Welcome to Chandley

When you arrive in the village of Chandley at the start of the game, Rosen – the village leader – greets you. "Welcome to Chandley! It's small, it's complicated, and everyone's got an opinion."

Chandley is one of the most important places in Mandrake. It has the densest concentration of characters, and because it's where many useful services are available, you'll spend a lot of time there. It acts as a window onto the wider world – this is a whole new setting, with its own mysteries and secrets to uncover. And it gives context to your arrival and actions as its residents react to them.

After all, the Mandrakes were once the overlords of Chandley, and everyone knows they're sorcerers. Some even say it was Mandrakes that turned the world upside down. So it's impossible not to have an opinion on one turning up at your doorstep. Nessa, the village smith, knows what it's like to be an outsider. She wasn't born in Chandley but arrived as a child with her father, fleeing a curse that befell their old home. Old Eseld, on the other hand, comes from fallen gentry, and insists on treating you with the archaic courtesies due your lineage (whether you want her to or not). And Kenway has a healthy scepticism of aristocracy. Chandley has got on fine without the Mandrakes, she reckons, maybe they should have stayed gone.

To manage this, Chandley has to feel authentic. Not realistic – we're not creating an accurate economic simulation, here, or depicting a specific place at a specific time in history. But it has to feel plausible, to have a convincing level of detail and, frankly, messiness. Our inspirations here are actual traditions, histories, and experiences.

At this point, I would like to talk about the duck race.

The duck race doesn't exist in Mandrake – it is a real actual thing that happens in the real, actual village I live in.

Every Boxing Day – crisp, cold, and at a frankly unreasonable hour given that we're all still recovering from Christmas – the locals deposit one thousand individually-numbered yellow plastic ducks into the river, and accompany them in an ambling procession as they wind through the village. This takes some time, as the river is actually a stream, and the ducks don't move very fast. Wellington-booted volunteers wade through the waters behind them, picking up straggler-ducks and hurling them towards the front, in what I presume is the historical origin of rubber-banding in Mario Kart.

At some point, the village's actual ducks try to muster a last-ditch defence of their river, only to flee, disgraced, before a yellow tide of inevitability.

The first plastic ducks to reach the bridge outside the church are hailed the winners, and the people who sponsored them get prizes. At this point, the village's troupe of Morris dancers begin their performance, clashing sticks and jangling bells, their costumes a-flutter with rags. They do this right in the middle of the main road, causing extensive traffic jams. When they deign to allow cars through again (that is, when it's time to go to the pub) one of them accosts the drivers, claiming that they have driven over his "invisible rat" and must pay for a replacement (the proceeds left over after