Hello! My name is Patrick Sklar, Narrative Director at Null Signal Games. I’m here to talk about the efforts we made to research and construct the setting for our upcoming expansion, Elevation.
While I’m representing the Narrative team in this article, the Visual and EDI teams worked alongside us during every step of this process. I became Narrative Director during the development of the Elevation setting, and it’s been a real thrill to work on creating this new part of the world of Netrunner.
In our previous article about Elevation, we introduced you to the city of Kota Kalimantan, and the space elevator, Mahkota Langit, that rises up out of it. Kota Kalimantan is located in an Indonesian province on the island of Borneo, and is administered by an alliance of nations known as OSEAN.
It’s hard to tell what came first, the setting (Borneo) or the story (the construction of the Mahkota Langit). One thing we knew was that if we were going to introduce a new space elevator to the world of Netrunner, it would make sense to place it along the equator, where the Earth’s spin would keep the cable taut, and where the elevator’s base would be just a little bit closer to space.
In a strange example of art imitating life, it was only after knowing where we’d set the next expansion that we learned Indonesia is building a new capital city on the Eastern side of Borneo, not far at all from where Kota Kalimantan sits in our fiction.
Help From The Community
We needed to ensure our vision for the cyberpunk future of Indonesia, and the other countries which make up OSEAN, would feel authentic. To that end, we kept in contact with the community of Netrunner players in Indonesia throughout the entire process.
That group of players has been incredibly helpful (and patient!) In the end, a lot of the imagery in the set came from their suggestions; a number of incidental and major characters were essentially named by them. Knowing there was a group of people excited to see their home depicted in Netrunner was constantly inspiring to us, and I know I, personally, wanted to make sure we did not let them down. To the Indonesian Netrunner community: you have our sincere thanks!
Additionally, we contracted a cultural consultant local to the area. Rin Draim (rindoesthings.com) came highly recommended to us, and with them we brainstormed story and character ideas, developed existing characters to better fit the setting, and generated an absolute treasure trove of ideas that we’ll be plucking from for years to come.
Among my own favourites of Rin’s contributions were names and backstories for some of the corps represented in Elevation. While not every Corp identity in the set represents an entity local to Kota Kalimantan, one in particular stood out. Without giving too much away, it was an idea I’d been iterating on but was not yet happy with. Rin gave it a plausible backstory that fit the setting: a government agency, sold off to help pay for the Mahkota Langit, now a corporate entity. Its official name is Agensi Pembangunan Pasca Bencana, but Rin provided something much punchier for the card title. I think you’ll like it.
The Future of Kota Kalimantan
We’ve been working on this setting for twelve months at the time of writing, including a fairly intensive period of research and worldbuilding that lasted from April to July of last year. At some points, members of the Narrative team were putting in over a dozen hours of work each week. Since then, we’ve contacted Rin once more to give us a few final notes on card names – resulting in another boatload of ideas for future use.
That treasure will not go to waste. Just as the release of Elevation represents a massive shift in the cardpool, it also represents a shift in the game’s narrative.
Kota Kalimantan will become a new ‘default’ setting for us to use, entirely of our own creation. In the past, when a card with no defined location could be assumed to exist in New Angeles, it could now exist in Kota Kalimantan. With a host of intriguing ideas still waiting in the Narrative vault, we expect that we will be returning to Kota Kalimantan and/or the surrounding OSEAN region in upcoming sets. I mentioned in a previous article that the many stories of Elevation will be open-ended, leaving it up to players to find their own endings, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the characters of Elevation, major and minor, pop up from time to time going forward.
Of course, any good setting is in some ways a character in and of itself, and one card from Elevation will bring the whole region to life in your games:
Mahkota Langit Grid
Neutral Upgrade: Region
Rez cost: 2 – Trash cost: 2 – Influence cost: 0
2 (When you rez this upgrade and before your turn begins, refill to 2 hosted credits.)
You can spend hosted credits to rez assets in the root of this server and ice protecting this server
Persistent → The trash cost of each asset in the root of this server is increased by 2.
Limit 1 region per server.
Illustrated by Marlon Ruiz
Working on this set has been an incredible journey of discovery, with so much more narrative work behind the scenes than we’d normally be able to show. Typically, the job of a designer of any discipline is to ensure the end user never notices any of that design. Every clever card you’ll discover in Elevation is the result of months of game design, playtesting, and development; every gorgeous illustration was a dialogue between talented artists, brief writers, and visual representatives. Similarly, a lot of narrative design goes on behind the scenes to make things like card names and flavour text appear authentic, harmonious, and, occasionally, a little bit clever.
On that note, we’ll have plenty more to tell you about all of that as the release of Elevation approaches. After all, as the bitter, ousted architect of the Mahkota Langit says, “Good design is invisible. But why settle for merely good?”
