Earth’s Empires tech

While the technology exists, flying cars are a rarity on most worlds in most times in the setting. That said, the skies over the cities of humanity are not empty. In most places the air contains both government and civilian surveillance drones.

The civillian drones are semi-autonomous flyers that circle in great clouds above the buildings, searching both optical and radio frequencies, pattern matching inputs in hope of discovering news worthy stories. Occasionally one will alert its minder of a potential story and get the ok to investigate. When that happens, the graceful wing meshes that it used to stay afloat above the city collapse into a sleeker, high speed form that is used for close in reconnisance. From the cloud of flyers, first one will drop , then as confirmation of interest becomes stronger, more and more will follow until you have a score of surveillance vehicles or more scanning an area. Of course, high speed reconnisance is not now you develop a story, so there is a final deployment phase. The craft reforms itself one last time, baring recording and communication equipment, becoming once again a flying wing, and finally deploying a quad rotor system to enable quiet and stable recording as well as the ability to follow a subject closely.

A larger event, shots fired, a large accident, anything with a large visual or audio component can cause hundreds of camera drones to descend upon the region. It is often possible to reconstruct a complete record of events after the first fifteen to thirty seconds

Space Traders

          So one of my projects this term is a game where you fly a space ship from star to star trading goods. The game itself has no explicit goals. One of the key points of the game is that the economy shift as you trade. When you buy goods in a location the price there increases and when you sell them the price decreases in hat region. At the same time, other traders are wandering the galaxy performing their own trades, so some times you will get back from a long trade route and find that the price of  good has changed a lot while you were gone.
          One of the key aspects of the game is that each planet in the galaxy has its own image, all of which are procedurally generated… 

To do this, first I create an array of blank bitmaps to use as color fills in the draw circle function in AS. Then each bitmap is filled with pixel colors taken from an array. The arrays are each 100 entries long and the program takes a random walk through the array to select the colors. Every step through the array is used to set the color of two pixels, and the arrays are set up so that two adjacent positions are likely to have the same or similar colors. These two things combine to make sure that there are relatively large color features on the selected planets. If the walker gets to an end of the array, it is placed in a random position in the interior. My arrays aren’t perfect, but the better the array the more interesting the resulting planets. The more colors you have and the further those colors are from each other, the more likely the planet is to look like it is tv static. The format I’m using is:

["array_name", 0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF, ..., 0xCCCC00, 0xCCCC00]

With 100 hexadecimal entries defining that array’s pallet and the relative frequency of colors and the name in the zero position telling me what the goal for that array is.

The Core of Fate

Far out in the depths of the astral sea, well beyond the regular travel ways there is a single small rock. On the rock is a stone arch, the only gate to an isolated demi-plane.  The gate stands cold and dead, silent in the face of the multiverse. Those who would walk the stacks of the Core of Fate must first find the way to open the gate, knowledge held by few among the whole span of reality.

Once they pass through the gate the seeker is faced by the expanse of the Core. The gate is surrounded by the muted roar of thousands of illusionary images speaking or shouting or raging words in all the languages of the multiverse. Before each image stands a pale humanoid of non-distinct aspect. Each one writes the words spoken by the illusion it stands before. As soon as the image stops speaking, it fades and its scribe drops the completed scroll. Before the scroll reaches the ground, tiny mechanical servitors dart among the asiles and grab the scroll. They rush out of the realm of the scribes and enters the stacks. They rush down thousands of thousands of rows of shelves made of identical square nooks until they find an empty hole to place their scroll into. There are shining steel entities, mechanical angles in the forms of the various sentients of the multiverse. They stand sentinel among the stacks and the scribes. Though they they always appear to be at the edge of your attention, anyone who approaches the scribes finds themselves facing a pair of sentinels. While the scribe is still writing, the sentinels protect them with their lives. In the rare occurrence that two sentinels do not suffice to stop an interruption, as each one falls, two more appear. As soon as the scribe drops its scroll, the sentinels depart. Every time a new illusion forms, a single scribe is there to write, and each time a scribe begins writing a new nook appears out in the stacks and the realm increases in size by the slightest margin.

Magic is much less effective in the Core of Fate, half of the power of any spell is drained by the very structure of the space, diverted to power the greater guardians of the demi-plane. Divination magic that is cast in or that impinges upon the demi-plane immediately fizzles, and as a caster tries to cast divinations, the guardians begin to manifest around him. If enough power is spent trying to preform divination, the guardians will completely manefest and consume the caster.

Even the most powerful of magics do little good. The most that even a wish can do is provide the caster with a single specific scroll, and the power of the spell is enough to raise a host of guardians against the caster.

Each scroll represents a single prophecy made by a seer somewhere in the multiverse. Not every prophecy is true, or more accurately, not every prophecy comes to occur, and many events that are the focus of prophecy are the focus of multiple opposing prophecies. Many of the prophets that are recorded here may even be stating prophecies that are part of branches that have already been cut off. The only form of recording information that works within the demiplane is the pens and scrolls of the scribes. Not even mortal memory functions here well enough to accurately recall a prophecy well enough to transcribe it usefully once off the demi-plane.

A visitor may safely walk the rows of shelves and may even take a single scroll. The problem is that finding a specific scroll is nearly impossible, the collection covers all of the prophecies that have been spoken by any being anywhere in the multiverse and the number that exist expand much faster than even an army could read.

If a scroll of prophecy is found by hand and carried out through the gate at the center of the demi-plane, they may leave with the scroll, but an hour after leaving the demi-plane it dissolves and reappears in a random empty nook. In the few cases that one of these scrolls has been successfully bound to a location, some of the larger guardians appeared where it was bound to lay waste to everything around the scroll and to break the bindings that keep it there.

Those who violate the rules and escape the plane are followed by assorted hunting beasts that are capable of shifting from plane to plane. Though the hunters are often fairly week, once they find their prey, they can bray and summon the greater guardians of the realm.

Those who are killed in the demi-plane or by the various hunting guardians of the plane have their souls returned to the demi-plane and are then reformed into a creature of the demi-plane.

Dreams Of Lost Chances

I still need to decide how interactive I want certain parts of the story to be. In the final piece, I may move all of the early scenes into the object based section of memories to explore. Each section has a header that will respond to the command “Remember (header)” The player’s actions in that section will be played back, but if this happens after some of the player’s memories have been sacrificed, anything that that memory references is removed from the playback.

 

Scene Zero: Dreams of Lost Chances

Every night you dreamt of darkness. A thousand eyes, the pressure of their watching a physical thing as you search the endless alleys of a sleepless city. You dreamt the sweet copper taste of blood that briefly overwhelmed the stench of the city’s rotting refuse. You dreamt of cold, the icy grasp of the claws that catch, the brief warm rush of the teeth that tear. You dreamt of dissolution and loss of identity. You dreamt of her scarlet hair and her radiant joy and all that you lost. You dreamt of knives in the dark and fain fools fallen. And through it all, you heard her voice, whispering in the distance. You could go mad trying to hear what she said. You may have, for you heard in her whispers a cry for help. Eventually the dreams were too regular, too awful and you slept no more. Then you awoke into the nightmare.

 

Scene 1 October Chill

October Sweet Penelope, she tried to tell you and you couldn’t hear. The air was cold and crisp and clear. You were busy and distracted, and she had always been one to take a joke too far.   She said her husband didn’t believe her, that he thought she was pulling a prank, and you must admit that you believed the same. You humored her, your oldest friend and said you would come, just not tonight, when life had calmed and business paused.   And as it will from time to time, life brought you a thousand thousand things that each called out for forgetfulness.   As she walked away that cold crisp day, the clouds came in and the rain began, a fall’s drizzle, sharp and cold, a misting chill, it brought the smell of molding leaves and the last nights of fall.   After she left, that whole month felt dull and grey, and once or twice you felt that the eyes that watched were watching you. You saw her and Chris several times, but she never mentioned the things in the dark again.

 

Scene 2: November Rain

November “The rains continued and you saw less and less of Penalope. It had happened in your life before, and was just part of the background of your friendship. Growing closer together and farther apart was part of the natural cycle of your relationship.   That night was the last you heard her voice, save in your dreams and in the nightmare you now traverse.”   A late night at work, a dark house, an on coming storm. You rushed inside your front door just ahead of the gust front. You hear the ‘bam bam bam of hail as you finally close the door. You are in the Foyer, the light is dim, there is an answering machine with a new message blinking on the screen, and

(if actions > 5) “There is a brilliant flash of lightning and the instant roar of thunder. The house goes dark as the neighborhood loses power”   (Play Message On Answering Machine) You hit the button on your answering machine and a static hiss fills the room. “… you there? Please…. …. They are here and I need you. Oh god, the claws and eyes and teeth, I can’t keep them bac… longer. Please, please come.” The line goes dead.   (if message has not been played) [Dark House]   (if message has been played and player leaves to find Penalope) [positive conclusion November Rain]   (Any action while wearing raingear except leave house) “You are dripping on the carpet, you need to take your raincoat off before you damage the     (take off raincoat) You remove your sodden rain gear and hang it on the door side coat-rack. A solitaire reminder of the cold days of winter approaching.       (go outside) (while still wearing rain gear) [November Outside a] (go outside) (without rain gear) [November Outside b]

 

 

November Outside a “As you step back outside into the storm, you are assaulted by golf-ball sized hail, and your rain coat does little to hold the sheets of icy rain at bay. You struggle against the elements for a moment when your whole world is consumed in a flash of light an earsplitting double crash as lightning strikes a nearby transformer and plunges the neighborhood into darkness.

(any movement that isn’t back into the house) (if outdoor actions <4) “You try to force your way into the storm, but it is just too much for you.”   (pick up hail) (if outdoor actions < 4) “You bend over and grab a few small icy spheres. (add hail to pocket, start melting counter, add pipe beat, memory of ice)   (when outdoor actions = 4) Under assault by hail, rain, and lightning, you finally give up and return to the now dark house. (add sick) [Dark House]   (If message = played) “You push against the wind and the rain and the hail to get back to your car, and though you are battered and soaked when you get there, you mange to get the door open and the engine running. You take off and race through the streets. You don’t see the tree in the road until it is too late. When you wake up in the hospital, she is gone [Scene 3] (Upbeat)

 

 

 

November Outside b “As you step back outside into the storm, you are assaulted by golf-ball sized hail, and clothing is instantly soaked by sheets of icy rain. You struggle against the elements for a moment when your whole world is consumed in a flash of light an earsplitting double crash as lightning strikes a nearby transformer and plunges the neighborhood into darkness.

(any movement that isn’t back into the house) (if outdoor actions <2) “You try to force your way into the storm, but it is just too much for you.”   (pick up hail) (if outdoor actions < 2) “You bend over and grab a few small icy spheres. (add hail to pocket, start melting counter, add pipe beat, memory of ice)   (when outdoor actions = 2) Under assault by hail, rain, and lightning, you finally give up and return to the now dark house. (add sick) [Dark House]

 

 

Dark House (not sick) It is hours before the storm passes, and hours more before the power is back on. The answering machine’s light glows red, accusing you in the silent evening’s gloom.

(Play Message On Answering Machine) You hit the button on your answering machine and a static hiss fills the room. “… you there? Please…. …. They are here and I need you. Oh god, the claws and eyes and teeth, I can’t keep them bac… longer. Please, please come.” The line goes dead. [Empty December Nights]

 

 

Dark House (sick) You stumble around in the dark of your house, wet, cold, and miserable with the loss of power and the cold wet storm, your house rapidly cools. By the time the power is back on, you are shivering in bed, and by the next morning, it is full on pneumonia. It is a week before you hear the message. A week of sweet blessed sleep. [Empty December Nights]

 

 

Scene 3 Empty December Nights

 

(if the player was sick or injured) By the time you are well enough to try to find Penelope again, she is long gone. The dreams of the other city, of searching the streets began while you recovered, and your sleep soon ended. [Police Station]

 

 

Police Station (if the player was not sick start here) The next morning it seems like a dream. You call her phone but no one answers. You call Chris and he seems a little vague. He is worried, but he can’t keep his focus on his wife. The conversation meanders, and by the end nothing you can do will get him back on the subject. The same happens when you try to call her friends or her family, no one can remember Penelope. There are moments of clear memory, but they fade. When presented with evidence of her existence, they focus for a moment, but always confusion over takes them and they begin ignoring it once again.   Finally, you go to the police. A detective with a cluttered desk takes your statement but he forgets the missing person’s report before you are finished giving it. He calls up her records, and there on the screen are the times she tried to get the police to help. Each call, each complaint, they are logged. The detective looks at the monitor and says “I am afraid that I don’t have anyone by that name in the system at all and there are no Jane Doe’s in the hospitals or morgues who fit your description. I’m sorry.”

(If the player requests a print-out) “You need proof you tried, for the family I suppose?” Yeah, l can print that for you.” (Upbeat)   (When the player leaves) “You walk out of the police station and the world feels unreal. Everyone is crazy, or maybe you are. [The Offer]

 

The Offer Outside the station, as you walk back to your car, an old woman dressed in rags and dirt waves you over.

(If the player talks to the woman) [Old Woman] (If the player goes on) You brush the crazy old woman off and get back in your car. You spend the day looking for Penelope, but you find it harder and harder to focus. Within a few weeks you have lost her altogether. You carry on with your life, but there is always the feeling that you have a unexplained hole in your life.   At least until the dreams begin again and the mad things in the dark take you as well.   The End.

 

Old Woman “I know what you seek. She was taken by the Witch of the Market in the Sleepless City. I can bring her back, but you must do something for you. Will you help me?

(If the player says no) You brush the crazy old woman off and get back in your car. You spend the day looking for Penelope, but you find it harder and harder to focus. Within a few weeks you have lost her altogether. You carry on with your life, but there is always the feeling that you have a unexplained hole in your life.   At least until the dreams begin again and the mad things in the dark take you as well.   The End.   (If the player says yes) “Are you sure? Does she mean that much to you? You cannot know what you will lose, and it may be more than you have to pay.   (If the player says “no” “A smart choice. You will in time forget her and the dreams will fade. Go now and forget that you were once nearly touched by the madness of those who do not sleep.”   The End   (If the player says “yes”) Tell me three times and three times it is true. I will bring you to the nightmare where Penelope is held. Bring me a coin from the hand of the Wax King’s hand, a News Boy’s hat, a key from one of Detective Tock’s men, A sound of joy from the endless screams, and a fork from the table of a gustatory explorer. [The Halls of Memory]

 

 

Scene 4 Halls of Memory

 

The Halls of Memory You walked the Sleepless City for days or months or years. You contested with the mad and the nightmares and the hollowed souls of the victims of the city. You exchanged almost all that you were for the things you needed to survive the City and to finally return to the old woman’s tent and bring her what you have. “You are ready to see your lost Penelope?” She ushers you down the alley until you reach a slate grey door. She opens the door though it has no handle. “Go in, remember what you may and release the times you had in this place. Memories can be burnt in the fires of forgetfulness and only in doing so may you leave behind that which would stop your return to the mortal world. ”   The walls are lined with shelves, and the shelves are full of nicknacks and bric a brac. Each item has a small brass plaque with a name and a single word. Try as you might, as soon as you look away from an item, it slips out of your mind. You wander the hall in a timeless grey blur.

There are five rooms in the halls, four of which are lined with shelves and the fifth of which has a clinging blue fire. The four rooms with shelves each possess an item of interest, a small token of the events that happened to the character between leaving the police station and entering the halls of memory.   The player can “remember” each item (or other memory based words) to see what happened. Each time they remember one of these events they get to make a choice between sacrificing part of their self or doing something that hurts someone else. The first is a beat toward Humanity, the second is a beat toward Madness or Nightmare. Those choices feed into the final decision.   The room with the fire is a place for discarding memories. The player cannot find the doors of Oak and Ash without having discarded almost every memory, unless they never picked any of them up. [Candle] [Origami Hat] [Silver fork] [A bell] [A book]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The door of Oak or Ash You prepare to step through the door, the old woman from the market of dreams is standing beside you, where she has always been. The shadows draw close around you, and the eyes that watch and the claws that grasp, the musk of death, of loss, all of those are in the shadows, all of them call to you. Your eyes almost see, your hands nearly claws, and your bulwark against loss is nearly spent.

(If the player has not accessed any memories) She speaks, “Our revels now are ended. But you, you did not play your part. Your promise was not fulfilled. I told you that through madness lie all hope. Now you have nothing.” The door flickers and wavers until it halts, an oaken portal in the wall. “Go now, to the reward reserved for those who spurn hope, who wait and lay still in the face of that vital choice.”   (walk away from door first attempt) The woman’s eyes flash bright and terrible and the darkness draws much closer. The things that you can not see loom closer, their presence becoming more real with every second. “Turn back. There is nothing left for you on this side of the dream.” (walk away from door, second attempt) “I warned you. Now what little you had left is grist for my mill.” The shadows leap forth and engulf you. The Teeth that bite, the claws that tear, and the eyes that see first rip away the remnants of your memory, and then the last of your flesh. The End” (walk through Oaken Door) [Hollow Way]   (if the player has chosen more madness paths than humanity paths) She speaks, “Our revels now are ended. But go you, who played my part to the hilt, who served well the sleepless night. I now will send you to that which you seek. My nightmare, my sweet monster who was a man.” The door flickers and wavers until it halts, an oaken portal in the wall. “Go now, walk the streets of the sleepless city, my emissary, bring me the hopes and fears of those who would abandon them too cheaply.” (walk through the door) [Nightmare Way] (try to leave) “It is far too late for that. You have given yourself to me and I will not be denied. Walk the path you have chosen or meet oblivion beside the one you came to save.   (try to leave again, or attack the old woman) “Some spirit is left, but you would have done well to have kept your bargain.” You double over in pain as your flesh melts away. The shadows engulf you and you are surrounded by the comforting presence of your family. Each of you share the eyes that watch, the claws that grasp and the teeth that bite. There is great comfort in being part of the will of the master.   (if the player has chosen more humanity paths than madness paths) She speaks, “Our revels now are ended. But go you, who played my part, who walked between the Nightmares and humanity. I now will send you to that which you seek. Beware the cost is yet more than you have given, but of that you were fairly warned.” The door flickers and wavers until it halts, a portal of ash and rowan in the wall. “Go now save the one you came so far, release her from the grip of nightmares.”   (anything except walking through the door.) “You should not break our agreement this close to its fulfillment. I would not see you damned like so many who came before you.   (Second attempt) “I warned you. Now what little you had left is grist for my mill.” The shadows leap forth and engulf you. The Teeth that bite, the claws that tear, and the eyes that see first rip away the remnants of your memory, and then the last of your flesh. The End”     (If the player still holds a memory) As you walk through the door, your fingers elongate, your face shifts and melts into a blank mask. You have become one of the nightmare guards from the market. You cling to your fleeting humanity and the tiny spot of irritation that is provided by the (trinket for memory kept). [Door Of Ash] (if the player does not hold a memory) As you walk through the door, your fingers elongate, your face shifts and melts into a blank mask. You have become one of the nightmare guards from the market. You cling to your fleeting humanity. [Door of Ash]

 

Scene 5 Doors into Night.

 

Door of Ash (3 Upbeats) “You pass through the door of ash and rowan into a featureless grey hallway. All your life, the people, the pains, the desires, “were all spirits and are melted into air” You remember losing, but not what is lost, and all that you have of what was is the (trinket for a memory kept)   As you walk down the endless hallway and shed all but the madness that brought you here. A figure approaches along the interminable path.

(look at figure) You look at the approaching figure, the mist and the illusion parting from your mind for a moment. A flash and you remember who and why and where. Walking away from the nightmares you have embraced is Penelope. She watches you approach and does not recognize you. She shies away from you. You try to speak, but your voice was left behind. All you know is that this was an important person to you once and that now it is one of the hollow ones.   (give memory to figure) You surrender the last aspect of your humanity and Penelope is suddenly there behind the figure’s eyes. Your fingers brush hers as you hand her your last memory, and you can see her clearly one last time. She tries to speak, but your raise your long slender finger to indicate silence in this place. Her tears are your gift, and the occasional memory of a human you might have known. As you part, you se e a moment of the future, her leaving this place and entering the world you once shared. You never come across her in the Mad City, and when your mistress calls you, she always says things about the one who left. While the words mean nothing to you, they always calm the roiling madness behind your eyes.   The End

 

 

Door of Oak (Hollow Way) You walk, lost in your mind, your memories fragmented, down an endless gray hall. When finally you step out into the twilight of the Sleepless City, you can’t remember who you are or what you are doing there. You become part of the background of the city, a Hollow soul ceaselessly searching the streets without any knowledge or cause. You are an event without self, the lost ones of the mad City of the Sleepless. A thousand times you find the object of your search, the Hollow One who was once Penelope, but the search is all you have left, so you walk on.   The End

 

Door of Oak (Nightmare Way) You slink down the mistress’s exit route, ready to do her will upon the Sleepless and the Nightmares and the hollow ones. As you pass along the subtle grey walls, a human wrapped in cloth, nearly hollow itself. Usually one such as this would not be worth your time, but perhaps, since you are new to Her service, you should take this one’s last memories and present them to the Mistress as your first collection.

(If the player possesses a memory still, they may give it to the human.) You discard your final memories of your life before the mistress. The human looks at you in shock, actually reaches out toward you. You threaten it with claws and teeth and much much worse and it backs off and keeps walking. It whispers so softly that even your ears have a hard time hearing. “Thank you.” And with the exchange you know its name for a moment. “Penelope” before you forget it once again. The End   (If the player attacks the figure) It tries to struggle, and something inside you knows that that is the best part. It is merely human, and one has lost almost everything to this place. It is not mad enough to have become one of the nightmares, so it succumbs to one instead. You taste its memories as they leave its cooling body, and it holds images of the pathetic thing you once were. You take a special pride that you have found the object of the search that brought you here. The lady will be pleased.   (The player ignores the figure) You decide not to take this one, at least not yet. It is heading into the Mistress’s chambers on its own, and if it survives that, you can always find it later. It has memories that smell strangely familiar, and that will aid you in hunting it at your leisure.   The End.

Game Design Tool Kit Paper (applicable to table top as well as video games.)

Tools for building a story in classic adventure games.

I am presenting a set of tools for using a classic adventure game model to tell stories. While my focus is the narratively driven genre of adventure games, these tools can help tell a story in any type of game. In traditional storytelling, the the teller of the story controls the pacing and the order how their stories are presented to their audiences. With books and video and other linear media, that control remains solely in the hands of the creator. But in video games, the presentation of narrative can range from strictly linear as in the Dragons Lair games to a series scenes where the player has some degree of freedom to explore and interact with the world and the story being told that are connected to each other in a linear or branching manner, to truly free form games like the Sims series where any narrative that exists is imposed by the minds of the player.

I am going to look at four tools of particular interest. The first, puzzles, provide the obstacles and difficulty that the player overcomes in the process of revealing the story. The second, beat analysis, helps map the emotional flow of the story being told telling. It can also help the author determine if there are any structurally important pieces of the story that are being left out. The third tool is the establishing scene. It is where you introduce both the protagonist and the rules of the world that the protagonist inhabits. The last tool I want to use is Easter eggs. These hidden pieces of the game can provide additional difficulty, help further define the setting, and reward players who enjoy exploring the world in depth, but since they are completely optional content, they do not break the flow of the narrative involuntarily.

Any sort of game can be used to tell a story, but the classic adventure game format is particularly well suited to the endeavor. Adams (2010) defines an adventure game as:

An adventure game is an interactive story about a protagonist character who is played by the player. Storytelling and exploration are essential elements of the game. Puzzle solving and conceptual challenges make up the majority of the gameplay. Combat, economic management, and action challenges are reduced or nonexistent.

In their original incarnation, adventure games were pure text exercises that rapidly spanned a wide array of stories from the classic dungeon delve of Colossal Caverns to the murder mystery of Deadline,to the exploration of multiple viewpoints of an art gallery in Exhilaration, to the literary fictional morality play of Trinity (Montfort 2003). They eventually gained graphics and sounds and a wide array of interfaces and run the gamut from archeological mysteries, to madcap detective stories to musical adventures (Kalata 2011) Any sort of story you wish to tell can be told in the adventure game format, and modern entries to the field such as Heavy Rain (Anderson 2010) can leverage graphics and computing power to tell deeply engaging emotional journeys with adaptive storylines

The closest fictional genre to the standard adventure game model of “find clues and items, figure out how to use them to solve puzzles that the game has presented and progress the narrative” is the mystery or police procedural. A well written mystery gives the reader all of the hints they need to solve the core mystery before it is revealed at the end of the story. The trick for the reader and for the protagonist is to use all of those clues to solve the main puzzle of the story. In Esoterrorists, his first implementation of the tabletop roleplaying system Gumshoe, Robin Laws (2009) says that to tell an interactive story, it is important that the things you need to progress the story should be easy to find and that the challenge should come from figuring out what they mean and how to use them. This insight into tabletop role playing is no less true when we are talking about the sort of storytelling that we do in adventure games.

Tool One: Puzzles

A puzzle, for my purposes, is anything in the game that you must interact with in a particular, non-obvious manner to change its state. A puzzle can take many forms; it can be a riddle, it can be a set of mechanical manipulations needed to change the state of some object in the game, it can be finding a piece of information that is needed to further progress the story. A well designed puzzle is challenging without being so hard that it stalls the progress of the story. The solution of a puzzle should usually reveal most information about the setting or bring the plot of the story a step closer to completion.

Adventure games are full of puzzles and obstacles. They are things that can get in the way of the audience’s ability to follow the narrative if they are not carefully placed and designed, but they provide the challenge that is needed to fully engage a player with the story. It turns out that humans get a great deal of enjoyment out of hard work that is optional, has discernible rules, provides rich feedback on our progress, and seems surmountable (McGonigal 2011). Difficulty is good, so long as we perceive it to be fair.

When we overcome a difficult task, it generates a feeling of pride, a chemical and emotional rush generated by victory that game designers use an Italian loan word “Fiero” for (McGonigal 2011). But if that task lacks feedback to let us know that we are approaching it in non-futile manner, or if the solution has no bearing on the way we understand the world to work, instead of feeling rising tension followed by the emotional release of victory, we are likely to just feel frustration. Instead of victory, we break our engagement with the story, and unlike a living storyteller, there a game can not read our audience and recapture their interest.

Early adventure games were loaded with puzzles with dream logic solutions (Montfort 2004), with situations that were unnavigable without repeatedly trying a comprehensive set of actions, attempting to use each item in your inventory in each situation, at every possible time, often with fatal or game derailing results. This sort of difficulty doesn’t generate Fiero in most people. Instead it convinces them to go do something else.

It wasn’t until Brian Moriarty’s Loom that a major adventure game company adopted a design philosophy that was intended to circumvent that sort of frustration. Lucas Arts started producing adventure games where your character could never hit an unrecoverable dead end, and character death was either impossible or uncommon (Kalata 2011). Their games still provided challenge, but the challenge resided not in nonsensical puzzles and unexpected deaths, but in figuring out how the parts of the story fit together and how to use the clues the player had collected to solve them. This model of difficulty never tore them out of the story, and it minimized frustration episodes without robbing players of their sense of achievement.

Every unavoidable puzzle in a game should serve a narrative purpose. The act of searching for the solution to a puzzles should move the story forward to its eventual outcome, and solving a puzzle should usually provide moment of positive emotion in the flow of the story. Difficult puzzles should seldom be placed so that they create a bottleneck in the story (Laws 2009). The most difficult puzzles in the game need to be used carefully so that they help progress the narrative instead of halting it.

Tool Two: Beat Analysis

The second thing I want to look at is a tool that lets us map the emotional results of each scene in our games as well as providing a way of checking to see if all of the structural bits we need to tell a coherent story are in place. In “Hamlet’s Hitpoints”, Laws (2010) establishes a model for the analysis of stories. He takes an actor’s trick, analyzing the beats of a script to lay out the emotional landscape of a piece and uses it to map out potential flows of game-play. A beat analysis can be done at different levels of focus, from the individual lines of a story to the larger divisions such as scenes or chapters. Each beat is composed of two parts, the category of beat, and the emotional direction the resolution of the beat moves the audience in. Laws chooses hope and fear as his emotional poles, though for specific needs other emotions could easily be used.

The categories of beat that Laws identifies are:

Procedural

A procedural beat plays on the character’s practical, external goals. Procedural beats tend to be defined by action, with physical dangers taking a prominent role., and verbal conflicts are resolved through external results instead of emotional states. Procedural beats, along with dramatic beats make up the majority of beats in most fiction, and most beats of these types .

Dramatic

A dramatic beat works with the character’s inner goals. They involve negotiation and concessions between characters. Conflict in a dramatic beat fulfills a character’s emotional needs. They are, almost always, dialogue beats

Commentary

A commentary beat takes the focus away from the protagonist’s pursuit of their goals and reinforces the story’s themes. This is often done by a third party narrator or as an aside by a secondary character.

Anticipation

An anticipation beat creates the expectation of a upcoming procedural success. It is often a preparatory scene without any threat to the focus character. Anticipation beats allow us to enjoy some of the thrill of an expected victory before it actually occurs.

Gratification

A gratification beat is a positive emotional moment that is unrelated to the main plot of the story. It is often an in joke or musical interlude. A gratification beat must be used with care because they can very easily break immersion in the story.

Bringdown

A bringdown beat helps set the mood by providing a negative emotional movement that is unrelated to the main story. While unrelated to the narrative, they should be used to mirror the narrative’s emotional direction. A bringdown beat should hit the protagonist (and thus the audience) while they are down.

Pipe

A pipe beat presents information to the audience that will be needed later without making it obvious that the information is going to be important. Pipe beats can make reveal beats much stronger, and as we will see later, can play an important role in setting the audience’s expectations of the logic of the world and are an important part of writing an honest mystery. This sort of beat is placing the gun on the mantle place.

Question

A question beat poses a question about things that have already happened that the audience is unaware of. This is separate from a procedural beat that introduces a question about what is going to happen. These beats generally move the emotional state of the audience downward because they increase uncertainty, the lack of information presents an obstacle to the protagonist and engages the audience. Question beats are an essential part of establishing a mystery.

Reveal

A reveal beat answers a question that the audience has been asking, either as a direct result of an earlier question beat or because one or more pipe beats have created a subconscious question in the audience’s mind. Often the release of tension from obtaining an answer causes a reveal beat to end on an uplifting note, though if the reveal shows us a larger danger or greater stakes for the protagonist, the beat can certainly lead to a down note.

In a traditional game with a mostly linear narrative, a beat analysis of the script can give us important insight to what is happening in the story. A string of down beats needs the occasional upbeat or the player is likely to be swamped in the emotional morass created by a constant downward slope. On the other hand, if we see a string of up beats without any down beats, there is likely to be no tension, no stress, and thus no engagement with the story being told. If a game has a dozen question beats, then you know that you need to reply to each one with a reveal at some point, and if you intend for a character to fire the gun on the mantle, it is essential that there is a pipe beat earlier in the game that shows the gun is on the mantle.

It is, of course, possible to create an interesting and engaging narrative while breaking the rules, but you should know what you are doing and why. One of the easiest mistakes for a person working in a creative field to make is to see the amazing work of the previous generation who does spectacular work by breaking the standards and rules of the format they are working in. The problem is that those prior masters first learned the rules they broke before breaking them broke them. That is why we have a thousand emotionally dead imitations of Van Gogh, Dali, and Pollock.

There are some interesting things that can be done applying Laws’s beat analysis to the construction of a less linear digital narrative. If your story is being presented in discrete chunks, then instead of analyzing the compiled narrative, it is possible to analyze each of the pieces of story. Each piece of each story has a type and a direction, and given the tools provided by working in software, you can do some interesting tricks with that. If you write each scene as a beat, and you know which beats are upward beats and which are downward, then you can use that information to influence the flow of the game.

If the player experiences a string of mostly downward procedural beats due to their choices, then your program can interject a positive gratification or commentary beat that is tied to the set of beats they have already chosen. If a player has a series of beats all moving in the same direction, you can use that to choose and modify music selections. As things go well for the player, the music can become broader, more inspirational. As they descend the emotional scale, the music can become darker, more discordant, helping to ratchet up the stress. The music then provides a sort of subliminal feedback, helping the players become more immersed in the story, but also encouraging them to make choices that cause the music to match the moods they wish to experience in game play.

A beat analysis of the story components of your game can also provide an important check. If a particular beat is a pipe beat or a question beat, you know that, no matter what sort of story you are telling, you need to make sure to close that beat off with a reveal or possibly a commentary. If your game has a place where there is a continual emotional downturn, beat analysis will show you where to insert an anticipation beat to mark the eventual upturn.

Tool Three: Establishing Scenes

The third tool I want to employ is the establishing scene. Early in the game, while the emotional stakes are relatively low and the world that is presented is still not overly complex, the player should get to see the sorts of solutions that are going to be prominent in the game. Just as the introduction is used to show the audience who the protagonist is through his or her early actions, a game should introduce the rules of the world. the logical foundation of all of the solutions the player is going to have to discover throughout their time playing in your world. This way, when the player finds themselves facing ever increasing challenges, they have a toolkit of previous expectations to draw from. If your game breaks the logic and the tone set in the establishing scene, the likely result is that the players will be frustrated and lose their sense of immersion in the narrative. Many adventure games fall prey to this problem, be it due to puzzles that don’t fit the tone of the game as in the Laura Bow mysteries, or wild shifts in tone, like the whiplash between grim mob violence and slapstick comedy in Runaway (Kalata 2011).

There is great storytelling power in worlds that follow their own logic. There is a reason that Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland remains a favorite book for many people into adulthood. It paints a consistent but strange world, a place where the logic of the ridiculous holds sway. While hitting a player with random and nonsensical situations can break immersion, if you are careful to establish the rules through early interactions, you can bring them delight and wonder in a story based on rules that would be nothing but frustrating had they not been presented in smaller doses early on in the game (Plotkin 2010). Just like Alice’s introduction to Wonderland establishes how the world works in smaller safer interactions before she ever has to deal with the stranger and more dangerous denizens of Wonderland, if you wish your game to hinge on strange logics, establish them early on.

Sam and Max Hits the Road establishes the sort of solution that “makes sense” in their setting through a series of option-limited early scenes where the title characters do things like throw a bomb out into the street because “nobody we know is down there” or reach down the throat of a cat to retrieve an important piece of paper (Kalata 2011). In both these cases, the game guides the player into making strange decisions by limiting the choices they have, both for actions and for places they can go and explore. there is never a moment of analysis paralysis because the player is not confronted with too much weirdness at once. Those two procedural beats act as pipe beats as well, presaging the sort of strangeness that will be required of the player in later sections of the game.

Tool Four: Easter Eggs

. While I have said that the narrative of a game should not be hindered by puzzles and implausible riddles, that does not mean that you shouldn’t include difficult puzzles and hidden riddles in your games. Instead, it means that those things should never halt the progression of the game. Moriarty (2002) explores the seductive nature of Easter eggs or hidden secrets. Finding secrets that most people don’t know is a profound source of pleasure for many people, and solving a wickedly difficult, optional puzzle is a huge source of fiero.

By putting your hardest puzzles into a game in places that they do not have to solve them in order to complete the scenario, by making their solutions optional and the act of finding them, itself, an emotionally positive beat, you create a chance for players to feel like they are achieving great things while minimizing the frustration of being forced to break your immersion in the narrative while you beat your head against a unobvious puzzle. We are creating unnecessary hard work that is completely optional, part of McGonigal’s (2011) prescription for a fun game.

Easter eggs are also a good place to put chunks of world building and background information that would break the flow of the narrative, even had they been put in a commentary beat. The rpg Baldur’s Gate did this. Scattered throughout the entire setting there were hundreds of books, each of which could be read by the player. Each book contained setting information, histories and biographies and discussions of the nature of reality in the setting. Each time you found a new book, a little bit more of the back story of the game was revealed, but these pieces were completely optional. You could collect and read all of them, but if you did, it was on your own time, by your own will, not because the game required that you know any of the information scattered throughout the books. Being hidden and optional made the books a source of fun instead of the frustration they could have been had they held the solutions to otherwise insurmountable problems.

We have puzzles to challenge our audience and to manage the pacing of our game. We have beat analysis to map out the emotional journey of our game from scene to scene. We have our establishing scenes to help our players engage with the world and to let them know what to expect. We have Easter eggs to provide additional challenge and a sense of reward for engaging with the game world. We can bring all of these tools with us and hopefully use them to tell better stories.

These tools are not the only things are needed to tell a good story in an adventure game, and they certainly aren’t the only route to constructing an interesting and fulfilling story in a game format. Using them won’t guarantee that your story will be interesting, engaging, or challenging. But, if you keep them in mind while you work on your game’s story, they can help you avoid common pitfalls of game design. You can use them to manage difficulty and the emotional flow of your game, and thus to construct a more satisfying narrative. Remember that our goals are the same as those of every storyteller since the dawn of humanity. We want to tell a good story that pulls our audience out of their daily concerns, that informs, entertains, and engages them.

References
Adams, E. (2010). Fundamentals of Game Design, 2nd ed. Berkley, CA: New Riders
Anderson, L. (2010) Heavy Rain Review. Retrieved from

http://www.gamespot.com/heavy-rain/reviews/heavy-rain-review-6251617/

Kalata, K. ed. (2011). The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures. North Charleston, SC: Self

Published, Printed by CreateSpace.
Laws, R (2009). The Essoterrorists. London, UK Pelgrane Press Ltd.
Laws, R. (2010). Hamlet’s Hitpoints Roseville, MN: Gameplaywrite Press
McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality is Broken New York, NY: Penguin Press
Montfort, N. (2004). Twisty Little Passages. Cambridge, MA: The Mit Press
Moriarty, B. (2002). The Secret of Psalm 46. Lecture Transcript. Retrieved from

http://www.ludix.com/moriarty/psalm46.html

Plotkin, A (2010). A Writer’s Guide to Interactive Fiction. Lecture Notes. Retrieved from

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/essays/if-for-writers.html

Procedural story development

Initial thoughts on procedural generation of narrative:
What we have to be creating here isn’t the epic story arcs, but the daily stories individual lives. The ebb and flow of a community of software entities that interact with the players. Now given a sufficiently flexible system, that could itself generate a wider story arc with the sums of the actions of all of the entities yielding a final story, but for the time being I’d rather set my sights on something with a little narrower scope.
So each “character” in our story is going to have a bundle of wants and needs, each of which are acted upon only when they reach a certain threshold. Interactions with other characters will modify those wants and needs in both positive and negative manners. The characters will need to be able to interact with each other as well as with the user’s character, and each of these interactions will lead to differing responses based on the needs and wants of a given character.

 

For example, Given the characters Alice, Bob, and Carol.

Bob currently wants two things at sub threshold levels. He wants a pet cat and he wants Alice to like him. \

Alice has her own wants, but she really hates cats.

Carol has a pet cat.

Whenever Alice sees Carol’s cat, she becomes upset.
When Bob interacts with Alice, his desire to make her happy increases.

If Bob sees Carol’s cat, his desire to have a cat increases.

But if Bob sees Alice disliking Carol’s cat, and his desire to be friends with Alice is stronger than his desire to have a cat, he will further lower the priority of cat ownership.

On the other hand, if bob’s desire to own a cat has increased past his desire to be friends with Alice, finding out that Alice dislikes cats will further decrease his desire to be friends with Alice.

This tension can be used to develop interactions with the player.

Every character will have a pool of dialogue that is ranked in accordance with how it interacts with the wants and needs of the given character. If Bob’s desire to own a cat is high, he will be more likely to use cat related dialogue options, and he may well be willing to exchange things he has with the player for things that lead toward his eventual ownership of a cat.

On the other hand, if his desire to own a cat is lower than his desire to be Alice’s friend, he might ask the player to intercede with her on his behalf.

This could lead to a situation where the player helps Bob come to terms with Alice’s dislike for cats. They might also increase Alice’s friendlyness toward bob, possibly even taking actions to mitigate her dislike for cats, which would allow Bob to get all of the things he wants, and allow Alice to become better friends with both Bob and Carol (who really likes her cat, so is a poor friendship prospect for Alice.

 

 

 

Na Essad Origins Take 2

In the first moments of the omniverse, there was but one reality shared by the seven speakers of the Word. All of existence reverberated with the echoes of the Speaking that had brought the speakers into being. There was nothing before the Word, no space, no time. The moment of the act of creation was the very first moment that anything had existed. The seven syllables of the Word set existence into motion and the speaking required speakers. Thus were the seven lines of the gods formed. The seven gods quickly started to speak their portion of the word in order to shape parts of existence. They took the very fabric of being and sang an aria that nearly shattered it. When they spoke the Word in harmony, a great making had been performed, but when they spoke at cross purposes, destruction reigned across the world. As such, the seven gods agreed to speak the world into separate, isolated realms. Thus were the first planes formed. The heavens and the hells, realms of order and chaos, they spoke the word of creation in a myriad of ways and with each speaking a new wonder sprung forth. They scattered places to their particular liking across the cosmos and wove deft bridges from plane to plane. They created WorldsCore as a realm where they and their descendants could meet, a place of neutral ground, and then across the planes, within the boundaries from one existence to another, they planted the seeds that would become the visible universes where their minor creations would thrive.
As the seven gods created more and more of reality, they became lonesome for more of their own kind, and each after their type, the gods created new gods to share the joys of creation, and to have more allies who followed after their own aspect. Soon the seven first gods spawned seven sevens of new gods

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

For my gaming group’s first non-D&D session, I wanted to pick something that was as far from D&D/Pathfinder as I could. So I picked Do. It is built around the assumption that the players will succeed in their tasks, that they will succeed without having to kill everything in their path. It doesn’t use dice or minis, and the game runs entirely without a GM. It is played on a sheet of paper with each player recording their own turn as it is played.

Here is our play notes (a direct transcript, with full names added when a character was introduced without one):
Humble pie does not want to interrupt his party to inform them that the whale was on route toward the party and then swallowed the party.
Humble Pie makes whale sushi to placate the party. And then, you see, Whisperless Pass (in a tactless display) loudly exclaimed, “Mmmmm, this whale is so tasty.” The whale began to sob, shaking the whole group to its core.
Whisperless pass pets the side of the whale until it quiets down, singing a whale lulluby. Meanwhile, the whale’s tears have washed away much of the debris scattered about the whale’s cavernous maw.
The party flies toward the planet in the distance, which contains a worried Melanie, to whom Effervescent Melody plays a song with her magical lute to calm her.
But the sparkling bubbly bounciness of Effervescent draws the eye and draws the ire of Melanie’s parents, who emerge from the house to glower and gloom over the temple-folks’ prospects of liberating a planet.
Merry Toolkit builds a harness for Melanie’s cat and explains his plan to have the cat pull th eplanet out of the whale while Effervescence empowers the cat with her magical lute. Merry cheerfully calls the cat who runs over the horizon and reveals itself to be huge, which greatly excites Merry causing him to call for it even more happily. The cat leaps over the trees and lands on Merry, purring contentedly. Merry is actually happy about this but it did hurt.
In a burst of inspiration, Lucent Flowers causes a patch of catnip to pop up near Melanie’s house, rescuing Merry from his fate as a cat toy.
Humble, having been charged with attaching the harness to the cat, begins to do so despite the mismatch in harness/cat size. He doesn’t want to cause trouble by asking why the harness is so small. In the attempt, the cat eats the harness and Humble’s arm up to his shoulder. Humble then notices the mathematical progression the cat opens and closes its mouth by. Using this knowledge, he jumps into the cat’s face to retrieve the harness. From this perch he can control the cat, using its teeth/control levers.
The harness is thrown out of the cat. Whisperless strolls over to the parents and offers each one a perfumed cigar, regaling them with tales of their extraordinary Temple exploits so they don’t notice Melody appropriating their gargantuan cat.
With a stroke of genius and a stroke on a string, Effervescent Melody moves the planet and propels it out of the whale’s gaping mouth.
Effervescent, flush with frenetic fervor at having rescued Melanie’s planet from the maw of the whale. offers to help Melanie make cookies. With the exaggerated patience only a child can exhibit, Melany asks, “What are you going to do about the whale?”
Merry builds a giant cat/toast powered propeller and a rudder to manouver the planet out of the way of the whale.
Then in the midst of his dance of joy, Merry climbs a tree and gets stuck in it.
Everyone praised Humble and thanked him for his help, but Humble thought they were just being nice.
Licking the last crumbs of whale sushi from her fingers, Whisperless contentedly watches the whale recede into the distance.
Excitedly, Effervescent Melody strums a jolly tune while screaming at the top of her lungs.
Merry, remembering he can fly jumps from the tree and joyfully flies around the planet.
Lucent ate cookies with Melanie’s family and continued on his voyage across the skies.

& Dragons

With the summer break coming, my Pathfinder game is going on hiatus, so I thought I’d try to wrap up with one of the iconic encounters of the game. My party is seventh level, and they are travelling cross country in the dead of winter, so how better to end the season than a White Dragon fight. I also gave them an oncoming winter storm to up the tension a bit. Now I personally dislike the tendency in recent editions of D&D to treat dragons like just another bag of hp and treasure. I think a dragon fight, even against a relatively weak (adult white dragon is a large creature with 13 hd) should always be a fairly difficult encounteer. If you are setting your party against a large number of “true” dragons as a fair fight, you might want to find some other sort of monster to take the role. I’ve written about this before when I posted my Devastator Black Dragon for 4th Edition. Now pathfinder characters aren’t nearly as durable as 4th edition characters, so while I modified the white dragon to make it a bit more interesting, I didn’t go nearly as far as I did with the Black Dragon. I really only added two things, a 30 foot leap attack that allowed it to use one natural attack against every opponent within reach for half damage and send them flying into the nearest snow bank, and I modified the fog spell like ability to be a free action that raises up a 20′ radius obscuring storm of ice and snow.
A party that was less interested in just killing the dragon outright could have either intimidated it or bluffed their way out of the fight, but there really was no way that a “mere” large dragon was going to get away without a fight in the party’s first dragon encounter, so conversation broke down, the party scattered, and the fight was on. I had decided to run the dragon as fairly primal, prone to give in to temporary amusement, not too bright, and more interested in savaging each opponent in turn than in the more tactically sound “eat them one at a time” maneuver. So it would flit from opponent to opponent, using fly and burrow liberally, do something nasty to each target and then move on. With focused attacks, the party being spread out like they were would have spelled doom, but as it stood, the dragon got to attack targets that attracted its attention without worrying about coordinated attacks. By the way, that 12d4 breath weapon? That’s a lot of d4s. He was also thee party’s first encounter with effective levels of spell resistance. Turns out that a sorcerer can just spam fireball until it eventually gets through (also? 7d6 is quite a lot of d6s too.) So the drsagon was a tough, memorable fight that could easily have taken a turn for the tpk but didn’t. The party survived, to have to run for cover in the face of a massive winter hail storm. We’ll see what they find in the ice cave they found at the end of the summer.

The Necrothane Part 1

Deep within the heart of Vostin’s Fang lies the Maze of Bone. At the center of the ever shifting maze, shrouded in the distilled essence of death, there is a stark white fortress, home to one of the more elusive powers of the Na Essad. Born Mortimer Winthelthrop, it was inevitable that he would turn the rage and pain of his early life to the study of death in all its forms. As these things go, his story is pretty standard, undead horde, a few towns razed and then raised to form an unstoppable army, the forces of light gathering against him, plans in disarray, a final escape route surprisingly used before one of the stalwart champions managed to split him down the middle with a gargantuan steel pokey thing.
Unfortunately for him, his escape did not lead him to the hidden stronghold it was supposed to. Instead he found himself in the main gate chamber of the unescapable demiplane of Na Essad. When confronted by the gathered factions of the Fang, he declined to choose an allegiance and instead went wandering the world for a while. The first thing he did was lose his name. He shed his past like his past had shed its respective flesh when he began his reign of terror. He found a world that was teeming with lost spirits and wandering undead, and over a century or so, he came up with an idea. He was still twisted and evil, but murdering and then reanimating all of the people who he had a childhood grudge against took the edge off of his particular mania.
He started harvesting the local undead, gathering them up and locking them away from the people of his new home. Over decades, he searched out a place to build a stronghold, the better to protect himself from meddling wanderers and to provide an isolated holding facility for the captured undead. As time went on, he left his fortress less and less often, becoming more involved in his research.
During one of his infrequent outings, he stumbled upon one of the great secrets of Na Essad. He found one of the Grottos containing the Soulstones of trapped deities. His first instinct was to bend even those powers to his whim, but he triggered Na Essad’s defenses when he started to absorb the trapped powers of a god. He escaped, but barely. The danger presented by his new home caused him to search for an escape, for he no longer felt safe. So concerned was he that he made peace with the Ice Lich of the Great Glacier, one of the undead he had most hoped to capture and bend to his will. The Ice Lich instructed him in the secrets of the great binding. It is the lore of the Giants that, combined with his necromantic mastery, has set him on his current path.
He went forth from the great frozen tower of the Ice Lich and recruited those who would best serve him. His gathered corpse takers travel up and down the Fang, retrieving the bodies of the dead before they can be raised and capturing or dispersing those undead whose creation they were incapable of stopping. His Ossifers or Bone Men provide a public service which is not always welcome, but none deny that the realms they walk are safer now than ever before.
The corpses his servants bring to him are used in the creation of skeletons and zombies that he stores in the Maze of Bones and in crypts hewn from the walls of Vostin’s Fang. The thousands of minor undead he has created as well as all of the greater undead he has captured and bound have in his mind but one purpose. Each one of them is little more than a battery of necromantic energies that he is setting aside for the day his plans reach fruition. His plans are two-fold. First he intends to ascend to godhood by absorbing the necrotic energy bound up in his collected undead, and then he intends to sacrifice himself to power a ritual that he believes will let him pierce the boundaries of Na Essad and return to the greater multiverse as a living mortal. He believes that the death of a god will unleash so much power into the realm of the dead that he’ll be able to bring his mortal self across through the barrier without triggering any of na essad’s defenses.
If the first servators ever find out about his plans, they would certainly oppose him, either sending parties of adventurers in to destroy him, or raising a force of Giants to confront him in his lair. If they fail, the twin pulses of necrotic energy released by his ascension and his subsequent death would be likely to be sufficient to kill almost every living thing on or in Vostin’s Fang. It is also probable that the damage to the intricate bindings that keep the thing at the center of the world both dormant and trapped inside Na Essad will lead to the ultimate destruction of Na Essad and from there the multiverse.