The Creation of Wonder

"...one forgets everything else in contemplating that stupendous Kells Chi. In purple and yellow it rises slender, like a flower stem, from a whorl in the bottom left-hand corner, flames across the page, and swells and soars to a massive head on the top right. Once you have seen it, you can never forget it. It stands above praise, and makes the critic dumb. They have tried to copy it, and have failed. It is the despair of the imitator, a ne plus ultra, supreme perfection in this branch of art."

LUCE, A. A.“THE BOOK OF KELLS AND THE GOSPELS OF LINDISFARNE—A COMPARISON (Concluded).” Hermathena, no. 80 (1952): 12–25. 

The Creation of Wonder is a narrative worldbuilding game about the labour that goes into the creation of art, and about the art that lives on when its makers are forgotten.

Designed for solo play or for groups of 2-4, The Creation of Wonder builds a story across three acts using a tarot deck. First you create a world, then you build out characters and narrate their lives across years of work, and finally you play as scholars examining the work they created many centuries later. Linking these three stages of play is the object of creation itself, the Great Work that your characters devote their lives to.

Although this is a game based on the creation of a religious work of art, I have mostly chosen to focus on the material and artistic rather than the spiritual. This game will certainly let you imagine an order of monks creating an illuminated copy of their holy book, but it will just as easily let you tell a cyberpunk story about underground archivists building an archive while battling the attempts of mega-corporations to enforce draconian IP law.

Originally conceived for a medieval art jam back in 2022, The Creation of Wonder draws on the real life history of the creation of the Book of Kells. Rather than playing with the more comical side of medieval art—the strange snails or odd cats—I wanted to make a game that invited players to think about the experience of making that art, of the lives so far removed from our own whose artistry has nonetheless endured to the present. People who we will only ever know and name by the years of labour they put into making something beautiful.

Players: 1-4

Playtime: Approx. 5 hours.

Tools: Tarot deck, paper/index cards, a coin.