Nowhere Prophet — Brenden Gibbons, Game & Narrative Designer

The Project

Nowhere Prophet is a roguelike deck building game set in the post apocalyptic Indian-flavoured world of Soma. It's about you, a technopath, taking a pilgrimage down to the Crypt where riches and machine knowledge of things before the Crash are kept safe. It's about the dangerous world, the people living in it, the blurred lines between faith and knowledge and how you, a person with power, manage that and manage your convoy to carry on your dangerous journey as the Prophet.

I was a freelance writer on it from February 2018 to June 2018 and contributed some writing to the events system. This ranged from filling in necessary gaps (Some factions did not have necessary encounters written up) to creating new lore/flavour and contributing to the world (creating slice of life events, etc)

WHAT i lEARNED

Like most people who spent their childhood in Indonesia, I grew up with Islamic culture embedded in me. Of course, much like how in England you have lots of people who say they're christians but don't visit the church on sundays, I wasn't exactly praying five times a day as a kid. I was too busy watching Rugrats and pretending to be Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. Now as an adult, I'm a humanist but boy, do I have Thoughts about what exactly pilgrimage means.

In Islam, once in your life, you are meant to go to take the Hajj. At some point in your life, you must travel to the city of Mekkah and do this laundry list of things. Mostly pray, facing The Cube. Sometimes you throw pebbles at a big rock (now, it's a big wall). It was a fact of life then, that this is something that I would probably do one day. Two to three million people visit for those five days. Sometimes people get crushed and die. I dug deep on those thoughts and feelings.

There's also an interesting dynamic to have in a situation where you're a Prophet. Where people follow you, trust you with all their lives. It was fun to try and focus on the slice of life aspects on this kind of setting and it was really interesting to research Indian culture and mythology and make sure that my work felt similar and was respectful of its origins.

tRAILER

Nowhere Prophet, the roguelike deck-building game set in a sci-fi post-apocalypse. Become the last hope to a band of outcastes and lead them across the randomly generated wastelands. Pick fights with greedy slavers and crazy machines using the turn-based card combat. But always spend your resources carefully.

the work

Writer
- Wrote many events (both to fill the gaps existing in the world but also to create new flavour)
- Made many graphs and structured complex events.