Development

[icycalm]

Hello all! Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0 took a few more months to deliver than I had planned, but when you see the breadth and depth of content it brings you'll wonder how the thing can exist at all even in mere conceptual form, let alone running on my servers and ready to play as I type this. The design is so monstrous, it hardly seems human, and I believe that anyone who can grasp it will lose all interest in other games forthwith. Even Star Citizen will seem like a charming minigame with which to take the occasional break from real gaming, which from this day forward belongs to me and Cult Games. But let's cut to the chase:

A. Cult Engine 2.0

B. InfiniEngine™ & InfiniContent™

C. Path/Starfinder Society et al. aka Master of Combat

D. Adventure-strategy Layer aka Master of Heroes

E. Unique Roles

F. Unique Role: Blade Runner

These are the main updates Alpha 2.0 brings (though there are numerous smaller ones) and I will be detailing them one by one in further posts in this thread starting later today and throughout the next few days. All the updates are massive, but the most massive of them all by far is D, the Adventure-strategy Layer, aka Master of Heroes, which is both a tremendous rearchitecting of the basic structure of Ultimate Edition, while being simultaneously a standalone game—the greatest 4X ever—that even players who don't play Battlegrounds can play—all the while affecting the players who DO play Battlegrounds, while the latter also affect them.

Have you heard of a crazier idea in gaming? A layer of a game that can also be played as a separate standalone game, but with both sets of players—the "inside" and the "outside" ones—affecting each other? And that's not even the craziest idea that Master of Heroes brings to the table. The craziest idea is so crazy that I have come to believe my whole life has been a preparation for delivering precisely this idea to gaming, and to art. My entire artistic journey has brought me here, and there is no one else who could have arrived at the position I am in today. So please read all the updates with the care and attention I am sure you'll see they deserve, but above all don't miss the Master of Heroes part because it is the most incredible design in the entire history of art, and I believe my essay detailing it will be the most uncanny essay on videogames and art that will ever be written.

Alpha 2.0 is the most important update my Battlegrounds will ever get; I could have easily called this the release version, and left it at that, with further updates being mostly cosmetic in nature (though Battlegrounds is a game where cosmetic updates profoundly impact the mechanics, so nothing is "merely" cosmetic here). Alpha 1.0 was merely 4 loosely connected Pathfinder campaigns (but which in itself was revolutionary because, believe it or not, the handful of GMs who run more than one group don't really bother to connect them). Alpha 1.5 brought the overworld online (though with barely any content) without which Ultimate Edition is unworkable and even unthinkable, though with few new features. But Alpha 2.0 IS the Battlegrounds: it is the actual full-blown massively-multiplayer online metaverse/multiverse (with metaverse being the out-of-game term, i.e. the genre; while multiverse is the in-game one, i.e. what the characters in the game call it). Conceptually, then, Alpha 2.0 is the high point of development, and it's all downhill from here in terms of architecture and design; there will be no more rearchitecting, though there will be the occasional redesign. Mostly though there will be a relentless addition of mechanical complexity and content to the current architecture, right up to the 1.0 release, and beyond. And then Alpha 3.0 will bring this metaverse to 3D in stunning detail (by the end of next month, believe it or not), and Alpha 4.0 to VR (in about a year or two). And I think somewhere around that time a few more people will begin to grasp what icycalm has created here.

But you can grasp it far earlier by having some imagination and using it while reading the really very complicated essays that I am about to post below. And then playing the game with me of course, starting as soon as this update's last section has been posted.

See you on the Battlegrounds servers soon,


ALEX KIERKEGAARD
FOUNDER & CEO CULT GAMES STUDIOS

[icycalm]

I'll start with the instantly impressive, flashy stuff so I can grab everyone's attention, because later on there is a lot of in-depth reading to be done that's terrifically complex and way more important, and I want to get it through as many people's heads as I can. So I need to warm everyone up first, and here's my appetizer:

Cult Engine 2 Blade Runner Intro Demo (Draft) 4K
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LL_eO8cLUY



This is recoil logging into the Cult Engine 2 server, getting past the Cult Games and Insomnia logos, and arriving at the Blade Runner start screen I made which in my estimation is one of the greatest start screens of all time (still needs some finishing touches though, that's why the video's labeled "draft", e.g. the "Press Start" will be pulsing, etc.)

And this is what it looks like in-game (though there'll be a cool main menu with many options between the intro and the game, which I am finishing up right now):



All assets are 4K, and the game is best played at 4K. That's why the icons on the left and right are tiny; if your res is lower, they'll be larger, don't worry about that. You can play almost all the way down to 720p.

Everything I show you here was done by me with help from freelancers and volunteers. None of this is available with the official VTT adaptations, no fancy login screens, no intros, no start screens, no main menus. I had to seek obscure ArtStation accounts to get some of the art here, and YouTube accounts with 1,000 followers.

Moreover, this isn't a program you download and install on your machine. This is a web game accessible at my website: http://play.akbattlegrounds.net/bladerunner

You won't see anything if you go there now because the server is offline, but when we're playing that's the address the players will go to, and they'll be playing the entire game on my server. No downloading, no installing, just go to icy's site on any browser and play his game. At least for Cult Engine 2 settings (more on which shortly).

Unfortunately, I can't afford right now the server I would like, because I would like the fastest CPU available, the Core i9-14900K [ > ] that goes for $300/month [ > ]). Now you might think that this beast is overkill, and I thought so too at first. But then we actually ran some tests with recoil, and it's not overkill at all. I can easily choke this server straight from the start screen lol. So let me tell you a bit more about the start screen to understand what we're dealing with here.

The background video was made by a freelancer. He used DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop, After Effects, and Cultjourney (more on this last later) for the visuals, and Ableton Live, Serum, FabFilter, Valhalla Verb, and Soundtoys for the audio. The video you see in my start screen is a mere 15-sec 50MB loop, but the original video the freelancer produced is a full hour, starting with the room in total darkness and no rainfall or music, and slowly lighting the room and bringing in the rain and the music, then as the hour progresses the lighting in the room subtly changes, until in the end the room goes dark again and the rain and music fade out. This is way superior to my 15-sec loop, but it's 2GB not 50MB, and the cheap shared server I could afford for testing with recoil wouldn't be able to push it to 5 or 10 players (including the GM) at the same time. And it's not just the start screen that suffers from inferior server technology, I have entire TERRABYTES of high-def video content for Cult Engine 2 scenarios. And that's why I would like the fastest available server, if I could afford it. And I will be able to afford it some day. But for now we'll make do with what I have. And the best server I have right now at my disposal is my Shadow in Paris. So we'll be using that to start with, though the issue with it is that it only works when I am online, so no 24/7 access to the game for the players, as I would have liked. Which is why we had to produce that intro video with recoil instead of just giving everyone the (currently non-functional) web address that I gave you above.

So, on game days, the Blade Runner players will be going to http://play.akbattlegrounds.net/bladerunner, the Alien players to http://play.akbattlegrounds.net/alien, and so on. Even better, these links will be placed in each setting's overworld pages, so players will be simply going to the overworld, navigating to their setting's main page, and just clicking PLAY BLADE RUNNER or PLAY ALIEN, and starting the game from there. And to quit the game, there will be a BACK TO OVERWORLD button inside the games, thus forming a complete loop, all inside my servers that will only end when the players close the browser tab.

This is just a draft, the finished page will sport a nice big Alien-styled button:



Clicking which will lead to the login page (and btw Alien's getting its own custom login, intro and main menu like Blade Runner; all Cult Engine 2 settings are):



And from inside the game you'll be able to click to return to the overworld. So the overworld server and the game engine server will be handing the player back and forth between them, without his noticing anything.

I think that's a pretty revolutionary bit of progress for a GMRPG. I doubt you'll find a single GM online who runs such an integrated gaming environment that works exactly like a traditional game. But this integrated environment will require the aforementioned dedicated server to be online 24/7, otherwise there's no point to PLAY ALIEN buttons that don't work because the server is offline. So these buttons, and this integration, will have to wait for a while. The plumbing is all done though, so all I need to do is turn it on when I have the cashflow to support it. Until then I've thought of some halfway measures, like for example making sure my Shadow is online whenever I am online, so that players can browse the settings whenever they see me on Discord (on my laptop/desktop, not on my phone of course).

So that's enough with intros and servers and technical stuff. Let's talk settings! What else can you play in CE2 besides Blade Runner and Alien?

Quite a bit of stuff, actually. Everything by the BR and Alien makers, Free League, comes out on CE2 now, day of release, and they have a LOT of good stuff, pretty much all of which is eventually going on the overworld. All the new Pathfinder Adventure Paths also come out on CE2 at 4K, again day of release, and the one we could play the soonest is Season of Ghosts [ > ], the Asian-inspired prequel to the entire Pathfinder setting. This is set 100 years before the first Adventure Path, Rise of the Runelords, which means we can play it right after one of the teams finishes their current campaign. Of course we'd have to learn PF2 for it, but the awesome thing about it is that any surviving characters will be able to play A HUNDRED YEARS OF MASTER OF HEROES IN ONE GO (MEANING MULTIPLE GENERATIONS OF DESCENDANTS) right at the end, to synchronize with the current timeline. I am sure no one understands what that means right now, but keep reading and you will.





Another possibility (and don't forget we have 4 teams, so we could play several of them) is of course Beneos's Curse of Strahd, last year's Insomnia's Game of the Year runner-up (Baldur's Gate III [ > ] is a joke in comparison, read the Insomnia thread to see why).

Full Animated Barovia World Map | Curse of Strahd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kkQSWuxZE



The moment we activate this campaign, this overworld will be integrated into ours! (though it will take a lot of gaming to figure out how it's connected to the rest, and travel between them willingly...) So let me tell you where we're at with Curse of Strahd. First off, we'll have to learn D&D 5E to play it. But that's not the roadblock. In fact there are no roadblocks at all at this point, Beneos finished the last location 4 months ago (which is why I count the release as 2023 for GOTY-awarding purposes), and we could play at any time. Literally Strahd could pull you into Ravenloft in your next session. So what we need is a way to determine WHICH team he pulls, and WHEN. Note that a regular GM has no mechanics to determine this. He just pulls whichever group he feels like whenever he feels like. But that's not how Ultimate Edition works. Ultimate Edition runs on RULES not GM WHIMS because it is a GAME and not a FUCKING NOVEL OR MOVIE SCRIPT. So we need rules for this. And I now have them and will unveil them on a need to know basis in good time. I can say that it's coming though, and soon™. To whom it's coming though is another matter. That even I don't know.

But what's coming even sooner is Cult Engine 2 4K Kingmaker. Now I know we'll be playing this in Cult Engine 3, but we can still use the 1,100 pages (seriously, watch the trailer) of journal entries and 4K art assets, above all the brand-new 4K map made specifically for this release. So I'll be buying the full campaign and integrating the assets on our overworld pretty soon.

Kingmaker Release Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru-gePN9_AU



Kingmaker Part 2 - Release Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwe5czsYPIc



So this was an overview of the main new content you can expect to be made available on the overworld for CE2 starting now and in the near future, but there's much more to it than that, including one-off locations that can and will be tacked anywhere they are needed, such as to you give you the latest example, Beneos's Arcane Library which Chev can visit if he follows up with the old Senator lady he recently met (assuming she survived the slaughter).

The Arcane Library
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEyLihZyvdE



I have many such locations ready to be dropped in any of the running campaigns to enrich them as needed, and therefore all players will sooner or later get to enjoy Cult Engine 2. And with the entire engine running in a browser tab, integration with the Cult Engine 1 sessions will be seamless. I give Chev a link, and voila, he's in the library in another tab. He does his business, and then rejoins the others in the main window. Or they all go together if they are invited.

The main point is that Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds now runs on two engines (three if you count the overworld as a separate engine, which you should), not a single one like every other game ever, which leads me straight to...


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART B. INFINIENGINE™ & INFINICONTENT™...

[icycalm]

All videogames ever, then, have used only one engine, but Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds, with Alpha 2.0's introduction of Cult Engine 2, is the first to use two, and soon multiple more, because we won't stop using Cult Engine 1 anytime soon, if ever, and we'll keep adding more and more engines as time goes on without dropping any of them.

In other games and game engines, once 2.0 is released, previous releases become inaccessible, and you can't go back to 1.73 again no matter its benefits over 2.0 (which can be as pedestrian as mere convenience: "We already have the material in 1.73 and are too busy to convert it to 2.0 right now, so we won't.") This is because programmers are stupid. In Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds the world is so vast and being built up by different studios working on different versions of our engine that ALL point releases (and even some half-point and quarter-point ones) are available simultaneously indefinitely, and still being worked on. 2.0 doesn't mean that 1.XX (the latest 1.0 release) is scrapped; different regions of the multiverse are rendered in the engine best suited to them at any give time for any number of reasons. This is a tech I invented called Alex Kierkegaard's ParallelEngine™ tech programmed in Alex Kierkegaard's C+++, a voice-activated programming language which consists in locking programmers in a basement who do what you tell them if they want to eat.

Multiengine development then is the future. Cult Games' world is simply so vast and so many teams are making content for it plus we're carrying over so many decades of legacy content that it's impossible to convert it all to the latest engine in any reasonable timeframe. If we waited for this it would never happen. Genius icy solution: multiple engines covering different regions of the world. If you want your game to include all 100,000 pages of Pathfinder content, this is what you have to do, you must use InfiniEngine™ technology conceived, architected and coded by icycalm. It is the latest technology.

In short we develop infinite engines so that our game can have infinite content. The infinite engines are the means to delivering infinite content instead of forcing yourself, like programmers, to redo all your fucking content with every single little engine upgrade, which means you never redo your content, which means you have fuck-all content and your stupid fucking programmer game can be finished by 1 player in 6 hours.

And why is infinite content so important, and 6 hours aren't enough?

Because if you want infinite freedom—meaning infinite interactivity, meaning infinite "gameness", since gameness = interactivity—you need infinite choices, which only infinite content can give you. That's why the universe is infinite and can't be "finished" in 6 fucking hours. Get it, you dumb fucking programmer pieces of shit that have been holding back videogames for decades? And that's how a single guy beat entire multimillion-dollar-funded developers with an i3 laptop from his bedroom: by not being a stupid programmer faggot and putting ALL roleplaying content in his game instead of only a single inane adventure that some borderline illiterate programmer scribbled in-between sessions of copy-pasting other people's code and pretending he wrote it.

Fucking programmers can't let anything work for 5 minutes, and force you to redo your entire website every couple of years because browsers no longer support it. They think the rest of us have no lives either and that we spend all our time hunched over a screen recoding the same fucking perfectly functioning piece of code to do the same thing it did yesterday, only slower, so that we now need a supercomputer merely to run fucking Gab.

They keep piling useless features on simple programs until the programs are unusable, and then another developer starts a barebones competitor that just works with no faggotry, and all the users switch over, until the new developer has rendered his program unusable too, and the process starts over. It never ends, because the dumb fucking programmers will not just LET A PROGRAM BE and JUST WORK. Every last little program must grow to monopolize ALL YOUR COMPUTER'S PROCESSING POWER until fucking Discord gets heavier than your VR cyberpunk RPG whose voice chat it was merely made to facilitate.

Programmers are dumb as doorknobs, and that's why all those D&D CRPGs released over the decades ARE NOT COMPATIBLE WITH EACH OTHER. How fucking hard would it have been to allow us to move characters between games? A character is just a few attributes in a text file and a jpeg, you could very easily transfer them between games and engines spanning decades. Why has this not been done? And why does every single CRPG have to go from 1st- to 20th-level? Why can't you just publish a variety of adventures for all levels and just let us thread our way between them like a real roleplaying game? That's where the "First level: Save Kittens, Last level: Kill God" meme comes from, which dominates both WRPGs and JRPGs. Since the programmers are determined to NOT link adventures, they must provide the complete RPG experience in ONE release. But they're lazy, so they won't code a 200-hour campaign, they'll code a 40-hour campaign and cram the entirety of the level progression inside it, leading to that stupid meme. And to cap it all off, they won't hire real RPG writers, they'll write the "campaign" themselves because they can't tell the difference between professionals and amateurs.

You can see how dumb all this shit is because the VERY MOMENT a game drops all this faggotry and just licenses a real campaign (Temple of Elemental Evil, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous) or hires real RPG writers to write it (Planescape: Torment) the playerbase goes wild and the game achieves cult status. It's STILL crap compared to the originals because characters are immortal and dragons can hide behind a barrel and there's no interactivity, but at least you don't get asked to save kittens in the first level and kill god in the last one. And that makes them at least playable as something more than a series of tactical battles strung together with preschool-level fanfiction.

Then along comes Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds and offers ALL roleplaying adventures EVER MADE.

Like, all of them, all the way back to the first one, Arneson's Temple of the Frog for Blackmoor, the very first roleplaying setting. It's right there in the Battlegrounds, and if your character makes his way over to Blackmoor, you can play it.


The 1986 standalone adaptation; the original was published with the Blackmoor setting in 1975, mere months after D&D

And how can I achieve this in my game when multimillion-dollar-funded teams of programmers can't even offer more than 40 hours of gaming every 3 years cause they're too busy coding saving mechanics that turn every character immortal thus killing even the mere possibility of roleplaying?

Cause I am not a faggot, that's why. Cause I am not a stupid fucking faggot who will try to compete with the professionals. I am a game director, not an RPG writer. It's not my job to write adventures anymore than Ridley Scott's job is to write scripts. Film directors compete over who will BUY the best scripts and film them, not over who will write the best scripts. That's the job of the scriptwriters. THAT'S how I beat all game directors ever: by simply BUYING the best adventures ever, so that the only videogame with good ones is mine, since the programmers insist on writing the adventures themselves.

Even the RULE SYSTEMS should be licensed and shouldn't be designed by programmers. Programmers writing rule systems is how you get the Original Sin games where there's no difference between the classes because all classes can do everything, so what the fuck is the point of classes then? But programmers can't answer, because they're too busy coding saving mechanics that turn every character immortal thus killing even the mere possibility of roleplaying.

JUST LICENSE THE REAL FUCKING GAMES AND REAL FUCKING ADVENTURES ALREADY, YOU STUPID FUCKING PROGRAMMERS. AND STOP TURNING ALL CHARACTERS IN ALL GAMES IMMORTAL!

To grasp how tragic the situation with CRPGs is, just read the back cover of the first roleplaying adventure ever, and note how freakin' well-written it is.



If you add together all the best writing in all the best CRPGs ever you'll still not get something amounting to the couple of ancient paragraphs here—and these aren't even the best RPG writing available, they're just average RPG writing, utterly unexceptional—but utterly unreachable by programmers with such dirt-poor literary sense that they think immortal heroes can generate drama. And yes, I am aware that Planescape: Torment is an exception. There, it does make sense for the hero to be immortal. BUT THAT'S BECAUSE IT WASN'T WRITTEN BY PROGRAMMERS BUT BY AN RPG WRITER AND GAME MASTER.

Avellone's hobby of gamemastering for tabletop roleplaying games made him try to get his adventures and articles published. Starting in his high school years, he sent a large number of submissions to Dungeon magazine, Dragon magazine, Palladium Books, GURPS and Hero Games, but they were all rejected. However, when Hero Games had a new product line for their Champions RPG called Dark Champions and needed writers, Hero Games' line editor Bruce Harlick contacted Avellone asking him to write a character book for it, which he agreed to, resulting in 1993's Underworld Enemies. It was followed by Dystopia in 1994, Widows & Orphans in 1997 and New Bedlam Asylum in 1998, as well as contributions to the adventure anthologies Heroic Adventures Volume 1 and Volume 2 in 1996 and to Dragon, Alarums and Excursions, Adventurers Club and Shadis throughout that period.

After asking Steve Peterson, his editor at Hero Games, to help him find him a job with a steady paycheck, Peterson put in a recommendation for him with Mark O'Green, the head of Interplay Entertainment's Dragonplay division. At the beginning of June 1995, Avellone flew to Irvine, California and interviewed with O'Green, who asked him difficult questions about how he would go about designing a videogame using the Planescape license, which Interplay held the videogame rights for at the time. Avellone told him he would "start at the death screen, and just tell the story of what happens after that". O'Green was intrigued and hired him as a junior designer.

You think a fucking programmer would have ever imagined that? Not in a million fucking years. You must have spent your whole life reading and writing fantasy to think of such things, and programmers are the least literate people working in the game industry! Many of them seem like they can't read at all! And that's how EVERY PUBLISHED ROLEPLAYING ADVENTURE EVER BEATS EVERY VIDEOGAME EVER IN WRITING AND DESIGN.

Take just a random, obscure example:

The adventure takes place in three different time periods inside the same inn. The first part of the adventure takes place in a dungeon setting. Clues found in the inn lead the characters to the second part of the adventure. The inn travels between dimensions for the second part of the adventure, which involves changes inside the inn as it shifts to another dimension.

Have you played any CRPG with anywhere near this level of inventiveness? And it's from 1986! RPGs are so much more advanced today than that. But the CRPGs still can't touch it.

So understand that the reason RPG writers and designers are so superior to videogame writers and designers is because of programmers: they're the chokepoint between the two, because everything written and designed by a videogame writer and designer has to be coded by the programmers, otherwise it doesn't make it in the game. So the programmers control everything! And the programmers would rather dick around with engine upgrades no one will notice than allow a good design to be published! And they will certainly not allow anything to go in the game unless it has been dumbed-down to the point where even programmers can understand and appreciate it! That's why you're still playing CRPGs and fantasy 4Xs with mechanics from 1995. Because that's the programmer ceiling!

Programmers pissed off Kojima so much HE SWITCHED GENRES TO GET AWAY FROM THEM: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... iew-part-2

It was hugely frustrating making games at that time for me. I wanted to control everything. So, after the second Metal Gear launched, I developed my own scripting engine and decided to work on adventure games so that I could have complete control over when the animation played or when the music triggered. That's when I developed Snatcher and Policenauts. It was a way to take creative control back from the programmers.

Btw I find it hilarious that even Japanese programmers are retarded. It's not a racial or ethnic issue, it's universal: I am sure alien programmers will also be retarded. It's in the kind of work involved. If you like it enough to make it your life's work, there's something wrong with you (what with the algorithm being the stupidest, most inartistic concept ever)—at least if you're any good at it, I am sure mediocre programmers can be decent people. Either way, keep them away from the creative room or be doomed to reskin the same ancient designs to eternity! That is the programmer way.

So at Cult Games Studios we don't allow mere code to constrain our imaginations, and will use any means and any engine to explore to the full the possibilities of our content—meaning half a century of roleplaying adventures, settings, and rule systems—including Theater of the Mind Engine™ (gotta put the ™ because anything that isn't trademarked—like for example all my games—won't be taken seriously by the programmers and their lapdogs, the journalists, because money. They wouldn't have taken seriously any ancient artwork either for the same reason, and the idea will never cross their minds that THE BEST ARTWORK EVER MAYBE CAN'T BE TRADEMARKED BECAUSE IT USES TOO MUCH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY FOR THAT TO BE POSSIBLE, in other words IT'S TOO INTELLIGENT FOR TRADEMARK LAWS).

The end result is that my Kingslayer runs on no fewer than THREE engines simultaneously:

1. Cult Engine 1 for the rules automation

2. Cult Engine 2 for the 4K overworld and 1,100 pages of journal entries

3. Cult Engine 3 for the 3D visualization

And if the neighboring nations end up involved in the players' affairs, add another 2 engines (CE3.75 & CE4), as explained in detail in my Kingslayer analysis [ > ].

Compared to all that, Owlcat's CRPG is the kids version, "For (mental) ages up to 11" it should say on the box (because my friend danjiro was GMing already by age 11; I started at 13 because that's how long stuff took to reach Greece from America at the time).

That's how far we go at Cult Games Studios to deliver unparalleled interactivity and immersion, we do "Whatever It Takes", which is our motto. Cloud Imperium's motto meanwhile is "The Only Constant", meaning that the only constant in game development is change. They came up with that slogan because of all the whining and bitching they got from players whenever they shifted priorities, which due to the sheer complexity of their game is practically every day. The same thing happens at Cult Games Studios, which is why our games, exactly like Star Citizen, seem to take forever to come out, but here development is more opaque and the players more patient, because higher IQ, so there's no whining and bitching and we just get on with things and move forward, doing whatever it takes in the name of interactivity and immersion.

And btw you can now see the engine powering a setting, region or adventure of Battlegrounds in the setting's, region's or adventure's overworld and Codex pages, as seen here for example for the Alien setting: https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... 18af5aa878



The link opens in a new tab so as to not take the player out of the game, and leads to the relevant engine's Insomnia Development forum thread where players can read up on the latest development news for all our engines.


TL;DR:

• Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0 brings InfiniEngine™ technology unique to Battlegrounds: Unlike all other games ever, Battlegrounds doesn't ditch older versions of its engine but continues to develop them to render different regions of its multiverse in different engines, thereby achieving...
• InfiniContent™ technology unique to Battlegrounds: Enabled by InfiniEngine™ technology, Battlegrounds achieves full compatibility with half a century of roleplaying adventures, settings and rule systems (D&D's 50-year anniversary is actually tomorrow [ > ]), thereby attaining infinite content for all intents and purposes, meaning absolute player freedom to explore the multiverse and interact with it and express themselves.

So, the twin InfiniEngine™ & InfiniContent™ technologies conceived, architected and coded by icycalm are the future. If your game doesn't have them, it's not a metaverse game, and under this definition even Star Citizen has invisible walls (at the edges of its one and soon two solar systems). So, my game is the only true metaverse game. icycalm wins again, and everyone else can suck it. I mean my dick. My big fat Greek dick, powered by InfiniDick™ technology, made in Greece.


TO BE CONTINUED IN PART C. PATH/STARFINDER SOCIETY ET AL. AKA "MASTER OF COMBAT"...

[icycalm]

This 4K cover image/wallpaper is a work-in-progress so please don't link it or use it in-game. Don't even download it so you don't mix it up with the final version, which is coming soon and will be used as desktop background for all MoC sessions.

THIS ESSAY IS TOO LONG TO FIT ON THE FRONTPAGE, SO CLICK THROUGH TO READ IT IN ITS ENTIRETY IN THE FORUM.


Before I put you to sleep with a couple years' worth of ruminations on the subject of the ultimate RPG, and SRPG (aka my Master of Combat), here's the TL;DR for you (remember to hit F11 for full-screen and play on the music before you start reading anything):

Sandpoint Hinterlands
https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... a13440b5e8



This is what it's all about. Take it in, and if you're quick about it you might even snag a cool bonus.

Now let's take it from the beginning.

What is Alex Kierkegaard's Master of Combat?

It is two things simultaneously.

1. A standalone game that is the greatest SRPG of all time, being the first massively-multiplayer online SRPG with infinite handcrafted levels across both fantasy and sci-fi settings, among others, plus the deepest turn-based combat mechanics ever. And the deepest lore and narrative.

2. A subcomponent system of Alex Kierkegaard's Ultimate Edition meant to simulate the operations of the biggest mission-based organizations in Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds, like for example the Pathfinder and Starfinder Societies in the Pathfinder and Starfinder settings, the Colonial Marines in the Alien setting, the LAPD SWAT in the Blade Runner setting, and so on.

If I have your attention, read on to find exactly how this game/system will work, and how to play it, whether as a standalone game, or as part of your Battlegrounds player career, if you're into that.

And we shall take it from the beginning, because I want to explain the labyrinthine thought process that led me to devise this system and develop this game. I've been thinking on this for YEARS, two years at the least, and I believe it would be extremely instructive to relate the numerous tough choices and decisions I had to make on the way. Genius ideas and works don't just fall out of the sky, they take forever to devise, and it really feels to me today that it took me forever to get here. And now I am so glad I am here, I will proceed to talk all day about it, and hopefully a few people will gather round to listen. This isn't the full adventure-strategy layer aka Master of Heroes btw, it's merely a component of it. You can think of this analysis then as the prologue to the Master of Heroes one. They're both crazy ideas, but the other one is the real bananas.



It all started when I discovered Paizo's Organized Play program and the Pathfinder Society Scenarios it runs. This is a competitive league where you sign up, roll a character, and play brief 4-hour official scenarios in a team of mostly strangers with officially-approved GMs in game stores, conventions or online. As long as your character keeps surviving, you can keep going on more of these scenarios which number about 24 per season/irl year, and each season also has a metaplot which is connected to an extent with the Pathfinder setting's overall metaplot.

This is Organized Play - Paizo's Pathfinder, Starfinder, & ACG Society Play
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTvalWnQSpE



So we're talking about HUNDREDS of these scenarios already existing, with a couple dozen more of them released every year. So of course I wanted them for my Battlegrounds the moment I heard about them.

But there were issues.

At first, I entirely discounted the whole Organized Play setup and was planning to drop all these scenarios in the overworld as side-missions for our 4 main teams to tackle when they fell behind the XP curve, or a character had died and they needed to level-up a new one, etc. I was still working in the Battlegrounds' early days with D&D 2E assumptions, where there wasn't really a metaplot to speak of, so material could be added wherever and rearranged at the GM's whim based on his game's needs. But then I discovered the Pathfinder metaplot, and I was floored at the scale and ambition of it. And then I discovered the Pathfinder SOCIETY metaplot, and its connections to the overall metaplot, and that's when... I lost the plot basically. I didn't know what the fuck to do because it was all so sprawling and complex that even in the Paizo forums no one seemed to know ALL the connections between the tens of thousands of pages of material spread across dozens of product lines over 15 years. Even the developers themselves didn't know them because they were 100 guys and very few of them had been with the company since the beginning, and even THEY hadn't read everything. There were only basically a couple of directors who knew MOST of the stuff (chief among them the three head honchos: Erik Mona who's mostly responsible for the setting direction, James Jacobs mostly for the adventures, and Jason Bulmahn for the rules; though they all do a little bit of everything from time to time), but they seemed to have a policy of not helping people trying to piece together the metaplot in various threads. I think that's a good policy if you want to motivate people to buy ALL your books and read them all lol, so I am not complaining. Piecing the Pathfinder metaplot together and uncovering all the connections between products, characters and events is really its own game, and I could easily see someone publishing a book on the subject some day. It'd sell like hotcakes. I'd definitely buy a copy. You wouldn't be able to GM in this world afterwards without one.

So there was no question of randomly dropping Society Scenarios all over the overworld, if I wanted to preserve metaplot development. Moreover, it was at around that point when I realized how strictly balanced all Pathfinder material is (see Pathfinder's Unique Balance). It's not like in the TSR days when adventures were roughly balanced, and the GM was expected to fine-tune the balance for his table. In Pathfinder practically every XP and GP has been accounted for by the designers (they even have formulas for how much extra loot to drop than what's required for the campaign, since players won't find all of it; 25% extra apparently—they don't call it Mathfinder for nothing), and there is no room to add side-missions to Adventure Paths or standalone adventures unless you don't mind your characters being overleveled for what comes next. Even a couple of Society Scenarios, assuming they were survived, would render the party OP for the rest of the campaign.



So I stopped thinking about all this for a while, as it was giving me headaches, and I had tons of other issues to address in the game anyway, not to mention actually run it. But I kept coming back to the conundrum from time to time as I learned more about the game, the setting, and the company, and my thinking kept progressing bit by bit and reaching new heights—and plateaus.

The next major advance in my thinking was when I decided to essentially stage MY OWN version of Paizo's Organized Play program, running parallel to my 4 campaigns. Since I couldn't integrate this program into my campaigns without breaking it to pieces, I would simply DUPLICATE it, thus preserving its integrity. Under this scheme, those of my players who wanted to play these scenarios would roll new 1st-level characters, all of whom would be Pathfinders (i.e. members of the in-game Pathfinder Society that travels all over Golarion and catalogues and disseminates its secrets; basically Pathfinder's version of the Forgotten Realms' Harpers—but on steroids, like everything Paizo does). And then with this new set of characters, my players would tackle the Society Scenarios one by one, in order, starting from the first scenario of Season 0 whose full title is "Scenario 1-01 Silent Tide". This takes place in Absalom, the City at the Center of the World; Pathfinder's biggest city. We almost played this, but at the last moment I pulled back, because... lol and behold, many of these scenarios are actually tied to the adventures and campaigns that Paizo released the year of their particular season. For example, several of the Season 9 Scenarios are tied to the War for the Crown campaign published around the same time (late-2017/early-2018), which we are in fact currently playing. So it makes no sense to start with Season 0, because by the time we reach Season 9 to play the WftC Scenarios, our WftC campaign will be long concluded.

I was devastated when I realized this. The whole thing seemed unworkable no matter what angle I approached it from, so I shelved it again and went on with my life, trusting that some idea would pop into my head to solve it at a later time.

And that's exactly what happened. It took ages but I got here, and as you'll realize when you understand my design, it was all for the better, as my design pisses all over any other conceivable arrangement, including Paizo's. It's simply genius, and eventually led me to the even greater genius of the adventure-strategy layer aka Master of Heroes, more on which right after I've wrapped up this analysis.

My final breakthrough eventually came in a rather random manner; but they all do that. There was an event that was the catalyst, but the reason I was able to respond to the catalyst with such force of genius is because my brain had been accumulating in the meantime all the countless little pieces of information required, plus forming all the necessary connections between them. So when I saw a thread in the Paizo forums one fine day a mere few weeks ago discussing the "Beginner Box", I was just about to take the last step in this long journey.

I clicked on the thread because up to that moment I didn't know exactly what was included in the box. I knew there was a brief starting adventure, but I didn't know where it was located in the world, or what it was about. So, after skimming the thread, I reached into my archive, pulled out the box, and looked it over.





To my pleasant surprise, the adventure was located just outside the town of Sandpoint, where our Rise of the Runelords team is currently. Even more incredibly, it is set 6 months before that campaign, which is the first campaign, and indeed the first product published for Pathfinder. Indeed RotR's Book 1, the Burnt Offerings adventure that our Sandpoint Crew (recoil, Rory, shock and shubn) is now playing, is the very first book published for Pathfinder, on August 29, 2007. We didn't arrange it to happen this way, the team just happened to pick it, without knowing what it is. (Another of our teams also happened to pick the second Pathfinder campaign released, Curse of the Crimson Throne, which was another happy accident because it turned out that RotR's second book is what kicks off CotCT, so the latter is basically a side-campaign of the former, if not an outright sequel.)

But the "Beginner Box" is set 6 months before, and that amazed me because I didn't know there was any prequel material for Pathfinder at the time. (There is an entire prequel campaign now whose last book was just published, Season of Ghosts [ > ], set 100 years before Rise of the Runelords.)

Note that the "Beginner Box" isn't part of the Pathfinder Society Scenarios, but it's the same deal; a 4-hour scenario written for 4 characters. It's just that in this case it's not the PF Society that sends you there. You go on your own initiative.

So at that point I was ready to stick the adventure in the "Beginner Box", titled Black Fang's Dungeon, on the overworld and let the Sandpoint Crew tackle it. Of course, they would have had to roll new characters since the adventure was set 6 months before their current characters met, but I thought that wouldn't be a big deal, and they could just keep any surviving characters in the vicinity as backups if anything went wrong with the campaign.

But then I thought, why limit this adventure to the team that unlocked it? Was there a benefit to this policy, or would it be preferable to allow all unlocked content to be played by any player and team of players in the setting? So I ran the thought experiment of how it would work out if any player could sign up for that scenario, and the result was astonishing. Because if a player from another campaign completed that mini-scenario with a brand-new character, he would suddenly have a character in the vicinity of another campaign, which means that he would quite probably take an interest in that campaign, even if it was located halfway around the world from his current one. And moreover the local campaign's players would no longer be able to guarantee that these new adventurers would help them out, if they got in trouble. The new heroes would have their own plans, and might well take off after the adventure, to any number of destinations, including possibly the region of the main campaign of the player who owns them, to help THAT campaign out, if it ran into trouble.

So ultimately, with teams unlocking short scenarios all over the world, and these scenarios being tackled by any kind of combinations of players, we'd end up with a world where many players would be invested in various regions simultaneously. An Oppara player could end up with a Pathfinder aboard the colonist ship in Azlant, while a Sandpoint player might end up with an extra hero in Taldor, and so on. And that means that, at any given time, practically any player could be called upon to aid in a campaign he wasn't even playing! Which is terrifically exciting stuff, both for the players giving the aid, and for those receiving it. It would mean we'd end up with a far less rigid, far more fluid world, where players wouldn't feel so "locked into" campaigns for months on end. Because if your main character died and was replaced by someone else's wandering hero, you'd be effectively out of the campaign while the other player would now be involved in two! And similarly, your extra hero might have jumped into another campaign, so now suddenly you have completely switched campaigns!

That also means that if someone is watching someone else's campaign because he really likes it, he can maneuver an extra hero of his there, letting him lurk in the background, ready to step in when needed. So, with this design, players could actively pursue multiple campaigns that interested them, and get potentially involved with them at various points, thus skyrocketing the level of complexity and interactivity of the game. And that's precisely what we call superior game design.

I was ecstatic when I realized all this, and at that point my mind was completely made up that I WOULD use all the PF Society Scenarios, and that moreover I would use them OUT OF ORDER. Try to understand why the out of order is so important. In this scheme, scenarios would appear on the overworld only ONCE UNLOCKED BY A TEAM IN THEIR VICINITY. So that when a scenario pops up on the map, it is GUARANTEED that its outcome will affect the nearby team and their campaign.

At this point I need to explain that some of these scenarios can have disastrous consequences for characters in their vicinity, if failed. Remember that Season 0 first scenario I mentioned earlier, Silent Tide?



These are its consequences (pay particular attention to the first line):



And this is the scenario's description that would go on the overworld:

When strange reports of misty undead spread through Absalom, you and your fellow Pathfinders are dispatched to the half-drowned district of Puddles. Notoriously rough, the drooling addicts, flesh panderers, and quick-handed knifers of Puddles are the least of your worries. The night's tide brings with it an ancient armada of some long-forgotten war and you are the only thing between their mist-shrouded ghost fleet and Absalom's utter oblivion.

An "ancient armada"! And four 1st-level characters must stop it! This is Pathfinder. They lean in the drama so hard. But the problem is, we don't have any teams in Absalom, or anywhere near it, at the moment. So even if the armada is unleashed, it's not really our problem. Absalom has plenty of adventurers, and even a military to deal with it, not to mention the very seat of power of the Pathfinder Society. But none of this is too exciting to us because none of us is there.

But with my unlocking system, at least one of our teams will ALWAYS be near each scenario's location, because IT IS THE TEAMS THAT UNLOCK THE SCENARIOS IN THE FIRST PLACE. So that dragon on the cover of the "Beginner Box"? That image is from the actual scenario, and that dragon is in the adventure's dungeon. Yes, four 1st-level characters are taking on a dragon (Yes THAT dragon! My players know what I mean, and what I mean is bullshit, because I never knew of this scenario when I was making those lame dragon jokes), and depending on what they do, who knows what the dragon may do to the campaign taking place in the region afterwards. On the flipside, even if the side-team gets wiped, they may still gain valuable info that the main team can use later. So the whole affair is terrifically interesting to the players we have in the vicinity. Without this scenario, the dragon wouldn't even be there!



This also answers the main objection that could be leveled at the Pathfinder Society Scenarios. They are objectively inferior to the campaigns and the standalone adventures, so why are we bothering to play them at all? Isn't that just wasting time that could be used to play more full-length standalone adventures and campaigns? I have asked this question to myself many times, and I didn't really have a good answer to it until now. Before, I just wanted to integrate the Society Scenarios... out of greed I suppose. They massively enlarge the Pathfinder setting with their countless characters, plots and location maps, and I just wanted the setting complexity of my world to go as high as it was possible to go. I felt my world would be poorer without all this material. But again, the objection remained: the full-length adventures and campaigns are objectively superior, so it doesn't make sense to take time from them in order to put it in these brief scenarios meant to foster Paizo's community more than anything else.

But ultimately I realized that it was never about the brief scenarios themselves. It was always about the full-length standalone adventures and campaigns. It is because the scenarios ENRICH the main material that we bother with them at all. I've shown you the Sandpoint example with the dragon. I am sure that recoil, Rory, shock and shubn will be drooling with excitement at these details; they make their already terrifically interesting situation and environment that much more interesting and exciting, even if they themselves don't take part in the mini-adventure. Actually, ESPECIALLY if they don't, because then the outcome will be entirely out of their hands. That said, they should feel free to grab one or more slots if they want to and find any available (there are only 4, after all). It is a great strategic move because it basically gives them extra lives, and precisely for this reason—i.e. to encourage strategic play—there are no restrictions whatsoever in who can play in these scenarios, including players who don't normally play in Battlegrounds at all. They can play them as an SRPG, which is basically a CRPG without the exploration. In a CRPG you have to manually walk between the battles, and manually spend your money on equipment, and even the order of the battles is to some degree chosen by you. But because this level of freedom is anathema to yellows, their games just teleport you from battle to battle, with some animu in-between telling you why you're fighting. And they are fine games, don't get me wrong! Much better than JRPGs, because, since they lack the exploration, all they have is the battles, so they can't screw that up as the JRPGs do, so the battles in SRPGs are far superior in complexity and difficulty to JRPGs. They're pretty neat games! But they can't compare to an epic 100-hour CRPG with orders of magnitude more complexity and freedom and depth of lore and setting, not to mention even the occasional dialogue and narrative choice, and they're basically mini-games compared to it. There, I just reviewed the entire genre for you.

But my Master of Combat standalone SRPG solves all those issues, and puts Whites on top of THAT genre too in the bargain! Because Master of Combat doesn't have the rock-paper-scissors children's combat system of the Fire Emblems, it has the deepest turn-based tactical combat of all time: Pathfinder First Edition. Its setting is also the biggest ever, and its lore the deepest ever, and the scenarios even have a little actual roleplaying and puzzle-solving in them that utterly trounce every CRPG ever, so they beat to an extent even the superior genre! And to top it all off, you don't get teleported between battles, you have to walk (or ride etc.) there, via my adventure-strategy layer aka Master of Heroes, more on which in a bit. So my Master of Combat solves ALL the problems with SRPGs, and even some with their superior CRPGs! Oh and did I mention that it's massively-multiplayer online co-op up to as many players as you can squeeze in the level requirements (so if the scenario is for four 5th-level characters, you're welcome to bring 20 1st-level ones), and that it has infinite levels and infinite heroes, and even infinite themes? You can play Blade Runner SWAT versus Replicants, or Cyberpunk Edgerunners versus Street Samurai powered by InfiniContent™ technology proprietary to Cult Games; and in what other game can you do that?

That's how icy enters a new genre: by destroying, and even humiliating, everything that came before. Go play Fire Emblem after reading about my game and seeing it in action. They are fine games, but they are children's games. And everyone here is an adult.

So if you're a gamer who's not into roleplaying, but love tactical turn-based combat and SRPGs, my Master of Combat which I launch TODAY is the ultimate destination for you. There will never be a superior SRPG because who tf will make a better combat system than Paizo and stick it on a Switch or whatever tf consoles SRPGs are released on these days? And the Japs will NEVER significantly improve any aspect of their games. They will never build deep world with deep lore, never allow you to walk between battles, never even give you a co-op option (I can't think of a SINGLE SRPG with co-op, which is hilariously retarded as the genre was made for it, and indeed it was INSPIRED by it, because it was inspired by D&D). And to top it all off, though you won't be technically playing my Battlegrounds, YOU WILL BE AFFECTING IT BIG-TIME with every scenario you tackle, and indeed the roleplayers' acting WILL BE YOUR FUCKING ENDING CINEMATIC, and of course also the opening cinematic, and so on. When you save the region from some menace, IT WILL BE ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS YOU WILL BE SAVING: the roleplayers in your vicinity who will be watching your actions while holding their breath, and sighing in relief with every successfully navigated scenario. Similarly when you fail, you'll see them running around frantically like drowning rats trying to salvage the situation. That's what ultimate interactivity looks like, and you will be partaking in it from your Master of Combat interface. It's okay, roleplaying isn't for everyone, just like the turn-based combat tactics scenarios you love aren't for everyone, which is why not all the roleplayers will be playing them. Some roleplayers are mostly in it for the roleplaying, and don't enjoy the combat so much as to seek it even outside the roleplaying, while the opposite is true for many SRPG players, and that is fine. I am just glad I have devised a game system so all-encompassing that I can enable these very different types of players to indirectly interact, thus populating the most complex gaming world ever, and bringing it to life to a degree it hadn't been possible before.

If, on the other hand, you want to understand the cinematic significance of Master of Combat Scenarios think about vignettes (French for "little vine") in the early stages of a sprawling epic novel or movie that seem unrelated to the main plot but come together and cohere later on. Game of Thrones had tons of those, for example, and much of the fun of watching it was seeing those vignettes come together, or simply get brutally cut short before having a chance to affect much of anything. So in our current situation in the Battlegrounds you have the main Rise of the Runelords campaign where they are fighting goblins in the festival and the Glassworks and so on, then chasing the instigator in tunnels under the town, and suddenly the camera pulls back and flashes back 6 months to 4 unrelated adventurers entering Black Fang's dungeon a few hours' walk to the east. What does that have to do with the town of Sandpoint, our protagonists, and the runelords? Who knows, this is the magic of gaming: it is the players who decide what happens, not a scriptwriter: in this case both the one-shot players and the main campaign ones (a one-shot is an adventure that can be finished in one sitting, and that's what all the Master of Combat Scenarios are), while the adventure merely sets the scene for interesting situations to play out. To be sure the dragon has his motivations, and the dice will have their say, but the main movers and shakers are the players, and the future is theirs to shape.

The artistic meaning of vignette is a picture (such as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper, and that's precisely what Black Fang is to the campaign into which I've just dropped him (or rather, into which the players have unlocked him); he's supposed to meld into his surroundings and become part of the campaign, even though he's not in the Runelords books. But he is in the "Beginner Box" adventure, and that's right in the middle of where the Runelords action takes place, so how can you NOT include him? Especially given how interesting he is!

So we should guard against thinking of the scenarios as something separate from the standalone adventures and campaigns. In my design, they are one, part of the unified mega-setting of Pathfinder, and this is where I am going with all these updates: to REALLY produce a unified flowing world instead of the extremely fragmentary one that every other GM on the planet is producing, not to speak of the CRPG programmers who can't even parse the concept of setting, or even campaign really.

Isn't there a balance issue by throwing freakin' dragons and undead armadas in the middle of perfectly balanced campaigns?

Absolutely. And these are just TWO scenarios, whereas there will be 5 or 10 or even 20+ that will be dropped into some regions and campaigns (depending on how developed each region is by Paizo). So that absolutely wrecks the shit out of Paizo's balance, and without even having done the math I would say renders them utterly unplayable, all else being equal.

But all else won't be equal in my Ultimate Edition design, because UE players will have tons of tools at their disposal that regular roleplayers don't: multiple teams of players around the world that can be called to help, multiple heroes per player that can aid or even outright replace fallen or incapacitated protagonists, extensive city-building and even kingdom resources to deal with situations that are threatening to spiral completely out of control or have already done so. And in the middle of all this will be me, the ultimate game designer and therefore also the ultimate balancer, making sure all the systems and adventure designs work perfectly with each other. Who else could do this job? No one else was even able to conceive it! And as my friend ysignal explained to me when we were playing Starbase and, awestruck by the game's complexity, I asked him whether it was possible that some bugs might appear that the developers can't figure out how to fix, "If you can code it, you can bugfix it."

So with all these new, rampaging threats, and with all these new heroes and resources running around the world, you first of all turbocharge each fused genre—which is why I win in EVERY genre that I add, because the synergy from all the others catapults them all past every previous example—and second of all you produce a gaming universe of unrivaled complexity and immersion. And we must ascribe a huge part of this success to these little scenarios that most good GMs view as beneath them, but without which my Battlegrounds would always remain a mere collection of loosely related official campaigns. And they would remain loosely related, as I at length realized, simply because of how far they are set from each other. How will the teams interact when the nearest team is weeks or even months of travel away, while all the teams are fully engaged with the threats they're facing and lack the time to so much as take a day off, let alone travel anywhere. About the only chance for some kind of interaction is if one team fails their campaign, and the nearest team takes a break from theirs—assuming that they are at a spot where they can—and goes to help. But this won't be likely in the middle of the campaigns, because everyone will be fully engaged with their own challenges. Only at the end of the campaigns, if say one team TPKed at the final boss while the neighboring team won, the latter could sweep around and finish off the other boss too, since they'd probably be OP for him by that point. But that's ONE interaction after a whole YEAR of gaming. So yes, under this scheme, the teams would interact maybe once a year. Which is nothing to sneeze at because I don't even know nor have I heard about any GM who gets his teams to interact at ALL; but it's far from the living world with frequent cross-party interactions that I dreamed of when first starting this project. I had hugely underestimated the distances involved, and also how totalizing Paizo's campaigns are: they're cinematic rollercoaster rides that take you from 1st-level to endgame with barely room to catch your breath. But Master of Combat solves all this because now instead of one character per player we can have as many as we want, and they can be all over the place, and getting in each other's shit all the time via the delightfully complex globe-spanning Pathfinder Society Scenarios that seem designed specifically to solve my problem!

Think of the game world as a salad, to grasp what's going on here and the genius of my design. A long time ago I used to run a snowboarding chalet up in the French Alps, and one of my guests drove all the way from London to the Alps in his car. When he arrived, I came out to greet him and saw he had packed his trunk full of soft supermarket bread because French bread "made his gums bleed". He said he's glad France has such great food ingredients, but one must know how to prepare them into meals, which he didn't, so he was sad he couldn't take advantage of the famed French cuisine (he was also too cheap for restaurants). So I taught him how to make salads because they're the easiest dish you can make apart from sandwiches, and you can perfectly take advantage of superior French produce with them. So one night I made a Greek salad for him, and he loved it. The next day he went to the store and bought all the ingredients and made it himself, but it didn't taste the same. He said it tasted much worse, and he couldn't figure out why. So I had a bite, and knew immediately his mistake. He had only put a little olive oil in it, because northerners treat olive oil as if it's made from gold (and given how much more expensive it is in the north, I don't blame them). I told him you have to almost DROWN the fucking salad in the most expensive extra virgin olive oil you can afford to make it taste good, because that's the conduit through which the various ingredients rub off on each other and fuse. Without oil, all you have are some tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and cheese just sitting on each other. You might as well shove them in your mouth separately at that point. But with the oil, the oregano, and some vigorous tossing, you have one of the greatest dishes man has ever devised!

And that's what Master of Combat, and Master of Heroes, will do to my Battlegrounds world: they will transform the largely self-contained and isolated campaigns into a flowing, textured canvas of epic fantasy of unrivaled complexity, interactivity and beauty.

Right off the bat you should be able to see that my design is able to sustain campaigns no matter how bad things get, whereas single-group games are forced to adopt all manner of lame devices to keep things going when disaster strikes, like rolling new characters at higher-than-1st-level or whatever. None of that is necessary in a truly living world where players, teams and heroes abound. You can just keep going no matter what the hell happens in the game, as Quill & Cauldron have so brilliantly demonstrated with their "Doomed Forgotten Realms" [ > ] sourcebook.

"Imagine the worst possible ending for each published Dungeons & Dragons 5E adventure path all happening one after another." It's a terrifying premise every player and DM has likely indulged via daydreams, but setting guide Doomed Forgotten Realms - Sword Coast Gazetter takes it one step further. The new book details a world awash in evil and how players might successfully survive it - or embrace it.

Created by Quill & Cauldron and coming to Dungeon Masters Guild on May 30th, Doomed Forgotten Realms throws disasters across the face of Faerûn - both natural and otherworldly - until every familiar location has been twisted beyond recognition. Waterdeep is overrun with cultists, Tiamat has claimed a floating citadel for herself and her boundless horde, and Baldur's Gate is, well... literally descended in one of the Nine Hells, replaced by a smouldering crater.

Like other setting guides, this book is meant to introduce a new world as a sandbox for a tabletop RPG group to explore a Sword Coast where no heroes rose up to stop any of the threats outlined in Wizards of the Coast's officially published books - Vecna, Zariel, the Elemental cults, and other world-threatening powers now vie to control a blighted landscape where humanity barely holds on by a fingernail.

This isn't an adventure by itself. Every faction, area and major player - of which there are many - contain several hooks by which a group can anchor itself to the world and provide a reason for venturing beyond what little shreds of safety remain. This place is very much a battleground for powers beyond the ken of most mortals - the world's most evil beings don't want to share with each other, so the simple act of travelling from one village to another means squaring off against demons, the undead, corrupted elementals, pitiless bandits and far-roaming dragons.

So, what's a new adventurer to do? Doomed Forgotten Realms' text is very explicit in saying that this book may not be for everyone. Beginning from a place of near hopelessness where good lost to evil but the world kept spinning might sound like a truly awful premise for game night, but those who do relish the odds stacked against them can roleplay the slow, silent resurgence of capital-G Good with the help of some familiar faces that barely escaped annihilation.

Alternatively, a party can lean in hard and throw their lot in with any one of the several dominant factions, helping the Fire Giants test their doomsday weapon against Tiamat or voluntarily joining the ranks of Zariel's devil army to fight in the Blood Wars. It bears remembering, though, that D&D 5E's alignments are fairly prescriptive, so those choosing to align with these entities should either understand the territory or always be watching for the eventual betrayal.

The book contains several new character and class options that better fit the drastic transformations the Sword Coast has already endured under its new masters. For example, druids can choose the Circle of the Nine if their character understands that the fiends and devils of the Nine Hells are now indelibly linked to the cycle of nature in the Material Plane. Rogues, on the other hand, can become Spell Slayers and learn just enough magic to protect themselves from a world seemingly full to the brim with liches.

The difference with my Ultimate Edition is that in my game and world all outcomes are produced by players playing the adventures, whereas Quill & Cauldron just dreamed their scenario up, it didn't occur organically by their running all these campaigns with 20 interacting players. I doubt they've played even half of them.

But their point stands that you can have fun with any situation generated by the game as long as your imagination is strong enough to handle any outcome. And no game will generate more surprising outcomes than mine now that its salad is about to be tossed more vigorously than any campaign setting's ever has.

There were still problems left with the Society Scenarios by this point, the elephantine one being: what to do with their metaplot. But by this late stage in my thinking process, I already had amassed all the data that would allow me to solve it.

First off, you need to understand how I can run the Adventure Paths out of order, even though they too have a metaplot. It turns out that, as I discovered after a couple of years of reading up about this stuff, out of the First Edition's 24 Adventure Paths, only a handful of them are STRONGLY related to others. To give a couple of examples, Rise of the Runelords, Shattered Star, and Return of the Runelords form a trilogy—incidentally, the biggest connected plot in the history of roleplaying, and therefore of gaming, as they span 3 separate campaigns, with even a couple of side-campaigns, if you can believe it. We're talking about a trilogy of CAMPAIGNS, not a trilogy of ADVENTURES, which is the standard. No one in gaming has ever dreamed as big as this before. And we're also talking two side-CAMPAIGNS, not side-adventures, for a total of maybe FIVE connected campaigns, taking FIVE FUCKING YEARS TO PLAY—if you're playing fast (10 if you're slow, and assuming you have only one team of players at your disposal).

So of course, all that stuff must be played in order in the Battlegrounds, so the only one of all these campaigns available for the players at the start of the game was the very first: Rise of the Runelords, which one team ended up choosing (doesn't mean they have to follow it up with all the others; it's a different team of adventurers for every campaign anyway, so any team can pick any of the others once they've been unlocked).

Then Council of Thieves must precede Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance, the latter two of which must be ran simultaneously. And so on for a couple of other exceptions. And finally, Tyrant's Grasp must be played last, after the 23 others have been completed, because it provides the monstrous finale with which Season 1 ends, and transitions the setting to Season 2.

So all of those exceptions have been set up as unlockables in the Battlegrounds overworld, and will be played in the recommended order. But the 15 or so others have few if any connections with the metaplot, or with each other, and can thus be played in any order the players desire.

Is anything lost with this arrangement?

Some small details MIGHT be lost, if the GM doesn't do his job properly at any rate. For example, one later Adventure Path features the sister of a character that was central to not one but TWO earlier Adventure Paths. The connection is not crucial to any aspect of any of these campaigns, but Paizo writers try to include such connections to enhance their setting's verisimilitude. It would be weird if in such a smoothly connected world, none of the characters of any of the Adventure Paths had friends or relatives or even acquaintances taking part in other Adventure Paths, and so the writers have sown these adventures with some tastefully sparse such connections. These connections are HUGE and even CRUCIAL in the Adventure Paths directly tied to each other which we'll be playing in order. But in all the other Adventure Paths, these connections are mostly cosmetic, and can simply be replaced or merely reversed to achieve the same effect. Does it really matter which sister appears in the narrative first, if you play the two Adventure Paths in reverse order? The texts even tell you that if one sister dies, you can bring the other one over from the other book to take her place in the next campaign. After all, the last surviving sister gets to inherit the family's fortune, so the result, from the players' perspective, is the same no matter what happens. Unless of course they've become attached to one of the sisters, which is another matter (especially when running Ultimate Edition relationship rules). But no matter what happens, the GM can make the connection work in either direction, with little trouble.

And the same is more or less true of EVERY minor connection between Adventure Paths or standalone adventures, and of course also Society Scenarios. There are connections EVERYWHERE between EVERY product line; but the writers, knowing that this is a game and thus interactive—and thus highly variable—have wisely made these connections sparse and minor, with few exceptions. Those exceptions we'll play in order, and all the rest I will amend as necessary to preserve the richness of the texture while conforming to the order in which our players choose to explore the world and its challenges.

Or else we would have had to play everything IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION. I.e. we would have had to take Paizo's entire publication catalogue of by now hundreds of books and, starting with Rise of the Runelords 1/6: Burnt Offerings, play them in order, one by one—which would have felt absurdly stifling as we would know, years in advance, exactly what we'd be playing in a decade! I am not saying there's no fun to be had by doing things this way; the material itself would have still been of unmatched quality. But that WAY of playing the game would have been WRETCHED. The players would have felt more like TV show actors than gamers and roleplayers, simply acting out a predetermined metaplot, whereas now, when they regard my overworld with its many flashing dots of adventures and campaigns, they feel like masters of their own destiny, real adventurers faced with a world of infinite choice. And when they play this material in whatever order they choose, and the consequences of their actions begin radiating outwards from them, and affecting nearby adventurers and their campaigns in ways entirely unique to our world out of all the groups who have played these games, THAT is how a roleplaying game should work for maximum interactivity, and therefore maximum immersion. And even the sacred metaplot won't be so sacred in our world, as it isn't in the worlds of any good GM. Things could escalate to a point where an entire campaign is wiped out of the map before it's even begun, and that's okay. It is precisely my job, the GM's job, to determine what happens to the world when game events overcome what's written in the books, and the books themselves offer various suggestions for multiple outcomes.

To return to the Society Scenario conundrum then, it was extremely naive of me to think—during my early attempts at integrating them in my game—that I could run the Adventure Paths out of order, but the Society Scenarios in order. Since these things are linked, with every Society Season focusing on the Adventure Paths released during that Season, I would always end up either playing BOTH product lines in order, or both out of order! No other arrangement could have ever worked; and since I was adamant from the first that the Adventure Paths would be played (largely) out of order, I was destined to arrive at the conclusion that the Society Scenarios should also be played out of order, and in fact in largely the same order as the players would choose to run the Adventure Paths (since the Adventure Paths unlock them). The reason it took me so long to figure all this out was because I didn't have the full data in my hand at the start of how the Pathfinder rules and setting and adventures worked, and it would take me years to amass it simply because of how sprawling and complex the Pathfinder setting is, and how opaque its workings to anyone not on Paizo's staff working on this stuff full-time. But in the end I figured it all out, because of course I would. What else is there to concern yourself with at the peak of gaming? Once you discover Paizo, everything else loses its charm. (Paizo is a Greek word by the way, it means "play", and everyone pronounces it wrong; it's pronounced "pehzo".)

Let's now switch gears to break up this wall of text for a moment and talk about something pretty: production values. While preparing the Silent Tide scenario, as aforesaid, I googled "Absalom Puddles" because that's where it starts: in Absalom's Puddles district, where, after "a massive earthquake in 4698 AR, it caused this district to drop below sea level at high tide, causing flooding and erosion. The center of the district is now a festering lake, known as the Little Inner Sea, and most businesses are calf-deep in water even at low tide. Unsurprisingly, most of the district's inhabitants who could leave the area have done so, leaving behind addicts, criminals, and the poor to fend for themselves in an environment as derelict as their squalid lives."

There's no map in the product provided for Puddles, but I found someone who'd rendered part of the district in 4K 2.5D video!

[OC] I'm sorry if this isn't allowed, I made maps this week inspired by The Puddles District in The City of Absalom! - 3 FREE 4K Animated Map downloads in the comments! [4K] [3840 × 2160px]
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... _maps_this

3 of the maps are free and you can get 6 more plus the Overview map (showing how the segments connect) by signing up to his Patreon. Take a look to see how stunning it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5CtQ-jLDE8



I think this beats every isometric CRPG ever besides BG3 and maybe D:OS2. And, to repeat, the Scenario doesn't even give a map of Puddles at all. The only thing you have is the Absalom map, and you can see Puddles at the bottom-left.



Moreover, there's no map for the first battle either, a fight at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. This is what one GM made for it lol:



Back when I was preparing this about a year ago, I'd found a slightly better map which appears to no longer be online, but it was still crap. But when I stumbled on the 4K video Puddles maps, I started searching YouTube and Patreon for video maps of other areas, and found a stunning cliffside one that was pretty much exactly what this battle needs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9l-DXI7X_A



Again, you'd be hard pressed to find an isometric CRPG that looks this good. So now with some research and a few bucks you've turned two theater of the mind scenes into two stunning scenes that wouldn't look out of place in Baldur's Gate 3. And you can just keep doing this, scenario after scenario, if you put in the time, and money. I have compiled massive lists of this material, and though not all of it is at the same high level, there are still dozens of stunning examples and hundreds of solid, usable ones. Take a look at some more highlights.

Small Islands
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftzBH8y-Yc



Watermill Defense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNMZLSyllws



Frozen Lake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR0LDwiYYz4



One publisher has a large storefront of this stuff on DTRPG, with bundles of locations going for hundreds of dollars: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/pub ... ngeon-maps

Or you can buy them individually, for about $15 per 4K location, such as this gorgeous celestial one: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/pro ... lestial-4k



But that's not the end of it because, if there are hundreds of 2.5D video maps, there are thousands of 2D maps, some of them wildly beautiful. Here are some outstanding recent examples; there's a growing industry of artists making a living out of churning out exclusively this sort of stuff (note that all the maps have Patreon stamps).

Lich Throne Room


Zoom in to see the detail. That's not even the 4K version.

Storm Realm of Giants


Druid Library


The Chamber of the Guildpact


Corporate Rooftop Landing Pad


Throne of the Thunder God


This last one is so complex—as befits a god's throne—that the tactical possibilities are infinite. Compare to what people play on Steam these days:



I don't even know its title. I just googled Steam tactics game and this is what I got. People say it has 2 sequels. I don't know if that's true, I don't follow subhuman news. But I have heard people say this. That's a series of 3 games whose designers can't even be bothered to put any more complexity in their battlefields than chess's: i.e. zero complexity, because chess boards are empty, like this game. They won't even put a single fucking rock in the battlefield. Steam is really becoming the platform of the mentally-challenged. As the smart, ambitious talent drains to metaverse games, i.e. Star Citizen (1,300 genius developers and counting) and GMRPGs, the remaining average drops lower and lower, in both developers and players. I should write a whole essay about this.

Has anyone even ever played an SRPG without invisible walls? In Master of Heroes you can walk off the battlefield if you want, if the battle's going badly, and save your hero (and your Battlegrounds credit, more on which in a moment) to live to fight another day. How the Pathfinder Society will take that though, is another matter; not to mention the other players—especially if due to your fleeing other heroes were killed. Merely that heroes CAN be killed is a revolution in the genre. And no, they can't die in Fire Emblem because you can, and everyone does, simply reload. Has there even ever been an SRPG without saving and loading? Note that the reason the programmers can't balance—they don't even have any idea what balancing is—is precisely because of the saving and loading. After all, what's the point of putting in the crazy effort to balance on a razor's edge like Paizo does when the player can just use the crutch of loading if things go bad? That's why arcade games are so finely-balanced, while console games aren't. And Master of Combat is an arcade game. Indeed, the entire Ultimate Edition is. Maybe I'll even make a cabinet some day for it. I can see Cult Cabs coming when Cult 3D Printers hit the streets.

"But icy, in an SRPG there is a plot that connects the battles. Where is it in your game?" It's in the overworld. It won't be delivered to you between "levels" in the form of cutscenes because... it can't be delivered that way. It's too complex for that. If you want the context of your missions, you'll have to explore the overworld for it. There you can track the consequences of your performances forever, spreading out from you like ripples in a pond. Just start clicking around the overworld when the summaries and video highlights start going up and you'll get it.

And, just as my game trumps SRPGs on the videogame side, it also trumps organized play campaigns on the roleplaying side. On the face of it our setup might seem inferior because PFS Scenario results are reported back to the organizers and used in calculations to determine the direction and outcome of the overall campaign. And it would seem at first that we have no way of emulating that. But first of all not only are we indeed "emulating" it, but doing much better: we don't need anyone to "report back" anything because all our results are directly reflected on the overworld! The reason Paizo needs the reporting mechanic is because they have so many unrelated groups playing their scenarios that they don't even know these people, and these people don't even know each other! So of course, for THEM, some sort of reporting system is required, and though it sounds very cool and very organized, it's utterly unnecessary for us. Moreover, their system doesn't even make sense in game-world terms, because many groups play the same mission as many others, so they aren't even in the same universe! So how are they all contributing to the campaign's outcome! It's pure videogamey sharding bullshit like Star Citizen also does in their Global Events, and though it's excusable for a real-time videogame with real server constraints, I don't see how it can be excused in a turn-based roleplaying game. In contrast, everything we do in and out of game in Battlegrounds makes perfect sense, which can't be said for Paizo's setup. And it's all because they are trying to accommodate way too many people, like Star Citizen: tens of thousands of them (and SC millions). This all began in the Living Greyhawk campaign back in 2000, which was a pioneering concept in gaming, but a flawed one. I would have done it way differently, I would have custom scenarios for each group made by the group's GM, and checked by the GM's Chief for consistency according to established guidelines. Then THOSE unique results would be conveyed back to the campaigns planners, and calculated to determine their influence on the campaign direction. It would be more work, but it'd be a true living world and not the bs videogamey sharding of the same handful of scenarios (to be fair, Living Greyhawk employed SOME of these measures, which Paizo ditched for the sake of convenience; a rare case of Paizo underperforming their predecessor, which can be see in Greyhawk's getting 1,000+ scenarios in 8 years while Pathfinder "only" has about 350 after 15 years, and this because regional GMs could contribute scenarios in Greyhawk while only Paizo staff can do so in Pathfinder. But maybe the Paizo scenarios are so superior that their quality compensates for their lower number. I don't have enough experience with any of this to make that judgement at this time, but from what I know about the capacities of the typical GM versus Paizo staff, I would guess this to be the case. Then again, is scenario quality the top priority in a living campaign, or is it rather the campaign's actually BEING a living one, which requires players playing unique scenarios, meaning you need as many of them as you can get.)

So, to return to the subject of maps/environments, the maps included with the Path/Starfinder Society Scenarios have great tactical value, and solid aesthetics, but when enriched with hundreds of video maps and thousands of 2D maps, they'll be the best squad-level tactical situations ever.

As for the music, there's so much incredible fantasy music being produced these days that goes unused, it'd be ridiculous if it weren't shameful. Please have a listen:

Forest Sanctum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddZKwg63bRg



I struggle to think of a videogame with better music than this; the best of the best barely gets to this level. AND NO ONE IS USING IT. It's PERFECT for a fantasy game, and it just sits there in that YT channel. THOUSANDS of excellent tracks are just sitting there. So that's what players will be hearing in the best SRPG ever: mine. Go listen to a Fire Emblem soundtrack after the above, and you'll be floored by the difference. Adult versus childish music.

The best mechanics, the best maps, the best music. The best and most balanced scenarios: it doesn't get any better-balanced than Paizo Organized Play, these are the masters, and these scenarios are playtested by thousands of the best squad-level tacticians in gaming, with lengthy forum threads as feedback for every scenario for me to study before the session, to help me fine-tune everything even MOAR. And everything stemming from the metaplot (since that's what's unlocking the scenarios), and affecting the metaplot in turn.

The craziest thing of all is the infinite nature of this setup. Normally, great things are finite, extremely finite, so you would expect the greatest SRPG to have only a few levels, but this one has infinite ones. Not only do we have 350+ right now, but Paizo releases a couple new ones per month. Just for Pathfinder. Then add Starfinder. And D&D's Adventurers League (same thing but for D&D). There are even older D&D organized play archives to mine, all the way back to the aforementioned Greyhawk days with the 1,000+ Living Greyhawk scenarios. And btw I haven't even mentioned Pathfinder Quests, Pathfinder Bounties, GameMastery Compleat Encounters, and more random mini-scenarios that Paizo releases in random bursts. So let me repeat that WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT of this stuff and that's why art critics call my Battlegrounds The Infinite Artwork. And besides, you can't just sit down for a few weekends and blaze through a dozen of these scenarios, you must wait until the Battlegrounds players have unlocked them in the roleplaying layer first. So there is a natural brake to the pace of the game applied through its tight integration with the rest of Battlegrounds.

What about progression? Can you progress along any other axis than level-ups?

Have I got some news for you.

In my Master of Combat (NOT in Paizo's setup), you can rise up the ranks of the Pathfinder Society until you're a Venture-Lieutenant and then Venture-Captain in charge of a Pathfinder Lodge, at which point YOU will be giving the other players the missions! You'll be literally dropping pins on the map with your objectives for them! Please show me another game where this is possible!



In Paizo's setup you can rise to Venture-Lieutenant and then Venture-Captain but in the REAL WORLD, not inside the game. I.e. you can become a head GM in the league's administration. Which is cool of course, I am not knocking what they do as a concept, but rising in the ranks INSIDE the game is so much more interesting and rewarding since that's why we play the game after all: for IN-game interactivity, not out-of-game.

This will be the only way to get a Pathfinder Lodge, you won't be able to get them through Master of Heroes (where all other buildings can be acquired), and I doubt anything published for the roleplaying layer gives you one. There may be the odd exception, and if we get there I'll honor it, but I haven't seen one yet. Also, this is the only way outside of the roleplaying layer to level a character to 20th-level. In Master of Heroes I have set a cap at 7th-level, reasoning that anything higher than that requires the overcoming of stiff personal challenges that only handcrafted scenarios can provide. And of course the roleplaying layer can go up to effectively 30th-level with the Mythic rules from "Mythic Adventures". So you can see Master of Combat has its unique place in the overall design. It's not just "Play this if you like squad-level tactics". For the complete Battlegrounds player, it's where you level your lieutenants, whereas the roleplaying layer is where you level your leaders, and the adventure layer furnishes the mass of your followers (or rather the bosses of the followers, because the followers are a separate category, and THEY are the mass of your people). You could also see it as a Planetary Annihilation-inspired zoom system: the more you zoom into the game, the higher you can raise your characters' powers, starting with 7th-level in the adventure layer, which rises to 20th at the tactical layer (though note precious few PFS Scenarios reach that high, so there'll be competition for them; most of them max out at around 12th-level), which rockets to 30th at the roleplaying layer (meaning 20 levels + 10 Mythic tiers). In other words you really have to get down and dirty and truly BECOME a character moment-to-moment for a number of months in order to raise him to the maximum levels of power allowed by the game. I don't think anything anywhere near as cool as this concept has ever occurred to anyone working on games, let alone implemented. To me the idea just came naturally as I was fusing together all those wildly disparate systems and layers into a single coherent whole. The task itself suggested the design to me, and the solutions to all the snags and incompatibilities are coming via the immense breadth and depth of my gaming experience.

And speaking of power, this is the real-world analogue of the Pathfinder hierarchy btw (since the Pathfinder Society is both an in-game and out-of-game organization):

[Paizo Publishing]
|
[Campaign Leadership]
|
[Venture-Captains]
|
[Venture-Lieutenants]
|
[Event Coordinators]
|
[Game Masters]
|
[Everyone Else in PFS]

The "Campaign Leadership" at the top also has an in-game analogue: The Decemvirate, also known as The Ten who lead the Pathfinder Society from the Grand Lodge in Absalom. And yes, you can aim for a seat at that table, and who knows (I know), maybe even beyond. How exactly would that work, mechanically? There is a metric ton of material released about the Society over the years, from the humble 32-page booklet "Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide" that launched the organization in August 2008...



...to the latest glossy hardcover tome:



...and what I've done is go through them all and arrange them in 20 levels, so that as a player levels through these missions, he unlocks more and more knowledge about the Society for himself (i.e. only he can access this info in the Battlegrounds Codex). If he survives to 20th-level (and doesn't retire from the Society either, because retiring is the easy way to survive), he will know just about everything about the Society that it is possible to know, apart from the darkest secrets that only The Ten know. And at that point he'll have enough tools to make a power play against them, or simply apply to join them. And THAT is an utterly awesome progression system and metaplot that Paizo simply can't replicate because they have to cater to tens of thousands of people. Everyone playing in Master of Combat will be playing a far superior version of Paizo's already fantastic Pathfinder Society campaign. It's a very popular campaign btw. If you google around you'll find plenty of chapters in White nations. Maybe even one near you, though you can also play online, and I indeed advise non-Battlegrounds players to sign up and play. Can't be worse than those Steam games you're playing. Give it a shot. (Battlegrounds players can also join a Society chapter, but they must report every Scenario they play in the Past RPG experience thread, and they can't play those in Battlegrounds).



As heroes level, there will be an increasingly strong incentive to "cash them out" and retire them into the less brutal adventure-strategy phase, to use them as strategic assets. But staying on, and rising through the ranks by completing more and more missions, will get you closer to the top of the Pathfinder Society, which is a huge strategic asset. How long will you stay in? How high will you aim? Yet another layer of depth and complexity added to Ultimate Edition and Battlegrounds to interact with all the rest. Yet another career path, as they call them in Star Citizen: Pathfinder!

The rules for leveling and purchasing equipment and such aren't the same in PFS as in normal PF btw. For example, leveling is much simplified: you just gain 1 XP per successfully completed scenario, and at 3 XP you level. Some higher scenarios give more XP, but that's the basic rule.



All these rules, plus the 1st-level dossier on the Pathfinder Society, will be given to players who play one "credit" of Master of Combat. As for how you get a credit/hero, they cost $50 and those subbed at Cult Roleplayer tier get a free one on sign-up and extra ones every other month, so 6/year (this perk has now been added to the tier description). That should be enough to recover from a couple of deaths, plus it's shared with Master of Heroes where, as I'll be explaining shortly, there's no limit to how many heroes can be profitably used. There isn't a limit in Master of Combat either, but the nature of how the missions are unlocked means the pace of play is dictated by the roleplaying campaign progress, so there is only a finite number of unlocked scenarios at any given time, while in Master of Heroes not even the sky's the limit, since you can expand in all directions including in space and alternate dimensions.

How good of a value is $50/hero? If you die at the first scenario, not very good. But with each scenario being 4 hours, every further scenario makes it a better deal, and if you survive 5 or 10 of them—which is entirely possible given Paizo's fine balancing—that's 20-40 hours, which is the price, and duration, of an average SRPG or CRPG on Steam. And instead of playing that 30-year-old design, you play my modern, cutting-edge masterpiece, and help fund it too. And that, I believe, is an awesome deal. The icing on the cake is that it turns my game into an arcade game lol. Leave it to icy to turn SRPGs into arcade games. And being an arcade game, it makes every credit you play, every hero's life, that much more valuable to you. You wouldn't value them as much if they were free, exactly as with infinite continues in arcade-to-console conversions.

As for why heroes aren't free: because they can't be, considering how much all the assets are costing me to set up these scenarios. But even beyond that, I have made a deliberate decision to adapt Star Citizen's funding model for Battlegrounds, and Master of Combat is part of that. Already I can barely keep the game and sites going; whoever reads Orgy will know how bad my financial situation has been lately. So either CIG's funding model will work for me, or I will have to put the game and all my sites on pause and get a job. But even when (hopefully) my situation improves, this game is, exactly like Star Citizen, a funding black hole: you can throw as much money into it as you want, and it will always be able to swallow more. So Cult Engine 4 will be free but come with a marketplace from day 1 to help fund the project, and I will have to pay for every chair and mug the players use, let alone for towns and castles. So if I can barely afford the lower-definition engines' assets right now, I won't be able to use CE4 at all to the level of fidelity I demand with my current finances. I can't even afford its server right now, never mind its assets. So either funding for my game will increase, or we'll stick with lower engines, and maybe even pause the game altogether if things get too bad. This is my last-ditch effort to make the game work financially for me. And the question to be answered is: Do the players like all the new stuff I am putting in, and are they prepared to pay for them, and how much? We'll find out. But please no charity purchases: buy only what you want to play, or pledge more even if you aren't playing as long as you're excited to see Battlegrounds grow and discover how far I can push gaming. But charity wouldn't help me, it would merely delay the inevitable, which is bad.

Can a person outside the clan drop $50 on a credit and play? No. Cult Superplayer sub is always needed to play any of my games. Any credits are in addition to that. That's what it takes to develop and run this game. It's not cheap. In fact it's the most expensive game you can play, as explained in Renaissance Gaming and the Most Expensive Game Ever. "But icy Star Citizen now has a $48,000 package." Oh really? Star Citizen should hold my beer until Alpha 3.0. That's all I'll say for now.

Some terminology:

Character = roleplaying layer (Battlegrounds)
Hero = adventure layer (Master of Heroes/Combat)
XXXXXXXXX = Master of Heroes expansion coming in Alpha 3.0
XXXXXX = XXXXXXX layer coming in Alpha 3.5

These are technical terms; "hero" in this context doesn't mean he is heroic, he could also be a villain or a scumbag. I just need a way to differentiate between layers, and hero comes from Heroes of Might & Magic which was one of the prime inspirations for Master of Combat, and of course for Master of Heroes.

Heroes aren't rolled in Master of Combat, or Master of Heroes. They're randomly generated. Moreover, though Paizo stipulates a 20-point buy system to level the playing field (it IS a competitive league after all), my games don't. Why random characters? Several reasons, the easiest of which to understand is that when we were planning to duplicate Paizo's Organized Play structure last year, all my players opted for martial characters, presumably because most of my players are beginners and didn't want to get into the added complexity of the casters. Some of them play casters in the roleplaying layer already and probably didn't want a second one, and the martial players probably didn't want to put more effort into their PFS character than their main character, which makes sense. But this setup is unworkable because we can't have the entire Pathfinder Society being staffed my martial characters, it'd be ludicrous. So that's one base reason I can give you why I went with randomized characters. But it's not the main one, not by a long shot, and the main one will be explained at length in the next section, on Master of Heroes, where I will convince you beyond the shadow of a doubt that randomization is the absolute superior character generation method for the adventure layer (of which the tactical scenarios are merely a component).

Portraits will be semi-randomized. This brings me to the reveal of the generative artificial intelligence program I architected called Cultjourney, being developed at Cult AI San Francisco, a studio I spun up in 2022 to handle this crucial aspect of Battlegrounds. We'll get into what exactly it can offer in future updates, and there will also be a Discord bot introduced, exclusive to The Cult's Discord, but for now all that needs to be said is that this tool will generate a unique portrait for each hero by being fed with his stats and background, and the end result will be semi-randomized because I will personally vet these portraits and, where necessary, customize and modify them to fit my game's themes and standards. But from the perspective of the player, the portrait will seem entirely randomized since he'll have no control over what he gets. If this seems too restrictive or even unfair to you, realize that's how every tactical and strategy videogame ever has worked, and as I'll be explaining in the next section, WITH GOOD REASON. It's just more fun this way. A hell of a lot more fun.

It's worth pointing out here that not all PFS Scenarios are one-shots, every season has at least one trilogy, and I've even seem some tetralogies. Moreover, and that is something I discovered mere days ago as I was preparing this essay, and it floored me, every season starting from Season 2 (meaning the third one, since their numbering starts at zero) has a Season Special that's meant to be played by multiple groups simultaneously! We're talking 3, 4, 5 groups minimum for some of them! One of them even requires 6! That's 24 players! They are sprawling battles introduced via spectacular setpieces where they use all kinds of experimental rules like for example strictly timing every scene with a stopwatch before the GMs trigger the next event, turning the game fully real-time! There is even a Special that "leads directly into the events of Starfinder"! And the awesome thing is that we can play them with all the players simultaneously! Paizo breaks the action up in separate tables, but we don't have to!



Now you might be reasonably concerned of how we'll get that many people on Discord at the same time. Hell, we don't even HAVE that many people. But fret not, Ultimate Edition comes to the rescue again! First off, we have 16 players and I am sure they won't all want to play Master of Combat. But even if "just" 5 or 10 of them want to play, we have the advantage over Paizo's setup that Master of Combat allows a player to control multiple heroes, even within a single scenario! Players are more than welcome to use 4 heroes to play entire scenarios on their own, exactly as if they're playing SRPGs or singleplayer CRPGs. The focus is combat after all, not roleplaying (but there IS some roleplaying in them, and also negotiation, puzzle-solving, non-violent resolutions, etc. so don't go around brainlessly charging at every problem!) So it doesn't really matter how many players we get in, what matters is how many HEROES those players bring to the Special, and there the sky is the limit because the Specials don't set an upper limit to how many characters can be involved. Bring dozens if you want, and the Specials can handle them!

And the opposition is scaled to match! We're talking a dragon per team and dozens of minions, that could easily amount to up to a couple hundred unit battles in our world, with our current playerbase. Even cooler, though the regular scenarios are balanced for fairly strict player power levels, the Specials seem to allow heroes of almost any power level to join, from 1st-level to 11th and beyond, depending on the Special! After all, if you basically have a freakin' WAR going on, a bunch of 1st-level characters can always be useful to throw in the meat-grinder. And here are my receipts just to show you I am not bullshitting you, and all this stuff is real:





Why can't programmers think of such things? Why must they always just reskin something that someone else designed?

Because then real designers would have nothing to design. That's why God made programmers too stupid to design anything, and designers too lazy to learn programming, amen. And by God I mean me.

And that's why friends don't let friends play programmer games. They play designer games POWERED BY programmer engines. They play, in other words, Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds.

So a Special will be essentially an event drawing ALL Pathfinders from the far corners of our world, from the strongest heroes who've survived dozens of scenarios to brand-new 1st-level ones (who btw can start play right at the scenario's location, which is a major advantage in a game like ours were everyone has to painstakingly move in the adventure layer, with all its costs and dangers, to travel anywhere; you definitely don't have to do that with Paizo's setup, and as a result the travel times between scenario locations for their thousands of players often don't make sense).

Ultimately we'll end up with hundreds of combatants in battlefields that stretch over multiple screens, maybe even entire city districts or cities, from some skimming I've done of the existing Specials. And all of it with full soundtrack and dynamic weather effects, none of which Paizo can have on their 4-player tables. And for combat resolution we'll employ simultaneous turns where players log in the VTT, indicate their moves, and log out, until I log in and resolve all their moves in one go. Otherwise, if we were using the traditional turn-based system, I would have had to log in after every single player's move instead of at the end of everyone's turn, and it would have been cumbersome.

Paizo can't have any of this in their conventions because they abstract the battle across multiple tables. They don't even have music. An epic battle with no music? With no rain or snow falling across the battlefields?

So when I said earlier that the PFS Scenarios are objectively inferior to the adventures and campaigns I meant in terms of narrative, drama, roleplaying. Not in terms of combat, and not compared to SRPGs lol, or anything you've ever played in your computer.

And it gets crazier. Because starting in a later season, they introduce Specials that incorporate their "adventure card game", whatever the hell that is.



Don't ask me what this means, I haven't had a chance to look into it. But you can be assured that I will check it out, and if it enhances the game, I will incorporate it.



Note also that your heroes must be Pathfinders to take part in Specials. So if you have say 10 heroes in the adventure layer aka Master of Heroes doing their thing (explorer, blacksmith, faction leader, etc.), these heroes can't take part. They must first be inducted into the Pathfinder Society, and that takes time. So when the Special pops up, it's only those heroes who have already been playing Master of Combat that can realistically take part. But there is an alternative. You can buy more heroes on the spot. One, two, three, however many you want. This btw is a direct analogue to Star Citizen's community-wide Global Events where people scramble to cashbuy vehicles they'll need because there's simply no time to earn them in the game before the event start. And yes I am sure hoping that at least some players will do this in my game too. It's what I need to run this game. Otherwise no Specials, and ultimately no game. Do you know any other GM who runs 10-20-player Specials? Moreover, Star Citizen runs the same 4 events over and over, whereas not only do I have 15 (plus a new one every year, and that's the PF Specials only, not the SF et al.), but each will only be run once! What game can beat this? So the question is, again, do players want to play this game and how much are they willing to contribute to the project to make it happen? And btw tell your friends to play Master of Combat. Just buy them a credit and tell them to give the game a try (you can reserve seats for your friends by posting in the scenario threads for them). Tell them if they like SRPGs they'll be in heaven. Also friends of subscribers don't need to subscribe for their first scenario of Master of Combat, similar to how Star Citizen attracts new players with free flys and referral rewards.

If your friend wants to play more after his first session, then he needs to sub, but the sub also gives him a Cult Engine 1 campaign slot and roleplaying-layer character, so it's a good deal.

Link your friends to the overworld—especially when it gets loaded with content in a few weeks. Link them to Alien for now, since that one's already loaded.


ENOUGH WITH THE THEORYCRAFTING, HOW DO WE PLAY THIS THING?

Glad you asked. Cause I could have kept going. For a while longer.

1. So we're at last back at the beginning. Navigate to the location of the first Master of Combat Scenario, Black Fang's Dungeon.

Sandpoint Hinterlands
https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... a13440b5e8



2. Follow the link in the scenario description to the new Master of Combat forum to create the team thread, or join a team if a thread has already been created.



For inaugurating the new forum with its first post, the thread starter will get a very special bonus that's sure to delight him and excite others' envy.

This map also inaugurates the Battlegrounds Overworld Music playlist with its first featured track, "Black Dragon" by Phil Rey Gibbons (the Alien tracks haven't been incorporated yet because they haven't been finalized): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... Tyq3ByUCfA



Black Dragon Theme: Black Dragon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4xvPjM ... Tyq3ByUCfA



This is overworld music. Overworld music must be evocative but relaxed, chilled, laid back almost. In-game music must be much more impactful. Overworld music is meant to merely suggest the epic, or the tragic, dramatic, etc. In-game music is meant to BE epic, tragic, dramatic, and more. Don't worry, I know music. Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds will be the ultimate musical-interactive experience, and I have prepared a terrific aural journey for the players who will undertake the Black Fang scenario. With a little luck I might also get to debut my TPK sequence!

On the subject of the map, which finally introduces the Pathfinder section of the overworld with James Jacobs's beloved Sandpoint and the launching point of the Pathfinder setting, the reason the map is empty is because the date is 6 months before the goblin raid on the Swallowtail Festival, so 6 months before the start of Battlegrounds. Most of the characters in the Sandpoint Crew weren't even in the region at that time, except recoil's character, Til, who hadn't yet taken up the adventuring life (the raid was the catalyst that spurred him to adventure). He still worked in his father's weapons shop, so he won't be featuring in this scenario or the interim at all. And we'll be playing out the interim with Master of Heroes rules.

This means that, after the conclusion of the Black Fang scenario, any surviving heroes (no refunds if you die, sorry) will have SIX WHOLE MONTHS to play Master of Heroes (I mean in-game months, not irl, so basically a weekend or two) before they catch up to the current timeline, which is 180 turns! You can accomplish a lot in 180 turns! A Standard Civ6 run btw is 500 turns (though I would never play Standard, I'd play Marathon which is 1500. And I wouldn't play Civ6.)

When/if a team is formed (and note that multiple attempts to form a team can be made in multiple threads simultaneously, and whichever team forms first gets the scenario), I will start a rules thread to explain the basics, and also a rules discussion thread to discuss them.

Don't be fooled by the "introductory" nature of the "Beginner Box" scenario. First off, it's tough! Read the review-quotes! Second, the scenarios ratchet up quickly in complexity as you level up to the late-game multiteam ones that I'd still be raving about if you hadn't so rudely interrupted me. This is peak squad-based tactics, peak SRPG even without the integration into Battlegrounds, let alone with it, and IT ALL STARTS RIGHT HERE, with a 1st-level scenario. Doing well here sets you up for further success down the line. So if you want a leg up in the strategy layer, grab a slot in this team!

"What are the rules for those 180 turns?"

That's the next section, Master of Heroes, aka Dungeons & Dragons 2. And whatever you may imagine about it, let me tell you, you aren't ready for it.




TO BE CONTINUED IN PART D. ADVENTURE-STRATEGY LAYER AKA "MASTER OF HEROES"...

[icycalm]

There's so much to explain about Master of Heroes, I struggle to decide where to start. Ultimately, there are two main approaches, the mechanical and the aesthetic, and both need to be elaborated, but I'll start from the aesthetic because pretty. And colorful. And utterly mesmerizing.

I suppose I could view the genesis of the idea as stemming from two frustrations: the frustration of lacking a real roleplaying-strategy game to play even after half a century of D&D, and the frustration of seeing Paizo release hundreds of pages of new material every month while being unable to play with them. Out of these twin frustrations grew an idea of a solution, so that I wouldn't be frustrated anymore; the world's first true roleplaying-strategy game—aka Dungeons & Dragons 2—running on the ENTIRE Pathfinder setting, and immediately incorporating every new book as it is released, on the day of release even.

That is Master of Heroes, and it is incredible. It is the most complex game design ever, that resulted from the perfect fusion of the two most complex genres.

[icycalm]

How great precisely is Paizo's output?

It's so great that people who don't even play their games buy the books to read as if they're reading novels. The books aren't novels, but the world they weave around the reader—and especially the player—is so fantastical, beautiful and complex, and so well-written, that even when abusing the books by using them as novels you still get more immersed in them than you would by engaging with any other artwork. I have never felt more immersed in a fictional setting than when merely READING Paizo books, let alone playing them. Even the inferior stories and locations are good enough to keep me reading and daydreaming of being there, because of the sheer skill with which the writers and designers fuse everything together into a coherent world; their world-building skill, which is unparalleled in the history of art. And so I struggle to describe how frustrating it is to me to see them pump out half a dozen books every month without me being able to play with any of them, because full-on roleplaying takes so much time that their writers can write at 5x the rate I can play their games, rendering all their new releases more of a tease than a real product or service.

[icycalm]

And then one day, a mere few days ago in fact, I had the solution: a way to play with ALL the Paizo content SIMULTANEOUSLY, by simply turning its world into a 4X strategy setting. Then every new release could simply be dumped into this overworld as-is—the entire book with all its text and illustrations, with ambient and epic music tracks thrown in to round it off, and turn it into true videogame content. And I felt such a rush of pleasure at the thought that I've been high ever since, barely managing to get any sleep, and working like a madman.

[icycalm]

Since my frustrations were twin, it stands to reason that the solutions to these frustrations would be twin as well. And that they were. The mechanical part of the solution ended up being hidden in Paizo's own so-called "Downtime" rules, while the aesthetic part was delivered by James Jacobs himself in his giant 14-year-old 1,650-page "ask me anything" thread in the Paizo forum. They were discussing the then just-released Blood Lords [ > ] campaign, and some players were saying they weren't interested in it because the characters and the whole setting were evil. And James told them that they could still use the Adventure Path's 6 books as a 600-page sourcebook for the region (Geb), that's full of maps and illustrations, history and background, outlines of the social order, countless important personalities, and of course that intangible unique "feel" of the region that the writers nailed once again, and due to which I am chomping at the bit to... go there and check it out!

[icycalm]

Of course, I always knew you could use an adventure as a sourcebook. James wasn't saying anything revolutionary there. But something about the SHEER SIZE of this sourcebook struck a chord with me, because sourcebooks are NEVER 600 pages. The average one is 64, and it's extremely rare to get a 128-page one, let along bigger. Campaigns are practically never 600 pages either. D&D's newest ones for example top out at around 150-250 if I am not mistaken. Not even half the size of Paizo's. Their Adventure Paths are simply MONSTROUS, and when James clearly verbalized that you can use this truly ENORMOUS amount of material for something OTHER than direct roleplaying—in this case as a mere SETTING SOURCEBOOK—some germ of an idea must have been born inside me; but if you'd asked me at the time what I had taken away from James' advice, I would have said "nothing special", since I already knew very well the point he was making.

[icycalm]

That was months ago, probably over a year. James posted that bit of advice in his thread, and my brain stored it for later retrieval because it found something very attractive in it, even if it couldn't say what at the time.

And then many months later—about 3 weeks ago in fact—I decided to check the Downtime rules in Paizo's "Ultimate Campaign" rulebook. I had been meaning to check these out for years, and I think at one point I did skim them for a couple of minutes, but I had never sat down to really read them, and that's because the word "downtime" doesn't sound too exciting, does it? Downtime is what you're doing when you aren't doing anything exciting, and why would anyone want to read a freakin' BOOK about that? So I never did, until recently. And I am so glad I finally did.

[icycalm]

I would have read these rules at some point anyway, and I would have incorporated them into my game to deepen and complexify... the downtime of my world's player characters. But since all my campaigns are currently in the middle of their respective books—and not between books, which is where downtime usually occurs—I wasn't in a rush to check these rules out. But you see at that time I was working towards finalizing the basic Kingslayer rules, and I was compiling a huge list of all the different mechanics with which I'd launch the game, and everything in "Ultimate Campaign" merited consideration since the book is so well-designed and well-written. And since the Downtime rules form about a fifth of the book, I had to finally sit down and seriously check them out.

And I was stunned by what I saw. Because hidden under the massively misleading "Downtime" label was nothing less than the skeleton of the best, the deepest and most complex 4X ruleset ever.

[icycalm]

How could Paizo have mislabeled that chapter so egregiously?

It was a simple matter of perspective, because what from a roleplaying perspective looks like downtime, from a strategy perspective looks like... action. It looks like adventure. And in fact I have on my tasklist right now to replace the "Downtime" in the chapter heading with "Adventure" (possibly by unlocking the PDF and editing it), because these rules will from now on form the basis of Ultimate Edition's adventure layer.

[icycalm]

I mean look at this:



That is a strategy game's rules, clear as day.

I mean wtf Goods, Influence, Labor???

I thought downtime was a dwarf sharpening an axe or some shit!

Wtf constructing rooms to build guildhalls?

And your characters do this for their DOWNTIME?

Who are they, Elon Musk?

Maybe that's how Paizo churns out so much material every year... It must be an office full of workaholics. That's why their leader maintains a 14-year 1,650-page AMA thread I suppose.

[icycalm]

By this point I understood perfectly what had happened here. What Paizo does is vacuum up all the past's best ideas and turbocharges them, by injecting them with steroids. That's all they do; and now and again they also add something of their own. But mostly they just push existing ideas as far to the extremes as they can go, by packing them with as much complexity as they can. And that's how at last they turned a dwarf sharpening his axe into Elon Musk.

[icycalm]

I mean some of these rules are more hardcore than the most hardcore strategy game's. Or do you know any strategy games where you construct buildings out of individual rooms? Aside from the wretched colony builders like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld (both 1/5 btw), which fail at practically every metric of strategy, so they aren't contenders.

Indeed the closest videogame equivalent to Paizo's room-building mechanics is... survival-builders and FP4Xes like Rust and Life is Feudal. And when you consider how significant segments of those games' playerbases go to quite some lengths to ROLEPLAY inside these games despite the fact these games have NOT been designed with roleplaying in mind, the connection becomes clearer, and quite obvious.

[icycalm]

So from the perspective of REAL roleplaying (i.e. Paizo's, not the survival-builders' and FP4Xes'), anything the player does that ISN'T WORTH ROLEPLAYING is INDEED downtime!

Do you get what I am saying? Sharpening an axe, or for that matter constructing a room, AREN'T WORTH ROLEPLAYING. We aren't going to bring axes and building tools to the table, and start banging on this stuff for hours, nor are we going to describe exactly how we sharpen the axe or construct the room. There just isn't any drama in these activities, and roleplaying IS ALL ABOUT DRAMA; specifically INTERACTIVE drama (i.e. not TV shows).

So RPG downtime started probably sometime around the 3E days (because in 2E, which I played extensively, I never saw it, but I skipped 3E, so it was probably introduced there), and I am sure the initial rulesets were sound, being about dwarves sharpening axes, or spellcasters researching spells, or crafting magic items and so on. Throw on some background side-quest, resolved perhaps by just rolling one or two skill checks, and you have a sane downtime system that does its job: to complexify the game by enriching it with a new set of diverse activities, but without bogging down the game by forcing the players to roleplay boring scenes.

Then along comes Paizo, who must outdo everyone else in sheer complexity of every aspect (mechanical, aesthetic, you name it), and one rulebook later downtime is about geniuses like me and Elon Musk who create things in our sleep. They put themselves in their characters' shoes and asked "What COULD this character be doing when he's not out exploring and fighting and getting involved in world-changing events?" And they literally thought up ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING a fantasy character could be doing, and wrote it down, and specced it out.

[icycalm]

I mean just look at their list of major concepts:

Building

Build Points

Business

Capital

Day

Followers

Goods

Gold Pieces

Influence

Labor

Magic

Organization

FOR FUCK'S SAKES THEY HAVE AN INFO BOX ON WORKING WEEKENDS

[icycalm]

Do you understand the scale of the simulation here? You get to decide if you will work weekends or not for peanuts in a game where you can build up to business empires, and even kingdoms, by fusing with the Kingdom rules provided a few pages later in the same book, at which point you can legitimately ask questions such as, "How long will it take to get a kingdom if I work weekends?"

[icycalm]

The stunning thing that casual observers miss is that ALL these high-level rules fuse PERFECTLY with the entire Pathfinder First Edition character creation and development rules, so that your performance in all these myriad of activities laid out in this 256-page rulebook from bargaining one-on-one with a merchant (pg. 138) to ordering a swamp drained because you want to build a palace on it (pg. 214) are still ultimately determined by all the attributes you chose when you first built your character, and evolve with them as your character develops. And that is something that's utterly unheard of in the entire history of gaming.

[icycalm]

And all this in a game world featuring 10 pages of weather simulation rules including "extraplanar weather" (in "Ultimate Wilderness"), all of which fuses perfectly with all the aforementioned rules of course, and thousands more pages of rules besides.

Meanwhile, back on Steam, programmers couldn't figure out how to add anything to 1994's Master of Magic which I played when I was 16 (next week I'll be 46), so they just reskinned it and re-released it, and that's the most exciting fantasy strategy release of the last few years.

[icycalm]

It was while realizing all these facts about the absolute state of the videogame strategy genre while comparing it to these unbelievable rules that Paizo's dozens of expert roleplayers had devised that my brain dredged up the memory from a few months prior of James Jacobs telling us to use Adventure Paths as sourcebooks. And then I knew what must be done.

I must make a 4X game with these rules, running on Golarion. And then I must fuse it perfectly with the roleplaying to achieve the greatest artwork ever.

[icycalm]

Around the same time I was still working on Kingslayer where perhaps my most urgent priority was smoothly translating Kingmaker's and "Ultimate Campaign"'s hexcrawl mechanics that underpin everything to Cult Engine 3's smoothly rolling 3D terrain, where hexes don't exist, unless you laboriously hack them in. I got very acquainted with those hexes during that time, and realized how every aspect of Paizo's adventure-strategy mechanics leans on these hexes and ultimately depends on them for its functioning. I learned that these hexes are 12 miles across, and that their surface area therefore comes to just under 95 square miles. And I learned that a character with the standard 30 feet speed could walk across a plains hex in about 5 hours.

And then I remembered that there is a version of the Inner Sea region map with hexes! I had even used it for my Cult Engine Zero overworld, but since that engine doesn't support zoom-in, and therefore you can barely make out the hexes there, I had forgotten all about them. But now I remembered them, and rushed to pull out the file and check the scale.

It was 12 miles per hex. Official, by Paizo, not drawn on by a fan.

They had produced the greatest strategy ruleset ever, and even specced their world's main region for use with it, but no one was playing strategy games on it. And it seemed no one ever would, unless I did.

[icycalm]

By this point it had become clear to me that absolutely nothing was holding me back from playing 4X on the Inner Sea region map. I didn't even have to edit a map! All I had to do was drop a token, or better yet get a bunch of others to do so while I refereed them, and we could start playing immediately. I even knew exactly where I would allow them to begin! I wouldn't just let them start anywhere. They would only be allowed to start in population centers unlocked on the map by the roleplaying teams! Meaning Sandpoint, Korvosa, Oppara, and if I wanted to be lenient with the term "population center", also the colonist ship in Azlant. And from those starting points, players could go literally anywhere in the world! They could go to Cheliax to check out what a devil-run kingdom looks like, or head to Osirion and try their hand at its shifting sands, or visit the City at the Center of the World and get lost in its maze-like alleys and world-renowned Bazaar. They could hire themselves out as mercenaries, they could sign up to a school, or start a business; or they could strike out into the wilderness and build a cabin in the woods and grow plants. And of course they could team up and explore the world as a group, or start a guild, a monastic order, or any other type of organization mentioned in the rules.

In fact, very quickly I grasped that it'd be the infinite possibilities in front of them that would give the players pause, exactly as in Star Citizen, but even worse here, because here the possibilities really are infinite, and gamers just aren't used to dealing with that. Many of us in fact play games precisely in order to escape for a while from the world's infinite possibilities, and just follow orders from an NPC. That's not me, but it's most players, and they certainly wouldn't have a clue what to do with themselves in this game world whose every last mechanic was built precisely with a view to infinity.

[icycalm]

To those players, I would just say, "Walk".

Just pick a destination that looks cool to you, based on your extremely limited knowledge of this world, and start walking.

Go to Paizo's site, and find the latest Pathfinder book released, and see if it strikes your fancy. And if it does, head on over there and take a look.

For example, in a couple of months a new Adventure Path begins, Wardens of Wildwood taking place in Avistan's largest forest: the Verduran Forest in Taldor. Depending on your starting point, you could start heading in that direction, so that by the time the first book hits, you'll have arrived. Or, depending on your plans for when you get there, you could take some kind of job in the meantime to invest in whatever activity you have in mind to pursue in the forest.



Place doesn't look very safe though, so you might want to do some info-gathering on your way there, and plan accordingly—and equip yourself accordingly. Maybe it's time to reach out to your contacts using the Contacts rules in pg. 148 of "Ultimate Campaign", and make some inquiries. But don't ask for a lot, because failure has consequences both for your contact and for you, and you can't afford too much since you're just starting out.

[icycalm]

Actually, don't head on over to Paizo's site and don't have a look at anything there, because spoilers, but my point still stands that with the introduction of the adventure-strategy layer we suddenly have access to, and can play with, all of Paizo's past and future releases as soon as they're released and we acquire them; and as for the spoiler-free browsing of the Paizo material, the full-detail overworld plus the upcoming Codex will take care of all of that very shortly.