Austen's Regency Fantasy and Yvris, the Hobbyist

I have a new game on the go so it’s time to rev up the Design Blog engines again. Vroom vroom, let’s talk about my regency ship wreck horror game: The Custom of the Sea.

Regency games - so hot right now

I’m far from the only game designer who’s been drawn to the siren song of Austen’s Regency era. Like many of my peers I grew up on the 90s BBC Pride and Prejudice adaptation and have long dreamt of being half the woman Jennifer Ehle’s Lizzie is. I’ve read all of Austen’s books at least twice. I happened upon her grave in Winchester Cathedral during a visit to the town and found myself genuinely moved. I’m sure a lot of her readers would feel the same. She feels familiar to us because she’s so present in her work. With Austen you’re not just reading a story, you’re having one told to you expertly and with immense charm. Who wouldn’t want to hang out with her a bit longer, maybe even create their own story in conversation with hers? I’ve played Good Society and think it’s great at this. So why am I making something new instead of playing it again?

Actually, Austen wasn’t my starting point. I love drawing on that well of inspiration as part of a larger tapestry, but the game idea actually started with the title - The Custom of the Sea. The phrase describes a system of etiquette less legally binding than maritime law, which was nevertheless used in 18th and 19th century courts to excuse decisions made by sailors during disasters at sea. Most notably the decision to eat one of the crew rather than starve.

Last-resort cannibalism is a bestial act of extreme bodily need. Perhaps the only one that you could get away with in the era of the “Bloody Code” which allowed people to be hanged for all sorts of minor offences, including petty theft, with scant thought given to the context of, say, the dire poverty of the offender. Something about the juxtaposition of the Regency of Austen’s fantasy romances and the real historic civilisation that created these euphemisms to smooth the reintegration into genteel society of people who’d done just about the least genteel thing imaginable tickled my story sensors.

To repeat: Austen is fantasy. I love her work and will continue to love it. I will defend it against all the incurious bores who accuse it of being “women in rooms having conversations and nothing happening”, as if that isn’t the whole point. But I do also have to wonder “what do the servants think of Lydia’s elopement?” Or “what happened to Emma’s poverty-stricken tenants AFTER she delivered them a basket of goodies?” We don’t know, we don’t care. We just want to know when Bingley’s coming back for Jane.

And then there's Bridgerton. I do watch it. I sometimes regret it. I’m not about the complain about the diverse casting - I think that’s a good and welcome choice. Is any of the diversity accurate? Who gives a shit? Austen is fantasy, let everyone join in. However, the show seems only able to deal with bigotry by vanishing it away completely, or having it easily vanquished before it becomes tiresome. There are clumsy attempts to tackle gender inequity and queer identities which tend to collapse into recognisable hetero-normative ruts (if you’ll pardon the word choice) after an episode or two of hand-wringing. And as for socio economic class? The latest season had a go at this and I applaud their choice not to have Sophie turn out to be rich after all, but her servant friends were the mice to her Cinderella, destined to quietly scurry back under the floorboards once they’d helped their pretty friend secure her prince. Next season servants will likely just be set dressing again. They won’t be coming to tea.

I want to make something that takes a different approach, and this means doing something that a lot of modern game texts actively ask us to avoid: leaning in to the social injustices of the time. Facing them head on. Then throwing in some mortal peril to make it abundantly clear how counter-productive they are and have always been to all of our mutual flourishing.

Status, Rank, Gender, and Station in The Custom of the Sea

The first step of character creation in The Custom of the Sea will be to roll a d12. This gives you a pool of Status tokens that can be spent at various points, most frequently to use Skills outside of the limited set of those Favoured for your Station. The total of this roll also gives you the first indication of your character’s Station: their Rank (either Common, Respectable, Genteel, or Aristocratic).

Once you know your starting Status and Rank, you decide your character’s Gender. This is very specifically the gender that they express externally and move through society in. The intention is that there will be space to play characters who experience a range of discomforts due to society’s expectations of the gender assigned to them, while framing that within the era’s rigid binary understanding of sex and sexuality.

Together, your Rank and Gender determine your Station. There are eight Stations: Common Woman, Common Man, Respectable Woman, Respectable Man, Genteel Woman, Genteel Man, Aristocratic Woman, Aristocratic Man. Each has its own selection of Skills that are Favoured and free-to-use and those that are Dis-Favoured and cost Status to use.

Crucially, this list of Favoured Skills in no way determines what your character is actually good at. The next step in character creation is to randomly roll your three main stats: Martial, Practical, and Refined. So you might end up with an Aristocratic Woman who has a low Refined modifier, impacting her use of Favoured Skills like Art or Dancing, but has a high Martial modifier, meaning she’d be handy in a fight if she’s happy to spend the Status since nearly all the Martial Skills are Dis-Favoured for her Station. This isn’t a broken build, it’s absolutely by design. The injustice of it is the story.

I’ll note here that I don’t currently have any mechanical approach to race wrapped into the game and I don’t intend to add one. There will also be absolutely no “primitive” human societies on the islands you wash up on (and if you create one consider the open license for this game revoked). I am conscious that people from all over the world absolutely did live and work in England in this era, including transported people and their descendants, so I’d love to work with someone better-qualified to provide player guidance on how to approach this sensitively. If you are one such person please do reach out!

Why this game?

At UK Games Expo this year I had a visit at my stall from the French language publisher of Drama Llamas. He’d kindly brought me the first-off-the-press copy of the game en français. Unfortunately I was quite distracted and didn’t give this moment the weight it deserved. Feeling self-conscious about my failure to give an adequate emotional response I tried to wrap up the conversation on a cheery note, like so:

Me: “Okay, great, thank you so much. I’ll be in touch when my next game’s out if you’re interested?”
French Publisher: “Oh, is it like Drama Llamas?”
Me: “Oh, no, not even a little bit. Not at all.”

At which point he gave me an “Euh, quoi?” sort of look and politely went about his day. And fair play to him. What was he meant to say?

It would undeniably make financial sense for me at this point to double- and triple-down on llamas. I know I should be promoting Bumbling 2: The Pollenating. But instead I’m writing a horror game about class and gender in Regency England. Crossover with my existing work? Minimal. Personal satisfaction? Proper loads.

I find I’m in a bit of a catch 22. I have a day job. It’s fine. It pays my bills and then some, so I get to have the sort of stable life conducive to the making of art. However, it is draining and it does mean doing things I don’t find interesting all day long. So when I sit down to do creative work I’m often out of capacity for doing anything other than exactly what I feel like. This is not ideal, because while churning out 101 NPCs for your favourite Llama-flavoured game would be fun it lacks the novelty of, say, mapping out brand new mechanics to describe the fluctuating social status of a group of castaways on an evil island that’s trying to kill them. And for me, novelty is what will pull me out of a stress fugue long enough to make something interesting happen on a page.

Is this just what being a “hobbyist” is? Probably. I’ve often resented the label as it feels like it exists to cast sneering aspersions on the quality of my work and occasionally my moral character, because I don’t suffer enough for my art. But there is an undeniable privilege in being able to make whatever actually interests me rather than what will give the best return on investment. That privilege is bought and paid for in time and stress and boredom and frustrated ambition, but I do think I get it. There is just so little actually green grass for TTRPG designers this side of heaven.

All of this to say that one day I hope I get to bring you 101 llamas to play with but for now my capacity is what it is, and I hope some of you will follow the llama lady on this, her spookiest voyage yet.