Nerdaissance

As promised, the Nerdaissance is going to keep filling up your RSS feed. This time, I’m going to start my dungeon master’s log for a new adventuring party. I figure this will be a good outlet for keeping track of exactly what happens, will be another medium for the nerdaissance to get out there, and hopefully, it will be a good story.

The session started off with the four party members in a room at the Temple of St. Cuthbert in the large town of Pinedale. The members are Yurram, the wood elf Druid, Tabris, the snow elf monk, a human ranger who doesn’t know his name yet, and an aquatic elf wizard who didn’t say his name. I’m sure these names will get set in stone soon.

As much of life happens in the world, all of these characters happened to be at Pinedale and happened to run into Loynis Uland as they went through the town. Loynis was in dire need of some adventurers, and he asked each person individually to meet him in the temple. Loynis explained to them that one of his fellow clerics was sick in a local hamlet, Woodglen, and he needed some accompaniment traveling to go cure him of his ills.

The party seemed to be a bit perplexed as to why the cleric was in another hamlet (he was doing charity missionary work being a healer for neighboring towns), why Loynis needed to be escorted (he is actually a fairly sickly man, and there are a lot of rogue gangs  who are of much danger to any lone travelers), and how they would be recompensed (100 gp upon Loynis‘ return to Pinedale and any treasure they find on the way.) The party agreed, and after a short trip for supplies, the party set out.

The journey should take a little over a day, and they set out in the afternoon. A couple hours into the trip, a tiny lizard-like creature confronted them on the road and yipped at them like a dog. Luckily, the druid and wizard both understood this creature’s draconic tongue, and understood that it asked for 50gp for their safe travel on the road. Tabris asked the wizard to relate that the road and these lands were under no kingdom’s command, and as such, they have the right to freely use the roads.

The Kobold didn’t agree, and a fight ensued. Quickly, three more Kobolds jumped out from behind trees and started pelting the party with their slings. They had horrible accuracy and they weren’t very strong either. Yurram and her owl swiftly dispensed with 1 very quickly, and this didn’t seem to be a fight the Kobolds should have started. As the ranger advanced towards the main Kobold, he fell into a camoflaged pit trap. It was dark in the hole, but he could hear something in there with him.

The fight continued with the Kobolds falling quickly, but the ranger was having a hard time climbing out of the hole. As his mates rushed to his aide, they saw with their low-light vision that there were two monstrous centipedes in the whole with him. Eventually, he was able to get out, but the centipedes followed him. Eventually, one was able to poison Loynis, but he was able to use his Patience domain ability to slow the poison. The last Kobold was found by Yurram’s owl and destroyed. The wizard summoned a celestial fire beetle which snapped one centipede in half, and Tabris punched through the centipede’s head to destroy it.

This was unfortunately all that was able to happen this session, because there was some teaching going on with how to do the battle system, and we only had about 90 minutes to do everything. Next session promises to be an interesting one, so in the meantime, have fun being nerdy and tell us what you think.

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?

For my first post I’d just like to outline a little bit here what the gist of my project is:

First off, this game was borne out of the idea that RPG characters always start mega-weak, and become super-strong. I thought it would be neat to kinda mix it up a little bit, with a character who is pretty powerful (relatively), and some type of cataclysmic event makes him weak again, forcing him to work for strength he once took for granted, and work even harder to surpass that.

What eventually emerged was a massively plot-oriented game with an expansive, involved story. Early in the development process, the idea of two distinct parts of the game arose: before the power-stripping event, and after. This brainstorming session also produced the titles of the two acts, Act I: Starting to Fear; Act II: A World Without Rules.

Once the entirety of the story was hammered out, and I began to actually begin the programming of the game it became clear that this project would be a monster! In the hopes of being able to actually complete this game, I had the idea to cleave it into two distinct games. Thus, the main focus of right now will be upon the game who’s working title is Starting to Fear. I hope to, eventually, come up with a main title, and have the working title get downgraded back to ’subtitle’ status, but at this point that’s mostly an issue of nomenclature.

This way, I can be free to develop the first arc to its full extent, not worrying constantly about how difficult it would be to layer an entire other game over, on top of it. The crude medium I’m trying to accomplish this in is Enterbrain’s RPG Maker VX, which I understand means this game will be forever doomed to the myriad of other banal RPGs hacked together with this beginner’s tool. I understand that.

But I am a beginner, and at least this way I’ve got a chance of FINISHING the game, so I’ll forge ahead nonetheless. The gameplan is to fully complete the first segment, and then copy some of the basic maps over, forming the foundation for the second game. The events of both occur in the same world, with the same locations, but one leads up to, and the other from, a cataclysmic singularity that radically changes the world.

For now though, I think that’s a decent introduction.
A story synopsis and present development posts are to follow.