A Lore Designer's Reflection on the Quiet Pipeline from RPGs to Authorship
I didn’t yet know what narrative design was when I first saw it staring back at me from a shelf.
An eye, rendered onto the cover of Neverwinter Nights, seemed to recognize me. Its gaze didn’t just land on me—it saw through me, pulling me closer with the promise of transformation.
I reached out instinctively, my fingers catching the exact texture of cardboard: slightly rough, with that faint coating that clings to your skin. In some now-forgotten store. Maybe Circuit City, with its too-bright fluorescents humming overhead. Maybe another of those vanished temples of the 90s, shrines to pixelated pilgrimages gone without warning.
What I remember is the feeling: that sharp spark of recognition. That this game, somehow, was mine.
That night, I slipped the disk into my PC, the mechanical whirr and click providing a comforting rhythm, and stepped into a world that wasn’t waiting to be watched.
It was waiting to be changed.
What RPGs Really Taught Us
That’s where the pipeline began.
Not with books or classrooms.
But with character sheets and story hooks. Patterns I could follow when real-world interactions had no discernible ruleset.
Truthfully, I didn’t start out wanting to be a writer. It was as simple as this: I started out wanting to know what happened next. Every quest drew me in, offering clear objectives that made the world feel more surmountable. Every dialogue tree taught me how language could shift meaning. Three response options, each with consequences—some subtle, some seismic—all shaped by how well you understood what was truly being asked. I learned to read by chasing motives. I learned to write by rewriting myself, one attribute point at a time.
Years later, I’m the Lore Designer for The Hundred, an MMORPG built to offer that same gift: the sense that your choices, and your stories, have weight. In the expanse of code and art, your mark is essential.
The Hidden Curriculum of Heroism
Ask anyone who grew up on RPGs what they remember, and it won’t be the loot tables. It’ll be the moments:
- A single line of dialogue that changed everything.
- A boss fight that required not just power, but harmony with your party.
- A companion who felt real, even though they weren’t. One who didn’t mind if you needed to reload the conversation three times to get it right.
These moments taught us more than we realized.
They formed the cognitive scaffolding for empathy, cause-and-effect reasoning, perspective-taking, and identity formation.
Safe spaces to practice being human.
From a neuroscience lens, I’ve explored the research, traced connections, and reflected on what it means for storytelling. Narrative immersion activates the brain’s default mode network, which governs reflection, empathy, and future planning. When players imagine themselves as heroes, it can increase agency and even reshape how they cope with real-world challenges.
We see this echoed in the Proteus Effect: when people embody powerful avatars, they begin to internalize those traits. Confidence grows. Curiosity blooms. The fantasy starts to inform the self.
And at some pivotal point along that path, we begin to wonder—not just what would my character do, but what if I wrote the next story myself?
From Roleplay to Authorship
At The Hundred, we build with this trajectory in mind. Not just as a design team, but as people who grew up inside that same invisible pipeline.
It begins with reading. But not school reading: motivated reading. Reading driven by urgency, reward, character development, and lore. Reading that feels like discovery rather than assignment. From there, we scaffold toward authorship. Players start rewriting spells, the enchanted expressions glowing as they take shape. They restore forgotten texts, letter by careful letter. They shape their village’s fate through wordcraft, watching as digital inhabitants respond to their choices.
Eventually, it clicks.
They’re not just responding.
They’re creating.
Our game doesn’t give players a worksheet. It gives them a world.
A world where every texture has been considered. Where ambient sounds create emotional landscapes. Where color palettes shift with storylines.
And then it gives them a reason to shape that world with language.
Because literacy, when paired with agency, becomes more than skill.
It becomes authorship.
A World That Remembers You
We’re crafting The Hundred because we believe in the quiet power of narrative play. We’ve lived the shift ourselves: from reader, to roleplayer, to writer. We’ve felt what it means to make a choice and watch the world bend around it. We’ve seen how immersion becomes authorship.
In The Hundred, heroism takes on a deeper form. It’s not the roar of battle that defines you. It’s the quiet moments of connection. The bonds you forge with NPCs reveal layers of their culture, their struggles, their dreams. You step into ecosystems alive with interdependence, where one decision can ripple outward, reshaping lives and landscapes alike.
Through crises and dilemmas, players uncover opportunities for growth—not just for themselves, but for the communities they touch. These challenges are mirrors, reflecting the player’s ingenuity, empathy, and resilience back at them. To support that reflection, we give players the tools to externalize what they've learned.
That growth doesn’t stay abstract. It crystallizes in mind palaces: a mechanic that lets players “code” their surroundings with valuable stories. These digital locales foster a sense of wonder and personal ownership over key information. They encourage players to map knowledge onto their own worlds, developing rich storytelling traditions that hearken back to oral histories.
Ultimately, narrative-driven games invite us to listen and exchange information, expanding our understanding of the world and ourselves.
At their best, they awaken cultural sensitivity, openness, empathy, and curiosity—traits every hero needs, in any world.
The Map Only You Can Draw
Here, you trace constellations: mapping meaning across familiar skies made new and novel, drawing throughlines between memory, choice, and voice.
In The Hundred, every decision sends ripples outward: not because we script them, but because you give them weight. The crises, the bonds, the stories—they're yours to uncover, to shape, to leave behind as echoes for others to find.
If you’ve ever longed for a world that listens—where choices matter, where language holds power, where story and self begin to blur—this is your invitation.
Join us in the early build——be part of the moment before it becomes legend, before it reshapes what MMORPGs can mean.
Because in this mythic expanse, there's a light that flickers only for you.
And it’s been waiting.
