Development

[icycalm]

This is the Insomnia thread on my upcoming game Kingslayer, that launches January 1. I have a lot of things to show and explain about it ahead of its launch, so I will take several lengthy posts to do so.

The game's official site is the same as Battlegrounds' since it's in the form of a campaign within it, but I haven't yet put up a section for it. It'll be added closer to release, and I'll link it in this thread. Until then, here's the main site's link for those who need to link something: https://akbattlegrounds.net

[icycalm]

So now that the launch city-building assets have been revealed (Nomadic Era, Rural Era, Suburban Era, Urban Era and Imperial Era, plus Ships & Boats and Siege Engines—don't miss this stuff, especially if you're an RTS/city-building fan, you've never seen such breadth and depth of detail), and the game is set to launch January 1 come hell or high water, and I continue to insist that it'll be 2024 Game of the Year and in fact best game of all time; I think it's time I made a thread on it and explained exactly how it will work. The design has changed and above all been expanded greatly since the last time I detailed it, so even those of you who've followed it closely need to read the new one, and especially if you'll be playing. It's gonna be a long explanation because this is the most complex game design of all time, so grab a beverage and a comfy seat and take your time reading through it. Whether you're a viewer or player, or just a curious reader, you're about to be blown away by the biggest, most complex and above all most interactive game design in the entire history of gaming.

But first off let me relink here the two teaser videos I've linked several times before just to underscore that this is a REAL game that's already playable on my computer (I recorded the videos on it myself, in real-time in-engine) and has been for some time, and also that it looks (and sounds) REALLY good:

First Teaser | Alex Kierkegaard's Kingslayer (2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K7wG1K ... XVyolQO3wj



Second Teaser | Alex Kierkegaard's Kingslayer (2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_9rZIz ... XVyolQO3wj



"But icy, these clips are old news, don't you have anything new to share?" I do, but I'd rather not spoil any more than I already have, so instead I will give you some new screens from other Battlegrounds regions and campaigns that highlight the power of Cult Engine 3 and how far the art team has come with assets and area/set design. All the screens below are from Planescape and have been taken from our until-now under-wraps new project to render all of Planescape in Cult Engine 3, and they speak for themselves, so I'll let them do the talking.















So just to be clear, I am not "merely" making the best and most complex game of all time, I am also making one of the most beautiful games of all time. And the one with the best soundtrack [ > ]. Just sayin'. In case anyone was confused about any of this. Because there have been confused people before, very confused people who thought that because I am not personally coding every single line in the game, I am not designing, directing and producing it. The industry is still decades behind me and it'll take them a very long time to come around to the idea that icycalm and Cult Games jumped to the top of the heap out of seemingly nowhere in a couple of short years. They still need to get to grips with genius, and that programmers don't have it and never will (I mean artistic genius, obviously some of them have programming genius, but these aren't the same thing, in fact they're mutually exclusive, as I am in the middle of explaining in my epic essay The End of the Tyranny of Programmers).

So these new screens aren't of Alex Kierkegaard's Kingslayer—the 2024 GOTY—but they are of Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds—the 2020 GOTY—and players will eventually reach these locations and adventure in them if they choose to head that way. Suffice to say Kingslayer has plenty of locations at comparable levels of fidelity, and the world will start seeing and getting to know them in January, when the game launches.


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART II...

[icycalm]

So let's dive right into the core of what I have to explain today which is the ways in which the design has changed and expanded since the last iteration of it I detailed. That version was called "Alex Kierkegaard's West Marches", and it was a wholly distinct game from Paizo's landmark 2010 Kingmaker Adventure Path. Kingslayer, on the other hand, as the name implies, isn't distinct. In short, I have merged the two campaigns, with a much-modified Kingmaker being now merely the prologue of Kingslayer. So let's understand why I made this change, and why it turbocharges the design and greatly raises complexity, interactivity, thematic coherence, and so on. And to do this I have to first of all basically REVIEW Kingmaker here (I mean the original GMRPG, not the dumbed-down CRPG minigame); I have to explain what Kingmaker tried to do, and what it succeeded at doing, and what it failed at, so I can then show how my design steps in and fixes all the issues so that it'll become the perfect and perfectly-stable base and prologue on which to build an entire new massive and massively interactive edifice on top of it.

Kingmaker was Paizo's effort to adapt Ben Robbins' West Marches campaign design to their Pathfinder setting and Adventure Path line of monthly campaign books, and since West Marches was itself an adaptation of the earlier hexcrawl style of campaigns that were common in the '80s but disappeared with the coming of AD&D 2E in the '90s, Kingmaker was essentially Paizo's attempt to revive the hexcrawl. But it was far from merely that. Because on top of the sandbox hexcrawl mechanics, Paizo also decided to add an unprecedented city-building aspect to the game. Sandbox city-building hexcrawling would already have been the most ambitious game design of all time if Paizo wasn't trying to shoehorn it in one of their grand narrative Adventure Path campaigns, thereby skyrocketing the complexity and making the design even tougher to devise and implement.

But Paizo somehow pulled it off, and Kingmaker should probably be taking the 2010 GOTY title.

But there were issues. The most glaring of these, that reviewers note again and again, is that it makes little sense for a king to spend 3 weeks out of every month personally chasing down bears in the countryside or whatever, or adventuring at all really. Other issues were the fairly weak plot by Paizo standards (which are sky-high, so by general GMRPG standards the plot is still good, and by CRPG standards, which are non-existent, it's a masterpiece), and finally the fact that the BBEG shows up in Book 6 pretty much out of nowhere. All these issues stem from a single factor: that Paizo was shoehorning sandbox hexcrawling and city-building into their monthly AP format that simply wasn't made for such open-ended designs. Keep in mind this line of products makes its money mostly from subscribers, so it's not like they could suddenly double the pagecounts to accommodate the vast additional complexity of the design. They had to cram the complexity in the exact same pagecounts used for even the most linear of their campaigns, and as a result the end product suffered.

But it is still one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed APs ever, which is also why it's the most adapted, having received a Second Edition adaptation, a 4K Foundry VTT adaptation that according to Foundry themselves is the biggest and most complex product they offer in their store as of this writing, and even a CRPG adaptation that's among the best CRPGs of all time, if not the best. So really the complaints I outlined above, while valid, are insignificant and easily ignored compared to the scale of the achievement. It's like whining that Planetary Annihilation planets aren't really planets but more like asteroid- and moon-sized. That's obviously true, but it's only a deal-breaker to those too artistically insensitive to be touched by the scale and scope and glory of that game. Exactly the same applies to OG 2010 Kingmaker and its current adaptations.

But not to my Kingslayer. Because I've solved all the issues and even added layers of complexity on top that no one else has even imagined, let alone implemented. Oh yeah.

So first off I need to explain why I killed off my "West Marches" title. I killed it when I realized that the Stolen Lands in which Kingmaker is set ARE Paizo's version of the West Marches. So it wouldn't make sense to have two West Marches regions in Golarion, let alone in the Inner Sea region (where most of the APs take place). For first off all, there is simply no space for the second region; the Inner Sea is simply too crammed with stuff to find the space for it, and the same is true really of the entire planet to the point where Paizo Creative Director James Jacobs suggested I try ANOTHER PLANET when I floated the idea of adding my own West Marches to Golarion. In the end I hit upon a genius solution to the problem that not even James Jacobs conceived: I would simply add my West Marches TO THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN by simply adding a huge island there. After all, it's not like they will write an AP that takes place in the middle of an empty ocean. So that is where my design was for a long time.

But I was never fully satisfied with it because there is such a thing as TOO MUCH content for a fictional setting to have. No other setting has this problem because no other fictional setting is as well-developed as Paizo's Pathfinder setting, but Pathfinder DOES have it if you try to shoehorn entire new regions of your own making into it. A brand-new kingdom in the middle of the Inner Sea region—and even TWO new kingdoms if we consider the "Eastern Empire" that the West Marches design implies—pushes the Pathfinder setting firmly into culture-overload territory until a kind of disgust starts to arise with the jumble of regions and customs and ethnicities and their (very complex) interrelations. So when I realized that Stolen Lands = West Marches I was glad to wipe out the problem with one move by simply relocating my campaign into the Stolen Lands.

That's when I started carefully reading the Kingmaker books, to see to what extent it was possible to fuse my design with Kingmaker's, and as it turned out it's not merely possible but it's the ideal way to solve all of Kingmaker's problems and even some issues I was having with my own design. The end result is nothing short of stunningly efficient, effective and complex while simultaneously supremely elegant.

To understand everything that I'll be explaining next you need to understand a bit about Kingmaker's structure. The AP is comprised of 6 books, like all First Edition APs. Without spoiling much, in the first book, the characters arrive in the Stolen Lands as agents of Brevoy with a charter to clear it of bandits and monsters, but by the end of Book 1 they are expected to have established enough of a foothold in the region to declare themselves its rulers. And that's when one of them becomes king (and the rest his cabinet ministers). The remaining 5 books detail the expansion of the kingdom, and again without spoiling much, the entire campaign ends at about the point when tensions begin flaring up with neighboring kingdoms. There may or may not be some active conflict with a neighbor by the end, but even if there is, it's not a huge affair—nothing like the massive conflicts I am designing for my game whose scale hasn't even been seen in dedicated strategy and wargames. So it makes sense for me to use Kingmaker as the PROLOGUE of my game, the entire point of which as the name implies will be to make someone a king, and then build my far more complex strategy/wargame-RPG hybrid on top of it where of course the players will engage in warfare with at least some of their neighbors.

About those neighbors, by the way, take a look at a map of the River Kingdoms, which is the region in which the Stolen Lands are situated:



As you can see, the Stolen Lands (at the top-right, just below Brevoy) are a fairly small slice of the River Kingdoms despite being hundreds of square miles across. Pathfinder is BIG. But the point is that the moment the players have turned the Stolen Lands into a significant force, they will immediately attract the attention of the perpetually-warring River Kingdoms, and doubtless also that of full-fledged states like Brevoy, Numeria and Galt. That is one tough neighborhood to be in, and Kingmaker in no way, shape or form provides the tools to deal with these potential conflicts. It ends pretty much precisely at the point where they will surely arise. That said, Kingmaker is designed to play out over no less than a DECADE of in-game time, because that's how long it takes to found a kingdom, so the players certainly have plenty of time before they need to worry about an invasion; no one in the region will care if some crazy adventurers clear some ground and put a few buildings down before wearing a tinfoil hat and declaring themselves "kings".

But I still can't use Kingmaker as-is because it is designed for a party of 4 players while I could potentially have several parties and dozens of players running around the Stolen Lands, which btw is exactly how the West Marches design works, which Paizo dumbed down to a 4P single party in order to shoehorn it into its monthly Adventure Path book format. So first of all, I am going back to the original multiparty freeform MMO design of the West Marches, thus greatly increasing the game's complexity. And in order to do that I'll be adding a ton of locations and encounters on the map. That's how I get to fuse my design with Paizo's, with every piece of content of both being utilized and nothing being thrown away.

My Kingslayer is therefore swallowing Kingmaker, but not whole. First it chews on it to break it up into logical chunks, and only then does it swallow those. So first off, I've broken out Kingmaker's Book 1, and expanded its scope to dozens of players. This will be the NEW Kingmaker, the Cult Games adaptation of it rendered fully in Cult Engine 3 and comprised of just one Paizo book plus about 3x the content added by Cult Games' dozens of contributors. Once that adventure ends (it's now an adventure, not a whole campaign, because it ends at about 3rd-5th level), that's when Kingslayer proper starts, and that's comprised of entirely new content and structure by me PLUS all the locations and encounters from Kingmaker Books 2-6 SPRINKLED AROUND AS LEVELING FILLER. Now you might wonder whether this isn't ruining the flow of the Kingmaker encounters, but the answer is no, because Kingmaker didn't have much of a flow to begin with, and everyone's main complaint was precisely that the encounters don't really flow much and each book feels too much self-contained compared to the typical grand narrative that spans Paizo's regular Adventure Paths. But that's what happens when you have a sandbox in which the players are free to roam: the main narrative suffers, and there's not much that can be done about that. Nevertheless the players report much more satisfaction from Kingmaker than from many other campaigns with far stronger narratives simply because the whole point of a sandbox is for the players to... MAKE their own narrative duh, by their choices guiding the story. And for precisely this reason there is no great harm done to the game by sprinkling the Kingmaker encounters around my own ones. And by the way, the narrative in my Kingslayer, though still not at the level of the best linear narratives—because it can't be, since it isn't linear—is far superior to Kingmaker's, so I have completely fixed that deficiency of the original game's at the same time as ratcheting up its interactivity and freeform nature.


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART III...

[icycalm]

Let’s switch gears for a moment and talk about music, specifically epic metal music. Ever since getting into roleplaying games in the early ‘90s I have wanted to use epic metal with them. The first album I ever bought as a child—Manowar’s landmark 1992 The Triumph of Steel—I got shortly after I began playing D&D partly because I’d heard they play too, and their songs definitely felt like it. It seemed to me this music—which was the first music I had heard that got me attracted to music at all—was tailor-made for the game. And yet throughout my GMing career in the ‘90s I never managed to sneak even a single track into a session.

I had to spend decades thinking about this stuff and growing into a world-historic genius philosopher to figure out the reason for my failure, which is that epic metal clashes with D&D at such a fundamental level that these two artforms (of epic metal and roleplaying I mean) cannot be combined/synthesized (except in the extremely limited fashion I am about to reveal). The problem is what is called intractable and my art theory explains why. All art is about storytelling, even music, and the best music tells the deepest and most complex stories. But a roleplaying session also tells its own story, which will of course be different than what a good piece of music tells. So when you try to layer these two stories on top of each other, they clash and cannot be meshed harmoniously. That’s why soundtracks are always bad music: they must be very simplistic and inoffensive in order to merely accentuate and emphasize the play, opera, movie or game, instead of overwhelming it and drowning it out (with opera soundtracks being the best since in opera at least all of the dialogue is essentially music). There is no piece of visual art to which you can add Iced Earth’s “The Hunter”, for example. It’s such an aggressive piece of music that it will destroy anything you add it to. It tells such a strong story that the idea of adding a second story to the work is ridiculous, and the same is true of all great music; you simply can’t make a soundtrack out of great music. Now someone will say and what about Woody Allen soundtracks that are all classical masterpieces? But Woody Allen crops five seconds here and there lol, he doesn’t play an entire 40-minute symphony lmao, so it’s not a masterpiece anymore. Five seconds of a Mozart symphony isn’t a Mozart symphony anymore, because you can’t make good music in five seconds. The reason Allen takes five seconds and not the whole thing is because the symphony has its own ups and downs, its own succession of feelings, which will obviously not match in the least those of the movie. So the most that can be done is to cannibalize one of the works and graft the butchered pieces onto the other, and that’s what Allen has done. To good effect mind you, but this isn’t music anymore, it’s a mere soundtrack, and if you removed the video and just listened to it you’d realize how crap it is. True soundtracks are unlistenable to those who have solid musical taste. But please don’t confuse that with cropped tracks, or with e.g. the opening or end credits tracks, which can be good music because there’s no movie story there to ruin!

Which brings me back to my Battlegrounds and the way I figured out to at last integrate epic metal into it. My Kingslayer is the campaign with which I will introduce epic metal into the game in the form of end credits music. That’s all the role that this music will play in my game, but this role is significant because my game will feature dozens of campaigns, maybe hundreds some day, which means hundreds of epic metal songs! Finally I will get to utilize my vast knowledge of the genre, leveraging it at last at the age of 45 to enrich even further the soundtrack of the greatest game and artwork ever!

So behold the end credits song of Kingmaker, Avenged Sevenfold’s “Hail To The King”!

Kingmaker End Song: Hail To The King
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DelhLppPSxY

[Verse 1]
Watch your tongue or have it cut from your head
Save your life by keeping whispers unsaid
Children roam the streets, now orphans of war
Bodies hanging in the streets to adore
Royal flames will carve a path in chaos
Bringing daylight to the night (Night)
Death is riding into town with armor
They've come to take all your rights

[Chorus]
Hail to the king
Hail to the one
Kneel to the crown
Stand in the sun
Hail to the king
(Hail, hail, hail)
The King

[Verse 2]
Blood is spilt while holding keys to the throne
Born again but it’s too late to atone
No mercy from the edge of the blade
Dare escape and learn the price to be paid
Let the water flow with shades of red now
Arrows black out all the light (Light)
Death is riding into town with armor
They've come to grant you your rights

[Chorus]
Hail to the king
Hail to the one
Kneel to the crown
Stand in the sun
Hail to the king
(Hail, hail, hail)
The king

[Guitar Solo]

[Bridge]
There's a taste of fear (Hail, hail, hail)
When the henchmen call (Hail, hail, hail)
Iron fist to tame the land (Hail, hail, hail)
Iron fist to claim it all

[Chorus]
Hail to the king
Hail to the one
Kneel to the crown
Stand in the sun
Hail to the king
Hail to the one
Kneel to the crown
Stand in the sun
Hail to the king
(Hail, hail, hail)
The king

As explained earlier, however, Kingmaker is no longer a full 6-part campaign in my Battlegrounds, it’s merely a single-part adventure, at the end of which—hopefully—some player will be crowned king, and that’s when the end song will play, and the SECOND part of my Kingslayer will begin. Because Kingmaker is the prologue/first part of my Kingslayer, which is named thus because, just as the goal of Kingmaker is to make a king, the goal of my Kingslayer is to slay kings, in the plural, since by that point there will be multiple kings to be slain; first of all the player character king in PVP, or the neighboring kings in PVE. And once a player king is slain, and the crown passes on to a new set of bloodstained hands, that’s when the Kingslayer end song will play, which is Halocene’s cover of “Hail To The King”.

Kingslayer End Song: Hail To The King (Halocene Cover ft. Cole Rolland)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bkFRgXaetAQ



Halocene’s cover is a clear superior to the original, which nicely complements the fact that my Kingslayer will be a clear superior to Kingmaker, though the distance in the latter case is much greater so that my game cannot in any way be considered a “cover”, a mere modification, since it’ll feature an order of magnitude more content, swallowing Kingmaker whole and reducing it to a mere prologue.


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART IV...

[icycalm]

Before discussing that content however I must explain the framework within which it will be delivered. As you may know, the original concept—back when the project would have been a West Marches campaign unrelated to Kingmaker—was to render the entire West Marches in Cult Engine 3 down to "millimeter detail", as Chris Roberts is fond of saying for his Star Citizen. And we did manage to produce the opening area for that campaign, a one-square-kilometer region that included the starter town and the surrounding hills, lakes, roads, and some points of interest. It was the coolest gaming environment I had ever seen, and I was dying to show it to people. However, there were issues. First off, it took a full week to put together (meaning just the terrain; the town and POIs were already built by others), and it was such a tough endeavor that the map builder quit at the end of it. I couldn't even entice him back with extra money (I already paid about $100 for that square kilometer). He outright called me crazy for being so ambitious.



Now that in itself wasn't a show-stopper and I was in talks with several other map builders to continue the work. In the last resort I had guides on how to do this stuff and was perfectly prepared to learn to do it on my own (though this of course would have significantly slowed development). But when I finally realized, for the reasons explained earlier, that I would have to scratch the West Marches and use Paizo's Stolen Lands instead, this idea became dead in the water. Because each HEX out of the HUNDREDS in the Stolen Lands is TWELVE MILES ACROSS, for a total area PER HEX of just under NINETY-FIVE SQUARE MILES. Do you understand what I am talking about? I am talking NINETY-FIVE maps each of which takes A WEEK to make merely so as to plonk down A FUCKING SINGLE TINY CAVE in them. Yep, that's Kingmaker for you. Of course some hexes have bandit camps or settlements in them, but most have next to nothing since this is supposed to be a wilderness after all, indeed the wildest area in the entire Inner Sea region. And you can't shrink it down because the kingdom-building rules are made to work with precisely this hex size. Besides, it would look stupid to shrink it down, as stupid as CRPGs look when they put the "fire" region three screens away from the "ice" region—and the starting town three further screens away. In Kingmaker you're supposed to be building MULTIPLE towns all the way up to full-blown cities; they can't be within freakin' walking distance! They must be dozens and hundreds of miles apart, ensconced in thousands of square miles of plains and forests and mountains because that's the size of a Pathfinder/medieval kingdom, and it is practically impossible to render it all in Cult Engine 3 at the moment because we lack the tools.

The tools are in development however. But we have no ETA on them, and it could be years before they're ready. Even in the best case scenario, we're talking half a year to a year before we can BEGIN using them, before we've even built a single hex! And because I don't want to delay Kingslayer's start that long, here is the solution:



That's exactly what you think it is: an overworld of the Stolen Lands built in Cult Engine 3, with each hex being exactly what it is in the books: just under 95 square miles. Each party or character (for solo players) will get a token on this overworld, and move it around in traditional D&D hexcrawling fashion. Probably danjiro is the only one of our players who knows how that works besides me—because it's very old-school, we're talking '80s—but I will explain to everyone the mechanics in the first session, no worries. And when you arrive at or discover a point of interest, we zoom in and play it in full 3D millimeter detail. And we shall of course have overworld music per region etc. It will be grand!


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART V...

[icycalm]

In fact it will be much grander than these locations have ever been, because... I will replace them with the best Cult Engine 3 sets ever. To understand what I mean, take a look at a bandit camp from the books:



This is how you would have played Kingmaker in a virtual tabletop, if you played it at any time since its release in 2010. And even with the just-released 4K Foundry adaptation, it's the same 2D graphics just at higher resolution and with some more detail.

Now check out how one Cult Games builder who loves the campaign adapted this location for Cult Engine 3:





Pretty nice, right? It's accurate to the original, and will get the job done in a pinch. But... it's not stunning and inspiring in the way the best original Cult Engine 3 sets are.

By the way, here's the same scene in the Owlcat CRPG:



I don't know wtf is going on here, but it doesn't look anything like the original to me, and moreover half of the approaches seem cropped? WTF you can only approach from two directions? And of course you can't climb walls or walk on roofs, etc. Typical CRPG garbage. I swear to god programmers hate art and try to destroy it as much as they can wherever they find it, especially good art. They fucking hate it with a passion! If you must deal with one of them at all, chain them to a radiator in the basement and throw them stale bread and brackish water ONLY AFTER they've completed the tasks you've assigned them to your satisfaction. Under no circumstances allow them creative control over the work, and if they offer an opinion, shoot them and replace them. That at any rate is how we treat programmers at Cult Games studios (but don't tell anyone), and the results speak for themselves.

In fact here is one such result below. Behold a bandit camp custom-built from the ground up to take advantage of Cult Engine 3's strengths, while minimizing its weaknesses:



Night and day, right? There's no comparison at all to this complexity, smoothness and sheer beauty with what was merely adapted from a 2D map, or worse still, entrusted to the dimwit programmers who control CRPG development with a death grip and are strangling the life out of them.

Even more stunning is this other bandit camp, again only achievable due to the power of Cult Engine 3:



This is even further removed from the 2D map as it's built into the excavated hillside! No 2D artist would have conceived this; the limitations of his tools necessarily limit his imagination, like a costume designer who works on black and white films, or a sound designer working on... silent ones.

And I have over a DOZEN such unique 3D bandit camp designs compared to Kingmaker's one or two 2D ones and the CRPG's stupid botched adaptations of them!

And I haven't even showed you the insane camerawork with which these incredible locations will be experienced in the game, because I can't show you without video! This is the last camp, seen from above, but I can't show you the smooth movement from side to above, nor how the camera will pan with EVERY player's turn to zoom in on him and his predicament after having rotated all around the battlefield:



You've never seen a game like this. You've hardly even seen a movie. I'll shut up about the camera now because no amount of words can do it justice. You'll have to wait for January to see it in action. True 3D roleplaying is about to arrive, and only icycalm and Cult Games can bring it!


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART VI...

[icycalm]

So for Kingslayer we will be adapting few if any original Kingmaker building designs. In the case of the bandit camps, I've sprinkled in the adapted Stag Lord's Fort among the rest, because why not? It's nice enough (it's not supposed to be an architectural wonder, after all; it's just a hastily erected half-ruined fort) and we could use as many of those as we can get. But in other cases such as settlements and towns, adaption is practically impossible—you saw how averse the best builders are to it, and as I explained, with good reason—so I'll be replacing the originals with brand new 3D designs.

What effect will this have on the setting and game balance?

None. Literally none. Let's take the example of a cave with hostile denizens, traps and treasure. The cave will be different, but the denizens, the traps and the treasure will be exactly the same, though placed in different locations. That is all. Same with towns and settlements. Different layout—fully three-dimensional and much more detailed—but the mayor, the butcher and so on from the books will still be there, along with all the gear, traps, encounters and opportunities—only in different locations. No one playing the game will be able to tell the difference except those who've played the CRPG. But as we've just seen, the CRPG itself takes heavy liberties with the location design, so who the fuck knows, and who the fuck cares, which version is accurate to which.

So in essence what I've done is adapt THE BOOKS to my 3D maps, and not the 3D maps to the books, as everyone else is doing (including Owlcat) and therefore ruining the maps. This way we get to preserve the genius of BOTH the books AND the 3D set builders, and let me tell you, the result is incredible. You won't believe your eyes with what you'll be seeing, and it'll blow away even the CRPG in this respect (which is full of invisible walls and single-story buildings because their engine doesn't rotate so it doesn't do height well), let alone the 2D maps of the books. Could we have done it the other way around, PROPERLY? Yes, but... we'd have to pay a lot of money to professional 3D modelers and level designers to adapt the 2D maps to 3D while painstakingly enriching them with three-dimensional features and details, and even modifying them where necessary, to achieve a great 3D result that still adheres to the original maps as close as possible. But since we can't afford this, that's why I went the opposite way, because I can adapt the books' text to the new 3D maps myself with the utmost care without having to pay anyone for it. I am a writer and game designer, so I can do this job; I am not a modeler and level designer, so I can't do that one, or at least can't do it well. Get it? I simply made the most of my talents, skills and resources, unlike all the GMs on Tales Tavern running Kingmaker who are churning out subpar versions of the 2D maps and then inflicting them on their players, not to mention Owlcat, who it appears are making levels that are WORSE than the original 2D maps lmao. Do you even level design, bro? Sorry I meant tovarich.

So it looks like with Kingslayer the world will get three different versions of every Kingmaker location: Paizo books, Owlcat CRPG, and Cult Games GMRPG. Four versions if you count the 4K Foundry adaptation as a separate version. That's what happens to cool, popular works: they get adapted, cloned and imitated ad infinitum. And no bonus points for guessing whose adaptation will be the best.

Now all the above applies strictly to the Stolen Lands. What about beyond that region? What happens when the players step outside of it?

First off, as aforesaid, that region is tens of thousands of square miles and the majority of both Kingmaker and Kingslayer take place within it, with the latter introducing far more—and more extensive—location encounters plus higher city-building tiers all the way up to imperial and... possibly beyond (whereas the biggest thing you can build in OG Kingmaker is a mere castle, not even a citadel, let alone an imperial palace). But it still takes place in the same region. So a party that comes to dominate the region can keep playing there for years without stepping foot outside it, if they want—until they come in conflict with a neighbor, at which point they might be forced to. They can certainly try to remain friends with everyone, but the River Kings in particular tend to be unstable people, which is why the region is a clusterfuck. Moreover, if the players really want to reach the Imperial Era, they will HAVE to expand beyond the Stolen Lands because the resources needed for these sprawling marble complexes and skyscrapers need to be amassed from somewhere, not to mention the treasure needed to erect them. So definitely Kingslayer's endgame will involve some kingslaying. That said, the full Ultimate Intrigue rules (currently being unlocked by the Oppara Crew a couple thousand miles to the south in the War for the Crown campaign) will be available by then, so maybe a party can try a full-diplomat build and skillfully maneuver all the way to an empire via trading, subterfuge, marriages and coups. Who knows if this is even possible. But I look forward to finding out how far in that direction the game can go, if the players want to try it.

But they will still have to step outside the Stolen Lands in that case, if only so as to manage their enlarged domain. So in what engine will we explore these lands?

For the full-blown neighboring states of Brevoy, Numeria and Galt, there's no question: the moment you step in them, we switch to Cult Engine 1, as that's where we have them fully built in many adventures and campaigns and sourcebooks. But the River Kingdoms—in which the Stolen Lands belong—are a different matter.

I believe we have a good chance of fully building those out in Cult Engine 3 over the next few years. I am already pretty close to doing the two immediate southern neighbors, Pitax and Mivon. Check out Pitax's description btw, it's hilarious.

Pitax is the domain of Castruccio Irovetti, a petty tyrant who fancies himself a god. Pitax is the name of his region within the River Kingdoms as well as the name of his capital city. It seems the River Kingdoms attract these sorts of deluded megalomaniacs, with the kingdom of Razmiran ruled over by the similarly deluded Razmir. The city of Pitax is filled with trashy art and bad sculpture, created by the masses of enslaved artists and poets that Irovetti maintains to massage his ego. The city suffers under Irovetti's rule, as his arrogant reign has turned the nearby countries of Numeria and Brevoy against him, and alienated Pitax from potential sources of trade.

So as you can see, if the players are to attack a neighbor, the small, isolated and badly-ruled River Kingdoms are the easiest targets. Paizo knew what it was doing when building out their world. So again, the question is if we can build these kingdoms in Cult Engine 3, starting with the most immediate neighbors.

And as aforesaid, I think it can be done, and done stylishly. Check out some buildings from a very good builder with a unique style.



























If you compare these with the Ultimate Edition city-building assets I've linked earlier you'll see they are completely different.

This is what it looks like when it's all put together:



Stunning, no? Zoom in to see how tiny the characters are compared to the hulking buildings. Average homes in my game are bigger than whole castles in CRPGs; the programmers have no idea what real buildings look like, because they've never stepped outside.

So the Ultimate Edition assets and architecture style will come to define the Stolen Lands (or whatever name the victorious group gives to the region, after taming it, if they choose to rename it), while this other creator's style will be the Pitax style, originating from before Irovetti took over and started uglifying the place. Similarly I have in mind several other creators with unique styles (all the best creators have unique styles, while the average blend together), and I've already begun assigning them to the various River Kingdoms after a careful reading of the area sourcebook.



Moreover, even though all these styles differ, there is still an underlying unity between them, since they all use the same building blocks that Cult Engine 3 provides, and THIS underlying unity is the River Kingdoms style that differentiates the region from Brevoy, Numeria, Galt, and all the rest of the Inner Sea states. And the rough, blocky nature of the assets—their slightly Minecrafty nature, to put it plainly—accords well with the rough, warlike nature of the River Kingdoms where powers rise and fall faster than anywhere else in the Inner Sea, and where buildings therefore don't tend to last long either.

The River Kingdoms of northeastern Avistan have long been a haven for inland pirates, anarchists, exiles, and anyone else who does not fit into the more "civilized" nations. The Kingdoms are by no means a unified nation, but rather a constantly shifting group of small city-states and fiefdoms (never larger than a few thousand souls), each at odds with the others, both to gain more power and prevent their own demise.

Pretty cool how that worked out, no? A fine synergy between Pathfinder lore and the practical realities of Cult Engine 3 development. All I am doing here is making the best of all these tools and assets, and as you can see the end result I have achieved is a tremendously superior approach to what every other GM does, which is pull from Tales Tavern any building in any style that he happens to need, and plunk it down in any region, until everything everywhere looks the same. In contrast, when you step into a new region in my game, you'll know instantly it's a new region.

And for the players who feel a little sad seeing these cool new buildings I just showed you and knowing they can't build them in the Stolen Lands, fret not, because I am adding mechanics whereby, if you capture an area, you also culturally appropriate it. These are the Ultimate Edition Cultural Appropriation mechanics, which are like collecting blueprints in Rust (and coming soon to Star Citizen, which copied it from Rust like I did). The idea is that, once you have conquered a region, you also have access to its architects, engineers and builders, and you can send them wherever you want to build what they know how to build. But the further from their homeland you send them, the higher the cost.

Even higher will be the cost of sending out a team to far off lands to hire (or kidnap, North Korea-style) a bunch of specialists to bring back and train your people to build the distant land's buildings, without having to conquer it. Oh yeah, we'll have mechanics for this too, though this would entail hiring a Cult Engine 3 expert creator to adapt the Paizo drawings to 3D, and this cost will be passed on to the players, so I imagine it'll be sparingly used, and that makes good lore sense too, since crazy North Korean-like dictators are rare even in fantasy worlds.


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART VII...

[icycalm]

Made some additions to the last chapter's text. All the bolded text below is new. I had meant to bring up these points in my original pass, but I forgot about it. There are just so many points that need to be made that, if I am not being meticulous with going through my notes, I forget some. I have a dozen pages of notes on this essay, and imma get through all of them by the time this is done.

Moreover, even though all these styles differ, there is still an underlying unity between them, since they all use the same building blocks that Cult Engine 3 provides, and THIS underlying unity is the River Kingdoms style that differentiates the region from Brevoy, Numeria, Galt, and all the rest of the Inner Sea states. And the rough, blocky nature of the assets—their slightly Minecrafty nature, to put it plainly—accords well with the rough, warlike nature of the River Kingdoms where powers rise and fall faster than anywhere else in the Inner Sea, and where buildings therefore don't tend to last long either.

The River Kingdoms of northeastern Avistan have long been a haven for inland pirates, anarchists, exiles, and anyone else who does not fit into the more "civilized" nations. The Kingdoms are by no means a unified nation, but rather a constantly shifting group of small city-states and fiefdoms (never larger than a few thousand souls), each at odds with the others, both to gain more power and prevent their own demise.

Pretty cool how that worked out, no? A fine synergy between Pathfinder lore and the practical realities of Cult Engine 3 development. All I am doing here is making the best of all these tools and assets, and as you can see the end result I have achieved is a tremendously superior approach to what every other GM does, which is pull from Tales Tavern any building in any style that he happens to need, and plunk it down in any region, until everything everywhere looks the same. In contrast, when you step into a new region in my game, you'll know instantly it's a new region.

So now you've also had a brief intro to the River Kingdoms, to help you decide if this region and campaign fits your tastes.

I still have about half a dozen big chapters to post before the entire design is online. It's the craziest game design ever, you won't believe the scale and scope and complexity I am going for. Two irl decades to play through. Not one, as I've stated in the past: Two.

We'll see how many are crazy enough to begin this adventure with me on January 1. Never mind how many will finish it. The important thing is to get the ball rolling.

Once the entire design is online, we'll start a separate thread in the Battlegrounds forum for sign-ups. I expect this to happen about the middle of December. And then January 1 we start rolling characters.

That's my New Year's Resolution, and I can't wait!!!

[icycalm]

After further reflection, I have great news regarding the composition of the various engines with which I plan to render the Stolen Lands, the River Kingdoms, and their neighbors in Kingslayer and beyond. Take another look at the River Kingdoms map I showed earlier.



The Stolen Lands and the River Kingdoms will of course be rendered fully in Cult Engine 3, as aforesaid. Numeria to the northwest will be done in Cult Engine 1 because there's an entire Adventure Path that takes place there, Iron Gods, and we have that fully prepared in CE1.

But what about Brevoy to the north, and Galt to the east? Up till now I had no special plans for them. I knew I couldn't do them in CE3 because we simply don't have enough sufficiently different assets for them, and may never have them at the current pace of development. Moreover, there are no Adventure Paths set in these two nations, so we don't have any of their locations prepared in Cult Engine 1 either. Brevoy has a couple of Pathfinder Society Scenarios plus a Module (i.e. a standalone adventure), and Galt also has a couple of those PLUS one deluxe 64-page adventure called Night of the Gray Death. And this is the one that gave me the idea that I am about to explain here.



As you can see what with the masked ball and guillotine, not to mention the adventure's name, this is a dark adventure, and it is fitting for the region because Galt in general is a dark nation. It's supposed to be a version of Revolutionary France where the murdering never stopped and "once high ideals have been laid low and mob rule has led to chaos". The city is now ruled by successive Revolutionary Councils while its justice system is made into a grotesque parody by the Gray Gardeners.


A final blade, which looks similar to a fancy guillotine. A Gray Gardener stands next to it, holding a long metal rod.

The Gray Gardeners are the hooded executioners of Galtan justice, and are violent, mob-ruled, and rarely just. During the ever-changing Red Revolution that has soaked Galt in blood for over 40 years, the Gray Gardeners have remained a constant. They have seen revolutionary leaders rise, and then separated their heads from their bodies scant months later. The Gray Gardeners are the guardians and maintainers of the final blades, the guillotines which are the most feared symbols of Galtan justice.

Gray Gardeners abduct a man in Litran.

So Galt is one of the darkest nations in the Inner Sea region, which is where... Cult Engine 3.75 comes in (internal codename: Dungeon Alchemist).

I haven't talked about this engine since I unveiled it in April 2022 because I lost interest in it. And the reason I lost interest is primarily because... it's too dark. I told the guys working on it that all their assets and effects were just too damn dark to the point that if I was forced to play in this engine for a long time, I'd get depressed. It looks like it would work for the odd Ravenloft adventure, but you can't use it for standard D&D and Pathfinder fantasy, the art is just too different, and it doesn't invoke epic fantasy or high fantasy or related genres that pretty much all D&D and Pathfinder adventures represent. Cool assets, super-high detailed ones, but they would probably be useless even if we just imported them into other engines.

But then I looked deeper into Galt for the purposes of Kingslayer, and it didn't take me long to realize that CE3.75 is PERFECT for Galt!







There's no doubt in my mind, this IS Galt, and I look forward to building the entire nation in CE3.75 when the players get to it—or anywhere near it.

Note that the engine is in heavy development with scores of recently-released and planned features and assets. Take a look at the roadmap to get a sense for how much work is going into it, meaning into... my rendering of Galt: https://dungeonalchemist.upvoty.com

So once I had Galt figured out, it was an easy step to look at Brevoy with new eyes and figure that out also. Brevoy looms large over the original Kingmaker campaign because that's where the charter comes from to clean out the Stolen Lands of bandits and monsters that the players begin the game with. But as the campaign progresses and the players grow in power it is natural for the relationship to become, let us say strained. It doesn't HAVE to end badly, and a lot depends on how the players handle the diplomacy, and how their goals evolve. But either way, it is clear that, certainly by the time my Kingslayer has kicked fully into gear, there will be quite some back and forth with Brevoy, at the very least.

And then I was watching the end-of-year trailer that Cult Games Paris released of Cult Engine 4, and realized they loved showing off their massive mountains, lakes, and snowing effects, and that's what Brevoy is all about: it's the northenmost civilized nation in the Inner Sea region, and these are the assets and effects it needs to be brought to vivid life.

Cult Engine 4: One year later
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNUEVq69lcw



There's no doubt in my mind that this engine and its starting assets were made for Brevoy. Doubtless there'll be more assets later and I am sure that eventually we'll be running multiple regions in it, but for the first couple of years, Brevoy will be our focus, and it will be stunning, and completely different to the Stolen Lands/River Kingdoms in CE3, and Galt in CE3.75.



So if you go back to the map of the River Kingdoms, you'll see that we now have their entire northern, eastern and western neighborhoods fully assigned to unique engines and assets. We don't have Kyonin and Razmiran in the south and southwest, but as far as Razmiran goes, that used to be a River Kingdom, so I might end up rendering it in CE3 along with the rest of them, while Kyonin is the elven homeland, and as such consists of mostly unspoilt nature with few settlements. Either way, these nations are so far from the Stolen Lands that any players getting there with armies is way off into the future, and we'll have tons of options for rendering them by that point, including the standard fallback of Cult Engine 1, for which some maps of these regions already exist.

Finally, let me close this parenthesis by noting that, though there is only one starting point for the original Kingmaker, on the border with Brevoy, my Kingslayer will feature multiple starting points to accommodate multiple teams and individuals and multiple starting motivations. Characters don't even have to have a Brevoy charter at all to enter the area, and the approach direction will be entirely up to them, so don't be surprised if these new engines and assets I highlighted in this post get used far sooner than you'd expect.

[icycalm]

An update on Kingslayer. It's being held up by Battlegrounds Alpha 3.0, which is being held up by Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0. Alpha 2.0 is literally days away from release, a week max. Then I'll need about a month, possibly 3 weeks, for Alpha 3.0. And that's when we start Kingslayer.

Alpha 2.0 is a gigantic update whose patch notes will be the most uncanny artistic document that will ever be written. Only some assets need to be created, and some others uploaded to the overworld and the Battlegrounds site, and then I can hit publish.

Alpha 3.0 will be the same thing but in full 3D. Which is to say, stunning, AND an order of magnitude more mechanically complex.

And then we can just enjoy playing the game until the time comes for Alpha 4.0, maybe a year from now, depending on how Cult Games Paris progresses with the roadmap and milestones I have set out for them.

I work all day every day now, barely sleep, don't exercise, don't socialize. I just masturbate once per day and that's my exercise and personal life. Game development will be my life until we're playing Kingslayer.

[icycalm]

We're currently polishing up Kingslayer at several Cult Games studios worldwide for a late March release, a mere few weeks after Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0's arrival, and to be simultaneously released with the upcoming Alpha 3.0 (it'll be its chief update), and I finally have our hero image to share with you. It still needs my name on it, but we have a new graphic designer and he's still learning the ropes with GIMP, he'll get there soon, I am sure.

I am very happy with the illustration, I specifically asked for a pose that shows the nameless leader possesses both martial and spellcasting ability to underscore that all classes can be crowned kings. Honestly, it's probably the coolest game cover ever, a perfect match for the coolest game ever. I am telling you it's 2024 Game of the Year, and there is no contest.