Archive Keeper | Make Believe: Telling Stories Contesting the Realm
Written by Archive Keeper
Editor’s Note: The following is a lightly edited written transcription of Archive Keeper’s video published on May 20, 2025.
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
—C.S. Lewis
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Chapter I — Instinct
Make-believe comes naturally to children. We are born with curiosity and wonder abounding. Only later does life methodically rip it out of us.
Children's minds lack memories and knowledge to draw from. The most intuitive way to pass the time is to make things up. Kids make up stories for a variety of toys — Hot Wheels, LEGO, and Army Men are story-building tools. These sorts of children’s toys don’t often come with well-known characters attached. They rarely come with scripted stories.
Parents know too well that their children don’t need a story written for them; they are thrilled to make their own. When I was 10, my LEGO castle set could change in an instant from Helm’s Deep to some Scottish castle at the center of my ongoing Braveheart fanfic.
As much as I loved my indoor toys in youth, I was drawn more to the turf of my backyard. Taking a Nerf gun or a stick out back with friends, pretending to be Dunedain Rangers of the North, to Marines storming Normandy beach.
My roughly whittled stick was a magical staff or a bow that fired imaginary arrows from an imaginary string. I loosely followed the lore from a galaxy far, far away or a story I saw in a History Channel documentary. My mind did the work. The point of playing was to tell a story; a better story than I had before, iterating and expanding the universe I had carefully crafted during grade school years.
Chapter II — Growth
All good things come to an end, and eventually, in my early middle school years, I traded my orange-tipped replica guns and handheld hot rods for snazzy computer games in obscenely large cardboard boxes.
The genre I inherited from my father, through the big beige cube that sat on his desk, running Windows 95, was Real-Time Strategy (RTS). I enjoyed the alternate-history campaign in Command & Conquer: Red Alert and, later, the epic tale of Jim Raynor in StarCraft. What I really loved was a Skirmish match against the game’s artificial intelligence (AI).
Every contest was a fresh set of blank pages to write a new story. Every on-screen unit was a character with a motive, locked in a mortal struggle amongst my monitor's pixels. RTS games offered a new set of story-building tools, all malleable and bursting with potential.
StarCraft let users create custom maps with a tool that gave players access to a game engine, allowing them to design whatever they wanted and tell any story they could imagine. Incredible creativity and passion went into these proto-mods. The creative ceiling and storytelling in games were limitless.
During these years, a trend took shape, and a gap opened between the games I enjoyed and those that captured my peers' minds. The most popular games, then as now, were those in which players controlled a single character on a harrowing journey through a world designed to be explored. That journey had a story prewritten by the game designers — it may have been linear, branching, or, more recently, open-world. Still, the game came with a story, deliberately and matter-of-factly, woven into it.
By contrast, the games I was increasingly drawn to were those without stories. From city builders and tycoons to 4X games like Civilization and Total War, what game critics now call “sandbox” due to their open-ended “play as you please” design.
I didn’t realize that I wasn’t drawn to those types of games because they lacked a story, but rather because they were like the games of my youth. I got to compose the story myself; petri dishes for imagination. What I encountered then, but didn't realize until much later, was the impossibility of a game without a story — some designers outsource that to the player to create.
Those years, I played my first games of Magic: The Gathering (MTG). I bought a small collection from a classmate. I built decks like I was King of some mythical land, assembling his grand army. Each deck's theme was as important to the fun as its power and synergy. I hadn’t discovered netdecks. My idea of a competitive player was somebody who knew all the rules and had hundreds of cards memorized. When I started playing my first trading card game (TCG), the world had not yet crushed my childhood curiosity and imagination. My brain wasn’t using the cards to win, or even compete, but to tell a story.
Chapter III — Difficulty
Years passed, and my transition from teen to adult coincided with PC game sales shifting from physical to digital. I’ll never forget picking up my preordered copy of Empire: Total War on launch day at GameStop, only to be frustrated by a “This game requires Steam” notification during installation.
This frustration quickly 180'd when I realized the potential of Steam to connect me with niche experiences. Quirky strategy games and obtuse business simulators were never important enough for Target or Staples to carry, but they filled page after page in the Steam shop.
This explosion in variety offered dozens of new ways to tell stories. Through a litany of open-ended strategy-esque games on Steam, I got to explore my personality. SimCity and Cities: Skylines let me tell stories about balancing quality of life with a budget. Other city builders, like Banished and Ostriv, told stories of survival and perseverance. Paradox games revealed that my priorities would guide a country during the Dark Ages or World War II. I crafted a 100-year narrative about the trade-off between quantity and quality across dozens of spreadsheets in GearCity. Playing Mad Games Tycoon helped me discover my deeply rooted desire to be a world-class storyteller.
Though I was unaware of what was happening ‘under the hood,’ it was these offbeat games that helped sustain make-believe in my soul for more than a decade of adulthood, when hobbies, passions, and values all waned before I rediscovered the beauty of childlike wonder.
Luckily, this new sense of wonder and obsession over beauty, art, and meaning came several years before Sorcery: Contested Realm was gifted to the TCG world. A childhood of spinning tales had led up to this: my discovery of the greatest card game ever produced and its monumental player-driven storytelling potential.
Chapter IV — The Contested Realm
I fell in love with the art when I first discovered Sorcery in January 2024. When I played my first games with Beta pre-cons, the tactical possibilities of the four-by-five grid required incredible aptitude. The game served as a refuge for storytelling in a landscape where TCGs all have rich lore and strong IPs. It wasn’t until I discovered avatars, sans the four alpha pre-con avatars, were designed intentionally with obscured faces. Sorcery provided a unique opportunity to make-believe while playing a TCG.
Four-by-Five Grid
Anybody who sat through an eighth-grade language arts class should remember the elements of a story: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. Particularly adept students may also remember that the critical component of the exposition is setting; the place and time where the story lives and breathes.
Take middle-school wisdom and assume the role of an aspiring game developer at Eric’s Curiosa, some years ago. We want to craft a brand-new TCG with an emphasis on player-driven storytelling. Eric confirmed my suspicion in the April 2025 “Round the Realm” on the SorceryTCG YouTube channel when he said that he was always studying other TCGs so that he could intentionally do something different, and that the story of Sorcery: Contested Realm is up to the players.
Nevertheless, imagine being Eric, eager to provide trading cards that served as competitive puzzle pieces and storytelling building blocks. If this were the goal, the first consideration should be exposition; the setting. A story needs a place and time to exist. What better way to give the player agency over their story than to give them control over the setting?
The genius of the four-by-five grid isn’t just the chess-like tactics and flavor it allows. It offers a storytelling dimension that forces players into a collaborative dance, where they create a different setting for each story, even as they populate it with characters and hardships, leading to rising action and climax. Every turn is an opportunity to shape the setting. Players are limited by counterplay and the variance of their Spellbook at Atlas variance — not every setting is ideal, but suffering makes the hero. The result is the most innovative, purpose-built concepts ever seen in a TCG — a four-by-five grid that offers mental complexity and a setting created by make-believe.
Faceless Avatars as Other TCG Characters
A story needs a hero. Again, Sorcery sets itself apart. A faceless avatar with only a title at the top of their card can be anyone from anywhere. They become one of many building blocks players use to craft their stories.
By contrast, in nearly every other TCG, cards are named characters who have personalities and backstories. Each new iteration of those characters carries risk. Our idols will always disappoint us; fictional characters are no exception. It’s challenging not to feel like a new iteration is needed.
There are expectations for power level and a character's participation in the story that may be hard to meet, since every player has a different version of that character in their mind’s eye. New cards will always ruin some fans’ head canon. This approach to character design in card games not only neglects player-driven storytelling; it actively suppresses it. By contrast, a faceless avatar is, at every moment, exactly what the player imagines it to be.
Just as in the video game market, where games featuring well-developed characters and pre-written stories are vastly more popular than sandbox games. But for those who have accepted the burden of imagination, those who love to make-believe, Sorcery is priceless for what it offers.
Chapter V
Everything is a story. If not given, then written. When the story is written for you, what’s left for you is optimisation of gameplay and mechanics. Even an open-world game is closed to new ideas. It’s already full of pre-scripted material that, no matter how adjustable, is only able to bend so far.
Endeavoring the challenge of storytelling in the contested Realm is accepting responsibility for your own fun. The contested Realm does not spoon-feed characters with motives and compelling backgrounds; you create them as the game progresses. Each match is an opportunity to build a new story or shape an older one.
Everyone has an innate desire, a need, to make-believe. It’s a shame so many have had that need unfulfilled for so long, often for no better reason than not to be childish.
“The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.”
—C.S. Lewis
I invite you to regain whatever portion of yourself you’ve lost to time, and join me in the contested Realm to tell a new story. Make-believe again.