How Stray Gods is turning an RPG into a musical
"A roleplaying musical? How does that work?" That was my primary question during PAX West 2022 as I met with David Gaider, former lead writer of the Dragon Age series, to discuss his new project.
Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical has a familiar format to fans of Gaider’s prior work, but the concept can be hard to wrap your head around at a glance. A song, after all, is typically more structured than most written dialogue. And that rigidity doesn’t lend itself to the spontaneity of player participation.
So what does such an unconventional premise look like in practice? It turned out that not only was Stray Gods surprisingly functional, but it had some lessons for other developers wanting to play around with the classic musical genre.
The idea for Stray Gods came while Gaider was still working at Bioware. At the time, he was thinking about using the format as a downloadable content expansion for the Dragon Age series. Though that musical-themed expansion never came to fruition, Gaider held on to the concept. He revisited it later when he and his collaborator, Summerfall Studios co-founder and managing director Liam Esler, began to build their company. “It was kind of on my bucket list,” Gaider explains. An interactive musical was fun in theory, but execution was another question. “It [was] like, ‘Oh, what are we doing? Well, gotta be an interactive musical, that should be easy, right? You're in a song, you make choices like you do in dialogue.’ [But] figuring that out has been the big challenge.”
Traces of Gaider’s narrative design past can be seen in Stray Gods’ format, which relies on choice-based dialogue structure. The game stars the Greek Pantheon in a dark, modern-day setting. It tells the story of Grace, a Muse who
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