The Dark Souls of Books
I’ve always played a lot of video games and so it’s no surprise that they can be a source of inspiration when I write. This was especially true of “The Sangrook Saga.” For this book, I wanted to invoke a sense of mystery and underlying, untold myths. I wanted the readers to feel like they were discovering hints and clues that help them piece together a larger mythos. More specifically, I wanted to recreate the experience I felt playing “The Legned of Zelda: A Link to the Past” and “Dark Souls” for the first time.
Let’s start with Zelda. A few of my friends received an SNES before I did, and I have memories of visiting their houses and watching them play A Link to the Past. They would just boot up their save file and show me the world. I’d see glimpses of dungeons and boss fights, tour villages, and watch them explore the overworld. And I was enraptured. The world seemed so dense and rich and full of secrets to find. When I finally experienced the game myself, playing my own save file start to finish, I found another layer: the story. Now, I’m not one for story-focused games. I avoided RPGs as a child and loudly decried cutscenes during the Console Wars of the 90s, but that isn’t to say I ignore all narratives in games. A Link to the Past was one that caught my interest because it infrequently gave out sparse bits of the narrative of how Ganon rose to power and consumed the Dark World. You’d enter a cave and never know whether the reward was a heart piece, a new item, some rupees, or an old man with a few lines of lore. Because the story was so sparse and infrequent, what little I got fascinated me. I wanted to collect all the pieces and put them together. I wanted to seek out those old men in caves in case they had something new to add, and so uncovering the story became an integral part of the game. I always felt an undercurrent of untold legend that made the game that much more epic.
I just focused on one game, but the whole series is like that. Each game has its own mysteries and lore, and entire communities emerged online to discuss how the games fit into a timeline. Is Ocarina of Time the backstory of A Link to the Past? Which Link was dreaming in Link’s Awakening? Is Wind Waker the end of the story? Does the timeline branch into different parallel histories? Are the games a series of stories or a bunch of retellings of the same legend? Is Link an immortal circling around a time loop, slowly losing his sanity as he goes (of course not, the timeline is a triangle)? Nintendo didn’t release an official series timeline until 2011, and that didn’t do much to end the debate.
I also mentioned “Dark Souls,” and this series took a similar approach to lore. The storytelling in the Dark Souls series is very hands-off, but there is a story to be found by taking a careful look at item and enemy placement, environments, and item descriptions. Dark Souls II, for example, has you retracing King Vendrick’s quest and slowly learning how he planned to break the cycle of dark and fire. You can find many examples (check out Vaatividya on Youtube), but my favorite example is Ceaseless Discharge. Ceaseless Discharge is a lava boss found in the Demon Ruins at the source of a lava flow. When you first enter the chamber, he ignores you (which is unusual for a Dark Souls boss). He doesn’t attack until you loot a corpse at the far corner of his chamber to acquire the Gold-Hemmed Black armor set. The description of the armor tells you that it’s associated with the Witch of Izalith and her seven daughters, who have been mentioned many times. Much later in the game (tens of hours later), you come across the Orange-Charred Ring. The description of this one says it was made by the Witch of Izalith’s daughters to stem the pain of their younger brother, who was cursed to be constantly on fire and suffering, but he lost it.
If you put all that together, you can deduce that Ceaseless Discharge is that younger brother, who would have ignored you if only you hadn’t defiled his sister’s corpse! All this information can be synthesized to form a story, and that’s just one of many examples.
For “The Sangrook Saga,” I tried to use these methods. When you write a fantasy novel, there’s a strong temptation to infodump, to make sure that the reader has the pleasure of reading your fifty-page worldbuilding notebook. Fighting that temptation and doling out only what is necessary is a lesson we all have to learn. For this story, I went a step further. I set out to tell a little less than necessary, and to spread out those bits of worldbuilding to when they could appear most naturally and relevantly. I wanted to give the reader space to imagine, to form their own ideas of the unspoken details.
On top of that, “The Sangrook Saga” is a family saga told in seven parts. Each part covers a different member of the Sangrook dynasty. They are not told in chronological order. Like the Zelda timeline, the reader is invited to seek out connections and speculate on the timeline. Regarding the worldbuilding and the timeline, there are details and connections and smaller stories that aren’t going to be apparent to the casual reader. However, I was careful to make sure that each story worked in the order presented in the book. The book has to stand up to a casual read, after all. I can’t expect everyone to be obsessively looking for clues. My goal wasn’t to punish anyone who just wanted to read a book, but to reward readers who look for more. It’s a bonus born of emulating something I love. It’s my sincere hope that people who share my taste in video games will also enjoy this book.
I guess you could say that “The Sangrook Saga” is the Dark Souls of books.
The Sangrook Saga
Let’s start with Zelda. A few of my friends received an SNES before I did, and I have memories of visiting their houses and watching them play A Link to the Past. They would just boot up their save file and show me the world. I’d see glimpses of dungeons and boss fights, tour villages, and watch them explore the overworld. And I was enraptured. The world seemed so dense and rich and full of secrets to find. When I finally experienced the game myself, playing my own save file start to finish, I found another layer: the story. Now, I’m not one for story-focused games. I avoided RPGs as a child and loudly decried cutscenes during the Console Wars of the 90s, but that isn’t to say I ignore all narratives in games. A Link to the Past was one that caught my interest because it infrequently gave out sparse bits of the narrative of how Ganon rose to power and consumed the Dark World. You’d enter a cave and never know whether the reward was a heart piece, a new item, some rupees, or an old man with a few lines of lore. Because the story was so sparse and infrequent, what little I got fascinated me. I wanted to collect all the pieces and put them together. I wanted to seek out those old men in caves in case they had something new to add, and so uncovering the story became an integral part of the game. I always felt an undercurrent of untold legend that made the game that much more epic.
I just focused on one game, but the whole series is like that. Each game has its own mysteries and lore, and entire communities emerged online to discuss how the games fit into a timeline. Is Ocarina of Time the backstory of A Link to the Past? Which Link was dreaming in Link’s Awakening? Is Wind Waker the end of the story? Does the timeline branch into different parallel histories? Are the games a series of stories or a bunch of retellings of the same legend? Is Link an immortal circling around a time loop, slowly losing his sanity as he goes (of course not, the timeline is a triangle)? Nintendo didn’t release an official series timeline until 2011, and that didn’t do much to end the debate.
I also mentioned “Dark Souls,” and this series took a similar approach to lore. The storytelling in the Dark Souls series is very hands-off, but there is a story to be found by taking a careful look at item and enemy placement, environments, and item descriptions. Dark Souls II, for example, has you retracing King Vendrick’s quest and slowly learning how he planned to break the cycle of dark and fire. You can find many examples (check out Vaatividya on Youtube), but my favorite example is Ceaseless Discharge. Ceaseless Discharge is a lava boss found in the Demon Ruins at the source of a lava flow. When you first enter the chamber, he ignores you (which is unusual for a Dark Souls boss). He doesn’t attack until you loot a corpse at the far corner of his chamber to acquire the Gold-Hemmed Black armor set. The description of the armor tells you that it’s associated with the Witch of Izalith and her seven daughters, who have been mentioned many times. Much later in the game (tens of hours later), you come across the Orange-Charred Ring. The description of this one says it was made by the Witch of Izalith’s daughters to stem the pain of their younger brother, who was cursed to be constantly on fire and suffering, but he lost it.
If you put all that together, you can deduce that Ceaseless Discharge is that younger brother, who would have ignored you if only you hadn’t defiled his sister’s corpse! All this information can be synthesized to form a story, and that’s just one of many examples.
For “The Sangrook Saga,” I tried to use these methods. When you write a fantasy novel, there’s a strong temptation to infodump, to make sure that the reader has the pleasure of reading your fifty-page worldbuilding notebook. Fighting that temptation and doling out only what is necessary is a lesson we all have to learn. For this story, I went a step further. I set out to tell a little less than necessary, and to spread out those bits of worldbuilding to when they could appear most naturally and relevantly. I wanted to give the reader space to imagine, to form their own ideas of the unspoken details.
On top of that, “The Sangrook Saga” is a family saga told in seven parts. Each part covers a different member of the Sangrook dynasty. They are not told in chronological order. Like the Zelda timeline, the reader is invited to seek out connections and speculate on the timeline. Regarding the worldbuilding and the timeline, there are details and connections and smaller stories that aren’t going to be apparent to the casual reader. However, I was careful to make sure that each story worked in the order presented in the book. The book has to stand up to a casual read, after all. I can’t expect everyone to be obsessively looking for clues. My goal wasn’t to punish anyone who just wanted to read a book, but to reward readers who look for more. It’s a bonus born of emulating something I love. It’s my sincere hope that people who share my taste in video games will also enjoy this book.
I guess you could say that “The Sangrook Saga” is the Dark Souls of books.
The Sangrook Saga
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