The Story of Northern Lights and Darkness, part 2

In hindsight, I couldn’t have asked for a better core team of writers to take on this challenge. We were all experienced in TTRPGs, and many of us had both played and GMed quite a lot of Call of Cthulhu. And we all had interesting ideas on how to set a scenario in our respective homeland, aimed towards an audience with little or no knowledge about Scandinavia and Nordic myths and legends.
That said, we all had very different approaches. I already had an idea that I had started working on (more about that, The Tunnel People, in another post), still rooted in my original idea of urban Nordic noir. One saw an opportunity to rework and translate an old convention scenario, based around a local ghost story. Another wanted to combine a creature from folklore with a fascinating and very real collection of rare books, turning modern statistics about mental health into something quite sinister. And so on. Not two ideas were even remotely similar, but they all fitted perfectly.
And so we settled on a name for both the project and the intended collection of scenarios: Northern Lights and Darkness. It captured the imagination and was easy to illustrate with the classic Aurora Borealis, which many associate with Nordic nights. And adding the “and Darkness” to the title felt evocative.
We were, I think, of great help to each other. Some needed initial help with proofreading English, others had questions about how to apply the Call of Cthulhu rules and mechanics in a scenario meant to be sold (as opposed to something one would write just for one’s group of players, when not all details needed to be spelled out). We were also eachother’s constructive critics regarding storytelling, characters, internal logic, pacing, etc. To be honest, I think we all made our scenarios a lot better by having those open processes.
Which brings me to another interesting point. Since we all lived quite a long way apart, in different countries, speaking different languages, all our interactions took place either on a Messenger chat, via email, or in the form of comments on Google Docs or PDFs. In English, a language that was none of ours first. And it worked astonishingly well!
Still to this day, I have only ever met Poul from Denmark and Oscar from Sápmi. I hope to be able to meet the rest of the group someday, because they all feel like good friends.
But fast forward, when we then released our initial scenarios, one by one, they sold really, really well. I think we all benefited from Poul being first, and having the smart combination of a cleverly constructed story, focusing on foreigners needing to learn about a uniquely Danish concept (“Hygge”), and the brilliant idea of accompanying the scenario with a playlist on Spotify!
The Art of Hygge created a momentum and sparked interest for the rest of our releases. Not all sold quite as well as Poul’s, but we all managed to reach the coveted 251 sales, and got approval to offer the collection of scenarios for sale as print on demand: Nordic Lights and Darkness. And with that, we reached our perhaps naive goal of having both our individual scenarios and the whole collection in printed editions. And I can tell you, it was an amazing feeling!
Oh, and as the updated logo for the collection suggested, we felt that we had more to offer. More about that later.