Chris Bissette
CREATOR
16 days ago
Project Update: Appendix N: A Deadly Education
Blood In The Margins launches in a little over a month. I plan to have the whole game written before the campaign goes live, and I've pencilled in the first two weeks of March to do that. February, in the meantime, is going to be dedicated to reading in preparation for it. I want to take in as much of the "dark academia" genre as possible. Wretched & Alone has historically been very good at genre emulation, and I want to make sure that readers who are familiar with the genre get the experience they're expecting going into it.
It seems to me that there are two main branches of dark academia. The first, and the one that I'm the most familiar with and the most interested in, is the branch that focuses on crime and mystery novels. These are the books like Only If You're Lucky and If We Were Villains, stories that focus on characters who commit - or plan to commit - a horrible crime, and the ways they go about trying to cover it up. These are books that follow in the footsteps of Donna Tarrt's The Secret History. This is the part of the genre I'm the most widely read in and the one that inspired the game in the first place, and so initially my reading is ignoring it a little.
The other side of the genre is firmly rooted in the fantasy genre. This is books like The Atlas Six and Babel, books about students of magic getting into trouble beyond their abilities to properly resolve it. These are books that often owe a lot to Harry Potter. For all intents and purposes they're an entirely different genre to The Secret History and its ilk, but both of these genres get lumped under the "dark academia" umbrella and I want to ensure that people from both sides of that divide can get something out of this game. The fantasy side of things is the side I'm less familiar with, and it's also the one that I tend to enjoy less than the crime side of things, so it felt important to me that I familiarise myself with it as much as possible.
Since reading these books is going to be a big part of my preparation for writing Blood In The Margins, I figured it might be a good idea to keep something of a journal of my thoughts about these books and how they're influencing the game as I read them. I suppose you can consider this a sort of "devlog" for Blood In The Margins.
I started off by reading Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education. This is the first of three books in her Scholomance series, which sit very firmly on the fantasy side of dark academia. Here's the blurb:
Lesson One of the Scholomance: Learning has never been this deadly.
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.
There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.
El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.
This is one of those books that's been on my TBR for years. Since I'm writing a dark academia game at the moment that I intend to launch in March, I'm dedicating most of my reading in February to that genre as some sort of research for it. This seemed like as good an excuse as any to finally tick A Deadly Education off my list.
I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. That's partly because I didn't really know what it was about - if I've read the blurb it was years ago when I first picked this up, before it sat unread on my shelf for ages - and partly because I remember not really enjoying Temeraire when I read it back in 2006. I haven't read anything else by Novik in the meantime, but she continues to be popular and to publish work that seems quite well-received, so I was cautiously optimistic.
My immediate reaction to A Deadly Education was that it felt like reading fanfic. I can't fully quantify what "fanfic voice" is but it definitely exists and is immediately identifiable, and Novik has it. The tiniest amount of research tells me that I shouldn't be surprised by this. Novik was one of the founders of A03 and I think given that it's reasonable to assume that she has read a lot of fanfic herself. The book having 'fanfic voice' isn't inherently a bad thing, but it definitely took some adjusting for me to get into it since it's so far removed from the kinds of books I usually read.
I'm not actually sure if I ever did get into it properly. On the surface there's a lot to like her, but it all felt very surface level. I never felt like I properly got to know El or learned who any of the other characters were beyond their surface level. Everyone exists as a person who's good at one thing with no more depth, which was frustrating. Part of that is due to the fact that we see everything through the eyes of a character who is supremely self-involved and who never makes any effort to let people in or get to know them on anything more than a superficial level, but it's also down to the fact that Novik never spends any time developing her characters in any meaningful way. The book is wall-to-wall plot; every chapter brings a new monster to be fought and a new problem to be solved, so that it feels a little like the worst sort of Monster Of The Week episodic TV, and the result is that nothing really has any weight because it's always wrapped up by the end of the chapter.
And yet despite the fact that I didn't really enjoy it all that much, I found it oddly compelling. I rattled through it in a few hours and when I got to the end I immediately wanted to read the next book. Given that I don't think it's very good, really, that's a very strange response from me. Maybe it's because there's so much hinted at about the world and the school that could be interesting but isn't ever really developed; perhaps I want more because Novik is dangling it in front of me and I (perhaps foolishly) think she's going to deliver on it if I just give it one more book. Who knows?
This isn't bad, per se. I think a lot of what I dislike about it is actually just a facet of the fanfic-adjacent genre that Novik is writing in, and I'm not the target audience for that. It reminds me a little of candyfloss. It's straightforwardly entertaining and makes you want more while you're reading it, but ultimately it leaves you empty and a little disappointed when you're done.I'm going to read the next one, though.
As you can see from the review, I wasn't particularly impressed with A Deadly Education, though I do find myself wanting to continue with the Scholomance for at least one more book. The fact that I didn't really like it doesn't mean that it wasn't useful, though.
A Deadly Education is very "tropey" (for lack of a better word). The characters occupy very specific niches in the genre - this character is good at fighting but bad at controlling his magic, this character is good at making things, this character is good at languages, etc. - with the result that although there isn't much in the way of character development, we still understand their role in the fiction because they're painted with a very broad brush. This is something that could come in handy when writing prompts about other characters. My previous W&A games haven't really asked players to write about other characters - certainly not other characters who are currently alive and present in the fiction - but that's going to be a necessity here. That's a hard thing to know how to do, because prompts need to walk a fine line between being broad enough to be applicable to every player but specific enough to prompt interesting answers. If I define "NPCs" myself that I risk pushing the game down a hyper-specific route where you're playing out a story I've already written, and that's antithetical to what W&A is good at. But it seems to me that I can write prompts that refer to character types or tropes in the very broadest terms and ask players to respond to them, and trust that their genre knowledge and expectations will help them to turn these broad archetypes into characters that feel real.
Another thing A Deadly Education got me thinking about was how to actually introduce fantasy elements to the game. As I see it there are a couple of different approaches to balancing the fact that "dark academia" covers more than one genre:
- Lean into the fantasy entirely. The "elite academy" is always a school of magic, or magic always exists in the world. All prompts are written with this in mind.
- Ignore fantasy. The prompts never refer to it specifically, and if players want to introduce magic they can just do that themselves without prompting.
- Somehow strike a balance. Some prompts introduce magic to the setting, while others ignore it. Some players will be prompted to include magic, and others won't.
To me, option three is the obvious one, even if that potentially makes it harder to write good prompts. But actually, I think the 3 Act Structure I've introduced to W&A for this game already solves this problem. The first act is largely going to be concerned with establishing the setting and the characters involved in it, and I'm going to write a full set of 52 prompts that will only ever be seen in the first act. What this means is that I can potentially dedicate a full suit to introducing fantasy elements. Act 1 will be comprised of 12 cards, and each playthrough will have a different proportion of those cards dealing with fantasy elements. Some players might end up with a very fantasy-heavy game, while others might not see them at all. Then the prompts in Act 2 and 3 can (mostly) deal with plot instead rather than expanding on the setting, and players will respond to those prompts based on the context that they've established in Act 1 - whether that's magical or otherwise.
I'm not ready to start writing prompts yet, but here are some vague ideas I've had for the sorts of questions I could ask in Act 1 that might push games in a more magical direction:
- You have heard rumors about a place on campus that does not always exist. What is it? Have you seen it, or do you only know it through whispered stories?
- Some say that the academy itself is sentient, responding to the moods of its students or faculty. Have you ever felt its presence? If so, how?
- The architecture of the academy doesn’t always make sense—certain hallways, staircases, or rooms don’t lead where they should. Have you ever found yourself lost in a place that shouldn’t exist?
- You find an old book in the library filled with strange symbols and annotations. What does it describe? Has anyone else mentioned it before?
Next up on my reading list is the sequel to A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate. If that provokes any more thoughts about how I can approach the fantasy side of dark academia I'll update you again. Otherwise I'll be moving on to one of the other books on my list.
In the meantime, if you're familiar with the genre and know of any overlooked gems that you think I should be reading, please let me know!
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