Stories

The Yondering Lands are the dreamlands of our gods, our mothers and our fathers. Time reshapes them again and again, but what endures are the stories. The Lands are full of ears, and stories are traded as handshakes and greetings, by the trees, the rivers, and the folk. They are collected in the river rocks, in the pine cones and walnuts, in the nests of birds. Walk through the forest in autumn and listen to the land whisper the tales of your ancestors. Write them down, share them, tuck them away.

Intro Scenario

Lights, level 0 heroes, burning village, a badly drawn well -- ACTION!

This showcases our ability to randomly generate specific scenarios, and I guess it will serve as the starting point for the campaign as well. I need to replace the MonsterGuys with actual gorgon boars or something. And you know, we should tune the stats and combat.

Next, more work on the campaign I think.

The Birch & Bone

"Taverns in the morning are strange places. For a few hours, they seem to hibernate, to exist in a nowhere-space between last night's revelers and the coming evening's patrons. It can be unnerving if you don't realize the hidden potential—no building in town can give you privacy like a tavern in the morning.

Which is why, if you want more information about that staff you picked up, you'll meet me at the Birch & Bone tomorrow. Eight AM sharp."

Latest Playable

 I took a long walk with Legacy, over the last few months. I rewrote a large portion of the client and server to work with multiple domains and an entity-component system. I integrated all of the work I did on the puppet lab animations, and that meant gutting a lot of the client side rendering code. I broke up the concept of a single client that commands all the units.

So now in the latest playable on dropbox you'll find some big changes.

Units are animated. They idle, run, attack, dodge, get hit, and die. Pathfinding. Monsters are now controlled by AI. They are not very smart yet, but that's just a matter of work. If you have suggestions or want to hack on them, let me know. :-)

If you play, I recommend the random cave scenario. I spent a bit of time improving the site generation and I'd like to get some feedback on that.

So, now I think we have another crossroads. I still have a big combat backlog with things like line of site, implementing more units, and a lot of the "standard" combat that we've talked about. But I wonder if I should head back to the campaign first?

Relatedly, I was thinking about X-COM, and one of the things that has always bugged me about that game (the new one) is the squad size limit. It is honestly, laughably ridiculous that a well funded intergovernmental military organization would send "4" soldiers to confront an unknown alien force with superior weaponry.

I understand that it makes the gameplay faster and well, better, but it really hurts the theme of the game, to me. One of the things that appeals to me about Legacy is that I think the theme fits the gameplay better in many ways, but the squad size thing has remained a puzzle. If you're successful, why not send all your heroes on every mission? Why wouldn't you?

So the idea that occurs to me is, what if your heroes are not really on retainer. They charge you per mission. So for a given mission you choose how many to bring, and more experienced heroes demand more loot. That creates a natural tension where the player is playing a metagame of "well, I think I can beat this with 3 guys..."

What think? I think maybe putting a straight up number on your heroes cheapens things a bit, but perhaps each mission has a 'par' number that you get for free, and you can add more by paying, but you don't really get anything for doing the mission with less than the par number of heroes. Or something. Even if we don't use the mechanic per se, it seems like a good way to explain mission limits in a fantasy setting. Gotta pay for that shiny armor, and uh, all those nights at the tavern.

So what's next for Legacy? More combat, or a working campaign?

Drauven Set Piece

Not that we're even close to doing Drauvens right now, but you know.

Mostly I just saw a picture a while ago that used orange as the foreground, green as the background, and yellow as the sky, and I liked it.

Ruins

Ruins are common in the Yondering Lands. Like liver spots, they dot the ever-aging landscape. A tower here, a dungeon there. It's almost impossible to permanently clear them of monsters, so most townspeople choose to avoid them, and inevitably forget about them. Every once and a while though, somewhere far out in the mountains, you'll come across a particularly impressive structure.

One set of giant black stone ruins has had many different names. Ebonkeep, Volcastle, The Hallowed Pillars, The Spine of the World. It has, in fact, exactly as many names as it has had visitors.

This is because none of those visitors ever made it back out.