We've developed a ton of lore for the setting that Warlord Protocol takes place in. And that is in part due to the fact that it was adapted from the setting of a TTRPG that we were developing back in 2014. Unfortunately, development for that game ended up hitting a wall and we abandoned it mid through 2015. But when I began designing the first prototype for the game that would eventually become Warlord Protocol at the beginning of 2017, I realized that I could salvage the world from that TTRPG and use it for our new deck-building game. But telling the full story for Warlord Protocol is going to take a long time, so we plan to slowly release it as content on the website as time goes on. With that being said, here is how we're going to communicate the lore going forward.
Faction Pages
When you navigate to one of the faction pages, you'll probably find something like the image above. You'll see a bunch of large boxes, some are black-out and say "CLASSIFIED" while others show some artwork but just say "Coming Soon". These boxes will eventually link to character bios so that you can learn more about their personalities and where their individual journeys have taken them. And while we've already provided a short description of the faction's playstyle, we'll also be filling out a short "about" section to give you some insight into the faction’s history.
Flavor Text
If you follow us on social media, you might be familiar with images like these. We refer to these as our flavor text images. And up until now, they've been one of our main sources for communicating the game’s lore. Now, you might be thinking to yourself "don't developers usually place the flavor text on their cards?" And you would be absolutely correct! At one point during development, we did attempt adding flavor text to some of our cards. Unfortunately, the ability text for Warlord Protocol cards tends to take up a lot of real estate; and this meant that we weren’t able to add flavor text to enough cards for us to consider pursuing the idea further. And any cards that we did somehow manage to squeeze some flavor text onto ended up being difficult to read because the text size became way too small (sub 8 pt font). Since we didn't think that made for a great gameplay experience, we decided to remove the flavor text entirely.
One benefit to doing this is that it gives us the ability to write longer flavor texts. So, we created flavor text images to accompany weekly card announcements on our social media accounts. And since we don't want to force people to dig through our social media posts to find out more about Warlord Protocol's story, we're going to be adding a flavor text section to our card gallery. Any flavor text that we've posted to our social media pages will be added to the card gallery very soon (with some minor edits here and there). And more flavor text will get added as we get closer to wrapping up development.
Flavor text will likely go right below the description field.
Story Articles
We also intend to write short story articles that we'll be posting to our blog. In addition to stories involving our main cast of characters, we also have a lot of side characters that we want to write about. For example, just about every character featured on an infantry and/or action card has a story behind them. Albeit, some of them are more short-lived than others but they do have a story to tell nonetheless. Unfortunately, these articles will take more time to develop so don't expect to see them anytime soon.
Final Thoughts
We have some other fun ideas for storytelling that we think will work well for Warlord Protocol. We're not quite ready to share some of those ideas with you, and others you might just have to stumble across as you explore the website. Don't go scouring the site for any secrets quite yet though, we'll give you all a hint when it’s possible to access them. Let us know down in the comments what type of story/lore content you're most interested in!
All the best, - CDour