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Governance de Magi 1 (2004) - MARDEK's Beginnings

5 years ago1,671 words

Did you know that MARDEK was itself a drastic revision of an earlier, more derivative story?

Some of you are understandably upset about the idea that something dear to you from your childhood would be changed beyond recognition were it to be completely rebooted... or you already were upset about exactly that happening with Taming Dreams. I'm posting this to give you some context of what MARDEK is to me, where it came from.

You might fondly remember MARDEK from your earlier years, but I spent a big chunk of my earlier years playing this game, Neverwinter Nights, a Western RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons (3.5e) by BioWare. It included a 'toolset' that allowed you to create your own adventures using the provided assets, and I had a lot of fun making many different stories.

This was one of the less interesting ones, but I think it's the only one that I actually finished? I know that I also worked on one called Fig Hunter, which was stranger and included a bunch of custom assets, as I'd already started feeling limited by sticking with what was provided by others, and I used that - combined with my love of the pre-VII Final Fantasies - as the basis for a custom JRPG engine I made in Flash.

I did a lot with Fig Hunter, and I have a working game which you might already have played, but for whatever reason I didn't stick with it. Strange, I know; normally I'm so good at that. Perhaps it was because it was getting too long? I know that I started MARDEK in a folder called "QuickQuests", and intended to make several short chapters of what I saw as a less interesting - but adequately functional - story, both to refine my engine and to make some consistent, relatively easy money.

Ha... How things repeat.

Obviously that blew completely out of proportion, and became the game you likely fondly remember now.

I wanted to show you this partly because I was curious to revisit it myself and to see how much was kept and how much was changed, but mostly because I want you to understand that MARDEK wasn't ever some perfect flash of insight that came from the aether fully formed, and which now must not be touched so as to preserve its purity. Rebooting it wouldn't be messing with or ruining a good idea; it's something I've already been doing since the beginning.

This first version of this story is very derivative. Its tone and tropes are essentially copies of what I saw in the NWN main game and other modules, as well as this game's predecessors like Baldur's Gate. I was surprised actually by how close it is to that style, considering that I was just 16 when I made this. It's not completely incompetent, it's just really generic.

But perhaps generic is what people like, because it's familiar?

Creators typically begin, when they're young, with mimicry. For visual artists, for example, they might start off by literally tracing, say, Dragon Ball Z or Pokemon characters, then they'll move onto drawing those freehand, then they'll design original characters in the same style, before eventually finding their own voice as they move beyond their teens. This module was pure mimicry, MARDEK was me synthesising this inspiration with inspirations from JRPGs and general sci-fi, then Taming Dreams was using those years of learning to make something wholly my own.

This recording is just over two hours long. Again, I don't really expect anyone to sit down and view the whole thing, but it might be interesting to skip along and see where some of MARDEK's concepts came from.





Some notes:

As I mention a few times in the 'commentary' for this recording (I haven't recorded my voice because I don't have a microphone, though the game lets my character say typed messages), this is my second attempt playing through this (since the last time I played it, many years ago). The previous attempt was just before this one, though I played as a comically-poorly-built sorcerer character called Spudfudger, and the whole thing was just me dying constantly and it took over four hours. While I wanted to show things as I first rediscovered them, I feel bad enough about uploading long videos, and that was just unacceptably long. This one ended up as three hours anyway, but I ended up cutting out repetitive chunks and got it down to just over two. YOU'RE WELCOME.

("But I wanted to watch every battle and you running uneventfully between locations!!")

Since I had to create a custom character to play this, I gave myself a crude name which I both regret and find hilarious. "If I'm reliving being a teenager, I might as well go all the way!", I thought. While it makes me laugh quite a bit (especially when it sounds like a request or an impatient demand from people I've just met, or from my elderly adoptive father figure), I'm aware that this isn't everyone's favourite flavour of humour. MARDEK was full of it, though, so it's not as if it's unfitting. I considered calling myself just 'Mardek', but thought this was funnier. I usually use names that'll sound silly in dialogue when I can name my character, though it's usually something fairly tame like "Chuckles" (that's what I always call Link) or something disparaging to 'myself' (like "You Idiot", surely born of self-loathing masochism!), so I'm actually surprised I went with something so crude here. It's because he's a monk! Obviously?

Rohoph is a human wizard, and he used to be part of an 'adventuring group' of other wizards, who each specialised in one of the "schools of magic" from this setting (Forgotten Realms): Abjuration, Alteration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation. I didn't really understand much of the Forgotten Realms lore since I'd never explored it beyond this game (and Baldur's Gate etc), but I just liked lists of things that I could refer to when making a group of villains. In MARDEK, these were transformed into the elements typical of JRPGs, and in Taming Dreams they lost these 'training wheels' and became sentiments, which were of my own design.

Mardek and Deugan are nowhere to be seen, though "Emela Jard" is your 'friend' and your first ally. She was inspired by the character Imoen from Baldur's Gate, a young woman who - exactly like here - becomes your first ally because she's your childhood friend or something. Emela's a bard here, and I wondered in the video whether it was because Imoen was too, though I later remembered she was a Thief. I think Rohoph might have been inspired by the starting events of Baldur's Gate too, though I only realised this when looking up Imoen just now; in that, you've been raised in a closed-off village by a wise sage called Gorion, who's essentially the same archetype as Rohoph is here. Like I said, creators typically start off by just copying.

Vehrn and Zach also appear, and their appearances in MARDEK were based on how they look here. Vehrn was made more comical (relatively speaking) in MARDEK, while Zach was changed less, maybe? I still need to replay Chapter 2.

Moric also appears, though he's a generic evil necromancer who you kill and who's then reborn as a lich. Cliche. To my surprise, he has a surname which is the same as one given (randomly-generated) to Muriance, who made his first appearance in a different module that I made.

There's an NPC called 'Meredoc', a gnomish inventor who asks you to defeat his old Iron Golem in Goznor's sewer so then he can use its microprocessor (as I'm sure they had in this setting) to make a new one. Those later became Meraeador and Legion, and then Meraeadyth and what was going to be called Cerberus. Again, refining ideas from something derivative to something more original.

Elwyen also appears as a literal nymph, who asks you to go and kill the 'sea hag' (not lake hag) - a literal hag - under the waters of Lake Qur, though it's to remove a curse on her here, not her parents.

Neverwinter Nights had a random name generation system, like many character creators, and most of the characters in this had their names determined by that. I know that some were custom names, but I can't remember which ones. In the video, I thought that Emela was randomly-generated, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe all the key characters were named by me? Though their surnames were likely generated. These days, I try to come up with meaningful names, and it bothers me that the MARDEK ones have names that are so empty of meaning. (Mardek himself is similar to the name of the Mesopotamian god Marduk, and that's where Enki comes from, but there's no thematic relevance to that; I came up with the name 'Mardek' randomly for another earlier story, and used the mythological references purely because of the similar sound, rather than, say, writing a story with themes that in some way related to Mesopotamian mythology and using names from it to give weight to that. Perhaps a reboot could use completely different character names, as was the intention with Belief...)



It's somewhat strange, showing something like this, because it's not as if I made the game's mechanics or graphics myself, so obviously they're better than the things I did make myself, which came after.

I'd forgotten all about this when I first started talking about returning to MARDEK, but had my memories rekindled by people's resistance to the idea of a reimagining. If you're one of those people, do you think that MARDEK's 'story and characters' were an improvement over this? And if so, do you think their incarnations in Taming Dreams were an improvement over MARDEK, and that newer versions might be an improvement over Taming Dreams?