No Truce With The Furies - Interview with the Devs

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IndieGraze had a long interview with the No Truce With The Furies developers about the game.

Anyone with a keen eye for truly literary RPGs should be drooling at the trailer for No Truce With The Furies, a police procedural isometric with sci-fi/fantasy overtones under development by ZA/UM. With input from Art Director Aleksander Rostov and Lead Designer Robert Kurvitz, the team chatted with me on their project.

Erik Meyer: For anyone who lived a life saturated in RPGs like Fallout, Planescape: Torment, or Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, the NTWTF trailer will spark curiosity, and the game clearly seeks to redefine and expand on earlier conventions. With a world created by Robert Kurvitz as ongoing source material and visual assets drawing on an oil painting look from Russian Realist painters, what have been the challenges in uniting these varied elements, and which parts 'clicked' the fastest?

NTWTF: There's over a decade of casual, creative and professional collaboration across disciplines embedded in No Truce With The Furies. Writing lead Robert camped out in art director Aleksander's studio for years while finishing up the novel that set the stage for the world in which the game takes place. We find the RPG a particularly suitable medium for joining the disciplines of art and literature into a seamless, coherent whole.

What's interesting is how our major themes manifest in different disciplines. The very existence of the world of No Truce With The Furies is threatened by a phenomenon called the pale, which is as natural as the oceans or space. There are edges in this world where reality sort of ceases to exist. And they move around sometimes. Imagine living in this unnerving world - it's a wellspring for people of character. The very structure of the universe affects psychology, bringing out eccentricities, producing people whose souls have depth. Even simpletons have at some point thought of grand things - you can't escape those thoughts when the disintegration of the world is not merely an eschatological threat, but a physical reality.

The art reflects this state of affairs. There is a disproportionate amount of color in this world. Nothing is ever just a flat green or red. There's depth there, the colors get fragmented and mangled into other hues. Flecks of complementary color add spark and life. The white of a plaster wall is made up of so many greens, blues, pinks and yellows. It's not that you won't see a white wall. The wall is white, but if you take the time to study it, you'll find there are other colors in its structure.

Thus, in the end, it all speaks to the same whole. Take any part away, and it's no longer No Truce With The Furies.

EM: In well-told stories, audiences often come to love protagonists who aren't terribly likeable (A Clockwork Orange comes to mind); in NTWTF, players assume the role of a disgraced detective in a police procedural drama. To your mind, what is it about difficult situations and dysfunctional narratives that hooks gamers? As you've developed locations, NPCs, and subplots, what do you see as essential to maintaining a consistent yet compelling feel?

NTWTF: I think what we like about these characters is seeing other humans being human. We were taught in kindergarten under the teacher's judgmental gaze to divide people into the simplified categories of "good" and "bad". We were told the police are the good guys who make sure the bad guys get due punishment. Now we know, of course, that this is not necessarily true. And, forgive me for the triteness of this statement, but the bad guy is just the protagonist of his own story, right?

As humans, we're a gossipy bunch. There's something infinitely attractive about seeing into the thoughts and experiences of a character who seems so different from us. It's also enlightening to see that it's really all the same stuff that makes us tick. And it's an opportunity to look into someone's eyes and see beyond our own reflection.

The really killer part is realizing you can mix that experience with player agency via the magical lightning-blasting-out-of-fingertips medium of video games, which allow you to live that life. And with the incredibly overpowered 4th dimensional super power of saving your game, you can see how far you can push a situation, how insane you can go.

We do not recommend save-scumming, though. Please experience your first run of No Truce With The Furies with full acceptance of the consequences of your actions. It's better that way. See if you have the guts.

A curious little tidbit: at one point in history, before settling on calling our system Metric, the pen-and-paper version of it was called "Come be a person!"
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