I recently got some time to talk with Jamie Jolly, a man whose legacy will far outlive him, about his pride and joy, a board game like no other – Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. Here is that chat.
Imagine you’re a child and you’re walking through a forest. Alone. The sounds of nature, which seemed pleasant when you first embarked on this adventure, are now starting to send shivers down your spine.
Once refreshing, the cool breeze is now making the hairs at the back of your neck stand up in a way nobody enjoys.
But you still have that invincibility that only comes with youth coursing through your veins, and you don’t plan on turning back yet.
In front of you, you see a lightly damp and moss-covered log, and something inside of you screams out, begging you to bend down and pick it up.
Only when you do, the true terror of the situation finally catches up. The worms and other natural horrors, now free from their log prison, start to wriggle and move towards you in a more harrowing way than anything you’ve experienced in your young life.
Can you feel it? The cold, damp terror tingling inside of you? That’s precisely the feeling that Oathsworn evokes in the souls of all brave enough to play, and it achieves this by digging deep into a childhood fear that Jamie himself holds close.
“I’m a big fan of the idea of fantasies, unfulfilled desires, and things like that. They often connect to something of what it means to be a person.
There’s this idea in sci-fi that you can’t write science fiction without having a humanoid protagonist of some kind. You need people at the heart of sci-fi because it’s a person’s experience that makes it feel real and allows us to connect with it.
Anything that’s going to be genuinely successful needs to be grounded in the experience of every one of us through simple concepts that resonate.
That’s something that H. P. Lovecraft did really well, that simple statement of ‘there is no greater fear than the fear of the unknown’. It’s perfect—this idea of the cosmic scale of things and how tiny we feel compared to it.
Lovecraft took that one fear and just wrote about it for thirty years. And that’s what we call thematic.
With Oathsworn, we started with that fundamental idea of not remembering this feeling being manifested in other places, that feeling of nature horror, of morbid curiosity mixed with fear and disgust, instead of cosmic horror.
The fear of the darker side of nature and how horrible it feels to be there.
And that’s really what it was; I couldn’t remember ever seeing that written as a fundamental concept in world-building in other places and then thinking, could we do it?
That’s where the Deepwood came about, the creatures there, the things they’re doing, and the idea of mankind standing against this gross over-expression of this dark side of nature.
Which is where the inspiration came from, from what was essentially a fear I had as a kid.”
But as anyone who has ever watched a movie, played a game or read a book will tell you – theme alone is hardly ever enough to carry something through a multichapter campaign.
Sure, it will draw you in, but once it’s hooked you, it needs to be able to keep you and to do that, it must be able to deliver something of substance to keep players returning time after time.
This is part of the success of Oathsworn – because it’s a concept that Jamie not only knew about but understood when he started creating the game.
“I don’t think any game designer wants to do the same thing as someone else. They want to make something that’s genuinely adding value to the world and filling a gap in the market.
You need to see where people have this unfilled yearning and desire, and the ability to see that part, which is probably the most important part of making a game, is founded and grounded, fundamentally, in being part of the audience.
At the heart of it, we are gamers and want to play something.
You need to be a consumer, watch TV shows and play games, and you can’t do that without passion. You can’t fake it.
If you have to watch thousands of hours of TV, read all the books and get into the culture of what it means to be a geek, you need passion”.
If Oathsworn is anything, it’s definitely novel and unique. But that feeling that draws you in and makes you decide to return to a game and not just play something else on the shelf doesn’t just happen. It’s also not something that can just be manufactured. It’s about finding a way to engage your audience and offering them something they can’t find in another box.
“You want to make your game unique and make players feel like there’s a reason to come back and play the game and not just play another game.
The answer to finding that something is just to be normal, not try to be exceptional, but just normal because then you’ll have normal experiences that other people can relate to – like the fear of picking up a wet log.
Because it’s not just about it being thematic, but being thematically novel is the key. Thematic is valuable, but if you’ve seen a concept played out again and again and again across history, it becomes harder for us to engage with it.
It’s still thematic but not engaging, so it needs to have this novel element.
The idea of novelty and having a very good experience that is unique – that is the idea makes a game good.
Artwork doesn’t just sell your game, and miniatures don’t just sell your game ultimately in the long run. It might help sell a few games in the initial rush, but the experience has to be amazing play after play.”
You also don’t end up with a game with the scope and magnitude of Oathsworn without having a serious drive to create. For Jamie, that drive came from a place many of us who grew up playing board games with our families can relate to.
“I’ve been a game designer now for…. too long. I spent a lot of my youth playing computer games, the original board games, the Risk’s and Monopoly’s of the world and dreaming of more extraordinary things, things that would surpass brutalising your family for four and half hours while stealing all their stuff.
Oathsworn is a silly big game, and it’s a bit ridiculous. At its fullness, it weighs 25 Kilograms, which is more than my six-year-old.
It’s this huge, romping, crazy dark fantasy adventure where the world has been taken over by this horrendous, chaotic, gnarly forest called the Deepwood that’s popped up out of nowhere and just destroyed civilisation. All the roads, bridges and towns are just gone.
All that’s left of mankind lives in these fortified cities that are like islands in a sea of death and trees, and if that wasn’t bad enough, the monsters started coming out of the woods, and no one knows where they’ve come from, but they do know why: they’ve come to eat all the people.
So there’s this sort of nom nom nom of all the citizens, and in answer to that, the Oathsworn was born – and that’s who you play in the game.
You’re a bunch of badasses whose job it is to go into places that normal, sane people would run away from, and that’s kind of the game.”
Still, even if people can relate to your story, you’ve put all the passion you can into the mechanics and theme, and you’ve found that novelty; there’s only one way to take a concept so large and have it be successful, and that’s by having one core element, and in the case of Oathsworn, that element is fun.
Fun runs through every part of the experience, like a lifeblood, and it’s also the part of the whole experience that Jamie is most proud of.
“The best bit is seeing people enjoy it. Right at the end, when you get to those first few days after your game lands, and you see people playing it for the first time and enjoying it.
If you could box fun, that would be amazing. So that’s always really been my ethos. I just want to put the fun in a box so that it can be replicated across many people and spread more fun across the world.
There’s this concept in charity of effective healthy years, which is the idea that whenever you do a project, depending on how efficacious it is, you end up adding a certain amount of good healthy years to the world.
And I had this idea of effective fun years. So we worked out that if everyone who bought the game played it and they only finished like 60% of it, there would be something like four human lifetimes worth of fun added to the world, and that’s awesome.
That’s the best, and if I do nothing else in my life, I’m happy that I could add a few lifetimes of fun into the world with our game.”
And that’s the story of how Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood came to be. How one child’s curiosity and fear of the things that live under a damp log led to a game unlike anything else and how a simple, universal truth could lead to the world being a happier place – at its core, it’s a story about boxing fun.
If you want to check out Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood for yourself, and you should, you can follow the link here.