The Imagine Isles - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

Name: The Imagine Isles Type: Region (archipelago) Also Known As: If's Scraps (sailors' name). Sometimes loosely called the Dev Islands, though that name belongs only to the Dev Archipelago, the small group of islands here dedicated to game development education (see A Note on Names) Location: Adrift in the Sea of Sagas, far to the West of Frays End, on the Tattered Hem, where the sea frays into the deep currents of the Void. Core Thread: Imagination Patron: If, the Spinner of What Might Be Notable Places: The Dev Archipelago, the Selvedge Strand, The Port of Possibility, Maybe and Maybe Manor, Cloudspun Keep, Turvy, Wishwalk Notable Inhabitants: Venture (the Elder of the Isles), the Imaginary Islander, the String-Stealing Sheep Themes: Imagination, Play, Wonder, Invention, Exploration

Every weaver who has ever made something worth keeping, first made something worth throwing away.

The Imagine Isles are a scattered archipelago adrift in the Sea of Sagas, far to the West of Frays End. No two travellers describe them alike. The islands shift to the shape of whatever a wandering mind dares to dream: castles spun from cloud, beasts of impossible feather and scale, rivers that flow uphill. Wishes spoken on their banks have been known to grow legs and walk away.

Every region of Threadbare is woven from a fabric of its own. The Memoir Mines are dense with Memory. The Song Sanctuaries hum with Spirit. The Imagine Isles are the thinnest and least settled cloth in the world: gossamer Imagination, still loose on the loom. That makes them unlike anywhere else, and makes them a place of wonder, adventure, and the occasional terrible idea.

Among the Isles lies one small, separate group of islands with a purpose all of its own: the Dev Archipelago, where StoryWeavers learn how the world of Threadbare is made (see The Dev Archipelago, below).

If's Scraps

Sailors call the Isles If's Scraps. They say the islands are the offcuts of a world If is still deciding on: pieces of the Great Weaving that were spun but never set as warp, and so never fixed in place. The Tidetellers of the Sea of Sagas say they must have washed out to the Tattered Hem on some great tide at the very beginning of everything.

The Elders of the Eternal Loom prefer a weaver's word. Before any weaver begins a great cloth, they weave a swatch: a small, rough square to test a pattern, a colour or a tension. A swatch is not meant to last. It is meant to be pulled, stretched, unpicked and tried again, so that the real cloth comes out right. The Elders say each of the Imagine Isles is one of If's swatches, and that If left them adrift on purpose, so that everyone who came after would have somewhere to try things out.

Spinners in Frays End still teach apprentices the same way. Weave a swatch first. Nobody minds if the swatch goes wrong.

Geography and the Drift

The Isles do not keep still. They drift on the far western edge of the Sea of Sagas, where the Void's deep currents run beneath the waves, turning slowly around one another like leaves in an eddy. An island seen to the east at dawn may lie south by dusk. Willomena WanderWeave, Chief Cartographer of the University of the Unseen, charted them three times and got three different maps. She kept all three, on the grounds that each was correct when she drew it.

Reaching the Isles is a voyage in itself. The Ferries of Fable set out from the Hem Harbour of Frays End and sail west across the Sea of Sagas to the Port of Possibility, and the old sailors' rule still holds: the Isles can only be reached by a captain who can hold a single, unwavering thought in mind long enough to arrive. Captains who let their minds wander tend to find themselves somewhere else entirely, which on the Isles is not always a bad thing.

Every ship bound for the Isles makes for The Port of Possibility, the great harbour of the Imagine Isles. The Ferries of Fable dock there, the Islanders' own ships set out from there to trade with the mainland, and the barrels of ink from the Ink Well are unloaded there for the Isles' writers and dreamers. The Port is moored to no island in particular, and drifts with whichever islands need it most. Learners bound for the Dev Archipelago land instead at the Selvedge Strand.

The charted Isles include:

  • Maybe - An island that is only there if you are not quite sure it is. Sail towards it with great confidence and it vanishes. Wonder aloud whether it might be there, and it appears, looking pleased with itself. At its heart stands Maybe Manor, a rambling house of might-have-beens, where every door opens onto a different room depending on who is wondering.
  • Cloudspun Keep - A tall, towering castle spun entirely from cloud, and home to the Isles' most ambitious dreamers. The castle has a different number of towers every morning, depending on how hard its residents imagined overnight.
  • Turvy - A steep, green island where the rivers flow uphill, the rain falls up, and the waterfalls spill into the sky. Visitors are advised to tie down their hats, and their tea.
  • Wishwalk - The island where wishes spoken aloud grow legs and walk away. Its hills are dotted with small, wandering wishes, grazing, dozing, or looking for the Threadlings who made them. Catching your own wish is harder than it sounds. They are very quick.

The charted Isles are not a complete list, and are not meant to be. When something new is imagined, a new island tends to drift in with it.

Nature

The Isles answer imagination the way the rest of Threadbare answers memory. Where a Threadling of Frays End might remember a lantern back into light, a Threadling on the Isles can imagine a bridge where there was only cliff, or a meadow where there was only sand, and watch the cloth obey.

This makes the Isles joyful, and it makes them dangerous in their own, peculiar way. The Isles give imagination its shape, and they do not ask whether that imagination is kind. Imagine too greedily, or too carelessly, and the islands may imagine you right back, unmaking you into something new and unrecognisable.

The KnitWitches still tell of one young Threadling who came to the Isles and imagined himself a kingdom. It was a very fine kingdom, with a castle, a crown, and a great many flags. But he imagined it so hard, and for so long, that he forgot, entirely, that he had ever been anything other than its king. A whole circle of KnitWitches had to sail out to remind him. The Elders teach that the cure is the same as it is for any weaver: care, patience, and a willingness to unpick what isn't right.

Inhabitants

Venture, the Elder of the Isles - The only Elder of the Eternal Loom who lives on the drift rather than in Frays End, and the Overseer of the Dev Archipelago. Venture was the first to navigate the tattered hem and find, or some say form, the Isles. She holds the patterns every island is built from, and is quietly delighted whenever anyone takes an idea and makes it into something no one on the Isles ever thought of.

The Imagine Islanders - The Threadlings who settle on the Isles are a particular kind: dreamers, inventors, tinkerers and wonderers, drawn by the promise that nothing here is fixed for good. They are cheerful, curious, and very hard to surprise.

The Imaginary Islander - A cheerful local who meets most newcomers near the Selvedge Strand and gives the same three pieces of advice: when you are lost, abandon the quest and come back; when you find something you like, turn the cloth and look at how it was made; and when the signs do not say enough, look closer, because there is usually more written underneath. The Islander always finishes the same way: "Let your imagination lead you."

Creatures

The Isles' creatures are mostly gentle, and mostly mischievous. Sheep roam every island. At some point they got hold of the Grapple Keeper's string, and now play tug-of-war with it, chase one another across the shoals, and keep a volleyball match going that nobody can remember starting. How the sheep learned any of this is a question the Elders still argue about. Bunnies, butterflies and the occasional CapyCorn wander the fields, and the wishes of Wishwalk wander wherever they please.

The Isles are not beyond the Void's reach, and their creatures feel it first. When the Void stirs in the currents around the drift, the animals grow jumpy, and the Islanders go out to wrangle them gently back to safety.

The Isles and the Void

It surprises many Threadlings that anything survives so close to the Void at all. The Observatory of the Unseen has a theory. Professor Alfeus AllPatch holds that the Void feeds on what is abandoned and forgotten, and that the Isles are almost never either. Every idea tried, every island given its first shape, and every StoryWeaver who comes to learn or play adds a fresh thread to the drift. The Isles last because they are always being imagined again.

That also means the Isles are only as safe as the imagination that keeps them. An island no one imagines any more begins to fade at the edges, its colours thinning like old cloth, until it drifts out past the charted isles and is gone. The Islanders say the saddest sight on the Isles is an island that everyone has simply stopped thinking about.

The Dev Archipelago

Within the Imagine Isles lies a small, separate group of islands with a purpose all of their own. The Dev Archipelago is Threadbare's learning and exploration zone for game development: the place where StoryWeavers, and learners from every world, learn how Threadbare itself is made. Other regions are places to be explored and saved. The Dev Archipelago is where StoryWeavers learn how.

"This is a place of creativity, play, and experimentation!" -- The Basics Keeper, greeting a new StoryWeaver on the Selvedge Strand

Venture created the Dev Archipelago in one small corner of the Isles, inviting learners not only from Threadbare, but from all possible worlds. It is the one place in Threadbare where the world openly acknowledges that visitors from elsewhere come to call.

The Selvedge Strand

Unlike the rest of the Isles, the Dev Archipelago does not drift free. It is held in place by the Selvedge Strand, the sandy shore at its heart. A selvedge is the finished edge of a cloth, woven so that it will not fray. The Strand is the one edge of the Isles that holds its shape, so learners arrive there, return there, and set out from there.

Like every part of the Imagine Isles, the Dev Archipelago can only be reached by boat. The Ferries of Fable set out from the Hem Harbour of Frays End and sail west across the Sea of Sagas to the Selvedge Strand, and every passenger lives through an entire story on the way (see The Sea of Sagas). Because the Strand holds its shape, it is the one landing on the Isles that every captain can find, however far the rest of the Isles have drifted. A signpost at the end of its jetty points the way home.

Some journeys begin on the Dev Archipelago itself, with Frays End still far off across the sea. On those journeys the Archipelago is home, the place where every quest begins and ends.

The Islands of the Archipelago

From the Strand, rope bridges and stepping-stone shoals lead out to the islands of the Archipelago, each kept by a Threadling keeper who has made it their work to understand one thread of how Threadbare is made. All of them learned their craft from Venture.

  • Firstknot - The gentlest of the Archipelago's islands, kept by the Basics Keeper. Here a StoryWeaver learns the first things: how the world is layered so that some things stand in front of others, how light and shadow make a flat place feel deep, and how the Threadways (teleporters) stitch one place to another, or one point of a place to another point of the same place.
  • Needlepoint - Kept by the Grapple Keeper, and studded with great hookable needles standing up from the sand. StoryWeavers learn to cast a thread, cross a gap, chain needle to needle, and discover that a thread can catch on far more than needles.
  • Rebound Reach - Kept by the Rebound Keeper, where anything thrown can be sent right back. Barrels, balls and ink all get repelled here, and the InkDrinker arena tests how well a StoryWeaver has learned it. The Rebound Keeper's sheep have been playing volleyball for hours and show no sign of stopping.
  • Patchwork Isle - Kept by the Level Design Keeper and the largest of the Archipelago's islands. This is where StoryWeavers learn to build a place worth adventuring in: growing a forest in a moment, peopling a town with townies of every kind, hanging doors and levers, and turning the sky from noon to night and from sun to storm. A small museum of time and weather stands at its centre.
  • Wrangler's Shoal - Kept by the Enemy Interaction Keeper. Here the StoryWeaver learns how Threadbare's creatures move and behave, including the Storyvore, the InkDrinker and the MemoryMoth, and how to slip past what cannot be befriended. Creatures from harder regions of Threadbare are kept here so that StoryWeavers can learn their ways somewhere safe before meeting them somewhere that isn't.
  • The Tangle - A small, windswept isle where the lessons of the others are knotted together, and a StoryWeaver learns to grapple and repel at once.

When a new thread of Threadbare's making is discovered, a new island tends to drift in from beyond the charted isles to join the Archipelago.

Learning on the Archipelago

The Archipelago is joyful, and it is forgiving. Venture ties every quest on the Archipelago to the Selvedge Strand with a single guiding thread, so that no one is ever truly lost there. A StoryWeaver who finds themselves tangled in a practice that has gone wrong may simply abandon it, and the thread will draw them gently back to the Strand to begin again. On the Archipelago, abandoning an attempt is not failure. It is how the work is done.

The Archipelago also keeps an old weaver's habit alive: turning the cloth. Any weaver who wants to know how a fabric was made turns it over and studies the underside, where every knot, float and crossing shows. Venture and the Island Keepers encourage StoryWeavers to do the same with anything on the Archipelago that delights them. Turn it over. See how it was made. Then make one of your own.

Keepers of the Archipelago

The Island Keepers - Threadlings who each keep one of the Archipelago's islands, and who learned their craft from Venture. Every keeper holds a storybook of practice quests for their own island. The Basics Keeper cannot always remember what a particular tool was for, only that a StoryWeaver will surely work it out. (Names to come.)

Muse, the StoryQuest Elder - An Elder who does not live on the Isles, but comes to the Selvedge Strand to wait for StoryWeavers returning from quests of their own making, and congratulates each one. This Elder appears on the Archipelago only on journeys where the Archipelago itself is home.

Narrative Function

The Imagine Isles are a real place in Threadbare, and should be written as one: they have a history, a geography, inhabitants, creatures, and a place in the struggle against the Void. They play two distinct roles, and it helps to keep them apart.

The Imagine Isles as a whole are a region of the wider game and its lore. Like every other region, they hold stories, dangers and wonders to be explored and restored, and they are open to LoreQuests and StoryQuests alike. They carry If's temperament more than any other region, and the StoryWeaver's allies of Imagination feel most at home there. They are reached by sea, across the Sea of Sagas. In the Threadbare Plot, the StoryWeaver sails to the Isles at the start of the arc for the Not Loom, where they find Venture and Rune defending the fading Isles from swarms of InkDrinkers, and Venture sets them on the trail to the Ink Well. The Dev Archipelago is not part of the main plot.

The Dev Archipelago is a specific, separate group of islands within the Isles, with its own purpose: game development education. It is Threadbare's practice ground, where players and contributors learn how the game is built, and are invited to build anything they can imagine with it. In the language of the world, the other regions are the cloth. The Dev Archipelago is the swatch. It sits outside the main narrative, as an optional destination reached aboard the Ferries of Fable from the Hem Harbour of Frays End: a place a StoryWeaver can visit at any time to learn, relearn, or simply play.

In the Threadbare Plot

The Imagine Isles open the arc for the Not Loom in Act Two of the Threadbare Plot, guided by the LoomWarden Whim. When Whim hears nothing from Venture for some time, the StoryWeaver sails to the Isles aboard a Ferry of Fable, only to find the Port of Possibility fallen and blocked. The StoryWeaver swims ashore, the ferry turns for home, and they find the Isles fading. Venture and Rune have been defending the Isles from swarms of InkDrinkers, but Maybe Manor has fallen too, and with the Port blocked, no ship can sail in or out. Creatures of every kind are camped on the beaches, waiting for passage to the mainland. Nothing new has appeared on the Isles for a long, long time, and the ink that the Isles use to write new stories has stopped arriving from The Ink Well.

In Port in a Storm, the StoryWeaver sneaks into the Port of Possibility, clears a ship of InkDrinkers and takes charge of it, and in Creature Comforts they ferry the refugees to safety on the mainland. The last barrels of ink arrived months ago, and Venture sends the StoryWeaver on to the InkKeepers to find out why. When the Not Loom is destroyed, the refugees prepare to sail home, their ships filled with barrels of fresh ink.

For Contributors

The Imagine Isles

  • The Isles welcome LoreQuests and StoryQuests. Any story of imagination, invention, wishes, wonder, or the perils of imagining too much has a natural home here.
  • New islands are welcome. The charted Isles are not a complete list. A new island should have a single, clear idea at its heart (an island that is only there if you doubt it, an island where the rain falls up), and a little bit of character that makes it feel like part of Threadbare.
  • The warning is part of the magic. Stories on the Isles can play with the idea that imagination unchecked may reshape the imaginer, but keep it gentle, and always leave a way back.

The Dev Archipelago

The Dev Archipelago is the in-world home of Threadbare's game design templates and learning curriculum. Nearly everything on it doubles as a working example that can be opened, studied, copied and changed.

  • Each island maps to a set of practice quests. In the Threadbare project, these live under scenes/dev/: basics (visuals, teleporters), grapple, repel, level design (area filler, character randomizer, doors and levers, time and weather), enemy interaction, and playground (ability combinations). Each keeper's storybook lists the quests in their folder.
  • The Archipelago is the home scene of the StoryQuest Kit. In the stripped-back kit, Frays End is not present. Contributors begin and end on the Selvedge Strand, and the StoryQuest Elder greets them when they return from their own quests.
  • Learning guides draw on the Archipelago directly. For example, the Teleporter Challenge asks learners to open teleporter_test_2, one of Firstknot's teleporter practice scenes, copy its working teleporter into a scene of their own, and give it original art. That is the Archipelago's purpose in miniature: play it, turn the cloth, then make it yours.
  • "Turning the cloth" is literal. From the options menu, the debug settings include Open Current Scene in Editor, so any scene that catches a learner's eye can be opened and studied in Godot. Abandon Quest in the game menu returns the player to the Archipelago.
  • New learning islands are welcome. When a new mechanic, template or learning module is added to Threadbare, it should find a home on the Dev Archipelago, as a new quest on an existing island or as a new island drifting in from beyond the charted isles. New islands should follow the pattern of the others: a keeper with a clear voice, a storybook of practice quests, and a small bit of island character (a creature, a joke, a mystery) that makes it feel like part of Threadbare and not like a menu.

A Note on Names

The Imagine Isles is the name of the whole region, used across the wider game, its lore, and its LoreQuests. The Dev Archipelago is a specific and separate group of islands within the Imagine Isles, dedicated to game development education, and the name used in parts of the project's files (for example dev_archipelago.tscn). The Dev Archipelago is sometimes loosely called the Dev Islands, but that name should never be used for the Imagine Isles as a whole. The older name Dev Island is retired.

A Threadling who lives on the Isles is an Imagine Islander. The cheerful local who greets newcomers on the Selvedge Strand is known simply as the Imaginary Islander.

Connections