KickStarter SKALD: Against the Black Priory - retro RPG inspired by Ultima

[Galdred]

The combat is far from mindless and is more complex than any 80s or 90s games

I'm actually comparing it to Rad Codex games. Kingsvein blows this away. Also Caves of Lore had more useful abilities and spells for all party members, though it's much easier.

Kingsvein's top down graphics are less appealing than the style of this game but they are more readable and easier to parse, esp. in battle. Skald often looks stylish but needing to constantly hit the 'highlight items' button is a sign of art design overtaking playability. Ultima never needed that shit.

*edit* also, really? Play any gold box game. Shit, play Wizards Crown.

So is that better than a clear-cut tactics game like Kingsvein?

It's not. Kingsvein has actual challenging battles but doesn't focus too much on resource accumulation. Much more build freedom. Skald is more about managing health and mana over the long haul, though because there's no random encounters in dungeons you can always walk back to a bed to rest. Skald also gives you a free heal every level up, I'm level 8 in my game and I've been milking this to almost never rest at all.

What Skald has is 'muh grimdark' and story. It's fine, nothing amazing, but some people weight those factors higher (*cough* game journos *cough* *cough*)

It seems like you are extremely biased against the game. And for fuck's sake, don’t tell me to play a Gold Box game or Wizard’s Crown—I’ve played them all. You are exhibiting the common syndrome of the Codexer, praising the ancient perfect game that never existed. Skald clearly has a lot of features that weren’t in those Gold Box games, which were filled with random encounters with little strategic depth. As for the grimdark aspect, yes, it’s a huge advantage. It has a good plot and is something that would stand on its own at a true RPG table. The young isekai hero saving the world from the demon king in a JRPG-style plot doesn’t do it for me. So, Skald’s darker and more coherent universe, with resource management and deeper gameplay than usual, is considerably superior in my eyes compared to the 'rad' Codex darlings.One thing I would agree with is the cluttering on screen, forcing you to use Shift to highlight things. But again, the games from the '80s and '90s were not as detailed.

Mortmal praising a game with such unreadable fonts is all the recommendation I could need!

 

[Removal]

Seems like a solid 6.5/10 so far. Combat is functional and story is pretty standard lovecraft slop so far.
Not bad, but probably not worth the 5 year wait

 

[Jermu]

after struggling early game with guild-magos now when I got 4-6 party members combat has been braindead easy + got around 50+ each of mana/life potions + food for 30 rests
have not needed to restart fight for a while
stealing good stuff is too easy so I stopped doing it
also this game found benefit if highlight would staying on all the time annoying to keep spamming it

hope combat difficulty gets better end game but so far been solid 8+ game for me

 

[Trash Player]

I mean, what is the deal with people complaining about casters being bad? I don't regret playing a mage at all. Fire is pretty bad but the other 2 are gamebreakers.

Thing is... they are not really gamebreakers and maybe that is ok. Your attunement pool is so comically small that you are a 2 pump chump. Your guild-magos can turn the tide of "A" battle, yes, but then he has basically shot his load. You won't be doing that repeatedly. You are useless after that.

I suppose if you abuse the rest system or simply chug attunement potions this could become game-breaking but barring that, you have a strict limit on your usefulness in the form of your attunement pool which will give you 1 or 2 really heavy hitter spells then you are spent. You have no other really useful skills to fall back on so are dead weight to the party at that point.

There is no need to use more than a couple of heavy hitters. I finished the later chapters without resting at all.

 

[Mortmal]

The combat is far from mindless and is more complex than any 80s or 90s games

I'm actually comparing it to Rad Codex games. Kingsvein blows this away. Also Caves of Lore had more useful abilities and spells for all party members, though it's much easier.

Kingsvein's top down graphics are less appealing than the style of this game but they are more readable and easier to parse, esp. in battle. Skald often looks stylish but needing to constantly hit the 'highlight items' button is a sign of art design overtaking playability. Ultima never needed that shit.

*edit* also, really? Play any gold box game. Shit, play Wizards Crown.

So is that better than a clear-cut tactics game like Kingsvein?

It's not. Kingsvein has actual challenging battles but doesn't focus too much on resource accumulation. Much more build freedom. Skald is more about managing health and mana over the long haul, though because there's no random encounters in dungeons you can always walk back to a bed to rest. Skald also gives you a free heal every level up, I'm level 8 in my game and I've been milking this to almost never rest at all.

What Skald has is 'muh grimdark' and story. It's fine, nothing amazing, but some people weight those factors higher (*cough* game journos *cough* *cough*)

It seems like you are extremely biased against the game. And for fuck's sake, don’t tell me to play a Gold Box game or Wizard’s Crown—I’ve played them all. You are exhibiting the common syndrome of the Codexer, praising the ancient perfect game that never existed. Skald clearly has a lot of features that weren’t in those Gold Box games, which were filled with random encounters with little strategic depth. As for the grimdark aspect, yes, it’s a huge advantage. It has a good plot and is something that would stand on its own at a true RPG table. The young isekai hero saving the world from the demon king in a JRPG-style plot doesn’t do it for me. So, Skald’s darker and more coherent universe, with resource management and deeper gameplay than usual, is considerably superior in my eyes compared to the 'rad' Codex darlings.One thing I would agree with is the cluttering on screen, forcing you to use Shift to highlight things. But again, the games from the '80s and '90s were not as detailed.

Mortmal praising a game with such unreadable fonts is all the recommendation I could need!

Well, I certainly have some experience with RPGs that are not so easy to read.

 

[Fatberg Slim]

I backed this game but didn’t closely follow the development in order to stay unspoiled. Did the developer explain why he went with 2d6 for combat rolls instead of 1d20, or why he added this whole list of reroll options as part of difficulty adjustment? I’m not sure what problems these systems are intended to solve.

I’m also not thrilled to see “dice smoothing” options and hope this does not become more of a trend. This bothers me more than just increasing or decreasing rolls by a certain flat amount, probably because it suggests a fundamental lack of respect for the rules of probability Was Solasta the first to add this or did another RPG do it first?

 

[Infinitron]

Kinda popamole 3/5 review: https://www.eurogamer.net/skald-against-the-black-priory-review

Skald: Against the Black Priory review - a robust but inessential throwback to the RPG's primordial era​

Blue cloister cult.

Skald: Against the Black Priory is without question the retro-est game I have played. The recent spate of boomer shooters and PS1-era survival horrors are mere whippersnappers in this 8-bit RPGs eyes, cosplay Roman soldiers marching under the shadows of its artificially ancient Pyramids. High North Studios dark fantasy adventure is a devoted recreation of role-playing from the primordial days of home computing. If it threw back much further, you'd need to visit a university to play it.

Skald is a good game. I want to say that up front and unambiguously. It's a tightly crafted, moodily written RPG that makes atmospheric use of its Commodore 64 aesthetic. But it also had me questioning the value of digging up this part of the past, as Skald's self-imposed restrictions make it tough to recommend in a genre that has burned so brightly in recent years.

We'll get to that in time. For now, there's a ship to wreck. Skald's adventure kicks off in enjoyably immediate fashion, with the vessel your character is travelling on being bisected by some giant, betentacled sea monster. As you drift down into the abyss, the story flashes back to the journey's inciting event; an aristocratic former friend of your father's asks you to find his daughter – a woman named Embla – who has absconded to the Outer Isles for reasons unknown. Then the abyss spits you back out onto the shores of one of these islands, where it soon becomes apparent that Strange Happenings are afoot.

Skald's Sword & Sorcery tale communicates like a knife in the dark, straight to the point and nasty as hell. As your bedraggled character hops across the pebbly coast, you battle ship rats and scuttling crabs horribly mutated by some unseen force, and pass the smashed corpses of sailors pulped by the roiling tide. The first NPC you encounter is a haggard old hermit who makes his living by picking clean the bodies of ill-fated seamen. The first side-quest you receive involves descending into the well of an elderly farmwoman to retrieve the bones of her children.

It's as clear in its vision as it is dark, and by far my favourite thing about Skald is how it uses the visual and audio stylings of the Commodore 64 to elevate this atmosphere of eeriness and dread. The garish 8-bit colours heighten the caricature-esque character art. The pulsing, buzzing soundtrack rubs like sandpaper against your nerves. The dithered pixel art pressed against the inky black background oozes with grim personality. When you enter the town of Horryn, for example, the scenes of devastation are only made more vivid in how the art abstracts it.

1: Skald ekes a powerful sense of mood from its simple visual style. 2: The writing is similarly evocative. 3: Water way to go. | Image credit: Raw Fury / Eurogamer
The broader mystery that emerges from this horror is dramatic and entertaining, though it lost me a little when I realised it was drawing heavily upon Lovecraftian archetypes. I liked Lovecraft as a teenager, and I learned a lot of fun new words reading his work (as well as some less fun ones). But putting aside the fact that Lovecraft was a colossal racist and, when it comes down to it, not a particularly good writer, video games have stripped that literary field of all and any fertility. Lovecraft isn't weird anymore, folks! Other cults are available! There's nothing more deflating when you posit a grand and spooky conspiracy, only for the answer to be 'oops we woke up some fish-people'.

Fortunately, the Lovecraftian elements are only a part of Skald rather than the whole, and the game interweaves these tired tropes into its own, more intriguing lore. For the most part, the story presses inexorably forward, though there are usually several smaller distractions to pursue in every location you visit, alongside a few bigger side quests such as an extended foray through a mage's tower. Likewise, the characters you encounter are vibrantly written, but don't expect to get to know your party enormously well. Like your own character, your companions are there to do a job, and they don't stray too far from familiar RPG archetypes. The noble cleric, the grizzled mercenary, the roguish pirate, etc.

Your skills don't just impact combat, but can also influence dialogue, navigation, and other actions, while good party deployment can make a big difference to the outcome of a battle - though some battles are limited in their options. Don't come to Skald expecting a lighthearted adventure, mind. | Image credit: Raw Fury / Eurogamer
Mechanically, Skald is an unapologetically traditional RPG, mixing top-down exploration of both a larger overworld and more specific locations, with some text adventure-style dungeon crawling and turn-based combat. It doesn't control like a trad RPG, however, using a modern, mouse-based interface that's intuitive and easy to navigate (although the game does support an option for a more classical UI).

Given the condensed nature of the game world, exploration is fairly rewarding. Locations are filled with lootable items, secrets that can be revealed by characters with high awareness, and food items that you cook into nourishing recipes for your camp when you rest. It also features obligatory 'Go West'- style text mazes, though mercifully the developers don't overload the game with them.

I was less thrilled by Skald's combat. Battles are surprisingly evocative considering how visually simple Skald is, thanks in no small part to some gnarly sound effects for blades cleaving through flesh. Also, the Victory screen music is fantastic, a grungy, synthy earworm that's been playing in my head for the last few days.

Saturday nights in Horryn could get a bit wild. | Image credit: Raw Fury / Eurogamer
From a more tactical perspective, Skald does reward careful assembly of your party. Mine revolved heavily around the enormous damage dealt by Roland – the aforementioned grizzled mercenary, who I specialised in two-handed axe wielding. Nearly everyone else fell into supporting roles. My cleric would heal him. My mage would blind and bewilder other enemies until Roland could get around to them, and my custom-made Officer character would provide partywide boosts to movement and defence.

By the time I approached the Skald's end, however, I'd grown weary of fighting. Skald places significant emphasis on character positioning. Both party members and enemies will block the path of other characters, and you can't attack an enemy from a diagonal position, only from the four points of the compass. In and of itself, this isn't too much of a problem (although navigating rogue characters so they can backstab enemies is as much a pain in the bum for you as your foe). But aside from the fact many encounters take place in incredibly cramped arenas and corridors, battlefields are often littered with tiles your characters cannot walk on, and the simple graphics and perspective make it hard to parse what is a viable movement space for your character and what isn't. Hence, too often the challenge is in where you can and can't move, rather than what kinds of enemies you're facing. It doesn't help that too many fights involve battling rats, bats, giant insects, amorphous blobs, or similarly unimaginative foes.

Alongside these harder problems is that question – what exactly does Skald bring back from the nostalgia mine? For context, I'm a big fan of retro-shooters, but the reason I like them is not just because I grew up in the 90s and have a weird gore fixation. It's because they reinstate ideas of design, particularly level design, that modern shooters have for the most part lost interest in. Each of them plays with 3D space in imaginative ways unique to its designer, and they demonstrate how much potential remains in that style of virtual architecture.

It says a lot that the Black Market is one of Skald's more pleasant areas to spend time in. | Image credit: Raw Fury / Eurogamer
There are examples of this retrieving of lost design ideas in the RPG space too. Baldur's Gate 3 is essentially a modern Ultima, taking that "anything goes" style of RPG design and spinning it out to its logical extreme. That's an unreasonable game to compare Skald to, however, so a fairer example would be Legend of Grimrock, which resurrects the old-school 3D dungeon crawler. That's a highly specific style of RPG, with unique game mechanics, level and puzzle design that were lost to time. In bringing them back, Legend of Grimrock demonstrated the specific appeal of that design, and showed how it can be explored in new ways.

I'm not sure that Skald can make the same claim, because it's drawing from an era where the big innovation was simply getting an RPG to work on a computer. It replicates that era well, but that also prevents it from bringing much to the table that you can't get from other, frankly better RPGs. Its most distinctive quality is how it uses its 8-bit aesthetic to create a moody, dark fantasy world, which it does effectively and, for the most part, enjoyably. But is that enough for me to declare Skald a game you must play? Ultimately, no.

Then again, if you have exhausted the higher echelons of fantasy RPGs, then there is an adventure worth having here, doubly so if you hold a candle for the Commodore 64. Skald might pray to the blighted altar of Lovecraft, but it has more in common with the work of Robert E. Howard, a grisly, propulsive fantasy adventure unpretentious in its aspirations and unyielding in its focus. Its ideas might not be especially radical, but they are the foundation upon which entire worlds were built, and in returning to them, Skald proves those foundations to be as robust as ever.

 

[Darkwind]

Well, I certainly have some experience with RPGs that are not so easy to read.

LOL! Holy hell... what game is that? That is a microscopic UI.

 

[Hydro]

Infinitron no u normie

 

[Trash Player]

Well, I certainly have some experience with RPGs that are not so easy to read.

LOL! Holy hell... what game is that? That is a microscopic UI.

Zodiac Legion, made by Galdred.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

A dude’s been compiling a list of spells with added comments; might be helpful until there’s a manual, specially with how frustrating character creation is, not being able to go back and all that:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kEfuXeVCZPpp3SFyF0OWcRqIIU/edit#gid=764152868

Usefull but

Thunderclap

30

18

Enemies

Allenemies

Lesser Blindness, Deafened, Mute, Stunned, 6-8 Magical, Kinetic

5/5

Congratulations, sit at the back, cast this spell, watch your team mop up the permastunned enemies

I dont see them permastunned unfortunately.

They get stunned for 1 round, but you can just cast it again. It doesn't seem to have diminishing returns.

You can do it twice only before exhausting all your mana.

Im lvl 10 and have 80 mana. More than enough to clean the screen with inferno

And nuke your own party too... so you are burning at least 1 round of combat and part of your attunement pool on group fire resistance just to "setup" your nuke. Is this efficient? Is this the height of magical gameplay? Seems kinda beat to me...

At that tier of fire you get 50 fire res. I am also playing solo so no problem about party roasting...

 

[DicLupa]

Is there a rule where if you mention Lovecraft, you are absolutely required to bring up his colossal racism? And if you don't call it out, a Nazi gets his wings?

 

[Cohesion]

A dude’s been compiling a list of spells with added comments; might be helpful until there’s a manual, specially with how frustrating character creation is, not being able to go back and all that:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kEfuXeVCZPpp3SFyF0OWcRqIIU/edit#gid=764152868

Usefull but

Thunderclap

30

18

Enemies

Allenemies

Lesser Blindness, Deafened, Mute, Stunned, 6-8 Magical, Kinetic

5/5

Congratulations, sit at the back, cast this spell, watch your team mop up the permastunned enemies

I dont see them permastunned unfortunately.

They get stunned for 1 round, but you can just cast it again. It doesn't seem to have diminishing returns.

You can do it twice only before exhausting all your mana.

Im lvl 10 and have 80 mana. More than enough to clean the screen with inferno

And nuke your own party too... so you are burning at least 1 round of combat and part of your attunement pool on group fire resistance just to "setup" your nuke. Is this efficient? Is this the height of magical gameplay? Seems kinda beat to me...

At that tier of fire you get 50 fire res. I am also playing solo so no problem about party roasting...

Do you level faster solo like in BG? (EXP is divided?)

 

[hellbent]

I backed this game but didn’t closely follow the development in order to stay unspoiled. Did the developer explain why he went with 2d6 for combat rolls instead of 1d20, or why he added this whole list of reroll options as part of difficulty adjustment? I’m not sure what problems these systems are intended to solve.

I’m also not thrilled to see “dice smoothing” options and hope this does not become more of a trend. This bothers me more than just increasing or decreasing rolls by a certain flat amount, probably because it suggests a fundamental lack of respect for the rules of probability Was Solasta the first to add this or did another RPG do it first?

Didn't back this or follow but am also curious about these points. Also wondering if it's possible to have a "custom" difficulty that allows us to avoid things such as "dice smoothing". If certain members of the buying public can't live with true random rolls, be it 1d20 or whatever, then giving them the ability to "smooth" the rolls is OK, but give us grognards the ability to opt out of that bullshit.

 

[Darkwind]

I backed this game but didn’t closely follow the development in order to stay unspoiled. Did the developer explain why he went with 2d6 for combat rolls instead of 1d20, or why he added this whole list of reroll options as part of difficulty adjustment? I’m not sure what problems these systems are intended to solve.

I’m also not thrilled to see “dice smoothing” options and hope this does not become more of a trend. This bothers me more than just increasing or decreasing rolls by a certain flat amount, probably because it suggests a fundamental lack of respect for the rules of probability Was Solasta the first to add this or did another RPG do it first?

Didn't back this or follow but am also curious about these points. Also wondering if it's possible to have a "custom" difficulty that allows us to avoid things such as "dice smoothing". If certain members of the buying public can't live with true random rolls, be it 1d20 or whatever, then giving them the ability to "smooth" the rolls is OK, but give us grognards the ability to opt out of that bullshit.

These "dice fudges" can be totally disabled in settings by picking Custom difficulty. What is odd though is that even at the highest difficulty they are NOT totally disabled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[hellbent]

I backed this game but didn’t closely follow the development in order to stay unspoiled. Did the developer explain why he went with 2d6 for combat rolls instead of 1d20, or why he added this whole list of reroll options as part of difficulty adjustment? I’m not sure what problems these systems are intended to solve.

I’m also not thrilled to see “dice smoothing” options and hope this does not become more of a trend. This bothers me more than just increasing or decreasing rolls by a certain flat amount, probably because it suggests a fundamental lack of respect for the rules of probability Was Solasta the first to add this or did another RPG do it first?

Didn't back this or follow but am also curious about these points. Also wondering if it's possible to have a "custom" difficulty that allows us to avoid things such as "dice smoothing". If certain members of the buying public can't live with true random rolls, be it 1d20 or whatever, then giving them the ability to "smooth" the rolls is OK, but give us grognards the ability to opt out of that bullshit.

These "dice fudges" can be totally disabled in settings by picking Custom difficulty. What is odd though is that even at the highest difficulty they are NOT totally disabled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks, I have to mess with it at startup more with a new character. I've been poking at it a bit via the demo and bought on GOG this weekend but haven't yet set the difficulty for a new playthrough. Even if it's through ini settings, it would be great to kill off any dice fudging completely.

 

[Lyre Mors]

So I'm level 5, around 4 hours in, and my save file says "Game Date: Day 159" and version is Pre-Launch 1.0.3d. Am I the only one with this wacky shit going on? Worried my save is fucked and bugged out.

 

[AdolfSatan]

No idea about the gameday, but the game did go live with the pre-launch version tag. Not a bug, just a sloppy oversight.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

So I'm level 5, around 4 hours in, and my save file says "Game Date: Day 159" and version is Pre-Launch 1.0.3d. Am I the only one with this wacky shit going on? Worried my save is fucked and bugged out.

Same here, GOG version.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Same here, GOG version.

Sorry, forgot to mention mine is the Steam version.

 

[Darkwind]

Same here, GOG version.

Sorry, forgot to mention mine is the Steam version.

Mine is that way too, Steam version. Not sure why he didn't update the version to release instead of pre-release. As for the "Game Day" my interpretation of that is that you have been at sea for a pretty long time. This is, however, never explained in game other than indirectly so I could be totally wrong on that theory there is no indication of why so many days have passed.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Did the developer explain why he went with 2d6 for combat rolls instead of 1d20

No idea what this particular dev's deal is, but there has been many long debates in the PnP community over whether to use 1d20 vs 3d6, like GURPS. The general argument being that rolling more dice clusters results in the middle of the curve so a string of 1s or 20s is much less likely. This means high skill characters are more guaranteed success while low skilled characters can't just RNG to victory. In general it just makes the rolls more deterministic.

 

[Alienman]

I'm guessing the code for the AI is as simple as "attack nearest enemy" and nothing more than that. There is no selective targeting, no tactics to speak of. Again, trade blows until someone dies is the extent of it.

Interesting. Because I had enemy mages and archers nuking my backline from afar, forcing me to hurry my melee dudes in to stop them - especially in the late game.

Edit:
Oh and yeah. Sneaky melee types sneaking into the backline. So the AI didn't come off as totally braindead to me.

 

[mushroomrain]

Overall the game was fun and atmospheric, but playing as a guild magos was miserable. I don't see what resting after 1 or 2 encounters adds in terms of value. Either you do that or you are limited to your weak low tier spells. I also have no idea what happened in that ending, not going to spoil anything of course. I would say it was a pleasant experience overall, but some things feel weirdly unpolished, considering how long the game was in development. The amount of typos was impressive and I am an ESL myself, I rarely focus on them.

 

[Trash Player]

It is a lone dev + outsourced work scenario. Dev time is long, but majority is probably spare time. He needed a publisher to actually finish the game. The crowdfunding money was long spent on outsourced assets, I assume. It is pretty common for indies with significant custom art assets costing more resources than most new devs expect. A blog post mentioned content lock just 2 months before release. It is acceptable enough to me without game breaking bugs.
The afterglow I had for the game waned quickly. The dev considers Firgol as the best content in game and he wishes to make more in the same vein. Personally, while I appreciate the narrative buildup, the quest is a massive downtime in terms of gameplay. It is a long setup for essentially 2 fights, with 1 being trivial. It seems the dev is more interested in other areas over gameplay. No regrets buying and playing but not really looking forward to his works in the future.