In Progress Let's Play: Fallen Gods

[Darth Roxor]

Spoiler

This update should be read at about the pace of this track.

I mentioned it in the very first update that Songstones serve as a means of fast travel around the map. As fate would have it, we are right next to one, and another is right next to loverboy jarl's castle.

We are ambushed by a bunch of draugs. There is no way whatsoever they can harm us at this point, but I'll use the opportunity to showcase das fog pot we got in the wizard's barrow.

Eat my dust, dust-eaters.

The fog pot is, alas, limited in uses, but it's not like we have to care about that anymore.

Here we are.

If only we had the strength of 30 souls!

Regardless, 9 will be enough to open it and GTFO.

Opening the Songstone gives you a convenient minimap with all the others' locations.

This is Norse Jesus to Commander Boreale. My party requires immediate extraction.

Where?

Southern quadrant, but we'll be on the move.

There is no time to be lost!

These lovably placeholder maelstroms engulf the party and transport it to the target location.

Since Southgate is in the middle of a forest, I wanted to use Wild Heart to jump over the river and emerge right next to the castle.

But then it turned out that Wild Heart CAN'T jump over rivers even though THE FUCKING TUTORIAL mentions this explicitly.

Dualnames your game SUCKS, it is LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE, and YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD

Back to the drop pods.

Fortunately there's another gate on the other side of the river.

We have placed numerous beacons, allowing for multiple, simultaneous and devastating defensive deep strikes.

The Codex Astartes names this manoeuvre "Steel Rain".

Go go go. You can see the Ormson's barrow in the top right corner of the screen, so it's all really close by.

The arm ring can be used to hire either a fighter or a skald. Obviously I get the latter.

Shut up and follow me.

"Homeward bound" indeed

Move like you've got a purpose!

On the way to the barrow I run out of food, and of course the ingrates start complaining.

Another day down the drain.

Obviously I teleport over 2 hexes again with Wild Heart. BECAUSE I CAN.

Let's brighten this place up.

I give him Thorn.

Then Oraekja's Folly.

just please don't mind the horrible curse, sir

And finally I splurge all my cash on IKEA to bedeck it as appropriate. Unfortunately, this is still not enough...

Food for fifty should make a good feast.

I am ready for this holy work.

Gladly would I wed him.

The tales of the Ormson should be sung again.

Yeah, we still need food for the hungry hungry yokels.

Leaving the barrow...

A good hunt gives us all the fud we need.

Also I remembered I forgot to show the skald's character sheet, so here it is.

The skald is arguably the worst combatant of them all. He has puny might, no special boost like the maiden, and no damage bonuses like the priest. However, merely having him around gives you a boost to your Words checks, and you can also pay him gold to tell [follower]'s tales and improve their morale. A VERY useful thing to have with some of the more fussy characters.

But back to the Ormson.

We place 50 appetising legs of meat at the barrow's doorstep to lure in some random volk from the nearby wilderness.

And we get this party started!

There is something funny about doing almost exactly what the other party at the barrow that we smashed last time was trying to do

You have done well. Now they will see a wonder.

Given how often we used Healing Hands this game, it's only logical to use that as our final act of this run.

Farewell, my fellow men. I may not have righted all your wrongs, but worry not, for, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

Huzzah!

Thus end the adventures of Njal - a simple priest from the shrine of Lanhyrr, recruited by Norse Jesus on the sixth day of his exile to this middle earth. Were it not for Njal's help and counsel, The Good Incarnation would have never been able to return home.

Three cheers for Njal! Hip hip, hooray!

But shall the saga of some other Incarnation yet be told...?

 

[Strange Fellow]

gg, ez

Perhaps the real treasure was the corpses we embalmed along the way.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Thanks Darth Roxor. Seems a game worth getting after all.

 

[Hag]

Thus ends Njarlquest.
GG all, and thanks Darth Roxor for this trip.

 

[Darth Roxor]

If you enjoyed this playthrough, I can also LP another one with the paranoid or practical incarnation with an entirely different skillset if you want. Remember that this is a roguelite, so worldgen is random, and actually so is the chargen, so we haven't seen plenty of what the game has to offer still.

Regardless of that though, I'll first wait for a new build. This one has an extremely annoying bug that, as far as I heard, has already been resolved, which hides the indicator for how many days it will take you to walk somewhere. It makes planning your route resemble a complex mathematical equation.

 

[Hellraiser]

Not enough raep, seemed too easy.

 

[lukaszek]

Darth Roxor was playing this fun?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Darth Roxor was playing this fun?

Yeah. Like I said in the intro, this wasn't my only run, and shit is p. good. I like that the choices in events all feel meaty and non-fake, and you're constantly working against the clock to win your way back. This playthrough we've actually won by the skin of our teeth - 5 days left is a ridiculously slim margin, and if that one barrow with the thief didn't have Thorn, we'd be toast. We were also pretty lucky that some of the setbacks like the near-wipe at the castle weren't completely catastrophic, because I'm pretty sure that an actual TPK there would have sent us on a downward spiral towards failure.

Not enough raep

Lusty castle draugs, lusty witch, lusty party at the burial barrow not enough for you?

 

[Malakal]

Winning seems very easy tho, you just need 30 souls and portal spell right? And you get souls from exploring dungeons...

 

[Dualnames]

@Dualnames your game SUCKS, it is LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE, and YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD

Can I use Njal to defend myself outside the game?

Malakal: That was my first reaction, but in the same way that Obliterate in ROR2 is a free win, it's also simultaneously not a satisfying win to repeat.
There are also multiple winning and losing conditions.

Also there are multiple runs where I find that acquiring 30 souls is not as easy as it is in other runs.

 

[Haba]

Metagaming wise, if 30 souls is the win condition in every game, it kind of railroads you into certain kinds of play.

 

[MRY]

Darth Roxor No less impressive than your LPs of Primordia and Strangeland. "The shill is coming from inside the house!"

Haba There are five victory paths, and the only run you saw was one where the Songbridge wasn't a viable option, so I don't think it railroads. Of the five, I'd say it's my fourth most common path. For various reasons, it is not always feasible to get (and keep) sufficient souls to win that way. Best way to win is to be flexible.

 

[Jaedar]

Darth Roxor No less impressive than your LPs of Primordia and Strangeland. "The shill is coming from inside the house!"

Haba There are five victory paths, and the only run you saw was one where the Songbridge wasn't a viable option, so I don't think it railroads. Of the five, I'd say it's my fourth most common path. For various reasons, it is not always feasible to get (and keep) sufficient souls to win that way. Best way to win is to be flexible.

Are all 5 paths available every run? Or is it random?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Winning seems very easy tho, you just need 30 souls and portal spell right? And you get souls from exploring dungeons...

'Just' 30 souls is putting it rather lightly. Going just by dungeons alone, you'll have to make sure to always squeeze out the best outcomes and be conservative about using souls to get past some of the more annoying obstacles or to keep yourself going (like I did all the time with healing hands in this run).

 

[Luka-boy]

Man, it sure was heartwarming reading about Njal's wholesome adventures with Norse Jesus.

Especially the part where he fucking slit Hilda's throat. That was very uplifting.

 

[Haba]

Haba There are five victory paths, and the only run you saw was one where the Songbridge wasn't a viable option, so I don't think it railroads. Of the five, I'd say it's my fourth most common path. For various reasons, it is not always feasible to get (and keep) sufficient souls to win that way. Best way to win is to be flexible.

The problem is that once you as a player *know* which conditions are required to win, it starts affecting the way you play the game.

Compared to the situation where you can't be certain what will be the conditions for winning the game until you discover them within the game session itself.

Of course it isn't feasible to expand the scope infinitely. For a "small game" 5 win conditions are probably are enough. But that doesn't warrant a whole lot of replay-ability.

 

[Malakal]

Winning seems very easy tho, you just need 30 souls and portal spell right? And you get souls from exploring dungeons...

'Just' 30 souls is putting it rather lightly. Going just by dungeons alone, you'll have to make sure to always squeeze out the best outcomes and be conservative about using souls to get past some of the more annoying obstacles or to keep yourself going (like I did all the time with healing hands in this run).

If I knew its 30 its probably easier to stockpile. Just pointing out that one event plus resource is easy way to win. Maybe the spell should be sometimes split into parts to be gathered or something.

For maximum autism you can check soul economy in this game as a comparison.

 

[lightbane]

I like how you stopped a human sacrifice in one side-quest that the priest was mad at, and yet he has no hesitation to cut down your waif(u) for the ritual to work.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I like how you stopped a human sacrifice in one side-quest that the priest was mad at

If you mean the barrow party with the angry undead thane, the priest was mad at us for stopping the whole thing

He even wanted to be the master of ceremonies there too

 

[MRY]

Jaedar I think as a technical matter, it is possible for some runs to generate in such a way that certain victory paths are practically not available. For instance, I have had runs where I couldn't find any armor (though maybe that was just bad luck in certain events) and thus couldn't get the victory path you saw in this LP. A victory path is never specifically disabled from the outset. (We may have "scenarios" where there are constraints, including to victory paths, but they don't exist yet, and they would not displace the core game experience, which is open-ended.) I should also note that one victory path has three variants, although the variations are not that significant, and you only ever get one variant per run.

Haba First, glad you know the folklore on scorn poles! Definitely once a player knows victory paths, that affects how he plays the game. For the better, I think. It's worse by far when a time limited game is directionless. Your win rate will be much, much lower if you always try to go the Songbridge path, though. Barbarian Prince (which heavily inspired FG) also has a limited number of victory paths, and I don't think that limited the game. Other things certainly do limit FG, including the simplistic combat (inspired by BP and Lone Wolf), the limited pool of events, etc. But victory conditions are pretty low on that list because there are so many different ways to accomplish them.

Darth Roxor The priest does object in the Till Death event, but that's because the dead aren't respecting the jarl's marriage, not because of the rite per se.

lightbane It's funny, having grown up playing jRPGs, I got used to right-side heroes. But once I started to thinking about it, yeah, it's not just in nu-stuff like Darkest Dungeon where the heroes are on the left, it's HOMM and MOO, which I played a lot as a kid, not to mention every platformer, etc. (The only strong counterexample outside jRPgs that comes immediately to mind is Sid Meier's Pirates! where your captain is on the right.) In retrospect, I wish I'd had the heroes face left (which would have also put the warband next to, and facing the same direction as, their portraits), but it now looks wrong to me when I flip it. Choice and consequences. In answer to your other question, wizards strike in combat because that's what everyone does. Combat is very simple because the starting point was the combat in Barbarian Prince and Lone Wolf. Worked up from there; it was never intended to be the kind of tactical combat real RPGs have (or the skill-spamming stuff that jRPGs feature). Those origins explain some of the things that Malakal noted are lacking (tactical combat, dungeon crawling).

Modron The two kinds of dice were because we're testing whether pips are suitably readable on a d10. I've never seen pips above d6, but I wanted pips because that's how the period-appropriate dice looked. Unfortunately, I find them hard to quickly read on a d10 (especially when there are four dice), so we are going to use numerals (but with much better textured dice than the blue defaults).

Demo.Graph The hut art is now changed, hope you're happy. Also, that's a foot. And it's after a touch up to make it less schlong-like.

Malakal On the difficulty level, I'd say that even with metaknowledge/recourse to the design documents, I still only have about a 50% win rate, and Songbridge victories are probably fourth out of the five victory paths for me. In terms of difficulty, my goal was not to hold experienced players to a low win rate, but to make sure that as you play, events don't feel trivial -- i.e., the risks/stakes are such that you still need to think about what choices to make, keeping an eye toward the victory conditions. I think we've largely achieved that. If anything, the problem we have with testers is that they find the game too hard, not too easy, but I am comfortable we have the balance right.

We may make a "hard" variant mode, and the levers for doing that would be disabling re-rolls, reducing the number of days (BP gave you 70, not 90), taking away starting follower(s)/item, and reducing or eliminating starting resources (gold/food/souls). I'd view this as an extra-challenge mode, not the way the game is intended to be played. Each of those things that we can take away were things that we added to the game from its original state ~2016, and I believe each one made the core game experience better -- the events are more fun when you have more choices.

 

[Haba]

Haba First, glad you know the folklore on scorn poles! Definitely once a player knows victory paths, that affects how he plays the game. For the better, I think. It's worse by far when a time limited game is directionless. Your win rate will be much, much lower if you always try to go the Songbridge path, though. Barbarian Prince (which heavily inspired FG) also has a limited number of victory paths, and I don't think that limited the game. Other things certainly do limit FG, including the simplistic combat (inspired by BP and Lone Wolf), the limited pool of events, etc. But victory conditions are pretty low on that list because there are so many different ways to accomplish them.

You should make a subtle scene where someone accuses the godling of being "argr", whatever the translated equivalent be. Give the player the choice to walk away or act accordingly. Then if the player manages to return despite choosing... uh, poorly, he should have a new status in the afterlife.

A valuable introduction of the Gray Goose Laws for the modern audience.

 

[MRY]

There are certainly various insult exchanges in the game, including regarding the god's manliness. I don't believe there are any instances where you can be insulted, leave, and return because very few events persist that way. Walking away from an insult typically bears more immediate consequences like loss of follower morale, getting cursed, or getting shut out of a settlement because the god is too ashamed to show his face again.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Also, that's a foot.

I hereby dedicate my 1000th message on this forum to dick feet everywhere.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The recent Wormwood drama seems like an excellent excuse for another playthrough of Fallen Gods!

Let us inspekt what's changed over the last two months.

Spoiler

The game now starts with an intro cinematic, which is just a recycling of this old-ass teaser trailer. Git yer deep lores here:

After which we start in this glowing pile of turd again.

Tales are strewn where a god treads, and I mean to glean them.

BEGIN MISSION

This might be an interesting run because as you can see, we're a total limpdick god. Our starting might of 3 will get us wrecked in every fight, though 7 HP might help mitigate that at least a little, and 5 speed is nothing to write home about either. However, with 8 wits we should be able to make our way through the game with conniving diplomacy and cunning stealthery decently safely. Until we run into an angry random encounter.

The other shit we start with won't make our martial life easier too. First, our god skills:

Stories-bones-tell. No real active use, but it'll let us rez dead followers after combat.

Foresight is great for a limpdick god because it'll let us evade a lot of harm. It has two uses: passive and active. The passive will make a blurb with a hint appear over each option we highlight in an event, hopefully preventing us from falling down cleverly hidden pitfalls and other hazards.

The active, on the other hand, lets you scan any cave, bog or barrow on the map for the bargain price of 1 soul to get a preview of what's inside. With only 1 starting soul, we're not gonna do that just yet.

Next up is our fetch, this time a raven. The raven is a pure utility fetch. It gets you some health back after fights, makes rezzing the god cheaper after he dies, and gives free info on all barrows on the map.

Our starting follower is a skald. In the previous game I think we only got one in the very last update when we were heading for victory, so it'll be nice to give him some more spotlight from the start here. He is a non-combatant and a wimp, which will perfectly complement our limpdick god!

And finally our starting item. Woodbane may look like a big nasty axe, but it doesn't actually give any attack bonuses. It'll prevent us from getting lost in forests, though, which is a huge benefit all by itself.

Alas, you can't give it to the skald to transform him into a WRECKER OF GITS.

I can wield the great gear of old only in song.

So summing up, as you can see we have absolutely nothing whatsoever on us that will be of any help in any fight. Lovely. We don't even have enough gold to hire a fighter or a woodsman to help.

Let's check our surroundings.

Zooming out now provides this fancy minimap-like overview to let us get our bearings easier. I've identified four possible avenues of attack for us.

Route A is NIGHTMARE level so I'm putting it here only for reference. With three barrows and a cave, it would take a miracle for us NOT to get butchered.

We also have info on the barrows along the way from our raven:

Auspicious!

Promising!

Been there, done that.

Then we have routes B and C. They will both start with a woodstead, castle and shrine.
After that B will head north towards a town and proooooobably for the hillstead close to it.
C will lead to another town and next to 3 runestones - depending on how things go we can even try heading into the big scary cave, though I see little success there, or make a detour into the steading by the cave.

D will also start with a woodstead and castle, then go southward. We'll pass another woodstead, then a town, and finally end up in two barrows.

Since this barrow peninsula is a dead end, we'll have to haul ass back to the town and take a ship somewhere else once we're done with this route.

PICK YER ROUTE OF CHOICE

ALSO, please specify the god archetype for this playthrough. We've already had the GOOD INCARNATION. The remaining choices are PRACTICAL INCARNATION (whatever suits the agenda) and PARANOID INCARNATION (asshole god). Choose wisely!

Oh, the assholes behind this game also decided to disable savescumming, which may or may not disrupt the flow of this LP, but I've successfully dealt with more competent developers in the past.

 

[Malakal]

I'm voting EVIL mainly because I want to see how you manage that without being actually able to hurt people yourself...