RPG: Chunk 5

So I’ve been kinda been holding off on the next post in the hope that Tusked would get his shit together and comment or post or something, but I guess custom Magic cards based on rare birds matter more to him than friendship.

Well, fuck him. This is the internet. This is the twenty-first century. I don’t need silly things like “readership” or “attention” to keep myself chugging along. I am a self-sufficient imagination machine and I get 70 miles to the gallon. Here’s the next post.

Story

This section takes two paths, depending on whether you got Vinan or Cathan, but they’re not appreciably different. Either way, you have to head to Phyrenia, Lucan’s historic trading partner and the rival metropolis of Cilusia. If you have Cathan, you head back to Phyrenian High Command and tell them that Lucan was subdued and your mission was a success. If you have Vinan, you also go to Phyrenian High Command, but you deliver an ultimatum instead and tell them that your townsfolk aren’t going to take it anymore.

If you have Cathan, Phyrenian High Command congratulates you and then tells you to run a smuggling ring out of business. If you have Vinan, Phyrenian High Command says that they will only even consider not invading and torching Lucan if you do them a solid and run a smuggling ring out of business. You don’t really have a choice, so you grab your stuff and head out to break some mobster heads. It’s kind of a random sidequest, I am aware, but it provides a break from nasty demons and provides some important stuff to the plot.

You break into a warehouse, storm through it, kill the hell out of a bunch of seedy gangster types and their leader, and you find that they were smuggling, of all things, grain. Grain, to feed impoverished peasants in the southwestern steppes of the continent. You don’t understand, so you head over to track the shipments and see what’s going on.

Phyrenia

Phyrenia is very large, and shaped about the same as Cilusia (four screens for the outskirts, four for the interior, one for the city square). The noticeable difference between the two cities is the art design: Cilusia is a cosmopolitan city full of magic users rocking stately robes and giant bushy beards, but Phyrenia is a cramped, pseudo-steampunk metropolis full of twig-thin engineers and chiseled, businesslike soldier-types. Cilusia has the magic and Phyrenia has the technology. This is the real basis of their rivalry. Another difference is that the two screens on the far east side of Phyrenia are docks, so you obviously can’t get to the world map from them.

The way to get to the gang hideout is this. You get information from the Phyrenian government about a suspected salesman. You find out where he lives, and then you go to his house and arrest him. If you got Cathan, he goes quietly. If you got Vinan, you have to fight him, but he’s not hard. He’s actually just a basic enemy from the dungeon you’re about to enter. When you arrest him, you get his ring, which is how the gang has been identifying him. Then, you go to an alleyway, flash his ring at the bouncer, walk in, and then beat the shit out of the bouncer before he can realize you’re not who you say you are. If you got Cathan, he’s an encounter. If you got Vinan, Vinan does some ridiculous nerve-pinch thing and knocks him out before you have to fight him.

Gang Hideout

This is going to be a pretty small dungeon, and the main puzzle element is block-pushing. Yeah, you read that right – back-to-basics, classic RPG block-pushing puzzles of the devilishly-hard Golden Sun variety. Also, stacking. Here’s how it works. There are piles of crates, which are immobile, but individual crates on top of them can come loose and get pushed around. You can arrage these into stacks of crates, and then use them as stepping-stones to jump across rooms that would otherwise be impossible to traverse. Puzzle-solving like this is pretty freeform, which means that there are a lot of ways to complete the puzzle, but exponentially more ways to completely screw the pooch. Don’t worry; if you fuck up you can just leave the room and come back in with the crates reset.

The dungeon is formatted as a long stretch of storage rooms full of crate puzzles that get progressively larger and more complex, punctuated by little side-hallways that lead to treasure if you want to get it. At the end is a boss. This whole chunk is actually pretty nondescript; I’m having trouble hitting a thousand words here.

Monsters

The Gang Hideout contains Delinquents, Assassins, and Thugs.

Delinquents are pretty weak, but they attack in large groups. They can Attack, Slash (extra damage between one-quarter or one-half more than normal), or Call for Help (always brings in either an Assassin or a Thug).

Assassins are in the mid-range, healthwise, but they can do more damage than any other enemy. They can Attack, Stab (double damage), Observe (sacrifices an action this turn for two Stabs next turn), or Hide (avoids damage for a turn). They can also run from battles, which they will do at random.

Thugs, as can be extrapolated by now, have high health. They can Attack, Pound (one-quarter extra damage; hits all enemies), or Brace (half damage taken this turn).

Boss – Ringleader

Continuing on our odyssey of Recurring RPG Bosses, I thought this would be a good spot to throw in our old friend, Boss Who Calls in Standard Dungeon Enemies to Indiscriminate Frustration on the Part of the Player. This dude can do some damage on his own, but his real issue is that he can Call for Help without using up an action, and will do so if he has less than two guys with him. So he will always have at least two Assassins or Thugs backing him up. And the Assassins won’t run this time. On the plus side, the experience you get from killing them stacks up, so I guess if you leveled really high before fighting him you could just beat up his friends and then get an assload of cumulative experience and gold at the end. Anyway, he can Attack, Stab, Observe (also applies to Pound now), Pound, Brace, and then he can Toss one of three substances – Sand, which sharply drops accuracy, Acid, which deals damage and drops defense, or Oil, which drops attack and speed. Once he’s dead, along with a pile of his friends, you get an Assassin’s Knife, which has a chance to immediately kill an enemy on every attack.

You also get the knowledge that the grain that was being shipped east illegally by these smugglers was laced with a hidden ingredient that would force the grain to burst open into abyssal portals when harvested, effectively allowing demons to attack from every blade of grass in the west. Too bad.

~ by pieboy on August 14, 2008.