How Obsidian's Latest Game is Inspired By a Medieval Theory About God and Worms

ign.com:

In the lead up to big game launches, some developers like to share tidbits of what inspired their work: for many, it's other games. For some, it's tabletop campaigns, or film or TV. For Obsidian's Josh Sawyer, who is leading the development of Pentiment, it's history books. Specifically, history books about weird little dudes.

While he's had a storied career working on hits like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, Sawyer's been ruminating on an historical game for a long, long time. His published reading list for Pentiment enthusiasts hearkens back to his college days; he tells me that working from it to develop Pentiment is "like going back to the greatest hits of my tour of studying early modern Europe in college."

Here's the short version, but I highly recommend checking the full blog post for Sawyer's notes on each title:

Indeed, Sawyer's reading list has the joyous feel of a syllabus, based around preparing for a course on 16th-century European history and life. But after becoming familiar with both Pentiment and a few of the works included, another theme jumps out: it's also a reading list of stories about, in Sawyer's words, "weird little dudes."

Take “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller." It's a micro-history about a miller named Menocchio who would not stop telling all his neighbors about his theological theories, to their great annoyance. Among other things, Menocchio apparently believed that the world was a big mass of cheese, and God was a worm crawling through it — heretical in a Catholic society, sure, but mostly (per his neighbors) very annoying. Even the Inquisition couldn't get Menocchio to stop talking his neighbors' ears off about this. One account from the book