Thoughts on Porting/Adapting/Fudging The Banner Saga to Tabletop

The Banner Saga, or Post-Apocalyptic Oregon Trail Viking Tactics DX as I like to call it, was the first video game I ever saw crowdfunded. Though I lacked the money to participate in or experience it until almost a decade after the trilogy started, it has lived in my head in some form or another ever since. I have certain gripes about the lack of interactivity with the ancestral banner that gives the series its namesake, and questions about the way some of the cumulative choices pan out across the series, but I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay, story beats, and lavish artstyle throughout. Do recommend.

Often I wonder how I'd go about porting or adapting the game to a tabletop setting because for some reason I need the things I like to bleed into every other medium I like. But I never got around to trying before now because it feels like equal parts convoluted and "yeah, duh". But since I'm now the guy who spitballs Dragonlance x Talislanta mashups, it feels silly not to just go for it already.

Gameplay in TBS falls into three major categories that I will call combat, caravaning, and conversation.

Combat

Most of your time spent playing TBS is spent fighting or preparing to fight battles, in which individual characters take turns moving around a grid-based map and using abilities that reward planning and positioning. If you're familiar with the FinFan Tactics series or basically any Ogre Battle game besides The March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Calibur, you already know the basics.

Where TBS differs is the fact that every character has two separate "health" bars that have to be managed carefully, and a turn order system that encourages spreading the damage around, rather than defeating enemies one by one.

Because tactics video games and combat-heavy fantasy TTRPGs have so much shared DNA, I think that overall the TBS system can be ported to tabletop directly, with only minor adaptations to the turn and actions systems. The end result is something that feels quite different from combat systems where you roll dice for everything, but I think that's somewhat refreshing.

Stats

Every character in TBS, regardless of class, has the same stats in common. These are Strength, Armor, Willpower, Exertion, Break, Movement Range, and Attack Range:

• Strength (STR) is both attack power and health; you deal as much damage with attacks as you have STR, and once you reach 0 STR you're defeated.
• Armor (ARM) is a pool of damage reduction that decreases direct STR damage you suffer before being depleted. A 3 STR attack against someone with 2 ARM will remove the ARM first and only deal 1 STR damage.
• Willpower (WIL) is a pool of points you can spend on actions to improve them. 1 WIL = 1 extra tile of movement, 1 more point of STR or ARM damage, an enhanced version of an ability, etc.
• Exertion (EXE) is how many Willpower points you can dump into a given action. 2 EXE means you can spend up to 2 WIL on something at a time, etc.
• Break (BRK) is bonus damage that is always applied to attacks vs ARM, regardless of current STR level. 1 BRK means your attacks always deal 1 extra damage against enemy ARM.
• Movement Range is how many tiles you can move in a turn. Diagonal movement costs 2.
• Attack Range is how many tiles away you can attack from. 1 is most melee units, 2 is some spearmen and others with long reach, and 3 or more is most ranged units.

In addition, most characters have 0-1 Passive Abilities and 1-3 Active Abilities, depending on class and level.

Size is also a factor that comes into play, although I wouldn't call it a stat like the others. Size is usually either 1x1 tile for humans, or 2x2 tiles for big beefy Varl boys, with less common creatures taking up different configurations of space.

This facet of the game is very easy to port to tabletop. Most PCs and monsters should have pretty small, manageable stat blocks if you choose to stick with the level of individual mechanical complexity offered by in-game classes. A character could have something like this for most of their career:

Sindri Unnsbur, Human Spearman

STR 8, ARM 6, WIL 5, EXE 1, BRK 1

Move 5, Range 2, Size 1x1

Passive: Embolden - Each kill the Spearman makes encourages allies to fight harder, granting 1 Willpower to the Spearman and any adjacent allies.

Active: Impale - Skewer an adjacent enemy unit, doing normal Strength damage (100% chance to hit) before knocking it back. Impaled characters Bleed for 1 round, taking 1 Strength damage for each tile moved.

And that's it.

Talents

Alright it turns out I was lying when I said "and that's it" for character stats in this game. That's because in my first draft of this post I entirely forgot that Talents exist, and only got remound of them when I thought I was 90% done because I just so happened to scroll past a hyperlink to them on the wiki. (This is because I'm not only a bad writer but also a bad researcher.)

Introduced in the second entry in the series, Talents are secondary progression given as a reward after maxing out your stats. There are 2 Talents per Stat, but you can only select 1 to put any points in for each. That makes 10 Talents, each with 6 ranks that improve their passive benefits by some percentile value, usually +5/10% per rank. You buy the first 3 ranks with promotion points, and can find rare items that give a bonus of +1 to +3 to them in your travels.

Talents let you specialize your characters a little more, making them better at the existing combat systems without radically changing them:

• Hunker Down (ARM) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 ARM damage per hit.
• Tighten Straps (ARM) grants a 20-45% chance to regenerate 1 ARM per turn.
• Robust (STR) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 STR damage per hit.
• Artery Strike (STR) grants 10-35% added Critical Hit chance. (Double all STR damage, including WP expended on the attack. AoE attacks and attacks from passive traits can crit.)
• Defy (WP) grants a 30-80% chance to straight up ignore a killing blow but be reduced to 1 STR.
• Stubborn (WP) grants a 20% chance to regenerate 1-6 WP per turn.
• Dodge (EXE) grants a 5-30% chance to avoid STR attacks completely.
• Lucky Shot (EXE) grants 30-80% added hit chance.
• Exploit (BRK) grants a 10-35% chance to gain Puncture on an attack. (+1 STR damage per 2 ARM the target has lost that fight.)
• Divert (BRK) grants a 5-30% chance to entirely avoid an ARM attack.

The power creep provided by these Talents is mostly taken into account in the balancing of TBS, so even if your entire party hangs out unkillable at death's door with 1 STR for 80% of the battle, the battle layouts and AI are meant to remain challenging.

But porting TBS to tabletop messes with many of those finely balanced systems at least a little bit, which means that Talents could get extremely wonky late in the game. More Playtesting Is Needed to determine if you should fiddle with the values for some Talents, or just remove them entirely in favor of slightly deeper Class customization.

Class

Speaking of classes, those are the main way characters are differentiated from one another in TBS. They affect their starting stats, max stats, and abilities, and at a certain rank level (out of a max of 15) they can be promoted to one of two advanced class choices that grant them extra abilities. It's another extremely Tactics-esque part of the game, but not nearly as complex as most full-fledged examples of that genre.

There are several dozen classes in TBS, many of them unique to specific characters or party members, and many more available to NPCs only. You could port all of them directly over to tabletop without a hitch as long as you've sorted out combat (see below), but I think that would start to make combat very same'y-feeling when it's no longer just one person controlling the whole party, but a bunch of players in control of individual characters who can only use the same few moves over and over, and common enemy types become easy to identify and boring to deal with.

That's why I propose making classes slightly more complex.

At the very least, give players a few more abilities in their toolkit, and give them some freedom of choice in the matter. If you keep the trilogy's level cap of 15, consider giving them a choice between 2 new abilities every few ranks rather than just once, until they have 4 or 5 active abilities and may 2 passives by the end of their career. Lowering the level cap to something nice and even like 10 would correspondingly give you fewer abilities to pick or for the GM to design.

For example, give that spearman above the passive ability later on to reposition after using Impale, or maybe allow them to pick up a single ability from a different martial class to reflect them dabbling in other fighting styles to diversify their options.

Species

I want to include a little subsection here for something that is mechanically present in TBS, but never explicit: character species. You can never create a character in the computer game, so you're never faced with a screen explaining the unique traits each group of humanoid peoples in the game world possess. But they do influence how you use the units in battle.

(Minor spoilers for the types of playable characters available in TBS 3, if you want to skip ahead. I really wish Blogger had clickable spoiler tags as a built-in tool so I didn't have to try to parse through the solid wall of text that it spits everything into in the HTML view.)

Humans are bog-standard with the most variety of classes, unsurprisingly. Varl always occupy 4 squares because of their size. Dredge usually have a passive "Shatter" trait where dealing ARM damage to them causes a chain reaction that damages nearby Dredge allies. Horseborn have the speed and size of a horse, often moving farther than other characters and taking up 2x1 squares like Large (Long) creatures from the original print of D&D 3E. Etc.

If you decide that species is baked into class, you don't have to concern yourself with the details. But if you want to allow for character creation and customization where species and class are separate choices, it's worth keeping in mind the traits you would or wouldn't want to emphasize in your game.

For example, I'd be likely to drop the negative passive trait Dredge have because it mostly exists to add a layer of tactical satisfaction when you're fighting Dredge enemies in the video game, and it would feel kind of pointed and targeted if a Dredge PC was saddled with that all campaign; they'd already be dealing with enough extra trouble, by my reckoning.

Character Creation

I've kind of been beating around the bush on this one for a few sections, haven't I?

Character creation isn't a thing in TBS, which is completely normal for the genre. But outside of introducing somebody to a new game, just handing a premade character to a player doesn't quite light the spark, in my entirely unqualified opinion. TTRPG characters thrive more on either randomization or player customization, or a bit of both.

So if everyone at the table is creating a custom character, either give them a set number of bonus points to distribute amongst their stats (excluding Movement Range and Attack Range), or have everyone roll a small die like d4 or d6 and distribute that many points, with a max of +2 to any single stat so balance doesn't go completely out the window.

Then, either roll on your favorite random table or come up with a background for each character to finish them off. Maybe provide them with an appropriate item for it. A veteran huscarl might start with a scarred shield they used when defending their jarl from an assassination attempt, and that shield might fill the "armor" slot and provide some small passive bonus. More on items down below.

Titles

Heroic Titles are unique upgrades granted to each character after they reach rank 11, introduced in TBS 3. They buff the character with the title in some way, and they have their own renown tracks that improve them over time just like ranking up in one's class. Only 1 character can hold a given title, so in TBS it was important to match characters with titles that complemented one another, even if they might not have made the most thematic sense.

But in tabletop where each player has more agency, I think titles should instead be tied to how a given character has been played over the course of a campaign. It doesn't make much sense for the chunky varl bulwark to pick up Shadow Walker after a campaign spent being big, up-front, and imposing for example.

Personally I believe a player should have input on what title their character gets, or in creating a new title alongside the GM that would be appropriate for them. But you could also run the game so that the consequences of the characters' actions and their fame or infamy in the game world dictate what title they are known by, as an organic response to player choice. In either case there is more room for narrative consideration here that would be a shame to ignore in favor of pure min-maxing.

Items

TBS dispenses with armor and weapon slots or other traditional loadouts. Everybody can equip a max of 1 item at a time that provides some kind of passive benefit, often gated by character rank. The characters are otherwise assumed to always have all the necessities of their class; archers always have their bows, shield-bangers their shields, etc. 

That kind of abstracted, 'don't worry about it' inventory works well for what is shaping up to be a relatively rules-lite tabletop system, but at the same time there is room to expand to add customizability. Maybe increase the number of item slots to 3 or 4, with categories like arms, armor, and trinkets or accessories. Existing items from TBS can be slotted into the above, mostly as trinkets, and a few weapons and clothing can be added to round things out wherever the GM finds there's a lack of support.

... Oh hey, this chapter was supposed to be about actual combat, wasn't it?

Turn Order

Battles in TBS have a somewhat unique tempo. Where other games might use a speed stat or some other initiative system to determine turn order, TBS just uses your assigned party order. But every other turn in between your party members is the enemy's, at least until the end of combat phase called Pillage.

This creates a fast-paced back-and-forth between the player and the computer that intensifies rather than winds down the more units on one side drop; the last two remaining units on one team are suddenly much more mobile and active than they were in the first round of combat because now they have their fallen allies' turn slots, and if you didn't take precautions to weaken them beforehand, they're in a position to tip the scales the other way. I've never played it to be sure, but it kinda looks like chess from the outside.

Once the second-to-last unit on one team drops, Pillage mode activates, and all the units in the numerically superior team go in order before the lone survivor gets their single turn, making mop-up faster and easier and preventing really drawn-out and annoying last stands by either side.

The system is great for automated gameplay, but making the table keep track of two separate but threaded-together initiative cycles that will change in size over the course of combat without some kind of VTT aid feels like it could be a bit much.

That's why I offer (but don't necessarily recommend) some alternatives:

1. Add a speed or initiative stat. The character sheet for this 'game' won't be very cluttered, so one more box isn't a big deal. That value is your set position in combat order with no dueling rotations, meaning allies or enemies can come immediately before or after you, depending. This makes combat much more traditional.
2. Use group initiative. Everybody on one side goes at once, with attacks and effects resolving in the order that the party has put itself in, in order to empower players to coordinate and find a way to make the person who goes last just as valuable as the one who goes first. Maybe the whole party can spend WP up to their lowest EXE value to add a bonus to this roll.

Bear in mind that both of the above would render Pillage mode unnecessary, as well as change the metagame somewhat by removing the biggest incentive for the practice of wounding a bunch of units but keeping them alive until the very end so they don't give their turn slots to healthier allies.

Action Economy

TBS lets you move, then take a single action. Actions include STR attack, ARM attack, and using abilities, among certain other context cues. You can also Rest at the start of your turn before moving, avoiding doing anything to regain 1 WIL.

I see no reason to mess with this simplicity, except to suggest that you let characters move before or after acting. It just seems reasonable.

No Rolls Necessary*

There's basically no random chance or uncertainty involved in any actions in combat. Only a handful of abilities have randomized outcomes, like which nearby tiles get affected by certain AoE attacks, and those could easily be simulated by stealing the rules for when ranged attacks or thrown weapons go awry from your preferred ruleset, or circumvented entirely by just giving control to the caster.

Attack rolls aren't a thing either, outside of the very specific situation where a unit tries to deal health damage to another unit whose Armor is higher than the attacker's Strength. In that case every point of ARM above the attacker's STR confers a -10% miss chance (up to a maximum -80% to hit), easily resolved with a d10 roll or the like.

Overall this is the easiest piece to port to tabletop, to the point that it almost feels too simple. It's not a dumbing-down of combat, though- it just gives more room for other parts of combat to be more tactical, and lets all sides operate and strategize with a sense of confidence uncommon to tabletop, I feel.

Renown

Every enemy you deep six in TBS grants the character who dealt the killing blow 1 point of Renown toward increasing their Rank. It's essentially just combat XP and Level, but here all that matters is who deals the final point of Strength damage. In the video games this meant you have to carefully manage who struck the final blows how often, or else you could wind up with a handful of over-leveled kill-stealers and a bunch of massively under-leveled support characters.

That would be pretty annoying and cumbersome to coordinate with a whole party of live players, and unwittingly kill-stealing could disrupt the fun and maybe even cause some bleed-over, so it's best to drop that part of the mechanic for tabletop. Renown from combat encounters should be divided evenly, with unique rewards reserved for roleplaying, feats of exploration, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. and so on.

If you keep the upgrade track for characters' Heroic Titles, consider granting them 1 title Renown every time they act in accordance with that title.

Caravaning

The second biggest part of TBS (albeit a distant second as I look upon that wall of text up there) is the journey, heavily inspired by Oregon Trail and other lightly simulationist strategy games aimed at getting somewhere and managing your collection of rugged and/or hopelessly in-over-their-heads immigrants so you don't all die before you reach your destination.

I might've missed it in my playthrough a few years ago, but surprisingly I don't think TBS had any dysentery jokes.

Stats

Just like a party member, your whole caravan has stats that fluctuate during your adventure:

• Morale is the measure of your caravan's overall, well, morale. It represents your army and clansmen's mood and approval of your leadership, and it goes down from the drudgery of travel, up from resting, and up or down depending on your responses to special events. Morale gives you a willpower bonus or penalty in battle.
• Supplies are an abstract counter representing all the food, tools, weapons, and other resources your caravan burns through as it travels. Supplies are consumed each day of travel and every rest the caravan takes.
• Population is how many poor sods are following your banner at the moment. In-game they are divided up between clansmen, fighters, and varl. Fighters and varl contribute to mass combat encounters, while clansmen are the ordinary noncombatants caught up on all this mess and aren't often used directly as a resource by the game.

Let's break these down a little more separately than character stats before.

Morale

Morale reminds me of the sliding hope vs despair meters used in some LotR-inspired games, and it also mechanically incentivizes players to care about the caravan because their own self-interest and wellbeing are tied up in it.* Its 5-step scale can be kept as-is for tabletop, and whatever formulae are used to calculate it behind the scenes can be boiled down to moving ±1 along the track from major story beats.

• Poor Morale gives each character -2 WIL
• Weak gives -1 WIL
• Normal has no effect
• Good gives +1 WIL
• Great gives +2 WIL

Remember to take advantage of morale as a nonmechanical tool, too. At the end of the day it's not just a bonus or penalty to a combat stat, but a representation of the whole caravan's mood and wellbeing. Let it factor into roleplaying and the way the characters relate to the rest of the caravan in ways that couldn't be done outside of a TTRPG.

If morale is low, maybe the referee should consider the next random encounter to be an inciting incident for an argument between families, factions, or a challenge to existing leadership positions; if it's high, maybe an unexpected good outcome to an otherwise bad encounter would be merited as everyone pulls together and comes through. Use it to humanize the caravan into more than just a faceless mass waiting to die of dysentery.

Morale is a good mechanic overall, and fairly simple to adapt to tabletop. The other two, on the other hand...

Supplies & Population

The interaction between Supplies and Population greatly benefits from being automated by the game. Dividing the former by the latter with different weight multipliers added to each of the three types of caravan followers to get your running counter of remaining days worth of supplies would be a serious drag on a tabletop game, as well as very out-of-place in a ruleset that otherwise doesn't have much math.

So I instead propose going with a non-simulationist mechanic, like for example depletion dice.

Every unit of time of travel (whether it be days like in TBS, or something longer like weeks) and every extended rest to heal up or improve morale is a roll on the Supplies die, and a result of 1 reduces its size by 1 step. From a max size of say d8 or d10 it can dwindle down to a measly d4, and perhaps even further to a d2 coinflip before food runs out and people start deserting from your caravan or worse. Conversely, successfully leading a foraging party or finding a hidden trove of resources increases the die size by 1 step in turn.

Similarly, Population has a die that increases as new people join the caravan and decreases as they settle down, desert, or die in large numbers. An increase in the Population die may call for a Supplies check to see if it drops in size or not. Population doesn't require daily checks like Supplies do, being reserved for bigger events like helping to resettle a village or fighting in a War (more on that below).

The basic idea to stick to is you only need to worry about big, discrete events so you don't have to stop the game to factor in a lot of little minutia, like how many hours of passive berry picking the characters did and whether it matters or not.

Events

The meat of caravaning gameplay is dealing with the events that pop up along the way to your destination, either predetermined by the plot and your previous choices in events, or randomly drawn from a table of possible events with different triggers. Events typically have two or more branching choices to make, with the outcome being anything from an increase or decrease in Supplies or Population, to entering battle or finding items, to even losing party members if your luck is bad enough.

Like random backgrounds or optional initiative systems above, events can be largely taken from existing materials in the form of random encounter tables from your favorite supplement. You can also trawl the TBS trilogy itself and repurpose its events in tabletop form, making them more open-ended prompts without set dialogue branches to fit the new medium.

War

War is a special kind of event where your caravan encounters a large, hostile force. It is a large-scale battle between two opposing armies that you dictate the overall strategy for, which in turn determines how difficult a battle your party has to fight, which determines the final outcome of the war. In TBS there are 5 options for how to approach a war:

1. Charge! - The most aggressive battle plan that is, ironically, also the safest for your caravan. The party charges into the fray and fights off the main force, facing a tougher than average battle while caravan casualties remain low.
2. Formations! - A balanced battle plan with an easier fight for the player but heavier casualties for the caravan.
3. Hold them off! - A very easy battle for the player but pretty considerable casualties for the caravan.
4. Retreat! - No battle for the player whatsoever and some really severe casualties for the caravan.
5. Oversee! - No battle, but with an outcome that varies according to several factors like caravan strength, party strength, and any specific follow-up commands given. It's kind of like the Auto-Resolve button in the Total War series, and casualties are often close to equal to Formations! on average, at least according to the wiki.

In all of the options leading to a player battle, you have the option to stick around longer and fight multiple back-to-back fights as you draw the enemy's best away from your army as reinforcements to the current battle. You don't get to reposition or heal in between fights, but you earn increased rewards and renown, and your caravan suffers less for it.

Combat can be resolved as normal, while you can probably have the party come up with more nuanced commands than the above based on where and why a battle is being fought. Let them find creative uses for topography or feints, or anything else theater-of-the-mind'y.

At the conclusion of a War (which you might just want to rename "Mass Combat" or "Skirmish" or something because describing a single battle as a "war" feels a tiny bit silly to me even if it is etymologically justified within certain Germanic languages the mythologies of which the game takes a lot of its inspiration from) you roll your caravan's Population die a number of times determined by the referee, probably based on how nasty the enemy army is. The players can reduce the number of forced rolls and therefore make it less likely for the Population to deplete by fighting multiple battles in a row, and by giving smart orders on a macro level. Morale level may also play a role in this.

If by some disaster the Population die drops from d2 to 0, it isn't necessarily a game over. Several chapters of TBS revolve around just a few lonesome characters, lost or otherwise bereft of their larger group, and that can offer a completely different flavor of game for a time.

The Banner

It's in the title, it's on every piece of cover art, you almost always see it flapping in the bitter breeze above your caravan. It has embroidered upon it the name of everyone who has ever lived and died in the clan, their deeds and struggles, and it will continue to grow until the end of the world. The banner is a central piece of the visual language and aesthetic of the series, but aside from a few scenes where someone is mending or adding to the end of the banner, or passing it down to their successor, the banner doesn't actually factor into the story much, and basically isn't present in the gameplay at all.

I feel like that's a missed opportunity for the series, but one you can rectify and take full advantage of in a tabletop setting.

First off, emphasize how important it is in-universe. It is a symbol of leadership in many ways, always being carried by the de facto leader(s) of the caravan, exchanging hands and passing from one generation to the next at various points as the plot demands. It's not a formal symbol of the chieftain, but an implicit recognition of an individual's guidance by the whole community. We don't see it happen in the video games, but losing or allowing the banner to be damaged could be a cultural faux pas so great that it's the grounds for removing someone from leadership; "if you can't keep our past safe, how can we trust you with our future?" and the like.

Second, think of ways to gamify that value. Maybe capturing the banner is an explicit goal of the enemy in many Wars that could cripple the caravan's morale until it's taken back. Maybe risking its safety to carry it aloft can have the opposite effect in a high-stakes event. Maybe the party can't cash in their renown to rank up or acquire heroic titles until the caravan has had time to rest in safety, long enough for the weavers to add this latest chapter of the community's story to the banner and cement their trials and achievements in cultural memory. You could make a whole event out of the subtleties of language and imagery that go into each weaving, and use several of those to bookend major arcs of the table's journey.

Conversation

Just roleplay, duh.

But seriously, the depth, tempo, and tone of storytelling and decision-making is entirely up to you and the table. It's both the easiest and the most challenging thing to port over because you can no longer rely upon the series' pretty solid writing, but that's okay; this whole exercise has been to give you the tools to tell your own Saga with, not to follow in the footsteps of Rook, Alette, Iver and co.

I hope this was a readable and enjoyable deep-dive, and that you can create something beautiful from these messy building blocks.

Assuming I don't cannibalize this to create my own FKR game like I have half a mind to now that I've read this whole post over, of course.

* I don't know why I give hypothetical players so little credit in my writing. My assumption that many of them will need to have a subsystem reminding them to care about the meeples is unfair upon further reflection, and also kinda stupid considering how many stories there are of parties latching onto the tiniest throwaway NPC the referee had no plans for. But I'll keep that part in for the edge cases.

Let's Dig Into: ArcticMUD

Since my late teens or early twenties, I've looked at text-based video games with a curiosity born of novelty. I was too young to play text-based adventure games during their heyday, so the idea of manually typing out your character's actions was always a strange one to me. It was like some lost artifact of a bygone era, so obscured by layers of electronic sediment that it wasn't even preserved in pop-culture's folk memory of what old school video games were like, what with all the beeps, chirps, joysticks, high scores and such.

Some of the first text-based games were mixes of exploration, puzzle-solving, wry humor, and occasionally bizarre logic, like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure from the 1970s. They helped birth the adventure game and RPG genres, and their influence continues to be felt to this day, both in the inherited tropes and language of gameplay and in the continuous reference to old early memes like the Grue that have never fully died out in nerd culture.

Multi-User Dungeons/Dimensions/Domains/Detcetera (MUDs for short) are a multiplayer genre of text-based games that branched off from their single-player ancestors in the 1980s when enough nerds who weren't busy playing chess or Roguelikes got together and figured out how to use their college campuses' computer networks for video games. A MUD is basically a series of self-contained rooms that players can guide their avatars through independently of one another, each populated with its own NPCs, tasks, interactive objects, or flavor text. Under the hood, the game world is just a disjointed series of flowcharts, but with care and craft it can be presented as an engrossing, living world that knows how to get your imagination going.

MUDs started off limited to whoever was on a given internal network at an institution, but with the emergence of the Internet they began to catch on wherever someone could afford both a connection and a personal computer. MUDs were, in essence, the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, depending on how strictly you define the word "massively"; dozens, even hundreds of users could be logged onto a MUD at a time, depending on how popular and stable the server was.

MUDs exploded in scope as their popularity grew. The first few were Tolkienesque fantasy or science-fiction in theme, but others soon came along that delved into horror, Westerns, film noir, post-apocalypse, erotica, and just about any other genre people experiment with when a new medium of artistic expression comes along. Many MUDs hosted user-generated content as well, which gave a game's fanbase real influence over the thing they shared an interest in. That bit might be the sharpest differentiation between old MUDs and modern MMOs, because rather than being a customer or consumer of the game, you were often a collaborator with it.

Countless ephemeral clones and spin-offs were born and died according to the whims of fate, community fracture, and occasional license disputes. The '80s and early '90s were a crucible of MUD creativity that is in many ways forever lost to those of us who didn't live to experience it firsthand: like pieces of tectonic plate subducted into the mantle and melted down to their base elements, most of these early games are for all intents and purposes gone forever, but little pieces of them exist everywhere in the bedrock and bones of online communities and gaming culture.

I've dabbled in a handful of MUDs over the years. Most of them were LotR- or D&D-inspired, as well as one Discworld-themed game I could never figure out how to finish character creation in. What they all have in common is that they stood the test of time long enough to appear on my radar, which means 20 or even 30 years in operation. Usually I'd either fail to get very far, or get into the groove until I ran out of easily accessible content to experience before one of the semi-regular server wipes hit, at which point I'd move on. Many of the MUDs I've played owe their existence and rhythms of gameplay to one particular MUD that had an outsized influence among its contemporaries: DikuMUD.

Diku, named for the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen where it was created in 1991, is in many ways the archetypal hack-and-slash MUD. You crawl through dungeons fighting monsters and collecting loot, with or without a party of friends, and it have stats, mechanics, and combat inspired by D&D, although technically the game uses a d100 behind the scenes. Diku was a massive inspiration for 1999's EverQuest, which some of the designers including Brad McQuaid played. It was so inspiring in fact, that there was a brief legal kerfuffle where the folks at Verant/Sony had to swear they didn't outright steal some of Diku's code.

The DikuMUD spinoff I'll be writing about today is ArcticMUD, a 1992 community project based on AD&D and in the Dragonlance setting. I played it fairly regularly between Summer 2022 and Winter 2023 the same way I play most MMOs: solo, and very poorly.

ArcticMUD starts with character creation, which is heavily but not completely based on character creation in AD&D tabletop. You choose from a surprisingly robust roster of species and classes, from kender and minotaurs to dark knights and scouts. Naturally, I rolled a goblin shaman self-insert named Furt.

You also pick your character's alignment, which is slightly different from the classic 9-point spectrum from tabletop. The game accounts for some amount of nuance and variance within the classic alignments, so Lawful Neutral and Neutral Lawful are separate options you can select, for example. I thought I was going cross-eyed the first time I read that. Alignment is limited by class and species, although not to the same extent as some other MUDs, so I considered myself lucky to get away with a Neutral alignment as a goblin. Better off grillpilled than chugging the Takhisis Kool-Aid, I suppose.

Unlike in AD&D, you don't roll your ability scores at character generation. Sure, the game rolls them behind the scenes, but the results are hidden from you at creation in order to discourage people from spending hours rolling and rerolling for the optimal stat array like some of us have done with the first few Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale games. You have to spend a bit of time playing and getting invested in the character before you can drink a potion that gives you full knowledge of yourself and all your stats.

I was a weirdly slim-buff gobbo.

Arctic actually hides a lot of the inner workings of the game from you. You rarely see a die rolled or referenced in-game, unless you do something like successfully identify a magical weapon at the shop, in which case you'll see the damage range but that's it. You aren't given a clear idea of your AC, saves, or really any statistic beyond the HP and Vitality points displayed down in the corner at all times. You are given even less information for NPCs and monsters, forcing you to approach potential challenges cautiously and with /consideration like in old school EverQuest. You don't even know for sure what your own variable spell effects are, which makes prepping them Fun™.

This constant, deliberate obfuscation of mechanics is part of the game's design philosophy, believe it or not. The designers don't want you to attain full knowledge and mastery of the game or its systems. They want you to always be in a state of guessing, whether those guesses are educated or truly blind. They want players new and old alike to have to feel their way through everything organically and authentically, like the entire game is under an aggressively enforced spoiler warning. They go so far as to delete posts on the forums that reveal too much about the game or one of its secrets- or at least, they did before they deleted the forums entirely a little while ago, apparently because the mods couldn't keep up with the number of spam bots flooding the place. The wiki and other officially-sanctioned gameplay guides are similarly sparse on details.

Assuming something does leak out and become common knowledge, even just through in-game player word-of-mouth, that thing won't stay the same for very long. Arctic does a yearly server wipe in which all characters are deleted, like many MUDs do to prevent too many characters accumulating at the very top of the game's content and ruining the ecosystem. Years before Diablo II was doing seasonal ladders, MUDs were coming up with their own multiplayer refresh mechanics.

But Arctic takes it a step farther by remixing pieces of itself with every wipe, changing small aspects like how a quest works or where to find a particular item. When I started playing for example, one wing of a low-level dungeon commonly recommended to newbies was completely sealed off and inaccessible, meaning I had to go elsewhere while it was under construction. This significantly altered the roadmap of my early playing experience, and pushed me into different areas at weird times.

I've never seen anything quite like this before or since playing Arctic. The game is in a state of perpetual New Game Plus, by and for the small handful of regular users who still play the game after 32 years in operation. The tiny trickle of tourists and new players like myself are expected to just kind of go along with it, or perhaps we're not really considered at all. It's a certain kind of charming to me, I suppose.

Gameplay begins with your newly-created character zipping down from the heavens into a city of your choosing, which for newbies is usually the town of Solace, forever frozen in time immediately before the events of Dragons of Autumn Twilight. The game has a day/night cycle, but technically it's always the morning before the imperfect reunion of the Companions. You can even find Tanis Half-Elven moping around in the Inn of the Last Home, while Tika serves up some drinks and Otik's spiced potatoes nearby.

You're walked through a brief tutorial by an NPC who teaches you the basics of the game and guides you through Solace. Solace is a city that really needs a guide, even after the first few levels, because it is a very vertical and sometimes disorienting starting city, replete with multi-level vallenwood tree buildings and aerial walkways between them. I almost always had a .png of the official site's map up in the background while I was playing. After you've gotten your bearings as well as you can, you're encouraged to head down to the dump where you can muck about in the sewers for your first few levels killing vermin, but otherwise the game takes its hands off and leaves you to get lost in the world.

And it is a dang big world to get lost in. Huge areas of the continent of Ansalon have been rendered in-game, and I can only say that they didn't recreate the entire world because I couldn't personally reach every area during my relatively brief time with the game. You can spend hours wandering in any direction, and you're bound to run into towns and dungeons (as well as a few maddening dead ends or loops) along the way. You don't have to hoof it everywhere, though: an all-terrain caravan added in one of the content updates in 2004 regularly makes the rounds through every major city in the world for a reasonable fare. There are many ferries connecting the coastal and riverine areas of the world, too. It's faster than walking, and safer. As long as you don't say anything about the upholstery.

I read this just as we hit some rapids and I thought I was
being transported straight into "The Most Dangerous Game".

My personal journey saw me wandering around in the forest beyond Solace once I outgrew the sewers a few levels in. Mostly animals and a few of my larger cousins turned to banditry could be found out there, as well as some very random touches of personality that the game threw in. For example, every sign that isn't a big official road sign between cities tries to simulate the scrawl of an inexpert hand by using mixed caps, which leads to warnings like this:

I can't not read this in the mocking Spongebob meme voice.

Other times, looking more closely at a bit of wildlife will reward you with a surprisingly competent bit of ASCII artwork in a game that is otherwise completely devoid of visuals.

After I wandered too far out and got overwhelmed a few times, I made my way back to Solace and ground the sewers again until I made up my loss of XP and gear, which gets left behind on your corpse when you die, also very EQ-style. It was around this time that I actually met another living soul.

Sure, I'd seen a handful of other players in town or in the /who list, but up to this point I'd never interacted with any of them. They were all seasoned veterans doing their own circles and their own things by my guess, and even though there's a chat channel specifically designed for them to help newbies out, I felt too intimidated to approach.

But eventually at the surprisingly easy-to-reach level of 16, someone named Hippy reached out to me in PMs. They asked me what I was up to and inadvertently offered some good advice when they found out I was new. Turns out I was playing my class all wrong. Shocking, I know!

Or maybe you could be generous and say I was playing hardmode. To start off, my alignment put me at a disadvantage. You get more XP for killing creatures of your opposite alignment, because character alignment is mostly expressed through violence and magic in this game. Being neutral, my goblin was essentially running around with a permanent XP gain penalty compared to everybody else... also a lot like EQ. Wow, learning that tidbit really opened my eyes to a lot of things here.

I don't really begrudge that part, though. I couldn't start off good as a goblin, but I wouldn't have wanted to go evil either. Especially once I learned that a lot of what constitutes evil character XP grinding is just slaughtering townsfolk wholesale.

Butchering them into meat was just for fun, apparently.

The other major inefficiency was in my loadout.

Up to this point I had been spending all of my steel coins on whatever weapons and armor I could afford off of either basic vendors or the shared market auction house style thing which I currently forget the name of. Sometimes I'd live long enough to turn a profit on those pieces and sell them in favor of upgrades, but usually I'd lose them from death or forgetting to repair.

Shamans don't need weapons, though. They can make their own, as the other player explained. I was aware of the Bone Shape spell they were talking about, which creates a club, staff, bow, or arrows out of the bones of a slain creature (even if the creature doesn't have bones, amusingly). But because of the paucity of details given by spell descriptions and the very low level I had tried the spell at, I assumed that the weapons created by the spell were low-damage and completely nonmagical; weapons of last resort to be quickly replaced by 'real' weapons.

I was very wrong. The weapons made from Bone Shape scale with caster level, and actually outclassed anything I could buy with my half-empty wallet. What's more, the weapons' power stacks with the Ancestral Blessing spell that buffs a weapon with scaling hit rate, saving throw and healing bonuses, and a chance to make extra attacks every swing. In essence I had an uber-Shillelagh sitting in my back pocket at all times, and all I needed to cast it was to have a dead centipede handy. This was on top of a plethora of other self-buff spells I hadn't been taking full advantage of, because I was spending most of my memorization slots on healing and status effect cure spells for when my weakness inevitably caused a fight to drag on too long.

This was that moment of mechanical satisfaction that I was waiting for. The synergy hit, and what followed was one heck of a dopamine rush. Which is ironic, because I can't write any accurate description of my next few levels of gameplay in a way that doesn't come off as incredibly boring and grindy.

What I did was make my way into the higher-level dungeon located in Solace; a burned-down school filled with the restless ghosts of the students and teachers who died there, only visible and hittable with the aid of magic items or spell effects- spells my shaman just so happened to have, but which I couldn't really do much with before I had the DPS for the task.

So I started clearing out the rooms of the school again, and again, and again, wielding nothing but a centipede bone staff and presumably wearing only a loincloth, because I began selling every single piece of armor that I could. Once I was finished whacking ghosts and nuking the area's unique enemies (a renegade mage, a pit fiend, and the wraith of the man who caused the whole mess) with a health-leeching spirit blast, I went back to central Solace to deposit all my earnings and occasionally check in with the eccentric shaman class teacher Foghorn for a shot at spell and skill upgrades.

You don't lose money that you have set aside in the bank, and so that's what I began to judge my true success by: an ever-growing bank account that I could eventually invest into something meaningful and more permanent once I reached a high-enough level.

Once I had outleveled the school I struck out west into the wilderness, skirting a lake until I reached an old copper mine filled with kobolds, myconids, rats, giant crawdads, a giant snake, an owlbear, and a very deadly giant spider at the bottom of a hundreds-of-feet-deep pit of no return that is frustratingly easy to accidentally walk off when your mental map of the area is just 1 room off. There I got used to the new rhythms and finally started to use scrolls of recall to cut down on travel, before settling into the grind all over again and soon surpassing 20th level, at which point I began acquiring a secondary advancement resource called Rank Points, used to purchase small permanent boosts separate from character level, yet again like in later expansions of EQ.

In essence I turned a party-centered game about socialization and exploration into the least compelling elements of a roguelite mixed with a dash of sigma grindset.

Yet I was having fun, and every level where I didn't fail my rolls to learn new spells, I gained new tricks that made my cup runeth over with options from moment-to-moment in combat. On top of all of my self-buffs and curses, my shaman could also hex a target, cause fear, enter a berserk rage like a miniature barbarian (pun intended), and bind the spirits of slain foes to myself or my weapon as combat minions/buffs. The only thing that stopped me in combat was my ability to type fast enough.

Which did become a legitimate issue for me, later on.

After a certain point, combat on a caster has so many moving parts, and can involve as many as a dozen participants at once, depending on the dungeon. When this happens the text scrolls very, very quickly and it was easy for me to miss important details like what had died, when a buff ran out, or what special attack an enemy just used. I would often try to cast a healing spell only to realize I had been sitting on my butt for the past few rounds after someone roundhouse kicked me off my feet. And then when I did stand upright again, I'd lose another precious few seconds misspelling the spell shortcut.

The game does have an answer for this, but it's not something I ever brought myself to use.

In most modern programs that run MUDs, there are options to create aliases, highlights, substitutes, and triggers. These are tools to allow you to navigate and respond to the game easier and faster, such as by condensing long typed lines of text into very short macro commands, highlighting or changing the language of important notifications, or just outright automating certain parts of the game by setting the program to run background commands that activate when X event happens.

It's enormously useful for standing up when you're knocked down, resting and preparing spells, and doing busywork like looting corpses after battle. And as long as you're not completely automating your character or turning them into something like a healbot, you don't run afoul of any of Arctic's policies. But it's a hell of a lot of coding for a tourist like me, so I never committed to it, and eventually that led to me hitting a skill ceiling of sorts, where if a battle was too hectic I just couldn't keep up and only pulled through thanks to lucky crits.

I wonder if combat was easier back in the '90s when everyone had dialup and you had more time to think in between ticks?

I also had a few unpleasant run-ins with people who did use all those commands, or at least that's what it looked like to me. Arctic is a server with PvP enabled, although you're discouraged from using it to grief specific players. But out in the world you're always vulnerable to attack from other players, and I was PK'd a few times during a run. Invariably, what would happen was I'd be engaged with a monster when the other person or party entered the room, evaporated me and everything else in the room into a red mist with AoE spells and crushing melee attacks, rapidly looted anything of value, and then moved to the next room like a tornado of death and avarice. Within 10 seconds I'd go from having a handle on a slow, tedious fight to sitting on the menu screen wondering how I'll pay off the new XP debt.

That would usually kill my motivation to pick back up where I'd been, and revenge was as impossible as it was undesirable, so I took frequent breaks and then went off in some other direction instead. I took advantage of the transportation system to find some of the more far-flung areas where I would be the only player-controlled soul for miles. I wandered the Plains of Dust in the shadow of Icewall Glacier, got extremely lost in some mountains, ran from trolls in Thorbardin, visited Pax Therax and other locations from the trilogy, undertook a vision quest with a Qué-Shu shaman, discovered tiny out-of-the-way hamlets that probably exist in one of the other hundreds of Dragonlance novels, and even stumbled upon a war crime or two.

I no longer feel so bad about the kender-skin sofas.

Eventually my wandering in search of secrets stranded me far from home with little to show for it, though I probably could have paid my way back to someplace more familiar thanks to the weirdly globally-connected banking system Krynn has in this game. But by that time it was getting late in the year, and the server wipe was on the way.

Nothing, not your bank account, character, or rank abilities, survive the great reset, so I was faced with the prospect of restarting from scratch, or not at all. I took a lengthy break and picked back up early in 2023, at which point I was able to smooth out my early leveling experience considerably using all that I had learned the first time around- and I finally got to access that part of the sewers that I'd been barred from entering. But I was still enough of a noob to forget that part of the Inn of the Last Home is an anti-magic safe area, so I spent a good fifteen minutes fizzling my hunger spell while angrily shouting "SATIATE!" at the wall- which is weirdly true to life when lunch rolls around and I don't want to spend so much time and effort feeding this carcass of mine.

I ended up focusing on Bridgetown for much of that year though, so I played little beyond that, and in time another wipe came. I've yet to partake in 2024.

I don't know if I'd recommend ArcticMUD to anyone who isn't already pretty into MUDs in general, which I imagine is a pretty small segment of people who read these posts. But my time with it has been entertaining so far, and if you are interested I'd recommend jumping in during one of the occasional special events that they host throughout the year, which often involves unique quests or bonuses to XP and other stuff. Sometimes they're purely focused on in-game lore, other times they commemorate real life events in some way.

Hey, maybe monarchs are good for something!

Furt Digs Into Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King

Despite my anxiety toward OSR RPGs and my recent tendency to wilt in the face of choices with meaningful consequences in video games, I am no stranger to the genre which is about as close as you can get to a midpoint between those two: roguelikes.

Sparse in visuals, slow in pace, and startlingly sudden in killing your characters, these semi-randomized permadeath dungeon crawlers have been around for over forty years now. There are plenty of variations on the formula by now, but they generally share a few things in common: you wander through procedurally-generated dungeons in search of an important something on the bottom floor, and when you die you lose nearly everything.

I'd become at least dimly aware of their existence in the early 2000s thanks to video game pop-cultural osmosis, but I stayed far away from them because it all felt too obtuse and cumbersome for me. Also, I might have been turned off by my completely mistaken impression that the original Rogue was a semi-hard science fiction game.

It wasn't until I was beginning high school that I became interested in giving one a shot. Somehow, I completely stumbled past Rogue, Angband, Nethack, ADOM, and pretty much every other big-name roguelike on the internet with little more than a glance, and wound up picking a fairly obscure title as my first foray into the genre.

The bane of my mid teen years. And my eyeballs.

Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King, released in 2007, is unique among roguelikes for how heavily it is inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Of course most roguelikes ever since the first have been inspired by D&D and other high fantasy sources to some degree, but (to my knowledge) only Incursion rips mechanics right out of the d20 3rd Edition ruleset.

You pick a species and class combination, choose feats, distribute skill points, and rely upon a whole bunch of simulated die rolls which use the six classic ability scores, plus the addition of a seventh Luck stat. This makes the game a bit more complex than the average roguelike, and even gives you an illusion of control- if you can survive the early levels long enough, you can start to get your own personal character build online.

Since 90% of my experience with D&D has been through building characters to fit concepts, I find that last part very enticing.

The importance of building one's character can lead to the same wonky imbalance as in D&D 3E, of course. Mundane and half-casting classes begin with survivability or some neat tricks, but quickly fall behind with the exception of rogues, who can get by on magic items and backstabs alone. While the game does a surprising job of mitigating the power of wizards, druids are mighty on such a terrifying scale that some guy even wrote a guide on doing literally anything with them and soloing the game handily.

Once inside of the miniature megadungeon, you're faced with many of the classic challenges: monsters, traps, hunger, and your fellow sapient adventurers, who may be friendly, hostile, or completely indifferent to your presence. An unseen town above the dungeon offers you a bit of respite, including an inn to rest at and a store to buy equipment from. You can even choose to retire a character to it permanently, in case you ever decide "screw it" and quit while you're ahead.

The caves are pitch black, and characters without dark or infravision will need a whole lot of torches or other light sources to see what they're doing. Health doesn't regenerate naturally, and sleeping in the dungeon eats through your food while leaving you open to ambush. Stealthy or invisible enemies are common, and it isn't unusual for something out-of-depth to get the jump on you very early in a run. Other than a scattering of eight potions in the first room of the first floor--five healing and three short-range teleports--nothing is guaranteed for you, and anything can be taken away by a successful disarm or sunder check.

Combining these aspects together gives Incursion a surprisingly foreboding, oppressive atmosphere for a game made entirely out of ASCII visuals. When you enter that first room, a text box describes to you the bloody remains of your fellow adventurers strewn about the floor, and you can rest assured that you will join them before long.

But until that time comes, you have the damp, cold solitude of the dungeon halls in which to contemplate how you'll handle your next messy, hectic clash with the dungeon's denizens. Detailed descriptions pop up with each new chamber you discover, giving glimpses into what this ancient mega-structure was once used for.

As with a lot of roguelikes, the plot is pretty bare-bones: you are one of many adventurers who has come to an out-of-the-way cave complex after hearing about an army amassing deep below ground. Your job is to descend to the lowest level of the dungeon and kill the eponymous Goblin King.

No, not that one.

Incursion makes up for this by having the beginnings of rich setting lore. Most of it is front-loaded in the descriptions of races and deities during character creation. The entries can be pieced together to illustrate the fantasy world of Theyra, which has already seen a lot of trouble, but is on the cusp of yet another nasty prophesy coming true. I really like a couple of the snippets of lore provided this way.

One of the gods of Theyra is a being known as Kysul, the Watcher Beneath the Waves. It is an unfathomably vast, tentacled consciousness from a doomed world, capable of shattering sanity with a glimpse of its true form and spawning countless aberrations upon the material plane by mere incident of its existence.

It is unknowable. It is terrifying. It is Lawful Good.

Kysul is a being of limitless, if alien, compassion, and it wants to protect the world which it has adopted as its own. It knows that its appearance is dreadful, and so it conceals itself to mortals, even its own clandestine clergy, which operates with all the trappings of a stereotypical cult but puts the utmost emphasis on ethical conduct, both with regards to doing its work, and with initiating its new members into Kysul's mysteries.

All of the tropes of cosmic, eldritch horror are neatly subverted in this big, slimy teddy bear of a god that just wants to make sure its home world's fate isn't shared by others. Theyra's backstory references some mages starting a war when they made pacts with horrors from beyond the pale. Perhaps Kysul has known their ilk before.

It's still thoroughly alien to the natural order of the game world, however, and both angels and demons count Kysul among their enemies. Lizardfolk, who have their own alien mindset in this world, regard it with some measure of respect and have been known to work alongside Kysul. It also appears to be fond of speaking in antiquated, flowery language, if its cleric intro is anything to go by.

"Seek now thine antediluvian progenitors that in sunken cities for eons have lain."

Another neat couple of details are about the playable orcs, because of course I had to insert my agenda into this article somehow.

The orcs of Theyra are peoples who are just throwing off the yoke of generic, villainous minionhood. They've been bred as stupid, burly slaves for centuries by demons and unscrupulous humans. But they recently initiated a slave revolt in Mohandi, an empire whose lands included the entrance to the goblin caves. The orc rebels freed all of the slaves in Mohandi, "good" races included, and now play a large role in the economy and politics of the formerly expansionist empire from within a number of anarchist communes. They've also developed their own gunpowder weapons, which is an accomplishment not even the technologically advanced but extremely hidebound dwarves of the setting can boast of.

The patron goddess of the orcs is Khasrach, who is also venerated by goblinoids goblin-speaking peoples. She is the Goddess of the Blood, and for good reason. She is fiercely protective of her children, as well as violent and demanding of blood sacrifice. Centuries of her peoples' debasement has twisted her into a vengeful and sometimes savage goddess. The bark she gives at the beginning of the game when you choose to play as one of her faithful pretty well illustrates her general mood:

"Smite now your slave-chains with the primal fire of my wrath!"

Khasrach is basically what you'd get if every orcish mother goddess dumped their chauvinist husband and then decided to help her people seize the means of production.

Presumably after hiring a couple of babysitters.

She isn't locked into this savagery, however. Her profile leaves open the question of whether or not enough change in the outlook of her people could transform her and bring her back to the more levelheaded, spiritual state of being she enjoyed in ancient times.

Recreation of the goddess is one aspect of an orcish cultural movement which seeks to rediscover the primeval society and values of their people, pure and free of influence from fiends or other species. This neo-tribal movement is currently vying for political dominance with the more cosmopolitan city orcs and stereotypical/traditionalist marauding orc hordes, and only time will tell who winds up on top and what that means for their people.

Or, actually, time won't tell. The game is actually sort of dead.

Surprise! This was actually a Things I Wish They Did More With post this whole time!

Development of Incursion slowed to a halt a few years after its first unfinished release, and it languished for a while until the creator finally admitted that they were doing other stuff and wouldn't be continuing the project. Fortunately they released the source code for the game, and someone else picked it up long enough in 2014 to patch some bugs up and convert the game to use libtcod instead of an outdated version of Allegro.

I have no idea what those last few words mean, but they feel important.

No one has stepped up to continue proper development of Incursion, though. The game's site has gone down and requires use of the Wayback Machine to access, the wiki is only partly filled out, and the Google Group used by its community hasn't seen any significant activity in the past two years as of this writing. The TVTropes page on the game, of all places, is the best source for information and download links today.

Incursion is effectively dead, and its envisioned full version, Return of the Forsaken, will likely never see realization.

Even so, I reinstalled the game a few days ago to take a couple of unsuccessful stabs at it. Being frozen in time with no end doesn't discourage me from playing as much as it would another game. It was a neat, odd idea that was executed with a lot of hiccups, and that's enough for me to appreciate. I can romp through and die every once in a while without too much worry.

I do wish the game could get a graphical tileset, though.

That little chump wrecked me, by the way.

Goblin Brain: Free Range, Dorito-Fed, Organic Gaming Experiences

As some of you may know from my Crypt Cities posts, I am a mild fan of Dark Souls.

I wasn't always one, though. I used to dislike the concept of them quite a bit.

I still might, actually.

Years ago when it was first released, Demons' Souls sailed right past me without my having a clue. A few years later, I heard or saw the name Dark Souls pop up here and there, mostly in relation to this fanboy flame war that I still can't wrap my head around, eight years later.

(Seriously, the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Dark Souls are such fundamentally different beasts that it seems like the only common ground on which to pit them against one another was that they were both some form of RPG and they both happened to come out in the year 2011. What was the beef?)

Anyway, I grew dimly aware that Dark Souls was some sort of brutally punishing game with a form of progress loss that was by no means as bad as roguelike permadeath, but still unforgiving. It seemed like the antithesis of fun to me at the time, and I gently avoided it.

A couple of conversations with a peer in community college on the eve of Dark Souls II's release in 2014 got my mildly curious as to what the big deal was since the game had done well enough to earn a sequel. I think I also saw a Game Grumps Steam Train series on DS2 at some point that involved a bunch of commenters getting angry at some ironic "MLG Pro" video thumbnails with swag-hats and Mountain Dew...

But again, it didn't go anywhere.

It wasn't until late in 2015 that I took a more active interest in figuring out what this series was, because the YouTube channel Extra Credits had just started up its new LP project called Side Quest, partly to look at animation and game design, and partly to die a whole bunch. I was familiar with and fond of at least one of the Dans of Extra Credits, and that was my means of bridging the gap now, even if it sounded weird not to hear him pitch-shifted- I thought we just had similar voices.

So I tagged along and witnessed the ruined land of Lordran for the first time. As I watched I grew more interested and wanted to find out what would happen next. But I grew impatient in waiting for episodes to release according to schedule, so I began to peer beyond that playthrough. I started to browse the game's wikis and click on the other DS-related videos I saw on my front page. I had no means to play the game and experiencing it first-hand, so I did so vicariously through others.

Eventually I found ways around my usual lack of resources and gave the first game a shot, first playing to keep up with the progress of the videos I watched using a similar character, but soon overtaking them and forging on ahead. Except I wasn't really forging anything. I was stuck in my newly formed habits, still consulting the wikis and going into each new zone or encounter with as much knowledge as I could reasonably obtain beforehand.

This trend continued into Dark Souls 2 when I tried out Scholar of the First Sin, and repeated again in Dark Souls 3 some years later. The number of hours that I played while unaided and in the dark could probably be counted on both hands. I was also entirely offline for all three experiences.

And in doing so, I think many fans of Dark Souls might feel that I ruined the essence of the game for myself.

A core part of the game to many fans, at least according to the impression I've gotten, is blundering through those experiences naturally, by yourself. To fall for the ambushes until you learn to anticipate them, and then falling for the second one in a row once you've felt an instant of hubris. To not find every treasure chest or hidden room until your second or third playthrough of the game. To either carefully piece together the lore, ignore it entirely, or give up and go watch a VaatiVidya playlist so that you can act like a know-it-all to your friends. Phantoms are free to come and go, but you need to experience the game without the middleman of guides or LPers.

But if I did that, I would die. And dying is an embarrassment to be avoided, at least according to the myriad of "git gud" memes out there. My logic was--still is--if I won't be able to do it perfectly the first time, mastering every challenge while still learning it, in order to impress or at least not coax boos out of a (completely imaginary) crowd of expert spectators, then there was no point to really trying at all. The games stopped being proper games for me, and became more like interactive checklists that I needed to satisfy in order to feel like I had done not-wrong.

When I encountered NPC quest lines in particular, I was faced with the same shattering feeling that I'd get when was faced with morality choices with consequences or quests with multiple endings in more traditional RPGs like Dragon Age- If I didn't get the 100% golden ending for everyone at once, I as a player, as a person, was failing them. I grew physically sick when I thought I had missed a Lucatiel or Siegward of Catarina encounter. It became a reflection of my real-life fears that by not doing perfectly, I was actively damaging the life experiences of everyone around me.

I couldn't just "hold that L" when I was already over max equip load with a Havel's suit of armor made out of other Ls.

But I still wanted to do the video game thing because the areas, spells, and gear were interesting and there were still some forms of positive feedback that I could enjoy and want to return to. So my every strategy was based around the idea of trivializing the challenge the game was designed for. I was shielded up with an over-leveled health bar whenever I wasn't spamming sorceries or using outright exploits to get past non-mundane enemies. I shot Manus almost to death with a longbow from outside his boss arena, and juked the Dragon Rider into falling off of his platform.

I dreaded ever boss battle, which I thought of as nothing but a roadblock, and a check on my enjoyment of the 'fun' parts of the game, which I can't even define adequately. Ornstein & Smough, the high point of Dark Souls I for countless fans, was an annoying and tedious mess that I quickly forgot all details and emotions of after I got past them on the 11th or 12th try. Meanwhile the almost universally panned Prowling Magus and his Congregation in DS2 was a-okay in my book because of how brief and inoffensive it was.

I never finished a Dark Souls game, not all the way through at least.

My armored lady-knight in DS1 was eventually abandoned after I had burned out on grinding tens of millions of souls from the Phalanx Hollows in the Painted World- I really wanted to have my Elite Knight set on while doing Dark Wood Grain Ring backflips, and that needed a lot of Endurance.

I technically killed the final boss of vanilla DS2 with my greying old lightning cleric, but that was only after I gave up on the DLC zones, so I never saw Aldia and the like. Also I was feeling guilty for enjoying DS2 because at the time the feeling that it was not as good as DS1 was in full swing on the internet.

In DS3 I got to the isolated walkway where I could literally see the room where the Soul of Cinder shows up, and I even circumvented it to enter the arguably harder Dreg Heap and have a shot at getting the fiery scimitar pyromancy catalyst thing that I wanted for my pyromancer. But it just never happened. I never reached any of the endings.

And yet, when I switched to other games in order to get a breather, the feelings carried over with me.

The Banner Saga, one of the first games I ever wanted to back the development of (but lacked the money to), had to be played with a walkthrough handy. I even tried to no avail for hours to get a glitch to work where you could recruit Ekkil while also saving Egil so that no party members had to die in this grim, icy world where people are expected to die.

Multiplayer games of any sort always gave me performance anxiety, but after seeing the way your shame can be immortalized in Dark Souls invasion fail compilations, I just can't. It's impossible to imagine co-op anything, let alone PvP where the options are to lose or ruin another person's fun.

I've been staring at an installed copy of Ashen on my desktop for a few weeks now, after hearing that it was a somewhat less intensive "Dark Souls for people who don't really like Dark Souls".

Maybe I'll get around to it without reading too far ahead? It's hard to say.

Furt Digs Into / Things I Wish They Did More With, #3: Goblin Commander: Unleash the Horde.

Betcha saw this one coming a mile away.

Long ago, when I was just a little whelp of... some age that's sufficiently little and whelp-like, I found our entire house bereft of phone, internet, and cable television during one of those rainy spring breaks that flies by too quickly despite offering few opportunities to do anything with it. What's more, my TV was for some reason out of commission at the time, so my technology-addicted self was agonizing over a very long weekend.

My mother, in her infinite mercy, allowed me to drag one of my game systems into my parents' bedroom for part of the day, and even picked up a rental game from Price Chopper (anyone else remember those days?) that she thought I'd like.

This turned out to be a copy of Goblin Commander for the Nintendo Gamecube.

All together, now: WAAAGH!

Of course I immediately threw myself into this game. I had never played any of the Warcraft series at the time, and World of Warcraft was still several months away in late 2003, but somehow I was still drawn to a game all about non-evil goblinoid creatures as if by instinct. Probably because I somehow managed to sympathize with or find a few of the orcs from the Lord of the Rings films charming.

Somehow.

You'll notice I was very quick to mention Warcraft in this post. That is because there are certain massive similarities between the universes, as I later discovered after delving into WoW and its precursors for a decade. I will try to point all of these parallels out after I'm done rambling and waxing nostalgic.

The story starts us off with an introductory historical narrative by a mysterious baritone voice while we are treated to a crawl of the map of the land of Ogriss. The goblins of this world are not a native, evolved species, and were instead created from scratch as servants and laborers by the ambitious human sorcerer Fraziel. Fraziel put the five goblin clans (the mining Stonekrusher, deforesting Hellfire, lightning-channeling Stormbringer, swamp-farming Plaguespitter, and ancient technology-scavenging Nighthorde) to work building a "Great Machine". The goblins dutifully labor toward what Fraziel promised them would be a source of untold power for them all.

Then it gets sabotaged and explodes.

Fraziel dies amid the wreckage.

Grommel, chieftain and head foreman of the Stonekrusher clan, gets framed for Fraziel's murder in his efforts to figure out what the hell happened, causing the other four clans to rise up against him and his people. With picks, hammers, rocks and bullwhips in hand, this motley bunch of miners goes on the offensive to try and uncover the truth before their people are torn apart by war. Grommel also happens to possess the power to transform into a ball of energy that is the literal cursor of the game, so he takes to the air to command his troops for the bulk of the actual game.

Goblin Commander suffers from the same clunkiness that most console-based RTS games experienced up until... well, it's still a thing, really. Unit selection was limited and cursor movement was slow, though base management was fortunately very minimal. Each clan had one or more Shrines on a map from which units would spawn, and where the game's two resources were pooled: gold, and souls. Neutral buildings could occasionally be fought over, including Alchemist shops where one side could obtain magical aid. One of the big draws of the game was that, with enough upgrades, gold, and souls, you could summon your clan's Titan. This massive creature was directly controlled by the player, and was significantly stronger than most units. The Stonekrusher titan is, appropriately enough, a Stone Ogre.

Majestic.

I definitely struggled against the controls a little as I played, but that didn't seem to dampen my enjoyment of the game as a whole. I don't remember it being too terribly long, because I was able to finish it before the end of that long weekend.

As Grommel advances through the locales of Ogriss, defeating the heads of the other clans who oppose him, he absorbs the clans and gains access to their units. This growing confederation of tribes eventually corners the Nighthorde clan, whose leader, Naxus, was the one who sabotaged the Great Machine. As it turns out, the Great Machine was actually a massive weapons factory which was able to produce hundreds of magical bombs capable of stealing the souls of everything killed by them. Fraziel was going to use these bombs to sap all of the soul energy from Ogriss, presumably including his own goblin servants, in order to reshape the world in his image and pave the way of conquest into other worlds through ancient portals called Moongates, which the Nighthorde clan had originally been tasked with unearthing. Naxus wanted this near-omnicidal power for himself however, and so offed Graziel and framed Grommel so that he'd rise to the top.

The game ends deep in the pits of the world, with all of the other goblins, including a traitor faction of Nighthordes, cornering and defeating Naxus. He lights one of the bombs in the caves before legging it through a Moongate however, trying to escape and kill as many of his pursuers as possible. Grommel manages to throw the bomb through the gate behind Naxus, destroying the gate and presumably killing him in an ambiguous Event Horizon-esque moment.

Finally, with his people united under him, Grommel poses on a mountaintop and announces his intention to find a purpose of their own with master and machine now gone.

For anyone with a passing knowledge of Warcraft lore, you might have already picked up on the similarities between the goblins here, and the orcs there. Ogriss is essentially Draenor, and the clans of goblins working together toward a great goal are the Horde with less demonic influence. Fraziel is very similar in function to Medivh the corrupted human archmage, or perhaps the orc shaman Ner'zhul with the tragic backstory bits left out. Naxus meanwhile is a power-hungry usurper like Gul'dan, and his Nighthorde clan seems to me to be as sneaky and clandestine as the Shadow Council full of warlocks and their ilk. Even the Moongates leading to other worlds amid unstable explosions resembles the twilight hours of Draenor during the Second War, when orcs who were of the opinion of "Screw this, I'm outta here!" were fleeing a losing battle through portals whose arcane energies were in turn tearing the planet apart.

On the other side of things, Grommel, chieftain of the most orc-like clan by proportions, seems to combine the heroic elements of Orgrim Doomhammer and his successor Thrall, as civil war victors and saviors of their people, respectively. Grommel even wields a hammer in cutscenes similar in size and design to the Doomhammer. His name seems light it could be evocative of Grommash Hellscream at first glance, but he bears no real resemblance to that ambivalent character at all.

All in all, the game was one of those odd titles with middling-to-decent review scores you'd probably only ever find in the store bargain bin. But I had fun with it, which is why I'm always slightly disappointed that it was a very stand-alone title, and that it didn't even get a proper PC port, where I think it could have performed way better overall. Objectively speaking, sales didn't merit the sequel that was planned. The company in charge of making it, the US division of Jaleco Entertainment, moved on to other projects until it seemed to quietly go defunct sometime around 2008. Wherever the property rights are, if they even exist, is a mystery to me.

I'm not counting on it, but maybe someday we'll get another game similar to this out of the quirky indie market.

SOMEDAAAY!

On a more positive note looking forward, there are games somewhat similar to this in concept out there, but different in execution. Possible for the best, really. I regret not helping its Kickstarter, but the game Goblins of Elderstone might someday give me my goblin RTS fix, but this time elaborated into a full-fledged city simulator with more building, worker management, and stupid levels of cuteness.

I don't have another shallow, one-word response

to this picture like the others. I just really like it.

They're really charming little buggers.