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Cody Miller, head of Far Off Games and designer of Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread, has managed to nail something D&D hasn't for me. Thanks to Arydia's Game Master-less design that sense of community spirit is more than uplifted, but there's no denying the D&D influence on this board game TTRPG hybrid. Of course, there's more to any story than what's on the surface, so I've been digging into the roots of Arydia.
Speaking to Miller, I discovered where his love of epic stories originated. He talks of how his journey from text-based World Of Warcraft games snowballed into a burning desire to play some of the best tabletop RPGs like D&D, and how this all transitioned into his board game design work.
"My mother read me and my brother Lord of the Rings when I was a tween," says Miller, "those stories have 'lived in my head, rent free' as it were for decades." This is one influence I'd certainly picked up having played about 14 hours of Arydia so far, but as he makes clear the game was "inspired by a tapestry of fantasy games, movies, and books."
"Some of my first online games were text-based 'MUD's which were basically World of Warcraft - but text only." If you've not had the pleasure, MUDs – or Multi User Dungeons – were some of the more popular multiplayer text based adventures on the early web, standing alongside solo text adventures like Zork. From MUDs, Miller says he "drew inspiration for much of the writing in Arydia."
Like many of us, Miller had the experience of staring longingly at D&D books and wanting desperately to jump into a campaign, but as he says "I didn't have any friends who played D&D when I was a kid, so I ended up being drawn to my computer, playing lots of CRPGs - the Baldur's Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege."
Pair those with some of Miller's Super Nintendo influences – "All the classics: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Zelda, Breath of Fire II" – and you start to see a fuller picture of how Arydia started to formulate in his head.
"I think I've always been drawn to games with compelling stories," he says. "The Elder Scrolls series had a huge impact on me", he notes. Of course games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are going to give a board game designer a pretty high bar for open world games and branching narratives. Where would we writers be without Todd Howard's influence in the modern gaming world, I ask?
"With Arydia I really wanted to try and capture that feeling of an open world: adventure around every corner – with wacky characters and surprising situations – these are some of the things I've tried to channel into Arydia."
I was trying to find like a 'quick start' box to get everything I needed to play and I discovered that it wasn't quite like that.
Cody Miller - Arydia designer
Three years after Miller's foray into Tamriel's northernmost regions (so I imagine not too far into Skyrim's main quest), he began getting into the idea of playing Dungeons & Dragons. "I wanted to learn to play D&D with my friends, and so I borrowed books, and did a ton of research," he says, "I was trying to find like a 'quick start' box to get everything I needed to play and I discovered that it wasn't quite like that. You needed to pull together lots of different pieces in order to play a campaign."
Soon, one of the best-looking D&D starter sets will be coming to us, so while we hopefully won't have as many people feeling stuck as beginner D&D players, maybe we'll be robbing ourselves of the next Arydia tabletop RPG board game hybrid. As Miller notes, "This was right after I had published my first game and just started my company. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do all of this work to make a D&D campaign for my friends - I might as well do a little extra work and turn it into a full-fledged box anyone could buy. And so that was the beginning of Arydia."
The game's D&D influences are clear, but discovering that WoW MUDs were where it all started for Miller was a bit of a revelation. I suppose it's yet more proof that there are far broader influences for game designers than many might think.
For more recommendations, why not check out the best D&D books or in the spirit of collaboration, what about the best cooperative board games.
