In order to jack up the Fantasy a bit, I've decided to do some renaming of things. Some of these are based off of previous ideas, while others are corruptions of actual names, nicknames, or alternative names found across history.
POINTCRAWL GOALS
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| The point-crawl map for Slumbering Ursine Dunes. |
COMMANDMENT has a few goals as a pointcrawl that I want it to hit. These have to be considered goals for creating a Souls-esque style of game as well.
- Every location should be utterly unique in terms of threats, treasure, lore, aesthetic, and implicit narrative.
- Every location should have no more than 3 ways of exiting it that are "safe," leaving room for outside-the-box dangerous ways to escape. This promotes linking of the points.
- Every location should either have a bossfight or climactic point that needs to be dealt with to really get the GOOD stuff from that location.
- Some locations should require other locations to visit, while a good number of locations should start out varied and open to approach.
- There needs to be a central hub area the players can go too (ala Demon Soul's hub, the Hunter's Dream in Bloodborne, the Firekeeper places in Dark Souls, and the Dilapidated Temple in Sekiro).
- Travel between points should be a mixture of abstract and concrete. Flux Space will make these areas unique. Travel between hubs should cost something somehow as well.
BUILDING COMMANDMENT AS A POINTCRAWL
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Pointcrawls are pretty demanding to design, I think. Hexes can be simple and treated as dungeon rooms on a wilderness map, while a full pointcrawl has very stylized, thematic, concentrated dungeons as its points. That being said, I think starting theme first will help us here.
This requires me to begin elaborating more on the world of COMMANDMENT. This is what I have thus far.
- There is a tablet of 10 Commandments. It is utterly unknown in creation, cannot be destroyed, but can be separated.
- These 10 Commandments change the laws of the world to fit the commandments, creating curses for those that break them and miracles for those that follow them.
- Usermaatre Setepenre II, previous ruler of the Evening City, discovered this sacred tablet and used his deific magicks to rewrite it.
- After rewriting the 10 Commandments, they were split into groups of two, each given to some other force to broker piece in the face of prophecized doom.
- Each city is based off of its two commandments, save for the Sunrise City, whose Commandments are lost.
- The Sea Peoples have the lost commandments and have rewritten them, providing the power needed for their invasion to have the success it does now.
- Players will need to collect the Commandments, reassemble the Sacred Slab, and choose what/how to rewrite them in order to change the world's destiny. Or they can destroy them, somehow, or use them to make themselves god-kings, or whatever.
- City names change a lot. Right now, the cities with the commandments have a naming pattern of the Seat of the Commandments of X & Y instead of proper names. Nicknames are given based on old prophecy, relating the city to a time of day, as well as a single word offered by Usermaatre Setepenre II to call the people of that city.
So we have here, from this outline, a minimum of 5 Cities to serve as hubs, plus the Denyen Isles--home of the Sea People. That's 6 points so far.
We're going to need some points for things beyond that. Libya & Syria are destroyed, so the Horn of Africa will be another point. The Great Green--this worlds name for the Mediterranean--needs 1-3 points in it as well, or maybe a generator to create points here. So right now that puts us at a minimum of 8 points and a maximum of 11. The Steppes we won't deal with in COMMANDMENT, nor will we deal with whatever life lies too far north of the Great Green to really impact this.
I want a few more points too, just as open-air what-ifs for right now. I think the Great Green itself could just be a mega-point, but we'll have one more point of interest in it as well, so settling on 2 from there.
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| Some of these cities I imagine like Anor Londo--cathedral meets ghost town. |
So, to recap, a glossary of locations for COMMANDMENT:
- The Godsblood - Grave of Heroes. This is the massive river is the renamed, deific Nile River. This is the player's opening hub--the mouth of the Godsblood, a sacred place where hero corpses end up after being put to river or sea. Allows for travel to 4/5 of the Seats or the Great Green.
- Evening's Marches - The Seats of the Commandments of Authority & Conspiracy - City of the Masyreen. Renamed Pi-Ramses, it is here that the God-Prince Usermaatre Setepenre III fights his endless war against the Sea Peoples.
- Sunset's Cradle - The Seats of the Commandments of Art & Lies - City of the Achaens. Renamed Pylos. Ruled by twin Oracles--one who channels the Sun, the other the Horizon. Divinations are inscribed onto pottery, weapons, fabrics, and skin here, and are used as currency.
- Noon's Empire - The Seats of the Commandments of Ancestry & Trade - City of the Azuhinum. Renamed Asur. Ruled by the Queen of Heaven, a witch-queen from future eons. It is a solid tyranny with an army unmatched that has utterly conquered Sunrise.
- Morning's Chains - The Seats of the Commandments of Slavery & Truth - City of the Yisra'el. Renamed Israel. Ruled by Shelohmoh, a man who mastered the art of chaining divinity, and thus has created a city of angels, smokeless fire, and demons. Miracles were once worked in the streets; knowledge is gathered here en masse.
- Sunrise's Funeral - The Seats of the Lost Commandments - City of the Bab-ll. Renamed Babylon. The Commandments here have been stolen, and Noon's Empire has replaced their leader with a vicious deific dragon, the Marduk. The people, oppressed, have access to Iron.
- Denyen Isles - The Seats of the Commandments of Conquest & Iron. The dark home of the Sea Peoples. Utterly Barbarous in all ways. To set sail for here is to likely die in the Great Green, as its location is obscured by magick & heretical belief.
- The Great Green - War's Endless Sea. A massive body of water that connects all of these different, spread out lands. From the far west came the Sea Peoples.
- Santorini - Haunt of Gods. Gods of Conquest flock here for reasons unknown. An isle of monsters, ghouls, and other barbarous things and who knows just how many secrets.
- The Pyramids - Ancient pyramids built by god-kings long past. Inside of each are secrets old, and riches true. Consider this like a DLC/expanse area to explore.
- Ri-A - Where All Skies Meet. My thought up "Final location," which is literally the interior of the sun where all horizons lead. Maybe it's here that the Commandments are rewrit.
So now we have 11 nodes. Now for each node, we need the following:
- Simple overview of location.
- Encounter tables.
- Treasure, armor, and weapon with fluff descriptions.
- NPCs.
- Commandments.
- Level layouts.
- Factions.
Level layouts is the hardest thing on this list. I'm considering pushing flux-space up harder. Every point is a hub of more points (probably between 6-10) connected by Flux Space. Each sub-point is treated like either a miniature dungeon (no more than a few floors) or a strange, complex dungeon room. They will be laid out in a way that you need to do certain things to progress to certain rooms, with hidden connections found between important places.
There's something else that needs to be addressed too: making everything have gone to shit.
Dark Souls Ruin
In every soulsborne game, the would has gone to shit. The decisions of the player(s) determines if the world heals, stays as shit, or something new happens, each with nuance that makes everything a somewhat grey choice.
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| Monsters, boss fights, and NPCs can be used to show ruin as well. See: High Lord Wolnir from DS3 |
That being said, we need ruin to come to this world. Luckily, we easily have it in the form of Sea Peoples and Iron.
The glossary of points higher up in this post describes things as they were before the Sea Peoples invasions began in earnest, and before iron-working became more mainstream. Now, with Iron making people Barbarous and the Sea Peoples constant attacks, much of the world is fucked. Some ideas right now are:
- Evening's Marches is mostly barren of life, with literally everyone being turned into a soldier and sent into war. Filled with Barbarous run aways, weird mystics, rebels, and the twisted palace of the God-King.
- Sunset's Cradle has been plagued with apocalyptic divination. Many people have fled, and those that remain are either trying to complete prophecies, prevent prophecies, or are becoming ever more brutal in their rituals to create prophecies.
- Noon's Empire has no friendly souls there. Everyone is oppressed and hateful or oppressed and broken. A rot is spreading across the empire, the cracks this weakness creates are seeing Gods of Conquest and other threats slowly overtaking her.
- Morning's Chains no longer is a place of masters-and-slaves. The deific slaves have finally revolted with the power of Iron behind them. A place caught in a very supernatural, curse-fueld, Hell-on-Earth stylized civil war.
- Sunrise's Funeral is seeing massive amounts of Barbarous rebels and Gods of Conquest pop up. It is the most dangerous place to venture of the 5 Seats because of this.
That covers the "normal" places. The others are pretty self-explanatory, given COMMANDMENT'S backdrop.
So in the end, we have points to create, a format for creating them, and compelling reasons to go there. Now all that's left is creating each one (which will take a long time, I'm sure), and to establish some more concepts, namely:
- What exactly are the 10 Commandments.
- Potential character classes.
- Making a character/running this stuff as an actual game.
- Lots and lots and lots of item descriptions written and rewritten for consistency.
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