Nerdaissance

Hey everybody!

I have a very special guest coming to visit me this weekend. Luckily for you, that means I am posting early this week.

I wanted to lay down the fundamentals of my world mythology in the hopes of getting some discourse over the flaws and strengths in it. This becomes very important to my game, so we’ll start here. Note:  Any of this mythology applies to my world in the realm of DnD. I really kill two birds by doing this.

One of the basic tenets of my mythology building is that most cultures use Gods to really explain how the world works. Oftentimes, they take an almost fairy-taleish way of explaining things, so I wanted to keep my story pretty simple as well.

Fundamentally, there would be the two ancient Gods- Time and Space (No names have been made yet). Being a physics major, the time-space continuum is a great place to start these things. These two Gods get go through a bit of “courtship” where they create the basic building blocks of the universe- earth, wood, fire, shadow,etc- in planes. That is how we get the different crazy planes that are pretty neutral, even if creatures on them are not.

Eventually, courtship ends up with marriage and 9 kids-the Elder Gods- come into the world. This number isn’t steadfast, but I want there to be enough to cover the 9 different alignments. Maybe there are twins in there who are both Chaotic good, but I’m going to say 9 for now. These kids each get their own “room” plane where they are free to do whatever they like. They create creatures to fight for them, play with, etc. Naturally they begin to fight. Good Gods versus Evil Gods, with the neutral Gods doing their own neutral best to be the mediators- does sound like a middle child right?

Eventually, they cause a big cosmic ruckus and get in trouble from the parentals. In order to get on better terms, they collaborate to create the material plane as a gift to the Ancient Gods. On the material plane, no God is allowed to set foot. This way, the Ancient Gods can have a nice piece of land to look at and not be bothered by the fueds of their children.

Unexpectedly, the humanoids who start springing up on Earth start to worship different things than just the Ancient and Elder Gods. They worship nature, the sun, booze, etc. Their collective worship starts to grant deitific powers to these objects. Most of this is benign however, a sun with powers doesn’t mean much, but a person who is worshipped can mean a lot. Powerful kings who are worshipped as Gods, start to get powers like Gods.

The elder Gods see this and realize that if they can get these powerful beings to fight for them, maybe they can win the God War. They talk to the different worshipped individuals and promise them positions in their planes in their afterlife if they dedicate their life to that Gods cause.

Byond that, some of the evil Gods talk to morally weak people, tell them what they can be in their afterlife, just so that person will activate a portal to let extra-planar creatures onto the material plane. It is a whole new level of the God War, except now it is happening a bit underneath the Ancient Gods’ noses without them really noticing. Mortals can’t fool Gods, but other Gods can.

How this all leads into the game is that once, the Evil Gods made a creature specially designed to be supreme over all other creatures.It is as strong as one of them, but it can also walk the material plane. The method of any of this isn’t thought out yet, but they unleash the creature on the material plane, it unleashes destruction on the world. When it was around on the material plane, some people survived its destruction. Some of those people started to worship the creature secretly, slowly giving it even more power. (All part of the Evil Gods plan).

Eventually, it goes back to the cosmoverse and kills a good God, changing the balance of the GW. Unfortunately for the Evil Gods, it turns around and kills one of them as well. This is such a powerful being, and it doesn’t see things in the Good/Evil scale the Gods know. It is dangerous, so the rest team up on the creature and end up banishing it to its own tiny plane.

This plane is populated with creatures that are immune to the mechanism the creature uses to kill Gods. The creature waits for years upon years. Somewhere in the beginning portion of the game, it will have gained enough power through years of sacrifices for it to break free from its prison. It will take its sword (or whatever weapon) and cast it into the fabric of the plane, breaking it off from its orbit.

On the material plane, a giant comet strikes the ground. The mechanical creatures start to try to take over the world. This isn’t the biggest problem though, because the creature is waiting for the right time to strike.

That was a bit long, but it was more like 2 medium posts in 1. Thoughts?

Where have I been? I had three or four great posts in a row, a month of good posts, only to leave a gaping hole of production on my game. Sure, I think only about 6 people at most read this, but to a certain extent I’m doing this blog for myself. So to Ian, and everyone else who reads this, I’m getting back on track and will do my very best to have weekly posts from here on. I’m sure there will be gaps, I’m human, but I am going to keep them to a minimum.

This week was my spring break, and among other things, I did some broad work on the ol’ Sightseeing: World Tour! There are three tiers of adventure. 

The smallest tier of adventuring will be very specific to where you are in the world. Most of these will be purely optional, but as any side quest in a game has, they will give access to something extra- different weapons,spells, information, etc. These adventures haven’t been planned out yet, but since there will be so many of them, there will be a ton of different things. I have been toying with the idea of having them be similar to the popular (and fantastic) computer game Fable. In Fable, you can go on every side quest you desire, but you pay a price: your character ages. I was thinking of either doing something like this, or if you spend too much time away from a quest you have taken that is in a higher tier, maybe there are some noticeable changes because of it, much like the butterfly effect. What do you guys think?

The next tier of adventure will be broader and world-effecting. Each of the four individual parties will have a definite storyline that they travel on. They will be concerned with things such as governments at war, Gods at war, pirates, chaotic nomads, and even cults and a mysterious force that is moving across the land. As I flesh out how these interplay, I will be putting it up as a post. The point is that the world is aware of these things, and as adventurers, it will be your duty (to your God, government, or personal honor) to fight them. They will be major plot points that were happening before you started the game, and you are just going to try your best to fight them.

The highest tier of adventuring truly encompasses the whole world. As each individual party will be focused on some general large event, there will be an event so large and encompassing that all individual storylines will be diverted. It isn’t going to be a Watchmen/WWII style, mutual enemy unites the world, there will just be something so big that it will complicate everything. I have this worked out mostly, so hopefully in the upcoming weeks, I can leave some flavor text style posts that give you a feel for what will happen without giving everything away.

For now though, I’m going to leave things here. Especially since I will be posting next week. Thanks for having me back guys.

Hey everybody,

For a while, I didn’t know what I was going to blog about this week, but there have been enough developments to merit a post.  After finishing the world map last week, I had to decide where to go from there. The next step down from a world map would be the city maps.

But what cities are needed for my plot. The plot I haven’t written out yet.

I had made a world with very little inclination as to where cities were going to go, or how many I should have or really anything. When I thought about how many cities I was going to have, I chose the nice solid 200 for my answer. 200! Ian, you’re crazy and will never finish the game! 

I am well aware of how arduous a task that would quickly, or slowly rather, that would become. 200 cities is misleading a bit. There will be 200 thorps villages hamlet small cities large cities and metropolises combined. A world doesn’t just have huge cities. I go to school in Kirksville, Mo, I should know. So my cities would range from 10-80 people in a thorp to 25,000 people in a metropolis. 200 of them would give about 400,000 people in the world, which is plenty enough for me.

Ian, you’re still never going to finish the game.

I thought that would be a lot too, but this world map has a dual purpose: it is also my world map for any sessions of DnD I run. Indeed, the nerdaisaance is more than just 16-bit games. In fact, there may be some DnD session posts under a different category as soon as this weekend, but we’ll just wait on that. Anyways, by making a world map for my game and DnD world together, I’ve killed two nerd birds with 1 stone.

200 cities is not an outrageous number for DnD, but is too much for a game. If I crammed them all in, every two squares on the world map would be another city, and my delicate world map would lose some aesthetic. So I will select the cities needed for my game, and only input those on my world map for the game. The end number will be more than I think FF7, but not too many. This all depends on the plot.

I did spend the time to randomly generate 200 cities, with size, general continent location, number of power centers, types of power center(conventional, nonstandard, monster, and magical), and the alignments of those power centers. When I decide which ones make for interesting combinations for my game, I will finish the work to design each one, write up a history, what exactly the power center is, and other such details which I compulse about.

In my free time, I will slowly fill in the rest of the places for my DnD world, but that isn’t as big of a hurry. I’m really excited for having this strong of a foundation for my world. I’m really going to try to hit the storyline hard this week, but I first am going to work on game mechanics.

This post may seem a bit underwhelming, but some weeks I do a lot of tedious work for my game. Next week, I want to talk about how I want the mechanics to work.

I would also like to welcome our new writer on the Nerdaissance, Unreasonable. At least, I hope that is his name. He is coding his own game, so there will be a lot of cool stuff coming from him.

Look out for a DM’s log of the new DnD campaign I am running here at school. Both other writers are playing in it, so I am hoping to keep a kind of diary of the adventures they go on.

Thanks for reading, and please leave any questions or comments about my game. The Nerdaissance is for everyone.

Hey Everybody!

If you haven’t guessed from the three exclamation points, with more sure to follow I assure you, already in this post, big things are happening with my game! Seriously though, a major breakthrough in my game just happened about 10 minutes before the start of this post: I finished the world map for my game. I daresay I even finished it with a bit of class. I think it looks really nice, and I guess this is a good time to give some details as to what my world will entail.

I made my world part by part, 10 times. There are 3 islands that are smaller and will probably only serve to be side quest areas, or maybe a place to travel to fight some big boss in their dungeon castle. One of the things I am really going to try to work into the game is a sense of it being a cohesive world. If your party goes on a side quest and kills some weird robber baron, word will spread. Then when you “replay” the game starting from a different area, you might here those exploits as lore of other adventurers. This also conversely leads to your characters hearing about some other adventuring party slaying a giant dragon, or other monster, and then you later get to play that party and fight the battle you’ve already heard about.

There are 2 archipelago areas which look nice, but would once again be of minor plot importance, although I believe the one may just be a pirate cove area.  Then there is the crux of my main storylines. There are four continents. These will be the major places of civilization, and the starting locations for each iteration of the game.  The beginning adventures for each run through will stay on the initial continent, and then branching out will inevitably happen. Each continent is different.

I’m not entirely sure on names yet, so the first one to be talked about is a smaller continent, but it will have a higher population per capita. There will be more villages, hamlets, thorps, etc. The second is very large but does not have a high population density at all compared to the first. It has vast stretches of desert, and then an icy tundra along the Southernmost coast.

The third continent is what I designed first, so I will always consider it the main continent in my heart. I have done some basic planning, so I know there will be larger regions inside with a predominant race: human, elven, dwarven, etc, standard RPG fair, etc. The last continent is actually made of two larger islands. Truthfully, I made this last because I wanted my map to not have a vast ocean on the Easternmost side, but I like what I did with it. This is going to be my wilderness area, because I don’t know what I’m doing yet with it.

I’m super excited about it, because well, I didn’t know if I would have kept up the work ethic this long on the project, and I’m as excited as ever. I will try to take some screenshots of my world map, and then maybe I could make a gallery of 16 bit glory.

In honor of this accomplishment, I have “renamed” the game “Sightseeing: World Tour!” Up next is going to be populating my world map with cities, villages, etc. I am going to be rolling them up DnD style and then implementing them into my game. This is going to be a very long time in the making, so while I keep up with that, I will be posting plot elements, maybe some cool cities I’ve designed, and character developments.

Hopefully by next week, I will have a world map gallery and all of the cities rolled up at least. In the meantime, I will be leaving you with the new tagline for “Sightseeing: World Tour!”

A 16-bit Game with 32-Bit Game Aspirations

Hey everybody!

I am Ian, although I will go by my “gaming” name “disposal” for the purposes of the Nerdaissance. I figure for my first post I will give a bit of a rundown of why we have this blog, and then some of the preliminary work on my game.

Why are we called Nerdaissance? Well, it is a play off of the Renaissance, which was a great time for thinkers and artists alike. m30 and I are great friends and are both quite nerdy. Last Fall, we just started having all of these ideas about different nerdy things ranging from DnD characters to movie trailers and even computer games.

We deemed this influx of excitement the Nerdaissance to try to promote and prolong our fervor for our different nerdy ventures. We both started working with RPG Maker after a friend introduced us to the program: A friend who may be a contributor eventually. We decided that this blog may keep us organized a bit, guilt us into keep on working, offer a forum for anyone’s suggestions, and maybe, just maybe, gain some excitement for our 16 bit RPGs.

I know we are both very focused on making the highest quality stories, since we won’t exactly be using any PS3s to full capacity. In a land where generic RPGs have run amok, we hope to be able to be a beacon of great storytelling. Most importantly, we both find this incredibly fun and a great way to destress from all of the other work we do.

As for my game, it is very unofficially titled “Sighseeing 16 Bit.” I was the last to start my own game and after seeing all of the capabilities of RPG maker, I decided to dream big. So big, that my world map is the largest size available. Needless to say, I am still making maps, so before any plotline is nailed down, my little avatar can only sightsee the wonders and possible adventures that are to come.

Needless to say, The odds of me finishing aren’t that great. With this blog keeping me honest however, that can all change!

My plot is very vague, but I have some of the mechanics and characters and plot mechanics worked out. My game is going to have 16 characters. You will be able to play the game through 4 times with different adventures each time, but you will start with different characters in different parts of the massive world. All four storylines will be fragments of some greater world crisis.

Each of the initial two storylines will “unlock” another place to start. After each part is beaten, you will unlock another game mode, the final death match. YOU will be able to make your final 4 teams from any combination of characters to go for the final boss matches of whatever world crisis there is.

That is my general concept, and my next posts will include my game mechanics, how my magic system will work (well, musings on), and I will sprinkle in different character concepts that I have finalized. I know all of the classes, but not the stories of everybody…yet.

So stayed tuned, we’ve got two great games in the oven here. Sorry this was so long, but better than not at all, right?