This is a game that draws from a number of different sources.  The first and most obvious is the long-since defunct French RPG Ecryme.  Written by Mathieu Gaborit and Guillaume Vincent, Ecryme was an ugly game that was somewhat foolishly written in the style of a series of first-person narratives by characters attending a scientific congress.  As a result the game was unreadable, even to me.  So this is not so much a game based directly on Ecryme as written but rather upon Ecryme as played by me and a group of friends over 10 years ago.  The game is more or less unfindable, though some digital resources have been pulled together on the Nouvel Ecryme yahoogroup where I found some of the artwork I'm using here.  It is the product of an extremely talented artist called Gerard Trignac, his blending of medieval architecture with images of post-industrial decline are wonderfully eerie and perfectly suited to the game's atmosphere.

The other source of inspiration was Paolo Bacigalupi's short story "The Calorie Man", which you can find in his (very impressive) collection of short stories entitled Pump Six.  I was particularly attracted to this story as it seemed to not only be a very modern take on the post-apocalyptic genre, but it was also the first really credible short story I have ever seen that really explores the idea of an economy based upon clockwork as a form of energy storage.  As I'm intending to turn the ecological aspects of Ecryme up to 11, this struck me as the perfect marriage of post-apocalyptic tropes.

The third source has undeniably been Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.  In an interview, Stephenson spoke about how the Baroque period was fascinating to him as it brought together aspects of the medieval world (nobility, swords, religion) and aspects of the modern world (science, technology, economics) and jammed them together to create a real sense of a society in a state of flux and evolution.  In particular, I draw your attention to the differences between the first book and the third.  In the first book, the scientists skulk about the place trying to keep out of the way of politicians, by the time the third book comes around, a lot of the scientists are politicians and I wanted to try and capture that sense of a changing order.

The Final inspiration (primarily at the level of the name) has been W. B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming.  Yeats has come to be quoted quite a bit when it comes to the War in Iraq but what is interesting about the poem is that it is quite reactionary.  It relies upon Christian imagery to paint the changing world as a negative one whereas in fact, what Yeats was affraid of was the end of the aristocracy, which he thought was inevitable in the aftermath of the first World War.