Mandrake is in Telltale’s Choices Matter Festival this week, so we’re taking the opportunity to talk about some of the foundational choices for your character in Mandrake. If you’d like to see a little of the following in video form, you’ll be able to catch our segment at 22:30 BST on the 10th of August - today! - and later on our YouTube.
Unusually for our games, in Mandrake a number of things are already determined about your character. You’re always a Mandrake, the last descendant of the aristocratic family that once ruled the region. You’re always a gardener-sorcerer, resuming arts long-forgotten and long-forbidden. And you’re always a newcomer to Penhallion and the village of Chandley, having been born and raised in a far-off land.
But that still leaves plenty of room to decide things about your character: name, appearance, history. We don’t want character creation in Mandrake to be complex or time-consuming – after all, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to define your character with your choices throughout the game. But we do want to give you the chance to make some basic decisions about their past, to provide an initial glimpse of the world beyond Chandley, and to provide more variety for future playthroughs.
(We’ve used some screenshots to illustrate the choices. Please bear in mind all these are in-progress; they contain placeholder icons, and are subject to change!)
Presentation
The first thing you’ll see when you create a new character is this set of options:
Here, you’ll make a number of simple choices about your character’s presentation: body type, skin and hair colour, facial hair, gender, and the colour of your starter clothes. None of these choices are dependent on others – all of them can be mixed and matched.
In some of our previous games we’ve asked you to choose how NPCs address your character, but you don’t get to choose a title this time around – that’s already fixed: you’re a Mandrake, and most NPCs will either call you that or by your first name (which defaults to ‘Morgan’, but you can change to whatever you prefer). The ‘Gender’ field allows you to choose male, female, or non-binary. If all goes well, we hope to translate Mandrake into other languages, not all of which share English’s approach to pronouns, so a choice of gender which can then inform localisation techniques made the most sense this time around.
After you’ve made your Mandrake, we move on to a short set of narrative choices which determine some things about their past, and set your initial Traits.
Traits
Traits are facets of your character’s personality: the way they see the world and the things they are attuned to. There are five of them, including Neighbour, Magnate, and Romantic. Neighbour represents your sense of community, of the benefits and compromises of being part of Chandley. Magnate, on the other hand, represents your affinity with your Mandrake heritage: your sense of familial pride or responsibility. While your Romantic trait describes your ability to see what might have been, your sense of optimism and tragedy, your poetic streak.
Occasionally, having a Trait at a certain level or above will unlock a new conversation option. But most of the time, what they do is provide Insights: interjections as you’re talking to an NPC that provide context and interpretations of their opinions and behaviour. A high Romantic Trait might help you understand a character’s regrets. A high Neighbour helps you know what’s expected of you at a village festival. (Traits aren’t the only things that can provide Insights, either, but that’s a topic for another time…)
A specific Trait level will never be required to complete a story, but they might help you find another path through it, or provide additional perspective, or allow you to bond more quickly with certain characters. You’ll be able to increase your Traits in play, but your narrative choices in character creation provide you with an initial spread of them when you start the game. And the first choice you’ll make is…
Your Homeland
After the Mandrakes fell, their heirs scattered far and wide, their ancestry forgotten. Generations later, you were born and raised in a distant land. But which one?
Perhaps you come from the sea-swept Leeward Isles, to the east? Perhaps you were born in the marshy Heartlands of the old Sophoi Republic – that same Republic whose ambitions grew so great that the laws of the world were changed to overthrow it – and grew up amongst its ruined bones. Or perhaps you hail from the High Eld: a distant northern land in thrall to the winter-gods…
NPCs might occasionally react to your homeland, or it might give you experience to draw on. A newcomer from the Leeward Isles is likely familiar with boating and its terminology. An arrival from the High Eld might have opinions about the mild winters in Penhallion.
Conclusion
After you’ve chosen your homeland, you’ll also choose the profession you were raised in, and the motive that led you to abandon your old life and take up this new one, each decision giving you another bonus to one of your Traits.
We want your Mandrake character to feel like a part of the world (even if they’re new to this little corner of it), and to enter play with perspectives that help them make sense of their new home and new situation. The bulk of customisation will come about in play: through the stories you pursue, the choices you make, and the relationships you form – but in character creation you’ll take the first step into a world we hope you’ll be spending a lot of time in.