The Creation of Wonder - artistic ambition and enduring legacy
A narrative worldbuilding game for groups and solo play by an award-winning writer
Umberto Eco called it "a cold-blooded hallucination." The Annals of Ulster named it "the most precious object of the western world." The scholar A.A. Luce described it as "supreme perfection in this branch of art." This is the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript (probably) created on Iona in the 9th century, and the inspiration behind The Creation of Wonder.
Designed for solo play or for groups of 2-4, 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. It uses a deck of tarot cards to build a story in three parts: 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.
The Creation of Wonder is written and designed by Eve Golden-Woods, the award-winning cowriter of If Found..., with design help and editing from Matt Carney, an editor and narrative consultant on NORCO and Perfect Tides: Station to Station. Like If Found..., this game is deeply grounded in Irish art and history, but it expands beyond them, allowing players to imagine all kinds of communities and artistic projects, from fantasy to historical to speculative fiction. At the same time it remains in conversation with the Book of Kells, each section of the game being peppered with quotes from different sources that elaborate on the historical and artistic context of the illuminated manuscript.
Like Avery Alder's The Quiet Year or Everest Pipkin's The Ground Itself, The Creation of Wonder invites players to breathe life into a community by framing scenes and answering prompts as cards are drawn, developing a world that orbits around a singular vision. "Once you have seen it, you can never forget it."
