Some of the best stories in Avowed are on bookshelves
As a reformed English major and general enjoyer of purchasing pretentious books to place upon shelves, I love peeping bookshelves. When I visit a friend or spot a stack of books on someone’s desk, I secretly psychoanalyze the owner, trying to build a profile of them based on that weird combination of D&D sourcebooks, romance novels, and self-help books. Are their shelves filled with old textbooks? Maybe there’s a sneaky Tom Clancy novel in there. Is that a copy of Twilight leaning against Carl Sagan?
Our personal libraries are some of the most obvious pieces of environmental storytelling about our lives. Browse the bookshelf in my house replete with Golden Age science fiction novels, architectural design books, and a brand new Curious George boxed set and you’ll probably have a good idea of who I am, what I like, and what is going on in my life.
While playing Avowed this past week, I’ve been struck by how well the game captures this phenomena. Away from all the magic slingin’ and sword swingin’, I love spending time in these sprawling RPGs treating personal homes and municipal buildings like my own personal library. I’ll lay down and curl up with a copy of “The Lusty Argonian” for a few minutes or read up on what Volo the Bard has been up to lately.
What is so immersive about Avowed though, is the game’s use of in-game writing as characterization. It’s one of the few games that I’ve stopped and noticed the libraries of characters are personalized. There doesn’t seem to be a repository of seven novels every person in the Living Lands has a copy of, instead each person has a unique library enriching the story of that person.
Chris Person at Aftermath wrote a wonderful piece exploring Avowed’s use of notes and skeletons, saying:
Unlike many other games in its genre, which can often feel bloated, dull and empty, every inch of the Living Lands begs to be explored. Each ruin and corpse feels boutique, and every moment feels like it’s touched by the hand of a real person with clarity and intent. I have rarely seen an RPG executed with such meticulous attention to detail. Few things feel recycled, and every nook and cranny has a little story to tell.
That same handcrafted feeling is just as present in the personal libraries you visit. The Aedyran Ambassador has a tall bookshelf packed with books about policy, the peoples of the Living Lands, and territorial disputes. you can open them up to learn a little bit about the world, but you’ll be forming a more cohesive picture of the man who owns those books as well.
In the side quest Dawntreader, you’ll explore an expansive dungeon, including some flooded areas of a long-lived Godlike’s home, including a library. The books on his shelves are distinct to this location: histories from lands he had traveled and technical manuals detailing his goals. Where the character is cagey about his aims, the text of the books tell a different tale; where his story seems outlandish, the ancient books from far off lands lend credence to his words.
Possibly the most repetitive books in the game aren’t saucy novels or codex-style explanations of the nine divine, it’s the grimoires you cast magic from. Even these books, rare as they are, are unique. The ancient glyphs and covers you’ll never see are bespoke, subtly alluding to the spells within. Some magical grimoires are unique weapons found in the wilderness or shops, but even these are pieces of unique storytelling. A pyromancer trying to make a more powerful gunpowder explodes in the distance, all that remains is his grimoire of fire spells and scorched grass.
In Paradis, the main magical vendor sells a one of the first unique grimoires you’ll find in Avowed. If you speak to her, she’ll ask you to buy something because she’s trying to prove a point to her blacksmith sister: magic can be just as strong as steel. Unlike the grimoires you’ve probably found at that point in the game, this one contains a spell for summoning a magical spear. Magical or smithed, each of the sisters sells a spear, both effective in different scenarios. The grimoire and spear spell tells to the story of these two sisters just as much as their dialogue does. It’s a small detail that doesn’t need to exist, but the story of these two vendors is that much richer for doing it.
I’m continually impressed by the attention to detail in Avowed and how something as simple as the written word is deployed as environmental storytelling so smartly. It’s not just notes jotted by dead men or one-off journals. The text of the books are important by themselves, but how they characterize the people who own them and are only deployed when necessary is so smartly done. I haven’t found a repeated tome yet and I suspect I won’t.
Avowed is small in comparison to the Bethesda RPGs it’s being compared to, but it’s clear—from the combat to the bookshelves—everything in Avowed is meant to make you think about the world and your place in it.
