Director’s Notes

© Copyright Revolution Software. All Rights Reserved

I do try to be as authentic as possible in the background that I use to support the stories, both in terms of the historical reference, and the places that the games visit. This certainly pays off when we hear from people who have travelled to a particular city to visit the locations featured in a specific Broken Sword game and research the elements portrayed. We are sometimes tripped up - an example being that the real Rue Jarry is in a different arrondissement of Paris to where Nico’s apartment is shown on the game map. Of course the best way to maintain authenticity is to actually visit those places – and ever since my children, now in their early 20s, can remember, family holidays have inevitably involved going on research trips for the next Broken Sword game.

Thank you so much for choosing to buy this Broken Sword adventure. I would like to take this opportunity to give a bit of background to the game and particularly some of the historical elements that inspired the core ideas. You may choose to read this before playing the game to give context or afterwards to understand the inspiration for the game. But beware of spoilers if you read it first!

Obviously the ‘facts’ then need to be moulded into an adventure storyline, but hopefully it is pretty clear where the line between fact and fiction blurs. Although often our fiction, derived from extrapolating fact, turns out to be surprisingly accurate. This convinces me that there are long-hidden truths that are waiting to be revealed – and what better medium to explore them than in an adventure game?

But to start at the beginning: the first Broken Sword game was conceived, like so many great ideas, over an excellent meal and a bottle of fine French red wine. I was dining with Sean Brennan, who was deputy CEO at the publisher Virgin Interactive, and Noirin Carmody, a fellow founder at Revolution. Sean had just finished reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. He suggested that the Knights Templar would make a great background to an adventure – and we agreed. In a pre-internet age, it was hard to find much information about that extraordinary order of knights – so there was no alternative but to travel to Paris and visit the locations that might offer clues.

Paris has always held an allure to me – as a young child in the late ‘60s I was taken there by my mother and gazed in awe at these alien people who were so different to us English. They smoked pungent smelling Gitanes and Gauloises rather than sickly Silk Cut. They wore perfume – even the men. And the food, oh the food, was so delicious compared to what we ate back home, and it was served by waiters who were self-assured, and commanding. They were dismissive of the men they served, but were alluring and flirtatious to the women (you may recognise a character like this in the game).

So it was wonderful to have the opportunity to visit Paris, as a family, to research the original Broken Sword. Later I read the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which was the first to make the claim that the Priory of Sion was set up to protect the bloodline of Christ. While this was clearly nonsense, the book did contain a fascinating background to the Knights Templar – the most comprehensive that I had come across at that time.

By chance, a few years later, Noirin was browsing in an art gallery in Floirac, a beautiful village overlooked the Dordogne river, and despite speaking little French got chatting with the owner who spoke no English. He was Jean-Luc Chaumeil, a writer who, in the ‘70s had interviewed Pierre Plantard, the man who claimed to be the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. The interview had revealed Plantard as a total fraud: a dishonest anti-Semite who claimed to be the Grand Master of many secret orders.

Plantard, it turned out, had planted false documents in Paris’s National Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, with the intention that whoever later discovered them might, just might, believe that they had stumbled on the most extraordinary conspiracy. And so it came to pass (some of you may recognise that we borrowed the name Plantard for a character in the first Broken Sword game.) The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail also,

Cecil family holiday (2002) atop Glastonbury Tor while researching Broken Sword 3 the Sleeping Dragon

somewhat tenuously, linked the Knights Templar with the Languedoc region of south-west France and the conspiracy around Bérenger Saunière and his church at Rennes-le-Chateau.

While Rennes-le-Chateau is a charming village, and Saunière’s church is certainly bizarre, that part of the Languedoc is in fact much more interesting for the story of the persecution and ultimate destruction of the Cathars. The foothills of the Pyrenees are lined with Cathar castles, the most famous of which is Montségur.

Catharism was a Christian movement that thrived in the Languedoc and throughout Southern Europe from the 12th century until the Albigensian Crusade of the 13th Century. The Cathars were dualists, believing in two gods: the good god dwelt in a condition of spirit and light, and the bad god, Satan, was the creator of the material world. Cathars considered the soul to be a genderless spirit trapped in a bad material body: everyone has an element of divine light – they believed that ‘God is within you’.

The Cathars considered men and women to be equal, and revered Mary Magdalene as a teacher. Women could become Perfecti (Perfectae), the highest rank of the Cathar church.

So many of the doctrines and beliefs of the two faiths were polar opposites. The monotheistic Roman Catholic Church saw the Cathars as a direct threat and denounced them as the Church of Satan. The Cathars, in turn, considered the Roman Catholic Church to be corrupt, both spiritually and morally. They also regarded the Church as superfluous, believing that spiritual purity could only be achieved through introspection rather than through the intercession of the Church hierarchy.

This difference can clearly be seen in the contrasting Gospels. In John 14, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (i.e. through the Church.) In stark contrast, in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

In 1209 Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Cathars – a Christian vs Christian crusade that would result in a million deaths. Béziers was the first major city to be attacked. Under the command of the papal legate, Arnaud-Amaury, the city was besieged and soon fell. As the crusaders entered the city, they were unsure how to deal with the surviving inhabitants: after all, 90% of the population were Catholics, whilst only 10% were Cathars.

When the Crusaders sought the guidance of Arnaud-Amaury, he famously replied ‘Kill them all, God will know His own’. According to his report to the Pope, the city’s population of 20,000 people were all killed. Carcassonne came next – here the people were forced to leave naked, according to one chronicler.

The war ended in 1225 when the French crown seized Languedoc, but the persecution of the Cathars continued unabated. Their final stand came in 1244, in the mountain top castle of Montségur. 10,000 troops surrounded the castle in which just a few hundred Cathars had sought refuge. After nine months, the Cathars finally surrendered the castle: after refusing to renounce their faith, they were burned in pyres set up in the village below.

Cathars being expelled from Carcason ne in 1209

Legend has it that just before the surrender, four mysterious figures climbed down ropes and made their escape: who these people were, or what they took with them, is not known. But it was clearly very important that they, or what they carried, did not fall into the hands of the soldiers. Cathars being burned for their beliefs

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, took this story so seriously that in 1931 he funded the medievalist Otto Rahn to seek the Holy Grail in the area around Montségur. Himmler admired Heinrich Schliemann who had discovered Troy in 1868 by close analysis of the Iliad; he believed that Rahn would find the Holy Grail in a similar fashion, by studying Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

So, back to family holidays...

The idea in 1996 was to drive around the many Cathar castles, which we did, going from one to the next. One late afternoon we drove into Montségur, a sleepy village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The children, then 4 and 6, soon started to object at having to climb up to yet another castle, so we decided to stay the night and do the climb in the morning. We found, however that the hotel/restaurant was full and, according to the owner, the nearest hotel was 20 Km away. As I started to drive off a woman threw open her upstairs window and shouted to ask if we were looking for a hotel. When I said that we were, she told us her hotel was much better – and cheaper.

As it turned out, her hotel was wonderful – we slept in extraordinary linen sheets, and looked out over the hills. I got up at 6am to find that a thick mist covered the mountains. Unperturbed, I decided to undertake the hour-long climb to the castle and avoid the tourists who would inevitably arrive when it opened later that morning. I climbed through the mist until, 100m below the summit, suddenly the mist cleared. The ramparts were chained off because of their poor state of repair – but at 7am there was no one there to see me – so I climbed the stone steps and walked around the crumbling ramparts, looking over the clearing mist at Perpignan and the Mediterranean beyond. The place felt very special.

Ten years later I read the excellent book, The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The book describes how in 1945 an Egyptian farmer was digging soft soil to use as fertiliser and discovered a carefully sealed earthenware jar. Smashing it in the hope that it would contain gold, he was disappointed to find thirteen leather-bound papyrus books. The story goes that his mother burned some sheets in the fire, before the family decided to sell the manuscripts illegally in Cairo. The different elements ended up all over the world.

It was only decades later that the huge significance of this find became realised. The books were a comprehensive set of Gnostic Gospels – including Gospels attributed to Mary Magdalene, Thomas, Judas Iscariot, and Philip. They were considered so heretical in medieval times that orders had gone out to destroy all copies. Someone, probably a priest from the nearby monastery, had chosen to hide this one set.

Reading the Gospels revealed an extraordinary difference between the orthodox cannon of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and these Gnostic disciples. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene suggests that she had a very special relationship with Jesus – when Mary Magdalene claims that Jesus gave her secret knowledge, Peter is furious and makes her cry. Levi comes to her defence, saying, “Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.” This special relationship is also implied in the Gospel of Philip where we are told that Mary kissed Jesus on the mouth. It would seem that even at the time of Jesus, there was a schism between Mary Magdalene’s Gnostic disciples and (what would become) Peter’s orthodox disciples.

© 2014 and Published by Revolution Software Limited. All Rights Reserved

Of all the writings, it was the Testimony of Truth that most piqued my interest. The Testimony describes the Garden of Eden, but from the viewpoint of the serpent. In this version, the jealous God maliciously refuses Adam the opportunity to attain knowledge by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. God asks where Adam is hiding – but, the Testimony points out, would he not know the answer if he really was all powerful? I found this deeply heretical text both shocking and enormously exciting – it was no wonder that the Catholic Church hated these doctrines.

In parallel I had been reading about Lucifer, Lux Ferre (the Bringer of Light) – clearly the serpent in the Garden of Eden. A fascinating set of connections were beginning to emerge.

And so formed the nucleus of an idea for a new Broken Sword game, which would mould the dualistic Gnostic beliefs of the Cathars, the brutality of the Albigenisan crusade, and the Catholic Church’s fear and loathing of the Cathars together with the concept of Lucifer being the deliverer of enlightenment in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden.

In so doing, I hoped to maybe, just maybe, propose some alternative ideas that have been forgotten as orthodox Christianity has developed from the time of Jesus.

I hope that you enjoy playing Broken Sword 5 – the Serpent’s Curse.

Looking down at Montségur village while climbing up to the castle