Everhaze

​Everhaze is a world of flying airships amidst a world covered in dense fog like clouds known as the Everhave. It’s made the land underneath mostly uninhabitable but breaks in the Everhaze have allowed humanity to settle like early civilizations to bodies of water and rivers. Here they formed cities and created flying airships to explore the wild floating islands that exist in the Everhaze. These islands are bountiful in totally unique materials, leading to their formally organized harvesting. However, the impossibility to map the everchanging islands causes them to remain relatively lawless, with pirates fiending to score impressive bounties.

I served as one of five writers on a Narrative Design Document where we collaborated in creating this totally new story world. We rapidly brainstormed ideas and discussed major details as a team before breaking out on our own to write. The core idea of our world came from our initial brainstorming session where I suggested going back to genre x + y thinking when our first ideas were proving uninspired. I suggested the combination of pirate + western and after that the world of Everhaze started to take off. I proposed that the central deviation and story world aesthetic could take the form of flying airships (pirate) visiting floating lawless islands (western). I played a large part in helping to write the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs section early on in the project when nailing down the details of our world. I additionally helped to write other key sections such as characters and how those characters shaped the arc of our pilot story outline. Other various sections I worked on were close competitors, bestiary, unique verbs, organizations, and artifacts.

The world was built to facilitate multiple different stories taking place asynchronously around the simple pilot story outlined in the NDD. Many of these different stories we wrote individually contributed to the major story plan also highlighted in the NDD. These stories took on the form of various small scale proof of concept games. They primarily served as evidence that the story world would be able to support these stories naturally without heavily needing to collaborate. The game I created was a system agnostic TTRPG, following the origin story of the simple story’s primary antagonist. In it players were a core part of the characters past and led to the difficult moral conundrum that led him down the path of being a pirate.

My partners on the project were Christen Niedzielski, J Sherrer, Darcy Hayes, and Conner Zielinski. Christen Niedzielski also served as the team's artist, creating the poster and character art.