KickStarter Realms Beyond: Ashes of the Fallen - Chaos Chronicles reborn! - now in COMBAT BETA

We'll do our best to disappoint your cynicism.

We currently have about 150 feats from the D&D 3.5 SRD implemented, almost exactly as they appear in the ruleset. We also add some new ones whenever appropriate (if they would fit to a certain prestige class or just a culture of our world, if we have a good idea for an addition to the ruleset that would make sense for our setting, we'll put it in).

Attribute generation is done similarly to KotC, with dice rolls + minor modification/point swap. We also let you decide to use a point buy system if you don't want to autistically re-roll until you got all 18s (which you won't cause our algorithm isn't pure random, you won't end up with all stats being the same), but of course point buy won't give you as interesting/varied results as rolling.

We haven't yet planned any house ruling for the other basic classes, but we're doing some with prestige classes and how they work.

It won't be a strict "once you enter a dungeon, you can't leave until you're through" system, but a case by case basis of various dungeons that all work differently. Some dungeons might have a one-way entrance and the exit is somewhere else, in some you'll be able to enter and exit whenever you want, others might lock the door behind you and you'll have to find a way to open it again, etc. Resting within dungeons will work in a similar way to Dark Sun: Shattered Lands and Knights of the Chalice, with fixed resting points within the dungeons where you can rest and restore your spell slots. The locations of these are, of course, designated by the level designer, so if we feel particularly evil we might give you a hard dungeon where the door locks behind you and the first resting spot you come upon is all the way down on level 3. If we feel particularly generous, we may give you a dungeon with a resting place right next to the entrance, and you can also leave whenever you want. You know - variety. Variety is the meat of a good RPG and ideally, every dungeon would offer a different experience to the player.

We could theoretically implement the Pathfinder rules since they're also OGL, yes. But most of our team are more familiar with D&D 3.5, and some of us also prefer D&D over Pathfinder, so that's what we're focusing on.
Doesn't mean we won't add some elements of the Pathfinder ruleset if we think they'd be a good fit for our game.

But I know that you're a massive Pathfinder fanboy, so you'll be happy to hear that we're aiming for a high degree of moddability. If you want to, you'll be able to add classes and feats from the Pathfinder ruleset to your own module. Heck, if you say "most of your homebrew rules are shit", you can change them to be closer to the original D&D rules, too. When it comes to modding, we'll try to give you as much freedom as possible, which includes being able to modify the classes, feats, races, etc to your heart's content.

 

Never learned to do dick with code or scripting, so I'll leave the modding to someone else. But thanks for your very informative answers.

Did I miss you talking about pres classes? Please tell me you're not just planning the DMG ones (many of which are useless) but are planning on implementing interesting choices that actually see use?

 

We're currently busy perfecting the implementation of the basic classes and haven't decided which prestige classes to implement yet, but we're going to look through them on a case by case basis and pick those that seem the most interesting to us.

I've already made a case for adding the Dervish cause sword dancer girls would fit really well to a certain faction I've designed, so you can expect the prestige classes that we do implement to actually be somewhat integrated into the game's world.

 

Oh well - didn't come here for the plot.

Cool to know you'll be implementing interesting prestige classes rather than stock ones, though I'd much prefer it be based on what pres classes play well or grant interesting character customization options rather than lore, which I won't care much about either way.

My main wish for a prestige classes would be Blade Singer (though without the stupid racial restriction) or equivalent since I love gishes . Its best implementation is of course the Magus from Pathfinder.

 

Obviously we're also looking at the gameplay elements of the prestige classes. Dervishes are also really fun to play (and play against - you can expect a very challenging encounter featuring them), and we'll pick the prestige classes primarily based on their gameplay enjoyment and validity as a class, and then mold them into our game world so they become an organic part of the setting. I've played a human female dual-wielding scimitar Dervish in a pen and paper campaign once and had tremendous fun with her special feats, and I'm including these kinds of characters mostly because of the gameplay, since facing them in combat would make for an extremely cool encounter.

My thought process was basically "I got this cult you are facing in a quest, and they got some warrior-priestesses, and I want the final encounter against them to be a challenge, and hey the Dervish prestige class would be just the right thing to make them into truly threatening foes."

 

Apart from the 3.5 D&D rules, TB combat and (optional afaik) full party creation, are there other features you'd consider "defining" for the game?

For example is there some sort of internal party interaction / management system?
A more dynamic world that the average static CRPG ones?

I'm basically asking if Realms Beyond is aiming to be a new ToEE of some sort or do something different/"special" that will "define" it.

 

Realms Beyond isn't trying to re-invent the wheel, we just want to make a really solid RPG that takes inspiration from the old classics, which includes ToEE's combat, Realms of Arkania's world map exploration and resource management, Ultima 6 and 7's NPC schedules and cities that feel alive, Arcanum's open-ended quests with different approaches, etc etc.

Our defining feature is, I would say, our attempt of bringing the pen and paper experience to life in a computer game - which is pretty much what the computer RPGs of the 80s, 90s, and early 00s have been trying to do, too, to various degrees of success. We love Ultima, Might and Magic, the Gold Box games, Dark Sun, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, ToEE, Realms of Araknia... and that's just the kind of game we want to create: an engrossing RPG experience that lets you create a bunch of characters, travel the world, have adventures, make some choices, and allows you to approach quests and dungeons in different ways (I fondly remember talking with a pal about Arcanum and Baldur's Gate 2 back in the day, discussing out different paths through the game, and how we were developing our characters, what the best builds are... good times).

We all have some experience with pen and paper RPGs, and that kind of experience is what we want to emulate in our game. We have a lot of different features - world map travel, combat, living cities, quests with mutliple choices - but if you want me to tell you the "one thing" that "defines" Realms Beyond, I'd say that it's the attempt to go for a P&P style experience.

Heck, some of our systems have been playtested in P&P, some of the things I want to add to the game come from my experiences with P&P (like the Dervish class which I've actually played in a campaign with friends and had lots of fun playing), and P&P is the very essence of what RPGs are and should be. Playing D&D campaigns on the tabletop is as much of an inspiration for us as the classic PC RPGs are.

 

Great answer to a not-so-well-formed question. Thx

Awesomeness

 

Our game has state of the art graphics that surpass even the most popular genre giants like Akallabeth and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

 

One thing I don't quite understand - this game is supposed to be based off of Chaos Chronicles, no? Wasn't that game fairly close to release? Despite that, it seems like you're only about halfway through the design / development phase. Were you forced to redo CC content, or was CC in fact not that close to release as one might have thought?

 

Out of curiosity, how much of dnd/pathfinder 3.5 is absolutely free for use and modification? Can you do your own d20-based game and face no licensing issues at all (as long as you don't include beholders and whatever else is copyrighted separately)?

 

Then you got the wrong impression of Chaos Chronicles. It wasn't close to release, it was still in pre-beta stage before it was cancelled. While much of the engine work had already been completed, and lots of assets created, only little of the content had been implemented at that point.

Also, some things have changed on the technical side. We've moved to a 2.5D perspective from CC's full 3D, the way we handle our world map has changed, etc.

We're re-using most of the assets we had for CC, and of course the core concept of a turn based D&D RPG is still the same.

Also, the structure of our development team is now more like a decentralized indie team (like Iron Tower) than a professional studio with everbody on-site.

And finally, we've created a new setting from scratch. New world, new lore, new story, etc.

It's more of a "using the foundations of what we already had to create a new thing with it" rather than "finishing an old product that was almost finished but not quite".

Fun fact: Pathfinder itself is based on the OGL D&D rules.

So yes, you can.

 

Question: What has happened to Demons Age? That's completely dead and you don't have to worry about it anymore, or are you still in some legal process?

 

It's dead, Jim.

 

Ah, finally something to wash down the bitterness of Chaos Chronicles going south, all these years of waiting finally amount to something! And look at those perfectly parallel lines in the screenshots! Keeping everything so tidy, gamey and immediately accessible. A true form of beauty!

Hopefuly they learned something from while dicking around with Chaos Chronicles, even if that wasn't the entire picture. Is the shareholder lawyer from back then still involved in any capacity?

Hobgoblin, how about that post-mortem you mentined back then that you might someday do?

 

How are you handling itemization? You don't have to go into depth if you haven't got it laid out yet, but maybe you know at least what item types (the whole 3.5 shebang or less?) you got planned?

 

I've answered a question about weapon types in my previous post, saying that we got plenty of different types there. You can expect the same variety with armor, clothing, and jewelry.

As for items that aren't for equipping, it depends. Consumables like potions and scrolls are in, of course, we got plenty of tasty food items, and so on.

As for utility stuff, we include those kinds of items that make sense for our gameplay. Bedrolls, thieves' tools, cooking pots (for preparing your food when you're out camping), and a bunch of other utility items that may come in useful.

Regarding magic items, we're going for hand-placed uniques like they were in Baldur's Gate 2. Unique magic items that are broken apart and can be reforged when you find all the parts are also a thing.

We also have plenty of flavor items, and it's relatively simple for us to add new items with interesting functionalities to them, by simple scripting. We have musical instruments that can be played, a hand mirror that tells you that you're ugly when you look into it...

So yeah. There's lots of stuff, including fun-to-play-around-with interactive magic items.

 

Half-orcs are Native Americans?

 

And Dwarven women look like the love children of Bradylama and Cleve.

 

The female dwarf all the way on the right reminds me of Meatloaf.

 

Furthest left human just took a long look at the rest of the cast.

 

i see clear realms of arkania hd inspiration in these portraits

 

I very much like the feeling of "Resource dwindling" dread. "Oh shit, I'm so deep into the dungeon, and I have no way to heal myself, how will I make it?".
It sounds like some of the areas will accomplish that. Looking forward to it