What a weird island and a Depression-era supernatural battle can teach you about character design
Mysterious stories - not mystery stories like whodunnits, but mysterious ones like LOST and Carnivale - are hard to write.
You can spot the bad writers because it feels like they’re just making it up as they go.
They think the mysteriousness gives them a licence to do whatever they want. Do they need to bring a character back from the dead? Just do it! Need a new villain because the old one is tired and dull? Just have something attack!
The plot works in mysterious ways.
Bad writers use the same approach to writing exotic intellects - fae, AI, aliens, monsters. They want them to seem non-human, so they make them random.
Randomness is no fun. It gives the characters - also, the audience - nothing to latch onto.
The best approach is to have really weird stuff happen - stuff that seems random - only for it to make sense at the end.
(I mentioned LOST and Carnivale before. They both did this well, even if the former dragged its feet getting there.)
Every human you’ve met has thought using human thoughts. Sure, everyone is different, but there are certain universal traits that come with being one of us.
Meeting an alien or AI might be damn confusing. They may or may not follow the same cognitive rules as us.
There are bound to be differences - fundamental differences in how we see the world and ourselves.
We’re seeing glimpses of that now. Image recognition software is pretty good, but the mistakes it makes aren’t mistakes a human would make.
I doubt we’ll ever fully understand how other intelligences think, even after we meet or create them.
Still, we can make some guesses about some of the details.
That’s what Call of the Gods is about. It’s an easy guide for getting out of your own head and crafting intelligent beings that think along different rules.
A dumb approach is to do something superficial and ridiculous, like Vulcans - humans who are logical and rational.
A better approach is to use the AMAM model, which I describe in detail inside: