The Heroes of Fable

I joined Big Blue Box in 2001, back when the game was still called 'Project: Ego'. At the time there wasn't exactly a story or real plot. Nothing, beyond a vague sense of 'you play a hero from their childhood into old age' (and, for the time, some astounding coding and artwork). Most of the team had played Dungeons and Dragons at some point and there was a vague sense that the world of Albion had other heroes besides the protagonist. Characters' who you could bump into and befriend or annoy. A 'rival' system which would add to the general immersion. I believe the idea was we'd fake a living world by having other heroes take quests before the player did (if they waited around for too long). Cool idea, though I'm not sure it was ever implemented to the point gamers noticed.

This was back in the wild-west days of game development. Teams were small, management was limited and people tended to fling ideas at the wall and see what stuck. Rank and file members of the group had a lot of say in what went into the product. We had artists making random creatures that ended up in the game, coders trying out odd mechanics... people trying their hands at level design, UI creation or particle effects because no one else wanted to. I was hired as an artist at a time when they needed someone to flesh out those major NPCs in the world. And I REALLY liked designing worlds, backstory and characters. Put me in coach, I'm ready.

As everyone else was occupied elsewhere, I got to be the one who create a roster of larger-than-life characters for the player to encounter. The conniving Maze. Briar Rose. Lady Grey. Teresa. The gigantic Thunder and his little sister Whisper (both concepted by the great Damian Buzugbe). Immortal Scythe. Also the Jack of Blades. The villain of the game, and one of the only characters of mine I've ever seen someone cosplay.

The simplicity of their names came from the lead designer's (The lovely and talented Dene Carter, not Peter Molyneux who came onto the project much later than is generally assumed) loathing of faux-Tolkein. He (and I) hated fantasy with names like 'Xy'lock' or 'Ashtarathi - Blade of Tuspelliak'. E.g. unpronounceable, illogical words. Instead, he wanted things in Albion to sound... logical. Bowerstone, for example. The Spire. Oakvale. Maybe it's the Britishness of the team that made this seem normal. The UK is full of places that break down into a description of what they are. Ox-Ford (a ford in the river for the cattle market). Cam-Bridge (a bridge over the river Cam).

A thing I learnt from this period was it's not enough to create a character. You need to find a way to ensure that the people who go on to develop them or play with them understand the intent behind your invention. Something I was, at the time, terrible at.

Scythe was a great example of me failing to achieve this. In the 80s and 90s in the UK, the comic book 2000AD was king. It had produced a stellar run of stories, including Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Alan Moore's Halo Jones, Zenith (more on that in a moment) and Slaine. Slaine was a sort of Celtic, gonzo version of Conan.

The Lord Slough Feg in all his weirdness - Simon Bisley

Beautifully painted by a string of artists and drenched in a pagan revival that flooded through Britain's festival scene at the time. One of his major enemies was an undead sorcerer called 'The Lord Weird Slough Feg'. A hero, from the primal past, who'd abandoned his goddess and staved off death for 20,000 years.

NOT Eddie the Head

Evil, but, I thought - what if he was good? What if you had someone who took an oath and vanquished death as a heroic action... so never died? And went on... and on... and on. And aged, and withered and rotted away. But still kept going. Until history forgot him and the age he came from. And he became this ancient, dusty husk of the hero he'd once been. Incredibly powerful but alone. Forced to walk across an Albion that had forgotten him eons earlier.

Boy, could I not sell this to the team. "He looks evil". I heard that a lot. Most people thought I'd stolen the idea from an Iron Maiden mascot called 'Eddie the Head' (I didn't, I don't really like metal). Dene said somewhere that the idea came from an old line of goth jewellery called Blackrose which used a very generic grim reaper mascot. Again... no.

Which... taught me that you can't just design a 'cool' character. The character needs to visually sell who they are to the audience. By making Scythe look like an evil lich, people I worked with couldn't see him as anything BUT that. Costumes should be shorthand for the personality of a character. Batman? Tarzan? Every Ice Sorceress in gatcha games? The second you see them you know what you're dealing with.

He drifted out of the first version of the game and only made a brief appearance in the remastered version, where I found out someone I'd never spoken to (the comic writer Mike Carey) had been brought on to add some lore and renamed him William Black. I think, if my version of Scythe ever had a name, it wasn't that. He'd forgotten it long ago. But my guess is it would be something very old and very Celtic like Cú Chulainn. He predated the Fable setting by millennia. 'William' felt like calling a bronze age warrior 'Steve'. If I redesigned him now? He'd wear a lot more gold jewellery and faded tartan rags. And probably have the hidden face/dark cowl of a ring-wraith.

Jack was far more of a success. The weird, creepy, clown motif is always a winner and I think people liked the simplicity of the name. 'Jack in the Beanstalk' and Jack Horner, Jack's seem to be the sort of name that fits into Fairy Tales perfectly. Which... was convenient but not what I was going for.

Jack just hanging out. Probably about to kill someone

Going back to 2000AD and Grant Morrison's Zenith, for a moment. Zenith is one of the greatest, unadapted, largely forgotten superhero stories ever created. The plot and characters are too complex to discuss here, but the core element is 'Superheroes are possessed by Lovecraftian beings'. On reading this as a teenager, I think my face must have resembled that wide-mouthed meme boy from a few years ago. LOVECRAFT?!!! AND SUPERHEROES!!!! TOGETHER?! YES! (As a side note, it still pains me that Zenith remains largely untouched by Hollywood and unknown to the general public - despite being one of the best stories ever created in that medium. Go track it down if you haven't heard of it. Especially as it shows how to do a superhero multiverse decades before the MCU tried and... well... yes.) When I was creating The Jack of Blades, I remembered Zenith and was off to the races. The masks were venetian, in the style of a Commedia dell'arte performer. I wanted him to swap masks depending on his mood, alternativing from laughing to murderous mid conversation. Alas, that wasn't to be - but I still like the idea. As for where he came from, I remembered an old tarot deck I owned and the Court of Blades popped into my head. Terrible beings that once burnt their way through reality but at some point had been locked away and sealed beneath the skin of creation. Probably by Scythe and his allies but maybe not. Myths work well when they're vague. From the beginning, I imagined four of them, the most powerful ones, The Jack, the Knight, The Queen and the King, pushing their way through and hijacking the bodies of key people around the world.

The Jack of Blades slithered into Albion, moving from body to body; forcing his hosts to commit atrocities and killing off anything that might prevent the ascension of the Court. His body never really worked the way I intended due to needing to fit into the standard skeletal rig which was built around short, squat men. My Jack was meant to be long-limbed, more praying mantis than human. Based on, of all things, an advert that had played in the UK a few years earlier for an alcopop called 'Metz'.

The Judderman - Metz

The short featured a strange, puppet-elf thing called 'the Judderman' which crept through the woods and lured people to their doom with... bad alcohol? Combine that with the odd, faceless look of Venetian carnival revilers and I had my guy. (the Judderman is cooler than I'm making him sound btw. Worth a wiki or an image search if you've never heard of the advertising campaign)

Why did Jack become a dragon in the remastered version? Because fighting a normal human, even one I claimed had an elder god-thing crawling around him, wasn't exciting enough. (Especially due to a few flaws in Fable 1's combat system. We never tested magic properly as fighting with a sword and bow was more fun. Result? You had a cheap lightning spell that could stunlock anything for a few seconds. Including an end boss. Did I beat my first playthrough by stunlocking Jack and drinking mana potions? Why yes I did. Do I think live service would have patched that out in seconds? Ohhhh boy, yes it would have) And whatever happened to the other three from the Court of Blades? Internally, alas, they got no traction at all. They're mentioned in a few lore drops and relegated to something called the Void. My suggestion after Fable 1 was we set the sequels, not in Albion, but elsewhere. In a Fable version of Arabia where the Knight dwelled. In a Fable-ized Asia where the Queen ruled over a court like some sinister spider. And finally in the ruins of that world's old Kingdom (e.g. Atlantis) where champions from three previous games could team up and defeat the King. Each was meant to be progressively more inhuman and more alien - as if the body they'd possessed couldn't withstand the magical pressure and was warping under their influence.

Alas, none of this was meant to be. The team was expanding and new creatives were coming in with new ideas. Microsoft, by and large, wanted more of the same, and we were years away from Assassin's Creeds world-hopping and MCU Avenger team-ups. But looking back at my time on the franchise, what I did get to add was fantastic. Just working on the games was a learning experience and a chance to work with some fantastic people. In the end, what more could you ask for?