absolutely loved John Rhys-Davies’ wonderful narration for the CD-ROM version of Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness when I was a kid. I haven’t heard that stuff in 20+ years, as I intentionally stayed away from revisiting that when developing the voice of the skald. But what stuck in my memory all these years later is a sense of what I’d call “detached intimacy.” Similarly, it feels to me like whoever the skald is, their fate is somehow intertwined with the player-character’s, as if the skald wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t serve a purpose without him. They’ll never meet face to face, but they’re close companions anyway.

The mystery of the connection that may or may not exist between them is part of the fun; the skald may truly have some stake in the wellbeing of the player, or he may just be doing his best as a storyteller. I think that this sense of mystery also colored the not-quite-discernible accent of the character. To me, he feels like a “person from nowhere,” and this unknowable, faceless voice is another element that fits right in with the ancient poetic and oral traditions to which it pays homage.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Mark: You’ve been working on Fallen Gods for almost a decade. Has your approach to the voice over, or the narrator’s personality, changed at all during that time? Has the passage of time presented any challenges?

Jamie: It became apparent early on that consistency was going to be absolutely vital so that there’s a level of comfort that the player settles into as they travel along in the adventure. This is especially true because of the non-linear, procedural nature of the game. At any given time, a player’s next encounter might be something that I recorded five years ago, or it might be something that I just finished yesterday. Thankfully, Mark and Maciej have been not only an excellent audience, but fantastically helpful collaborators with regard to choosing which takes felt most appropriate. I think that in doing so, they helped steer that consistency along.

With regard to whether the approach and personality of the skald changed over the years, I’d say that it’s been a very engaging balancing act. On the one hand, keeping the aforementioned “baseline neutral” as a bedrock to keeping consistent with what’s come before, and on the other, developing a keener sense of just how close the relationship between the skald and the player comes to feel over the course of this vast number of lines and encounters.

I mentioned earlier that a lot of the passages have the feel of ancient epic poetry. As the voice developed, it was important that even when voicing events that don’t necessitate this poetic rhythm, I wanted it to feel like that same heartbeat was there; it needed to remain buoyant and ready to move when the words next wanted to dance to Mark’s lead. After years of recording, so many brilliant passages have come in and surprised me, and there’s an ever-widening scope of just how many adventures the player goes through with the skald accompanying them. I hope that ultimately the passage of development time won’t be evident, but on the other side of the microphone, I’m always learning more about this world, and I’m just having a blast throughout.

As to the challenges of working on a project with this kind of lifespan, it’s presented one particular challenge which I’m delighted to have. Over the last few years, my wife Katya launched a successful handmade jewelry brand called GogolHaus, which she operates out of our home studio. She’s crafty enough to have also built the structure of my recording booth (Orm bless her) in the same room, so we’re often splitting work time between a jewelry workshop and a recording studio. But we’re both able to pursue our creative work in our little space, and I feel very fortunate for that.

Otherwise, it’s been great fun to be on this Fallen Gods journey for so long with such talented collaborators. Being a spoke on the wheel of this project, which is so clearly a labor of earnest love, has been hugely fulfilling, and I can’t wait to see (and hear) it in action in its final form.

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Mark: In addition to the narrator, you voice any character who has direct dialogue in the events’ intro nodes. How do you go about differentiating these voices?

Jamie: It’s very common in video games and other media that take place in a pre-industrial setting to lean on British accents. It seems as though developers or creators often think that in the minds of the audience, those voices feel authentic to anything “fantasy.”

I’m not Scandinavian and wouldn’t purport to fake such an accent for hours upon hours of dialogue and narration, so we established a baseline with the Fallen Gods trailer (which also served as my audition for the role way back in 2016). Leaning into an American accent felt like it might clash with the world of the game, but I wanted something that was familiar enough to retain a lot of range and consistency. What felt right was a sort of dampened Transatlantic accent that tended toward a rhythmic mode of speech, which would lend itself to the often poetic pieces of writing that Mark provided for the events.

The flavor of the writing and visuals are suggestive of the history of a certain region of our world, but because we weren’t tied to leaning into a Scandinavian accent for the skald, it meant that there was also a lot of freedom when it came to the voices and accents of the other characters. The game isn’t reflecting a slice of history from our world; it’s its own thing. As such, I was able to play around a lot with the voices of the many characters that the player encounters throughout the adventure.

This is also a world where many of the people and creatures that the player encounters understand who the player-character is: They’re speaking to a god who’s fallen from Skyhold. The player-character isn’t someone who’s at the height of their once lofty powers, but they’re no one to be trifled with either. This often informed the development of a character’s voice and differentiated them from each other. What’s this character’s relationship to this fallen god? A wary thief who stumbles upon the player in the wilderness is going to have a very different attitude to the haughty Lord of the Mud who laughs at the very notion of the player’s supposed power.

Sometimes Mark would have a specific reference in mind that I might use as a baseline for a character, but most often I was given free rein to just reach for context clues and have fun with it. There’s a great collection of memorable characters here, and many of them were such a joy to voice. A wurm who’s trying to project the power it once had through intimidation, while being deathly ill and desperate for help from the very person it’s threatening, or an undead who finds it so hard to speak and whose mind is so addled that it vocalizes on its inhalations. There was typically some quirk to work with, which made each a singularly fun challenge.

I can’t wait for you all to enjoy the game, and to let us know what you think!

Without knowing who he was, I had seen Ivan’s work for years: his fantastic portraits are in virtually every game developed or published by Wadjet Eye Games (the publisher of our two adventures, Primordia and Strangeland), and he contributed beautiful backgrounds to Quest for Infamy, another awesome adventure game. When a couple of his scene illustrations came across my Twitter feed back in early 2021, I immediately wanted him to join the Fallen Gods team, and I reached out not even realizing the common ground and friends we shared.

Since then, I’ve discovered why everyone who works with Ivan wants to collaborate with him time and time again—he is the consummate teammate: immensely talented, committed to the common effort, and considerate of his colleagues. One thing that stands out in particular is Ivan’s ability to integrate his illustrations into the other aspects of the game (its gameplay, its sprites, etc.), so that his art enhances those elements rather than detracting or distracting from them.

Ivan's answers and some of his art are below, and you can find more his work on Twitter.

Mark: Like Wormwood Studios itself, your prior projects have been point-and-click adventures like Unavowed, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, and The Charnel House Trilogy. How is illustrating for Fallen Gods different from your work on those games?

Ivan: One of the trickiest aspects of creating art for games is that more often than not you’re creating small, detached parts of the whole—a floating head for a portrait, a standing sprite of a character, an empty background to be occupied later. This means you have only limited control over how your art would actually look in the end, and a lot of effort goes just into making all those disparate elements mesh together. Making illustrations for Fallen Gods was a different beast—much closer to classical book illustration, it was a welcome change in how much freedom it allowed, both in terms of interpreting the stories, and in terms of control over your compositions, color palettes, and style.

Another important difference was in the role that the illustrations play in the game—the way I see it, they are not there to create a rigid, specific game-space, but to create little windows into the imagined wider whole, to expand the possibility space and to spark the players’ imagination. And each illustrator brought their unique flavor to that shared table, which was always inspiring.

Mark: Many of the event illustrations depict followers, enemies, scenes, items, and the like that appear elsewhere in the game as sprites or backgrounds. How do you approach illustrating those elements so that they complement the pixel art?

Ivan: Drawing characters that would also appear in the game as tiny pixelated people was an interesting challenge—the small sprites stand in for entire groups of people (churls, priests, fighters, etc.), whereas the ones I illustrate are individuals involved in specific events. There’s a clear difference in the level of abstraction there, but the player should still be able to relate one to another to make informed choices. My solution for this was to always take a couple of visual cues directly from the sprites—a piece of clothing, a haircut, a particular color, but change the rest—that way you both get a sense of continuity, and get to expand and enrich the world of the game by showing a wider variety of its inhabitants. In a funny way, it was a bit like drawing fanart for a game you’re working on yourself.

Mark: One of your largest undertakings on the project is a multi-stage victory path involving first a clash between armies, then a battle between the god’s warband and the elite enemy forces, and finally a direct confrontation with a single powerful foe. How do you capture the shifting scale and focus of a long event like that?

Ivan: I wanted to make that sequence feel grand and sweeping, so it made sense for me to think about it as if directing a film, and then boiling it down to a couple of essential shots. So we start with a bird’s eye view “establishing shot” to create a sense of scale, and then go down to the ground, right into the fray. Presenting a scene from different viewpoints has its own challenges—it’s easy to go too far and end up with a disconnected collection of images, but I've tried to anchor them with repeating visual elements and recognizable topography—the fact that the battle takes place on a river helped with that a lot.

Another important part of the cinematic approach was emphasizing the passage of time. Thankfully, as an illustrator you get full control of the weather in your art, so it was only a matter of deciding how it should change to best accommodate the story we’re telling. For that I’ve turned to another film technique often used in animation—making a color script. A color script is a visual way of presenting a story simply through the change of color palettes in the scenes. In our case we move from ominous gray to orange-red, and then to red and black. You can probably tell how this story goes just from that.