Dev Blog: What a Name Can't Fix

All fantasy is built out of the real world. The question is whether you built with it, or just took it.

We changed a lot of Einsol's Razor recently. Before you spot a name that's different and wonder what happened, I want to explain the whole thing from the start: what we did, and why.

We ran a sensitivity read on the entire world. If that term is new to you, here's what it means. A sensitivity read is when someone goes through a piece of writing looking at one thing only: how it portrays real groups of people. Their culture, their religion, their bodies, their history. The reader flags anything that leans on a stereotype, demeans a group, or gets a real people's life wrong. Publishers hire people to do this before a book goes out. We did it to our own game.

Here's why that's worth doing. Every fantasy world is stitched together from the real one. Every people, every god, every city borrows from something that already exists. That's normal and it's fine. The trouble starts when you build fast and grab whatever's nearest, because sometimes what's nearest is a living culture's actual word, and sometimes it's an old, ugly idea about a real group that you picked up without ever deciding to. It lands in your work wearing a costume. A sensitivity read is how you find those places on purpose, instead of waiting for someone you've hurt to find them for you.

We found two kinds of problems.

The first was names. A lot of ours were lifts, meaning we'd reached into a real language and taken its exact word for the thing we were naming. Our evolution-elves were called "Jìnhuà," which is simply the Mandarin word for evolution. "Dōngtiān" is winter. "Sefirot" was taken whole from Kabbalah, a living Jewish mystical tradition. We replaced them with words we actually invented: Renkai, Ænkrév, Vaer'eth. The full list is on the site.

The second kind was harder, and it mattered more. It was not what we called a people, but how we described them. Our desert elves are the clearest example. We'd written up their skin, their noses, their features as "adaptations" to the desert, and said the climate had shaped every part of who they were. That's the exact shape of race science: the long, discredited practice of ranking human beings by their looks and claiming their bodies determine their character. We'd dressed it in a fantasy costume and put it in a rulebook. Reading it plainly was enough. We cut it.

It showed up in smaller ways too. We had a people written as smugglers and black-market fixers who "navigate the underworld." Said out loud about a small, wandering, othered people, that's a slander real groups have had thrown at them for centuries. We rewrote them as couriers and brokers who keep hidden networks running. Same job in the story. None of the borrowed contempt.

I want to be honest about the line we drew, because this kind of work has a failure mode: you can panic and sand off everything until the world is bland and says nothing. We didn't do that. Einsol's Razor is dark, and it stays dark. Suffering that serves the story stays on the page. The test was never "is this grim." It was narrower: does this take a real, marginalized group and map it onto a stereotype? If yes, it goes. If it's only brutal, it stays. Brutal is the point. Bigotry smuggled in as flavor is not.

And we kept what was ours to keep. Elohim stays, because that's my own language and my own call to make. A word we invented that happens to sound like some real word stays too, because a coincidence is not a theft.

None of this touched the mechanics. Not one number changed. Your character is exactly as strong as it was yesterday. Some things just have names we built now, instead of names we took, and a few peoples are described with more care than before.

If you find one we missed, in a name or in a description, tell us. This world is load-bearing, and I'd rather be told we got it wrong than leave it wrong