Today's post is the final part of the
Frankenstein's Legions high concept document. In a parallel universe, Eidos did this game instead of - well, take your pick!
The Notebooks of Doctor Frankenstein
“A dream has
power to poison sleep.” – Mary Shelley
Tom Clerval, raised in the United States by his father, an
exiled French aristocrat, enlists as a surgeon on the British allies’ side
during the Promethean War of 1821-36.
Clerval has inherited the notebooks of his godfather, Victor
Frankenstein. Although familiar with Frankenstein’s experiments, he has never
put the resurrection procedures to use – not even when, a few years before the
start of the game, his fiancée Victoria died by drowning.
When, after fourteen years of war, the fanatics of the
Second Convention that governs France restore Napoleon – “the Boney Man” – to
life, Clerval gives in to pressure from his own side and agrees to release the
Frankenstein notebooks. Clerval insists, however, that the use of resurrected
men in battle remains limited and Sir Percy Blakeney, the head of military
intelligence, concedes.
Clerval and his platoon of monsters become a legend on both
sides. He rises swiftly through the ranks, turning the tide of war with a
series of decisive pitched battles coupled with daring raids behind enemy
lines.
Although kept strictly under guard at Versailles, Napoleon
succeeds in restoring his former lieutenant, Marshal Ney, to command of the
French cavalry in place of the Convention’s general. Internal political
divisions within the revolutionary government begin to pave the way for
Napoleon’s return to power.
After a year when the fate of Europe hangs in the balance,
the Allies (Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria and the United States) finally
manage to split the Convention’s forces and defeat the army of Citizen Valdemar
at Crecy. However, Napoleon seizes power in Paris and returns with a new army
raised from the dead.
Clerval is betrayed. When he encounters other monsters on
the Allied side but not controlled by him, he realizes that his best friend has
given the technology to the government. Angrily he vows to wage a war to end
all wars. He swears to Blakeney that, when Napoleon is defeated, he will
destroy Frankenstein’s secrets for good. It seems an empty boast.
During an expeditionary attack in Eastern Europe, Clerval’s
army is seemingly surprised by Napoleon’s larger force. Defeat seems
inevitable, but Clerval retreats into the steppes as winter closes its grip.
The intense cold of the Russian steppes disables Napoleon’s cannon – his
“beautiful daughters” on which his tactics depend.
Clerval defeats Napoleon’s army only to discover that the
Emperor has fled. He overtakes him on the road to Paris. Marshal Ney, sickened
by the barbarity into which the war has descended, offers Clerval a duel and is
killed. Clerval destroys Napoleon with a bomb that blows his body to pieces.
A last mission, this time in the English countryside.
Clerval locates the laboratory where the Allies are creating monsters and
destroys it, ensuring that Frankenstein’s notebooks go up in flames. Clerval’s
last remaining monster sacrifices itself to save him from the flames.
* * *
Epilogue: Napoleon’s personal physician arrives by carriage
at Vilnius in Lithuania to oversee a huge excavation. A tall figure emerges
from the carriage – Marshal Ney, but now with his head shaved and a scar
indicating cranial surgery. He surveys the excavations, which are revealed to
be the mass graves of the Imperial Guard, crack troops of the Grande Armée who
had died of starvation during the retreat from Moscow more than twenty years
before.
These are the best troops the world has ever seen. They lie
in the soil, still with their weapons and uniforms intact.
“The cold has kept them young,” says Ney, although he speaks
now with a Corsican accent and a cadence that is instantly recognizable. “Glorious
sons of France, now you can arise and go home at last…”
The Emperor raises his face to the west. We go close on his eyes, which are burning with an inner light as he speaks over the
open graves:
“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in
me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth
in me – he shall never die.”
Smash cut to black. Music and end credits.
Look & Feel
“What disturbs
our blood is but its longing for the tomb.”
In the gothic romances of the early 19th century, nature is
seen as immense, remote and daunting. Man is a speck in the eye of an uncaring
universe. Against this world view, the idea of a mortal man daring to usurp the
power of life and death becomes both inspiring and doomed to catastrophe.
Weather and environment in the game convey the gothic view
of heightened reality. Fast-moving clouds send ragged shadows racing across the
hills. Rain gusts in horizontal sheets and sluices off gutters. Snow swirls
like fine desert sand in the wind. Fields become mires of mud or featureless
blisters of rock-hard frost.
The interface utilizes a crackling, dynamic,
scratched-negative effect. Icons seem to flicker unwillingly into life,
accompanied by a mournful electrical hum.
The main game screen will present a behind-the-character 3D
view of a nightmarishly ravaged European landscape – blasted heath, craggy
hills, unkempt cemeteries, wild forests, sullen cities. The colors are stark
and desaturated. On the surface this is the mid-19th century, but in spirit it
calls to mind the horrors of modern mechanized warfare from 1914 onwards.
Frankenstein’s Legions will employ a stark visual style to
evoke hyper-real images of a landscape blasted and laid waste by war. Common
images: storm clouds over churned mud, stumps of splintered wood in the earth,
barbed wire, mountains shouldering the sky, carts carrying body parts from the
front, gibbets creaking in the wind, shrapnel whip-cracking the air, handkerchiefs
covering the face from the stench of formaldehyde, lightning rolling along the
hills, the hollow stare of patchwork soldiers driven beyond madness, the unease
of living officers in command of reanimated men.
Sounds: sullen mutterings of villagers, keening wind,
weeping from mourners at the graveyard, the distant rumbling of thunder, the
howl of wolves, the shriek and snort of frightened horses, muffled voices from
taverns at night, forlorn cries from mountain caves, the thunder of cannon, the
whistle and crump of exploding shells, pebbles clattering down a steep cliff,
the relentless wail of dying men, the dismal groans of the resurrected.
During gameplay, the only sounds will be environmental:
wind, gunfire, footsteps, the shouts of men, the snarl of monsters, and so on.
The use of incidental music is restricted to inter-level cutscenes.
* * *
I can't wrap up this saga of the
Frankenstein's Legions game without mentioning that I originally conceived it, not as a squad-based tactical game, but a classic eye-in-the-sky RTS game. In that version, players chose to be one of three "races": Prometheans (creating Frankensteinian monsters), Artificers (creating armies of proto-industrial robots) or Expurgators (religious zealots opposed to meddling with nature in any form). At the turn of the millennium, however, there was a sense that the time of those old cerebral games was passing. Game design has its fads like anything else. The character-based game into which
FL evolved would cost millions to develop, though, whereas the RTS could be perfectly adequate as a tablet game with almost retro graphics à la
Starcraft. A famous game industry figure was fond of saying in the late '90s that platform games were dead, then a few years later that classic RTS was dead, but I would say: never say never!
