I'm almost done with the Sewers of Saldanus. This dungeon took me a wee bit longer than I expected, but that's OK. For the next few weeks, I am going to alternate between finishing up the last few areas of the sewer, and returning to work on the city locations. It will certainly go into June, but I think I can have the module ready to release by the end of next month. In the meantime, here are some screenshots.
This shows the party's thief detecting a secret passage.
The way secret doors work in the IceBlink version of
Hearkenwold, all the wall tiles are elevated, which creates a shadow rim effect but also automatically assigns the collision property to the square. Every individual tile can have the property changed to allow walking through, or can even be toggled through scripting. However, the tile would remain indistinguishable from other walls tiles. In blobbers, bumping into every wall that a player might suspect is a secret door can be fun, but can also be frustrating. That is why there are usually visual clues, or at least a related skill, to direct characters to such features. In IceBlink, I often use text prompts when the player passes a secret door. These cues, however, are only one time events. So after a wall is identified, it doesn't disappear, but the player will have to remember which wall you can walk through. In this way, I get the best of both worlds from a design perspective, giving the player a nudge in the right direction but not permanently.
Here is a description of something one might expect to find in a sewer complex.
And here is something, one might not expect to find.
The sewers are populated by all sorts of interesting creatures. Maybe even potential rivals. Here is an encounter with a group of individuals that turned violent.
In this battle, the female vampire won initiative and acted first. She summoned a skeleton right between our cleric and wizard. This is potentially problematic, as if either character attempt to cast a spell, they will provoke an attack of opportunity. The characters could also move away from the skeleton first, but still risk getting hit.
Regardless of how close I am to releasing the IceBlink version of the module in June, I decided I will start working on copying everything over to the Knights of the Chalice 2 adventure module at the start of July. The conversion process typically takes me a few months, and I want to have all this new content in KotC2 by September.
