Cherie Heiberg · Archivist / Associate Writer

Who says we ever left the rabbit hole?

Will Weissbaum · Lead Writer

A lot of it comes from need. Maybe we start with the base supposition of, they have a lot of religions. With the Banu, we said they're going to have a lot of different belief systems that they try to incorporate. And that's enough for us to start going on. And then we start filling that in as we need it. So talking about the God of Luck, that's a very important one, and so we've learned a little bit more about how that works. Or we decide that they're a little more monotheistic, like the Tevarin had this major belief that was instilled as part of their culture, and that's kind of surmounted, like it was part of their identity. And so that focused it in. So I think it's usually like that. Even for the human stuff, there's a bunch of sports. Humans play a bunch of different sports, but we talked about Saddleball. We just have to pick and choose our battles, and a lot of times, it's that need: I'm writing this thing right now, and I need more detail about this, so I'm going to dive into it. Because otherwise, you'll just go crazy. You can just sit forever thinking of bands for hundreds of years.

Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

I think it's also one of those things. I always try to equate a lot of this to drawing a picture, where you draw in the sort of block shapes to block out your composition and your sizes and your framing and stuff like that. And then you fill in the details as you go and you refine down as you need it, as opposed to starting really detailed and trying to do a picture; it'll take you forever. You get what you need to get you through and sell what you're trying to sell, as far as the flavor or a location or something like that. And then just move forward, because, again, there's so much stuff to cover that hopefully, as we are moving down, we're still filling in all these little things, getting specific on stuff, because we go, oh, I have this Banu, and I don't want him to worship Teren, so I want him to do a new god. So I've got to come up with a new god. So now we have a second one that we can flop in there. Yeah, it's just about trying to keep moving forward.

Will Weissbaum · Lead Writer

I think this is a really interesting difference between the kind of nonlinear storytelling we do and a more traditional linear storytelling, where if you know exactly where you're walking and where you go, you can fill in a lot of detail on that path. So your character goes to this one bar and has this one drink, and you can describe the full history of that. But with us, where anyone can do so many different things, it becomes a lot harder to have that kind of controlled level of detail. So Dave's analogy was great for that kind of high-level rough sketch and then filling in the details as we go.