Uh oh. The pet ‘cematary’ that will bury aristos. I think there are some of the crew that couldn’t come back any worse though
Even if that isn’t the real idea, I think it’s kinda funny. I was gonna suggest something like “The Thing” with an alien crash site and the whole bit heh. After having been frozen in the ice for millennia, all of the power cells (perhaps an intact one could be used for a quest) for the ship and the neato guns decayed/failed. That doesn’t stop them from being a threat though, cause their mental and physical strength still exceeds almost anything on the world. As such, their power to adapt has allowed them to make powerful weapons/armor and pervert magic to their own designs.
In the next area for Indel, Stephen King comes to MD . . .
My money is on Pennywise the clown going on the rampage. Although, MD’s very own Salem’s Lot would be pretty damn good. I watched that film as a kid and loved it.
Pet Cemetery (or however King spelt it) already exists in Exedoria (for low- to mid-level players, anyway).
Yep, It came to mind too. An entrance connected somewhere in the moat might work with the story too. I thought that ‘horror’ was a little hard to quantify, and there really only was one spider at the end. Would be interesting to see though.
Didn’t know about the midbie place either Apparently I misspelled his intentional misspelling...’Pet Sematary’
After very briefly looking over King’s stories, The Eyes of the Dragon might fit with the Indel castle too.
This is a dungeon crawl; you just work your way through, killing EVERYTHING you come across. But I want ppl to have to pass through certain gatekeepers before moving on to the next level. So far, this is common to every side-scrolling arcade game ever made (think Gauntlet, original Street Fighter, or even the original arcade version of The Simpsons.) BUT I don’t want the gatekeeper/ Level Boss to be at the end of the level. The path is non-linear, so I want people to have to take path A to the end, kill the boss, then backtrack and take path B to get to the next level.
Here’s where it gets tricky and I need some brainstorming help. I can’t exactly have a Key object on the Boss because the area will sometimes have multiple parties in it (there are three distinct levels/ areas), and if Party A takes the key to Level 2 with them, then Party B can’t do the route and get to Level 2 also - because Party A has the key on the other side of the door with them!
Soooo ... how can I keep the gameplay from the first paragraph and still (easily) control passage to subsequent levels?
Unless I am missing something, couldn’t you do this with a boss that just simply guards a key, and put the key on a 5 minute respawn or something fairly quick.
You wouldn’t want it to instantly respawn or some idiot would go and get 5,000,000 of them and lag the mud.
I suppose I could have the key respawn with the Boss himself, forcing Party B to also kill him. I’m sure this is just me and doesn’t bother players at all, but I don’t like named NPCs respawning. It bugs me that I can kill Stitch and then come back in 45-minutes and kill him again. Nameless/ faceless NPCs, I’m okay with repeatedly killing - one peasant looks like any other peasant. So, I suppose I was trying to avoid forcing players to kill Boss Stitch repeatedly. (I could always give the boss a random name, and thereby mask that it’s really the same dude, just respawned ...)
I know, I know It’s just a function of life that we have to deal with ... though it’s now possible (b/c there are fewer players, and the Mud’s area is bigger) to turn off NPc respawning. So there’s only one of each NPC per boot. That’s reintroduce the fun of Boot-rush
Please don’t do that to named monsters lol. If people designed the game to work that way, it would be a different issue.
Back to your path issue though, I think it can be very simple. There is a monster at the end of each level and its name is simply ‘Guardian’. How this works is that the solo person or party that gets the kill, receives a weightless no-drop key when the Guardian dies. The Guardian is on a faster respawn timer too, like 10m and gives zero exp if you’ve already killed him once. The entrance to the next level is right where you enter and is just a magical portal that will not let you enter without the key object. This way, if the group needs to tp out, they don’t need to fight tons of worthless junk to continue where they left off, and people fighting on the previous level don’t need to worry about groups having to kill stuff just to get back to the next level. Normal respawns on their level would still be an issue of course.
Why not leave a ghost of the Boss “Stitch” when he is killed. Then let the ghost give the “key” or “object” when persuaded? Maybe you have to get him something before he will give it to you, etc…
Possibly a randomly, changing quest too, so you cant come prepared.
1. this makes it so he doesnt respawn and fulfills the “named npcs dont respawn” thingie
2. It also makes it more challenging for Party 2, and makes so you cant just wait for someone to get Boss “stitch” then rush through the first level of the dungeon
Correction: the new Indel area is based on a Michael Crichton novel I got around to pulling the book out to re-read it, and saw it was Crichton, not King.
Correction: the new Indel area is based on a Michael Crichton novel I got around to pulling the book out to re-read it, and saw it was Crichton, not King.
Jurassic Park! I wanna go dinosaur huntin’, bag me a Barney
I can neither confirm nor deny either the Jurassic Park/ The Lost World or Eaters of the Dead guess. Maybe it’s Congo or Timeline ... no, scratch that - I can categorically say it is NOT Timeline because that book sucked.
