ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

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SPOILERS
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Coming next year in a ToME near you: the Sher'Tul fortress of Yiilkgur

The Fortress is hidden within old sher'tul ruins and onces the player clears it it can be used as a house.
It contrains many rooms, most of which are unavailable at the start and can later be unlocked to provide additional services to the player:
- rod of recall enhancement: the rod degisn seems to have been based on old sher'tul magic (the rod was made by the first halflings to discover the farportals); it can be enhanced to take the player directly to the fortress when recalling
- transformation room: the old experimentation table can be used once to change oneself; the results are not very predictible however
- exploratory farportal: a special farportal that sends the player to a random world from which he must escape (the world/level could be randomly generated!)
- contingency room: if used the room will attune to the player; when he is on the brink of death the fortress will recall him automatically and treat him; side effects probable but unknown; usable only once. Only works in zones that allow worldportation
- automated defence system: it needs to be destroyed to take ownership of the place, but you can reactivate it to fend off random attackers that could break into the fortress. (sometimes when you come back/recall in there would be thives & such around)
- flight system: the fortress is actually a flying citadel, it can be made to fly again and serve as a mobile base of operations (and could be used to explore zones unavailable otherwise)
- recharging magical items: recharge items; maybe for a lower fee; or maybe provide a "fortress remote" that allows to access this feature from within a dungeon without having to recall
- trash disposal: use the powerful alchemical facilities to turn any items that you do not need into gold/power for the fortress

Other ideas are welcome!

I'm pondering an energy system for the house where doing quests for it would unlock more power that could be used to power different powers of the fortress; kind of like a talent system for it.

So what do you think about it ?

-training room - you could generate any monster you have previously beaten(you cant die in here instead if you are about to die you get ported out from room)
-chat room(?) - you can talk directly to any NPC you have encountered(like sun paladins when they find staff whereabouts)
-buff room(?) - you can take some long term buff that will help you in your adventures(sometimes something can go wrong instead as we are dealing with ancient magic here)

Wow. This is so much more than what I expected

Whoah, this sounds really nifty. Here are some of my thoughts.

1) First of all, when someone says "fortress" I imagine something like this. I assume that the story of the fortress will be connected with the Old Forest (the lake of the Old Forest, to be more exact), so will it be a dungeon or actually a fortress that is built on the surface, not under it?.. Personally, I'd like the second variant more: the idea of an ancient fortress standing by the lake is just awesome. Also, will it be randomly generated?

2) I'm not sure about the flight system...

Pros:

• The flight system will help with reaching the 3rd continent when it'll be added.
• It'll allow player to have access to their home from every continent: the house will be there physically.

Cons:

• It isn't that easy to raise a whole dungeon/castle into the sky. Sure, that is handled by magic, but there are limits to it. I'm not saying anything 'bout realism here, but it just could be, well, improper.
• Personally, I would expect to see flying fortress in a steampunk or futuristic setting, not in the fantasy one.

If you ask me, I'd stick with the idea of farportals. They just, heh, give rise to less number of questions.

3) Other features. I like enhancement of RoR, exploratory farportal, transformation room (I wonder how it'll be realised. Will the player get some kind of mutations in the spirit of ADoM or DCSS?) and contingency room. Automated defence system also sounds pretty decent, but that depends on the realization, so I can't say anything now. Other things didn't impress me that much, to be honest.

I think, the main thing is: don't make the house too complicated. Add several nice features (by the way, you didn't say anything about the storage, and I think that house should have it) and that's it, don't overdo it.

Although I do think sometimes there is such a thing as 'overdoing' it - I gotta disagree here...

Reverend Bizarre wrote: [*]It isn't that easy to raise a whole dungeon/castle into the sky. Sure, that is handled by magic, but there are limits to it. I'm not saying anything 'bout realism here, but it just could be, well, improper.

(bold added by me)
The only limits on magic are setting-dependant. Here magic is strong enough to do this
And this would be a Sher'Tul artifact(yeah, think about it - it's an artifact, in a way), not something made by mages from the 'punier' races we can pick for our players.

[*]Personally, I would expect to see flying fortress in a steampunk or futuristic setting, not in the fantasy one.

Not all fantasy has to be the same - for example, not many fantasy game settings have something like runes and infusions, yet here it works quite well.
Even if flying fortresses were definitely a steampunk/futuristic thing, there's nothing bad in having a 'fantasy' setting with other influences, anyway.

Also...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Zonk: well, you have a point there. If DG thinks that flying fortress fits his setting, that's all right. It just seemed a bit bizarre to me at first glance. Then I just want to know how DG envisages the fortress: as a dungeon or as something that is built on the surface.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

He-he, yeah.

Yes the Sher'Tul were *REALLY* more advanced than anybody knows, you'll see as content gets added - a flying fortress is certainly not out of their reach; they had flying cities even

Anyway the flight system is still being pondered for gameplay reasons.

As for the fortress itself, it is buried deep within the lake indeed. That's the reason it was not discovered before.
It was not constructed there however (since it can fly it just flew & crashed there). Think of it as a sunken airship if you want to speak in SF terms

Actually, the stories of magic-powered flying castles and cities are pretty common (frequently combined with stories about how the magic went away without warning and they fell from the sky). It's a classic trope in RPGs, in novels... this isn't anything like unheard of.

Possibly consider making the process two-stage. In the first stage, you clear the Old Forest, and find an entrance to the first room. This gives you a house/storage place, starting relatively early in the game (with appropriate comments telling you that it's safe to leave stuff there). You then have a (significantly higher level) underwater dungeon that you have to fight your way through to get the various important basic systems turned on so that it can actually pump itself clear of water (and possible dredge itself out of the lake). After that, there are a number of interesting rooms of various sorts that you need to do various things to to activate - slotting artifacts into place or buying enough of resource X or saving certain people or whatever.

You could even do something (eventually) with accumulating different sorts of people to run the different rooms for you - with different effects. For example, the effects of the "transformation room" could wind up being very different when run by a Zig wyrmic, an elvish corrupter, or an orcish necromancer.

As for what I think, it's shiny. I don't know how much work it will be for you, but if it looks like it won't be horrible, and you think it will be fun, then that's great. I'm a tch concerned about the possibilities of the transformation room, though. It's the sort of thing that could be pretty cool, or could be pretty weird and broken. I'd be interested to talk more about how it was going to work before it gets implemented. I don't think that "recharge while in dungeon" is necessarily the best idea. I think if you had some sort of "fortress energy" resource (and ways to refill it, and possibly ways to make it self-recharging) then being able to recharge your items with just fortress energy, and no gold, might be reasonable, though.

In terms of unlocking more room types, I think it might be cool to have some sort of a salvage system. Let certain dungeons contain random, inexplicable (and unidentifiable) fortress parts in them. Have a salvage room int he fortress that you could bring these to, that would rebuild/identify them. Some might be working parts in and of themselves, while others might be pieces that could be crafted into parts. Basically none would be worth money. You'd load up on incomprehensible stuff, bring it back to base, and then see what you'd won. Various bits would let you activate or upgrade various rooms, or possibly upgrade the energy system, or buff up the defenses, or whatever. Again, if this is more trouble than it's worth, then don't bother, but I think it might be cool.

May be you can add as an NPC that guy that scattered his journal pages all over the Old Forest. For example, when the player defeats Wrathroot, the dialog with this fellow appears (same way as the dialog appears after clearing Derth from elementals), which triggers the quest.

Wowzers. This is fascinating and surprising!
I really like the ideas.
I sure hope that, apart from the trash disposal, the fort will offer a way to store excess items as well?

I'm not sure about the flying fortress / city thing, it sounds a bit... Final Fantasy..
Don't take me wrong, the FF series are great, but it seems out of setting for the Tome world.

Perhaps, to get the same functionality (mobile base / reach otherwise unreachable spots), a 'dwarven' room could be unlocked, which gives the player the option to
- 'found an outpost', effectively moving the location of the fort's entrance to a location of choice. The player will have to collect 7 dwarves for this *
- 'explore ancient dwarven tunnels', which will lead to aforementioned unreachable spots
- 'pull the lever', alternate way of suicide-quitting, floods the world with magma, with the sound of stampeding elephants in the background

* - text in italics should be taken with a grain of rock salt

It isn't that easy to raise a whole dungeon/castle into the sky. Sure, that is handled by magic, but there are limits to it. I'm not saying anything 'bout realism here, but it just could be, well, improper.

Read some Steven Brust, those are some of my favorite flying castles. Also includes (in the prequels) the magical interruption that Sirrocco mentioned with all of them crashing to the ground at some point in the world's history.

Sirrocco wrote:
In terms of unlocking more room types, I think it might be cool to have some sort of a salvage system. Let certain dungeons contain random, inexplicable (and unidentifiable) fortress parts in them. Have a salvage room int he fortress that you could bring these to, that would rebuild/identify them. Some might be working parts in and of themselves, while others might be pieces that could be crafted into parts. Basically none would be worth money. You'd load up on incomprehensible stuff, bring it back to base, and then see what you'd won. Various bits would let you activate or upgrade various rooms, or possibly upgrade the energy system, or buff up the defenses, or whatever. Again, if this is more trouble than it's worth, then don't bother, but I think it might be cool.

I like this idea, a lot. But instead of having a room just "do" that for you, maybe you need to find an NPC first. Some kind of scholar that dedicated his life to studying the Sher'Tul. He is the only (or one of the only) people that can recognize what those pieces of scrap are, ancient sher'tul artifacts that can be converted to whatever is needed.

After getting the fort maybe a dialogue box telling you, "you realize you have NO idea what any of the writing on tablets, inscriptions on walls, or books say. You just are not studied enough in the ancient ways to know how to reliable reconstruct this place. maybe you could find an archaeologist (new class! studied sher'tul, gets talents based on ancient sher'tul magics/rituals!) to help with this monumental task?"

just an idea.

i'm a tad leery about the flying castle bit, as well - agree w/ martinuzz, its very 'final fantasy'.
but on the whole, i think its an awesome idea. a great way to add basic house features (which many have been clamoring for for awhile) but also adding a whole new cool element to the game.

I have to agree that "Final Fantasy" is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a flying fortress in an RPG. Whist I enjoy the FF seres I think the sort of fantasy flying castles in those games is inappropriate for Maj'Eyal. I guess the important thing is to implement the fortress in such a way that it fits in well with the rest of the game. I think the key to this is emphasising the feel of a Sher'Tul ruin - the place should be really ancient and showing it, with creaking parts, collapsed rooms, plants growing here and there. I also think the utility element should be underplayed - it should mostly serve as a base. And, of course, it should have some interesting Sher'Tul lore (I'll type up some suggestions in the next week or two). I like the idea of it initially being just a base, and gradually gaining new strengths as you unlock deeper sections, with the ultimate power being transcontinental travel.

Neverwinter Nights 2: The Storm of Zehir had it about right.

The stronghold in Neverwinter Nights 2 could have also done it right, but there wasnt a whole lot you could do with the stronghold outside the main storyline.