The Necromancer’s Tale turned out to be a huge undertaking, especially with regard to its narrative, which finally came in at 400,000 words (almost as big as the Lord of the Rings– all three volumes!). I started work on the game at the end of 2019, and finished mid-2025. I had never written such a narratively-detailed game before, nor attempted to write any substantial works of fiction. Was I crazy? Quite possibly yes, but it worked out well in the end…

I had some things in my favour, including my BA in English literature (majoring in Gothic fiction) and 30 years experience as an academic: proof-reading and editing are things I’m very experienced at.

Still, I was all at sea in late 2019 when we received EU (Creative Europe MEDIA) funding to prototype the game. I was faced with a mammoth task and had little idea how to start it.

Building the Narrative Structure

Luckily, I’m friends with a very experienced game-narrative director (and awesome writer) Dave McCabe- and he was interested in writing for a traditional RPG (his prior work mostly being the point-and-click Darkside Detective series). Dave worked with me on the game for about 15 months, during which time we put a lot of shape on the story. Under his direction we put together the pre-game timeline, including history, geography and backstory, as well as the biographies of key characters. Dave wrote the 10,000-word prologue for the game, and a lot of the writing for the next three chapters. This provided a good foundation (including stylistically and atmospherically) for the additional writers that we found we needed.

Since I only get to work part-time on my games, I always develop them without hard deadlines, and that played into the requirements of The Necromancer’s Tale. A story turns out best when it is mulled over, iterated, refined, and edited. It needs time to ferment in your imagination.

The Team Expands

Due to work and family commitments, Dave had to step back from the project during 2020, so I put out an advert for game writers to help. I was lucky to recruit an awesome team of writers (two at first: Damir and Zach, with three more following later: Sarah, Michael, and Brad). As it turned out, the strong direction I could provide due to the early work from Dave and I resulted in strong results from the team. This is something I’ve seen too when commissioning artists: the stronger  your direction, the better their work will be.

Branching game narratives and interactive-world to text-narrative integration are pretty complex, even when working with a powerful authoring tool (we used Articy:Draft). I found very quickly that there was a lot of back-and-forth needed between the narrative and my other code: e.g. synchronising in-game actions with the narrative- this required controlling in-game things with reference to the unique IDs of the text nodes exported from Articy. The process was pretty unwieldy while Dave had ownership of the Articy writing and I had ownership of the game code and 3D environments.

The Writing Process

When I recruited the other writers, I took sole ownership of both the Articy project and the Unity project. This meant that the tight integration that was necessary between the narrative, the C# code, and the 3D game world became manageable. Writing was provided to me in simple Google documents, and I copied-and-pasted it into Articy. Although this was a bit onerous, it also forced me to carefully proof-read and edit everything, keep an eye out for any contradictions or inaccuracies (or logic errors), and add extra material where I saw an opportunity.

I put together a pool of writing tasks – made up of scenarios and quests from throughout the game. The writers (including me) claimed these tasks according to their own preference and available time. We met bi-weekly to discuss the ongoing work and to brainstorm current and future writing. This worked really well, not least because it respected the availability of each contributor. (We were all part-time on the project).

Keeping the Writing Coherent

I was concerned about the potential risk, that having 8 different contributing writers could lead to inconsistent characterisation and confused narrative arcs. However, neither of these things happened, and indeed reviews of the game widely praise its coherence and the compelling story arcs – most notably, the mental slide of the player character into deceit, murder, and black magic, as their humanity is chipped away piece by piece. Our foundational work and ongoing process served us well.

In our game design document, everything is laid out chapter by chapter, and one of the things I’m very pleased I did was to indicate at the top of each chapter the internal state-of-mind of the player character (PC). This provided direction for the writers, which ensured a coherent arc. For example, in the early game – as they are just starting to explore quite benign magic for mostly-selfless reasons – the PC’s mental state is framed by the concerns of a young adult whose father has died in suspicious circumstances, but who is generally law-abiding. As the story progresses, the PC requires darker magic to progress their aims, and begins to fall under the influence of entities from ‘beyond the veil’. They begin to see friends and family in a different way – and the player is forced to question how manipulative they would be to achieve their goals.  By the mid-game, the PC is quite unhinged, sometimes not knowing what is real and what is a whispered manifestation from the realm of the dead. Mortals are becoming mere tools, and the PC ruminates on how they are left cold by the needs and desires of mortals.

What Did I Learn?

My early work involved putting together a high-level outline of the total plot. All subsequent work was about iterating this and adding more and more detail. Even before any dialogue was written or any quests specified, I had passed three or four times through the story, identifying puzzles, opportunities, and motivations for the player. This meant that, when detailed material came to be written, it was done with a knowledge of the total scope of the plot. It meant we rarely struggled to identify what aspects of each piece were most important to progression, and it meant we didn’t encounter inconsistencies and contradictions that needed fixing later. I learned that iterating/cycling through the story over and over is a good way to develop a project like this.

The Necromancer’s Tale  has been widely praised for its narrative and writing, and is shortlisted as a finalist in the prestigious TIGA awards 2025, in the narrative & storytelling category.