Story
Avernum is a nation underground. The surface world is (or was) ruled by the cruel Empire, and anyone who didn't fit in (misfits, or petty criminals, or you) was banished there. To die in the dark.
This is the setting of the Avernum Saga, a six-part indie fantasy epic that was a huge success in the early days of computer games. Now it is being remastered with modern design for modern computers, and we'd love your help.
We want to create Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. It is a huge chapter in the story of Avernum, though you can start the series with any game and completely understand what's going on. It will be a massive, indie, retro, turn-based, story-heavy fantasy adventure for Windows, Mac, and iPad. In addition to all of those keywords, it will be a lot of fun.
At the edge of an Avernite city, about to walk out into the darkness. Explore the strange, alien underworld!
The Avernum series is our biggest success in this business. We wrote our first game in this world in 1994, a full thirty years ago. (Yes, we've been in this business that long.)
The Avernum Saga is two trilogies. The first half (Avernum: Escape From the Pit, Avernum 2: Crystal Souls, and Avernum 3: Ruined World) has already been remastered. They tell the tale of Avernum's survival and battle for freedom. The second trilogy deals with the challenges to come, as powerful forces battle for Avernum's wealth and your land faces its final fate.
This huge project begins with Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. It will be a remaster of Avernum 4, which came out way back in 2005. The original is a massive RPG, full of skilled warriors and wizards using a multitude of weapons, spells, and artifacts to conquer an enormous world. It is also a very old game, and it doesn't run so good on new machines anymore. We want to fix all of this.
An intricate game system with tons of skills, abilities, artifacts, and ways to customize your characters.
Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is about the wild early days of Free Avernum. This is a land of endless tunnels and caverns, full of savage beasts and great wealth. It's a wild frontier, drawing settlers and treasure hunters in great numbers. They (and you) come to test their strength and gain wealth, power, and fame.
However, Avernum is not the only power in the world. The surface Empire still hates and fears it. Meanwhile, the deepest caverns are the home of the Vahnatai, a strange, alien race possessing great power. They are alarmed by the flood of humans into the deep, and a peace with them must be found.
None of these political matters concern you at first. Then Avernum is attacked. Hordes of monsters flood the tunnels. Towering, godlike magical constructs possess the cities. You are forced to get involved, and your decisions will determine the future of Avernum. If it has a future at all.
You might also get really, really rich.
Avernum is an endless labyrinth of caverns. There's something unexpected around every corner. Piles of treasure. Mysterious magical workshops.
We are eager to remaster Avernum 4, and Spiderweb Software doesn't half-ass its remasters. We will go through every location, line of text, sound and graphic asset, and encounter, revising and expanding it all to make a really good game.
Avernum 4 was a big hit in its day, but it also had a number of flaws (like an underdeveloped story). We're going to put in a lot of time to fix those. The story is being heavily reworked to be exciting, engaging, and full of interesting choices.
We've done a bunch of remasters, and we're learned to respect what our fans loved about the series. The world, characters, and game system will be mostly the same. We will make a much more interesting story. We'll add new adventures, storylines, abilities, and ways to achieve your own destiny in the underworld.
We hope to complete Avernum 4: Greed and Glory in late 2025, and we have a long, long history of making our deadlines. Along the way, we'll give plenty of updates and give fans a chance to give their opinions about what is interesting and what should be developed more.
The original Avernum 4, released in 2005. We really want to remake it. There's a lot of good stuff in there.
We love doing Kickstarters, and no such project would be complete without some fun stretch goals. We want Avernum 4: Greed and Glory to not just improve on the original but strike out in new and unexpected directions. Making stretch goals will enable us to spend more time expanding the game with your help!
$50K Level - A New Storyline!
Avernum 4 was already an enormous game. There's still room for more. We love adding new adventures and adding new lore. It's fun for us and gives our fans new adventures to explore. At this level, we will create a new multi-zone, multi-part storyline, telling a whole new tale in the world of Avernum. We will also ask backers to give their ideas and suggestions. We'd like to know what lands or characters you'd most like to see more of.
$70K Level - Arena Ordeal Mode!
We love to put arenas in our games so that you can test just how strong your characters are. We have an idea for a new, crazy, expanded version of this. The new arena will make novel, randomized dungeons, heaping on more and more difficulty. Then you can see just how powerful your characters are (and earn achievements if you do really well).
$90K Level - A Pile Of New Human Art
We have long had ambitious plans for an entirely new system for the art for humans, along with more customization of your characters. Alas, this would take a lot of expense and freelancer hours. At this level, we'll finally pull the bandaid off and get this done.
If we make these goals, we will look for other things to expand or improve. We have dreams!
We are Spiderweb Software! Since 1994, our tiny little mom and pop operation has created fine, indie fantasy role-playing adventures for the gamer masses. We specialize in retro games with enormous worlds, open-ended game systems, and intricate stories.
If you'd like to try out our games but don’t know where to start, our Avernum series has been very popular. Geneforge 1 - Mutagen is another really good place to start.
Our games are retro and low-budget, but they're also reliably interesting, and FUN. That's why we've stayed in business for so very, very long. We're known for exciting gameplay, unique worlds, and unpredictable, open-ended stories.
Our Next Game and Kickstarter ... Avernum 4: Greed and Glory!
As in days of olde, we are artists searching for patrons.
We’re back to Avernum, and we’ve got a ton of new ideas.
While I mostly write stuff of general interest, there are times when I have to address posts more directly to my fans. This is one of those times. Let's get the basic PR out of the way:
We have launched the Kickstarter for our next game, and we're thrilled to finally return to the world of Avernum! Avernum 4: Greed and Glory will be an epic, indie, turn-based fantasy role-playing adventure for Windows, Mac, and iPad. It continues the saga of Avernum, a nation in caverns far under the world, full of misfits, adventures, treasures to be found, and monsters to hunt (and that hunt you).
It will be a remaster of the indie RPG cult-classic Avernum 4, which came out way back in 2005. The original is a massive RPG, full of skilled warriors and wizards using a multitude of weapons, spells, and artifacts to conquer an enormous world. It is old and doesn't run well anymore. We will completely rework everything to make a great, modern game.
The Kickstarter will run for four weeks and comes with a huge variety of stretch goals and backer rewards. You can get unique merch, including stickers, hand-drawn original art, and the original, signed, annotated designs from our first game, Exile,from back in 1994! We humbly ask for your support as we take this mostly-forgotten game from our past and rebuild it as something really cool.
Thank you for your patience. If you've appreciated this blog and want to support us, backing this Kickstarter is a great way to do it. Plus, you'll get a fun game next year!
So let's talk more about Kickstarters and Avernum 4!
We’re melding together the best design bits of Avernum 3: Ruined World and the old Avernum 4.
We Still Love Kickstarter
It's very possible that, without Kickstarter, we wouldn't be in business anymore. Or we would, but in a far reduced form. It gives generous patrons a chance to pay a lot more for our game and get lots of goodies in return.
In return, we get to remaster our old, forgotten games, fill them with polish and new content, and send them into the future in a far more playable and fun form. We have 6 games we very much want to remaster, and Kickstarter will hopefully keep making it possible.
Avernum 4, in particular, could use a lot of work.
Original Avernum 4, from way back in 2005. Making this game was hugely exhausting, and it still had a lot of flaws. We really didn’t get this engine working at peak efficiency until Avernum 5. Still, there’s a lot of good stuff in here, and we can make it shine.
It Came Out In A Dark Time
In the early 2000s, Spiderweb came close to going under. We got complacent and released two kind of so-so games in a row, sales were poor, and we got pretty scared. So I rethought everything about our process, put out two games that sold well, and avoided disaster. One of those successful games was Avernum 4.
However, it's a really flawed game.
Making Avernum 4 required a massive rewrite of the Avernum engine, and it took a ton of time and energy. At the same time, we had an infant child, and I had a really hard time getting sleep and focusing.
As a result, Avernum 4 was a decent game and had the nice, valuable Avernum name. However, it is really underdeveloped in a bunch of ways. The story is painfully barebones. So are a lot of areas in the game world. Some regions are terribly balanced and full of too much trash, as my longtime fans will testify.
At last, 20 years later, I get to go in and fix this. I'm really excited about it, but it's going to be a heck of a big job.
So anyway, thank you for your kind attention. The next section is for the fans. A lot of people played Avernum 4 back in the day, and I suspect the more devoted will want me to answer some questions about the remaster. I'll just dump a quick FAQ here to link to before I try to get a little sleep.
A completely new location for the remaster, part of one of the new storylines threading through the game.
Avernum 4 Remaster Questions Answered
For people interested in what the remaster will be like ...
Q: How Will The Story Change?
A: Avernum 4 was what it had to be about. Avernum 3: Ruined World left a lot of big questions about the future of the underworld unanswered and I felt I had to deal with them before moving on to other things.
However, when I started the second trilogy, I didn't yet realize what those three games had to be ABOUT. Why spend so much time telling this story? I didn't really figure that out until I was almost done with Avernum 5.
So I will totally expand the stories of Avernum 4, with lots more characters, factions, and choices. Avernum is free, and it is powerful and valuable. What is its future? Who will control it? How far can it expand?
Q: How Will The Game System Change?
When I made Avernum: Escape From the Pit, I made a new skill tree system. I think it was decent, but it wasn't super-popular. Worse, it didn't respect what about the old games made them popular. This respect is very important when doing a remaster.
So Avernum 4: Greed and Glory will use the Avernum 4 skill system. However, I will take from the Avernum 1-3 Trait systems, which provided a ton of cool ways to customize your characters.
The Battle Discipline system will remain. Also, we will be rebalancing to make melee and archer characters stronger and more necessary in relation to priests and mages.
Q: How Will The World Layout Change?
A: Avernum 1-3 had a world where you wandered through an outdoors and then entered towns, which were sort of "zoomed-in" zones. This worked well, but, by the time I was done with Avernum 3, I was completely out of ideas for what to put in the outdoors.
Avernum 4-6 had a more open-world feel, where there was no distinction between towns and outdoors and outdoors just blended into the towns. The problem was that parts felt crowded. Also, people don't like change.
I am adding a ton of detail and new areas to Avernum 4: Greed and Glory to make the outdoors feel more mysterious and possible to get lost in. I'm also playing a lot with the lighting, to make the underworld feel creepier and more real.
Q: How Will The Graphics Change?
A: I am going through every icon in Avernum 4 and reworking/rescaling/reshadowing and adding a ton of new art on top of it. I'm also getting some great results with the lighting. It'll still be a low-budget, icon-based Spiderweb game, but it will be, to my eyes, pretty.
Thats it for now. If we get more good questions, we’ll answer them here. I think this new game is looking really good. Wish us luck!
Read what Jeff had to say about Escape From The Pit in that blog post.
Wasn't that the game where he had a 30 year old seeming like an ancient hag because he misunderstood what average lifespan with high child mortality means? I hope there wasn't that much research.
Avernum has a kinda sorta big problem of being designed for Mac, so you have the bug of left mouse button moving your party 2 spaces instead of 1. Fortunately, right mouse button moves them 1 space as intended. The problem is that right mouse button is intended for the "look" command you'd use to search chests; it might not seem like a big deal since Exile 1 also doesn't bind RMB to look, but having to manually stab 'l' with you finger or clicking the icon every time gets annoying super fast. Avernum 2 and 3 fix this fortunately.
So Avernum and not Avernum: EftP is the way to go.
Geneforge and Nethergate are his best titles, and the Geneforge remakes are good quality. I am not a dementia patient, it's not true.
How do you know?
Nah. At least, his initial plan was to do Queen's Wish 3 after A4. And only after that -- G3.
Will probably reach ~50k, additional Steam sales and residuals over the next years will bring at least another 50k...
Honestly, it funded +10k in less than a day. Unless Vogel's campaigns are insanely front-loaded (and they might be... I haven't followed any previous campaigns), I'd think that would put it on pace for at least 70k by the time the campaign ends next month, even if they only get the spike(s) at the start and the end of the campaign.
