User:Fumblebee/sandbox

Forgotten Runes is a fantasy-themed franchise comprised of several non-fungible token collections originating from the Ethereum blockchain. The goal of the project is to become the largest franchise globally while remaining decentralised. Currently, the franchise via Magic Machine (the developers) has engaged animation studio Titmouse and film producer Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick series, to produce an eight-part animated series. The franchise has also engaged Bisonic Games to develop a massively multiplayer role-playing online game based around the Forgotten Runes intellectual property. Each implementation within the franchise takes the form of a named project on a separate smart contract deployed by Magic Machine.

Forgotten Runes places itself as a collective legendarium. Synoptically, ownership of the tokens allow for longitudinal on-chain development of narratives associated with the individual token placed within the larger franchise.

Inception
The original collection, Forgotten Runes Wizard's Cult, was designed by two long-term game development collaborators going by the pseudonyms Dotta and ElfJ. In the words of co-creator ElfJ, the original collection was designed to provide "creative primitives... to bring out what may have been forgotten... within your heart". At a high level, the concept of Forgotten Runes is the transmogrification of the interaction between the abstract and the real into a tangible expression, that being of the original non-fungible tokens. In a teleconference call with early members of the franchise, ElfJ articulates this concept with the phrase of "you summoned wizards, and now these wizards are going to summon you." The idea of provable ownership of a token opens the possibility of individual creative expansion wholly owned by the owner within the framework of a larger body (here, the franchise).

The original Forgotten Runes Wizard's Cult project launched on June 30th, 2021 on block 12736300 of the Ethereum blockchain and completed minting in 21 hours and 35 minutes (last block 12736411). Currently, the collection encompasses 8 projects, notably the Forgotten Runes Wizard's Cult (the original collection), Forgotten Runes Warrior's Guild, Forgotten Runes Beasts, and Forgotten Runes Ponies. The project's popularity amongst its members also resulted in the creation of community-driven Forgotten Runes projects Forgotten Nouns and Forgotten Babies which have been included in the franchise's official marketplace. To date, the collection has transacted approximately 18,236 ether across in volume across all collections at OpenSea, the current dominant NFT marketplace globally.

Smart Contract
Designated on-chain, the original project's smart contract embeds the necessary code for the complete reconstruction of the images directly onto the Ethereum blockchain. The project is implemented as an ERC-721 and, as customary with all Forgotten Rune contracts, contains a quote from a source of inspiration, in this case, J.R.R. Tolkien. Other quoted sources include William Shakespeare and the Bible.

Concepts
The collection was conceptualised by Dotta and ElfJ to embody some of the Web3 ideals - specifically to extend the idea of provable ownership and commercialisation laterally into the domain of story-telling and narrative building. Rather than simply providing intellectual property for the construction of media around any given token such as popular projects like Bored Apes Yacht Club, the creators of Forgotten Runes (operating as the company known as Magic Machine) provide a way for token owners to longitudinally and incrementally expand on the narrative of any individual token built on top of decentralised infrastructure which provides data perpetuation and redundancy outside of central control via a mechanic (another smart contract) called on-chain lore. Effectively, this is association of any given token within the collection to permanent longitudinal records, specifically stories and other media, on the blockchain. In implementation, this smart contract is called the Book of Lore and associates tokens within the franchise with hashes from the Interplanetary File System.

The aggregation of longitudinal records within the Book of Lore allows for easy and decentralised access to narratives from multiple contributors within the community. Consequently, the aggregated data provided a source of browsable stories and narratives that allowed Derek Kolstad and members of Bisonic Games to draw inspiration from whilst developing an animation series and designing a game  around the franchise respectively.

Franchise Media
The franchise has produced its first physical comic, titled Forgotten Runes Wizard's Cult June Issue #0, freely distributed at San Diego Comic-Con July 2022.

In May 2022, Magic Machine released a trailer for an eight-part series to be created in conjunction with Titmouse and produced by Derek Kolstad. The trailer is voiced by Kristian Nairn and has garnered over 800,000 views to date.