Elven Academy

Happy New Year! This evening I’ve uploaded module C3: Town of Terror: the Return. This is the third ‘outdoor adventure’ in Elven Academy.

In this module, you return to the seaside port town of Queen’s Bay with Alex and another companion. He has some issues to work out. He also wants to drag you into a secret spying mission. This module features more zombies and more romance than any other project so far, so what’s not to like?

Module B1 has a bit more romance with succubi and other children of the Dark Lord, but added together with companion romance, C3 has the most. The number of combats might also be a bit more than the previous champion, module D2. These combats are a bit more boring, though.

I’m not thrilled at all with my current RNG combat system, featuring rounds and attrition to hit points. It’s a coding clown fiesta. I’m strongly thinking about changing to scripted combat encounters, which are more exciting and unique, although not as replayable or interesting in terms of figuring out what works.

This module took at least the last six months to complete. It was a stupid and insane amount of weekend warrior work – from designing, writing, coding, creating all the art, translating into Spanish, and debugging. Throw in some music. And there are still probably a few bugs hiding in there somewhere.

This module was supposed to be an epic adventure, and filesize-wise it actually is. I believe it’s twice as large as any other module created to date.

The reason for the length wasn’t the size of the adventure though. It turned into a character-based story centered on Alex. That’s great, but it meant the focus wasn’t on sword and sorcery fantasy adventure, and D&D-like scenarios to solve.

So I still have a major itch to create a “mega-dungeon”. I will try again next time, after planning a bit better, and probably after completing B3: The Seelie Court. I feel like the most epic adventure has to be more on rails. C3: Town of Terror is a depressingly modest spiderweb with a few breadcrumb trails to nudge the adventurer towards the more intense story beats.

I enjoy writing dialog, but I tend to do so at the expense of other things. Anyway, off to yet another creative project (an oil painting), which is sitting waiting for me. Here is a direct link to module C3.

Note that if you are a level one/first year student, casting these combat spells will be fairly difficult. Luckily there is another, even more effective way available to handle these zombies. Actually, a lot of rolls in this module will be difficult. So.

Here is a level three (female chaotic heritage) code you can use, if you want: NAN100-OMHLLI-LFIFFK-AAABAC-18-15-12070C0000401-AEAAAA-AAEAAAAAAA-RAACAAAAAA-IAAAAAAAAA-ODMIVC-WWEIUL-YUGKAK-8535332222522343-0AUL4AAY000000000000000000000-000000000

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