Man, what a thread to stumble into. You guys just made my day! I'll be looking forward to playing the remake/sequel.
I would also like to help if I can. I'm not a programmer or artist but I love writing adventures (for tabletop RPGs and MUD/MUSHes). Let me know if you think you could use help with content writing.
Cheers
C
Nice to meet you, Chandos!
And that's excellent, content writing is something we could really use. It's probably the biggest thing we need in the short term right now, in fact. Long-term we need background artists who work in a similar style, but it's going to be hard to put out releases without encounter text.
We're dropping the original assets--staying true to the experience, near-duplicating many or most encounters (while adding new ones), but we can't keep the original text. If you'd like to grab one of the encounters from Darklands and re-write it, that would be cool. Just try to avoid plagiarism... If you're rewriting the wolf encounter, for example (which I'm already working on), then you should know that it goes kinda like this:
- Intro text: Wolves.
- Do you attack them, or fail to drive them off? Text for them going after you. Maybe hint that surrendering is not a good idea.
- If you try to drive them off, it's an easy skill check by the person with highest WdWs in the day, or a hard check by the person with the highest WdWs at night. Needs two text results for success at day and night. The text should state who made the successful roll.
- If you fought, you need results for the end of the battle: Winning, fleeing, getting knocked out, and surrendering. The last two are the same in this case: It picks a random surviving party member to get eaten, and kills them.
- Do you try to invoke a saint? Needs success text that includes who invoked the saint. If some saints work noticably different (IE, one is said to calm animals while another is said to drive them off), needs different text for different saints/saint types.
- If you fail to invoke a saint, needs success text that it failed (and either include 'the wolves attack', or segue into that text as a next screen, or segue back into 'make a choice', depending).
- Same with alchemy (success and failure, the person who attacked, the potion that was used).
- Same with trying to outrun them (whole party uses horses, if present).
- Oh yeah. While it's not always easy, some of these cards need alternate text for the case where you have less than three survivors. Did you lose the fight, and only have one survivor? Yeah, the party doesn't look on in horror while X screams. There's no party, it's you. It's often okay to refer to 'the rest of the party' when there's one guy talking to a lone partner, but the party also shouldn't look on in wonderment as a single guy explains something to nobody in particular. It's good form not to avoid something cool just for the sake of writing less cards, though.
What you shouldn't do is simply rephrase while reading the original text; since we're working to avoid copyright violations, that's just as important now as it was in middle school. In fact I would recommend that, after exploring the encounter so you know what the options and vague roll difficulties (and relevant skills and roll types) are, you put the text away and re-write them from scratch.
Anyway, you see why we need help with this kind of thing? At first glance, it seems like a simple encounter--wolves, and you either drive them off or you don't--but it actually needs about fifteen to twenty different blocks of text (and for cards where you can make choices, one-line descriptions for each choice). Usually each block can get away with anywhere from a single short paragraph to two paragraphs, but it's still a big chunk of writing for each and every encounter, especially the ones that involve combat. There's also some transcription into XML involved, but I can handle that myself for now--once I get good documentation written up, writers can do that too if they /really/ want but it's not a necessity.
It's a massive effort. Just think of how much text there is for the Raubritters: About the same stuff as wolves for meeting his men in the field, the same for all kinds of stuff for outside the castle, and for various ways of entering the castle, and for dealing with him in person... Don't worry about those right now, though. Worry about taking a small wilderness encounter and committing to get it finished.
If you want to stretch your creative muscles a bit more, we also need ideas for brand new encounters. You should keep them mundane for now--even very minor fantasy elements need some vetting first, to keep the setting clear--but new encounters are nice. Bounce 'em off me before you dive into writing twenty paragraphs. If you have ideas for events that happen in a specific region of the map, that's GREAT, we're trying to add things like that. But...ideas themselves are only so useful. You gotta be willing to do the heavy lifting of writing, too.
If you want to get involved long-term as someone who writes multiple encounters, and can commit to it, it would be excellent to have more team members. We're also grateful for volunteers who just want to take an encounter or two, though.
Drop by the Yahoo group mentioned a couple posts up, or email me if you've got some thoughts on things to implement, and thanks very much!
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Topic: Darklands remake is underway (Read 56654 times)