I am the Sovereign of this tower, God help me. By the time the bells rang for the next cycle in Sovereign Tower, I had already sent Chester away twice over a goose he swears is staging a coup, bowed all the way to the floor for Daisy and her goat Majestina because that animal has a look in its eye I am not paid enough to argue with, and broken up Groveshire and Clovermont before somebody got called a silk rag for the second time that week.
Then the herald cleared his throat differently, which is never a good sign, and the man standing in the doorway did something none of my usual visitors managed. He just waited, quietly, for his turn.
“Gobert,” the herald read from the card in his hand, “Creative and Art Director, Wild Wits.”
I sat up properly then, prepared to interrogate the creator of these halls and everything else from the wet green woods of Groveshire to the frost-cut peaks of Brimwood, and, if I’m honest, me.
On Which Knight He’d Actually Save
I asked him, if he ever found himself trapped in the tower’s crypts and was forced into a real bargain with a demon (a wholly hypothetical scenario, of course), which of his own knights would he choose to save.
“Goberto probably since it’s a character based on me,” he said, and then, perhaps embarrassed by his own honesty, added, “(A bit egotistical maybe?).”
A man who wrote himself a trapdoor out of hell before anyone else got the chance. I understood him completely, and privately noted to ask the demon about interest rates.
On What Got Cut
As I pondered on what kind of question to relay upon one’s maker, I recalled an ancient book I’d read in the tower’s library revealing that my knights’ traits used to be much longer before Gobert engaged in a game called Dispatch, So, I asked whether some older, messier version of the system still nagged at him on quiet nights, but he wasn’t sentimental about it in the slightest.
“Originally these traits were much more simple, they did not have particular passive abilities like they do now, but mostly affected the compatibility with the quest,” he said, adding that the system had since changed so completely that comparing the two felt almost pointless.
“The system has changed a lot now so it’s hard to imagine how they would relate to the current system.”
He did explain that he “originally wanted the Sovereign to have a much more complex ‘tag’ system that would unlock particular answers and options. But that system seemed to put too much focus on the player character rather than the other character and world, so we had to give it up.”
On the Demon Powers and The Cost
Well, no one else would give me the answers I sought, so who better to ask than my maker himself. My rewind, the one real weapon I hold against fate itself, will using this power come at a cost?
“Using the rewind doesn’t directly affect your stats, but it will continuously push terrible grievances with no positive outcomes to the player. So you are in fact punished for it during your game.”
He explained that the mechanic used to run on a scarce resource players had to hoard carefully, before that idea was scrapped for being too fiddly and too frustrating in practice, especially once it became clear most players were already too afraid of the narrative fallout to abuse it anyway.
On Keeping Track of All Of It
Having been privy to this power and the different outcomes it leads to, I asked how anyone keeps track of every version of every choice, every knight, every thread rewound and rewritten, without the entire tapestry simply coming apart in their hands.
Alas, he offered no secret spell for Belladonna to reproduce. “There’s no trick to it; we just had to plan everything, make diagrams, and be thorough with our design,” he said, freely admitting that careful planning hadn’t spared them from constant unexpected trouble.
“Even then we had many problems and unexpected issues with this system so the only thing I can say is: we tried our very best.”
On Whether Anything Stays Hidden
I wanted to know whether anything in this tower had been built to stay hidden forever, some secret buried deep enough that even the most dedicated player would never stumble onto it.
“I wish we could, but in a post-internet world, it doesn’t seem very realistic to think some things can never be discovered, so I personally wouldn’t expect anything to remain hidden forever,” he said.
A little bleak, and probably true. Somewhere out there right now, someone is already finding the thing he privately assumed was safe.
I could not resist asking him about the ones who apparently gather in 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔠𝔬𝔯𝔡, in numbers large enough that my own library keeps a shelf just for their theories. By every account, they behave less like well-wishers and more like a standing court of their own, tracking every quest, every knight, every choice by hand, in ledgers thicker than the ones my own scribes keep. Had anyone ever theorized something entirely wrong that he secretly wished had been true instead?
“Yes, all the time actually!” he said. “The most fun is also when the players theorize things that actually happen or better yet, things that we’ve had to cut.”
He stopped short of naming an example, but insisted that engaging with their ideas had become “a big highlight of [their] experience with this game.”
On the Future of the Tower
As for what comes next, I already had some idea, having found a heavy tome forgotten in the library. Blowing some dust off, it revealed its name — 𝔐𝔢𝔱𝔞𝔠𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔦𝔠 — and its purpose seemed to be to tally the judgment of strangers into a single number. Eighty-six, apparently.
I still asked what was in the future for Wild Wits. Gobert’s own answer was “First is obviously bug fixing,” describing a game so tangled by time travel and narrative branching that stability alone had become its own ongoing battle. “Our programmer Paul has been relentless in this effort and is doing everything he can to help alleviate every issue that the players have met.”
Every kingdom needs a knight nobody applauds. Mine apparently has one named Paul, awake at some hour I would rather not picture, quietly keeping my tower from folding in on all of us while I sit here judging geese.
“As for the rest, I cannot speak before anything is confirmed, but we are reading through every criticism of the game, and we will try to fix every issue we c-”
I dismissed him mid-sentence, the way I dismiss everyone really, because the truth is, I don’t have time for him. I currently have ten knights wandering this tower at any given hour, and I am still, deeply, working out which ones (yes, plural) I intend to romance next.
Still here? Good.
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