The Culling is a story about how few things are truly disposable.
We began with a discussion about how we harvest limited resources, and questions about how recycling is more often downcycling. Materials tend to degrade when recycled. While aluminum is highly recyclable, and it’s cheaper to recycle it than harvest fresh material, a plastic bottle cannot be recycled into another plastic bottle. The materials change with each iteration. An early title for The Culling that reflected this was “Diminishing Returns”.
We considered setting The Culling in a factory or foundry, having players manage lines of materials. We had a rough idea for some sort of Manager figure pushing production unsustainably. But as we looked at the life cycle of materials, we realized that we could give life to the raw materials. Make the Vessels animate beings. The resource that was degrading could have a life of its own.
If supernatural clay homunculi are what this factory produces, then the Manager might have some frailty in their own human form, guiding them to see these living Vessels in a different light. The factory became an abbey.
We wanted a sense of limited resources within a boundary, so the Abbey was set on an island. With that isolation, we had the ingredients for a classic folk horror chain.
We wanted the sense that a surplus could lead to diminished value, stagnation or eutrophication. So the river filled with silt. If this abbey is a place of stagnation, they might cannibalize their own home to continue production.
Absent dredging the river, the Abbey would eventually be doomed, but the human custodians don’t wait to start cannibalizing their residence. A bit of that caution regarding “burning your home to keep warm”.
And as we looked at the idea of clay homunculi as vessels, the terminology of ceramics production kept feeding the flames. Slop and slag, castaways, broken shards of biscuit-fired pieces that didn’t meet production values as a kind of boneyard. Human thumbprints embedded in all of it.
One of the slickest things about The Culling is that it is written so it can be set in any time period. Change a few terms, and you can pop it into another era. If you want a medieval religious story, it’s set at the Abbey. If you want secular industrial, it’s the Factory. If you want a corporate futurist story, it’s The Source of Terrestrial Ways and Means. The core of the story will fit any era.
The trickiest part was writing something both creepy and a bit hopeful.