Broken Weave: Dev Diary 1 - Painting a Broken World

‘The Weave of magic is broken and the gods are dead…’

That was our guiding mantra when we set out to create Broken Weave — an original post-apocalyptic tragic fantasy campaign setting for 5e. In this, the first of a series of dev diaries leading up to the launch of the Broken Weave Kickstarter campaign in February 2023, we’re going to dive into how we discovered the Broken World.

Painting a Broken World

Throughout, we’ll be showing lots of concept art for the game, and providing commentary from the developers working on the game. 

Imagine a typical high fantasy setting, it could even be one your group is playing in now. Now imagine if the weave of magic, a fundamental pillar of reality which holds the universe together, was broken. What would that look like? What would it do to the magical landscapes, creatures, and even the gods themselves that call your fantasy world home? How would people survive in a land so fundamentally altered? These were the questions we set out to answer during the early stages of concept development.

Much like the Broken World itself, the creation process began as a fragmented collection of ideas. During this early concept stage, the art and writing team got together and threw everything and anything at the wall — exploring shapes, mood, and tone through a rapid-fire process of thumbnails and explorative pieces.

Hundreds of concepts were created, reviewed, and discarded. The goal at this stage is not to look for finished works of art, but to explore the setting and seek out a unique aesthetic that resonates with and excites the development team. 

“The desolate world of Broken Weave taxed my experience to the limit as I let loose to explore. I was looking for the alien, the unfamiliar, the scary — letting the images guide me on my journey. I sunk down into what it must feel like to live there, how you might survive, what kind of parts of ourselves would arise in such a shattered world.”

— Jonathan O'Donoghue, Broken Weave artist

We knew from the early concepts that we were dealing with a world where time and space itself were shattered. Magic was a fundamental part of the world — like gravity. It helped to shape mountains and carve paths, to mark time and uphold memory. But with the force of a global arcane cataclysm, and the weave of magic itself in tatters, the lands themselves are almost unrecognisable and shifting in unnatural ways — a fantasy world viewed through a fractured kaleidoscope. 

As such, we could really push the boundaries in search of evocative or surreal landscapes. These might one day develop into cornerstones of the setting, or even a specific adventure location.

‘The Weave of magic is broken and the gods are dead…’

That was our guiding mantra when we set out to create Broken Weave — an original post-apocalyptic tragic fantasy campaign setting for 5e. In this, the first of a series of dev diaries leading up to the launch of the Broken Weave Kickstarter campaign in February 2023, we’re going to dive into how we discovered the Broken World.

Throughout, we’ll be showing lots of concept art for the game, and providing commentary from the developers working on the game.

‘Finding inspiration for Broken Weave meant, to me, largely leaving behind the recognised shapes of the majority of past and present societies, and looking instead to bone and fungus, to skin and vegetation, to the insectoid, to curves and arcs and spheres without too much mortar or metal, to changes in scale and location. Perhaps we might see forests of above ground coral, or tiny glowing stars/novas somehow sitting on the surface of the world.

My goal in developing a visual style here was to work towards something that held an overarching sense of the familiar, haunting, alien, decaying, with an identity all its own. I felt playing with the location and scale of otherwise known and more natural objects (or abstracted shapes, even), might be a way to approach this. That’s more than one piece could accomplish, of course, but with all the pieces I created that was what I was broadly aiming for.’

— Sam Manley, Broken Weave artist.

Join us in the next part of our painting a Broken World dev diary, with more art and developer insights.

Broken Weave comes to Kickstarter in early February, so don’t forget to head to the Kickstarter page and sign up to be notified when it launches!