The Necromancer’s Tale has a strong focus on the social aspects of RPG gameplay. The player secretly operates as a black magic practitioner in a medieval city (in 1733) where to be caught would mean certain execution. A lot of play revolves around the social aspects of conversation, coercion, blackmail – and even seduction – whatever it takes for the player to progress their cause. We wanted a game system which would involve decision-making during conversation as well as during more action-oriented play. In short, a system where choices matter – where the player wouldn’t feel that they could just mindlessly click through every conversation option without getting punished. Our system involves two related concepts: Trust and Tension.

Trust

Trust represents the attitude of the NPC townsfolk to the player. Through the use of ‘Trust Groups’ we simulate the behind-the-scenes gossip through which one NPC’s changing attitudes to the player propagates around their social network. For example, if the player acts cruelly to an NPC, then the Trust value will reduce for each of the Trust Groups that that NPC belongs to.

The Trust Groups are:
1 Workers
2 Educated
3 Military
4 Gentry
5 Orphans
6 Outsiders

The player’s uncle Jervase (militaristic baron of the city), for example, belongs to the Military and Gentry trust groups.

The overall trust of the city to the player is calculated from the average of each of the first four trust groups (since no-one really listens to orphans or outsiders). If this overall city trust value drops too low, the player will be tried in court, punished, and perhaps hanged. In the meantime, conversation options are affected by Trust values.

Transgressions

As well as conversation, the game also involves physical activity, of course. The player interacts with objects in the world, moves around, fights (on occasion), and sometimes drags dead bodies back to their home laboratory. Whenever the player is doing something illegal, line-of-sight arcs are displayed for all nearby NPCs. If the player falls within the arc of an NPC, then Trust is affected by the witnessing of the transgression (for the appropriate Trust Groups).

Tension

The second concept in our social system is Tension. This is a number which represents the overall atmosphere of fear in the city. Actions taken by the player which they were not actually witnessed doing will raise Tension but not directly affect Trust. So the player should be careful not to leave dead bodies lying around or bump off too many NPCs – even though they may get away with it at the time.

As Tension rises, the city becomes more heavily patrolled by guards, which in turn makes Transgressions harder to get away with. A high tension value also means that people are more suspicious, harder to deal with in conversation, and more likely to jump to conclusions if the player ends up in court.

The Necromancer’s Tale is in development and you can wishlist it on Steam now, to keep up to date on development progress!

In The Necromancer’s Tale you will be involved in various combats – including early-game fisticuffs, skirmishes with the city guards, wild animals, ambushes from unsavory creatures such as gūls which haunt places of death – and some more magical foes. You’ll be supported by various undead minions as well as some mortal allies – depending on your choices in the game.

Combat is turn-based and both sequencing and the number of action points available to a combatant is based on their Agility. The combat system draws on my own tactical combat game Darkwind: War on Wheels, as well as on my other prototype (unreleased) games and ultimately an Amiga game called Critical Hit which I released back in 1995. The combat system is simple and quick, yet nuanced and augmented by a critical hits system which adds a lot of descriptive flavour along with mechanical effects.

Energy and Activity

Energy and Activity are two very important ratings related to health, which every character has. Each is displayed as a percentage (0% – 100%).

Energy refers to the amount of stamina which a character has remaining. Being hit in combat reduces this, and mortal characters regain energy as time passes. When energy drops to zero, a character falls unconscious. An unconscious character is not necessarily in imminent danger of death, but significant continued damage beyond this may kill them. Certain injuries cause bleeding (unless the character cannot bleed), which causes a continuous loss of Energy as time passes. Without bandaging or rest, a bleeding character will die.

Activity refers to the ability of the character to move about and fight. It is temporarily reduced by certain critical hits (e.g. a broken leg) and by being stunned. When activity drops to zero, a character falls unconscious. When a character’s activity is less than 100%, every physical action they perform (e.g. attacking, defending, or moving – as well as their number of action points) is reduced in proportion. Thus, being stunned can seriously impact a combatant for a few turns.

Energy reduces through physical exertion and becoming tired, while Activity reduces through more serious injury such as broken bones, torn flesh, or concussion.

Weapons

Melee weapons (such as swords or halberds, fists or teeth) are those which are used to physically hit an opponent (at a distance of 1 or 2 hex tiles depending on length of reach), while ranged weapons (such as crossbows and muskets) are used to attack from a distance.

When a combat starts, all ranged weapons are considered to be loaded. After firing in combat, they must be reloaded. The time taken to reload depends on the type of weapon. Muskets, for example, while being the most powerful weapon in the game, are very slow to reload – they take several turns of uninterrupted attention. The game does not track ammunition: a character never runs out of it.

To-Hit Rolls

To hit an opponent, the attacker must have a line of sight that is not blocked by obstacles. The following factors determine how likely an attack is to strike its target:
– The base ‘to hit’ chance of the weapon.
– The distance between attacker and defender (ranged weapons only)- this is moderated by the distance accuracy of the weapon: some weapons are excellent at short range but terrible at long range, while others retain their accuracy at distance better.
– The agility and activity ratings of both the attacker and the defender. The agility factor is more important for ranged weapons than for melee, and beyond 12 metres range this importance increases (essentially, at longer ranges it becomes possible for an agile target to dodge a missile attack or for an agile shooter to counteract that or anticipate it).
– The body size of the defender (i.e. a tiny creature is harder to hit than a huge one)
– A hit is much more likely if the defender is unconscious and close to the attacker

Combat Damage, Critical Hits and Injuries

An ineffective strike will merely cause a small Energy reduction to the defender. An effective strike may also cause one of over 330 different Critical Hits, which include such injuries as broken bones, stun effects, ripped flesh and torn muscles. Critical Hits typically cause both Energy and Activity reduction. These effects will be for a limited time duration, ranging from a couple of combat turns (mild stunning) to several days (broken bones). Some injuries recover in steps: for example, broken ribs will become bruised ribs after some time, with a lesser Activity penalty.

For melee weapons and some ranged weapons, the amount of damage caused is also affected by the Strength of the attacker. If the defender has high Constitution, all damage received is reduced.

Weapon and Armor Types

Each weapon is classified by the type of injuries it causes, as well as its relative effectiveness against unarmored opponents or those wearing leather or metal armor. For example, edged weapons are good against leather but poor against metal, while blunt weapons are moderately good against each.

The types of injury are: bashing, explosion, fire, piercing, and slicing. Bashing weapons will for example tend to cause more broken bones while slicing weapons will tend to cause more bleeding.

 
You can wishlist and follow The Necromancer’s Tale on Steam:

The Necromancer’s Tale is a dark, narrative driven game which follows the descent of an (initially) upstanding minor noble in 1733 – as he/she taps into powerful forces in a quest for power and revenge. What starts out as a simple investigation into your father’s suspicious death spirals into a web of secrecy, black magic, killing the innocent, and raising them again to do your bidding.

  Steam page now open for wishlists!

Since my last update, we’ve been making good progress on a number of fronts. From a narrative point of view, the text for the game’s prologue is fairly complete – in which we use an interactive-fiction/’choose your own adventure’ style process for player character customisation. The prologue covers the events from a few years before the player’s birth, through to their 19th birthday. This material is presented in an animated book, with pencil sketches scattered throughout. The player chooses from three main career paths, and makes numerous other choices which affect their physical, mental, and social stats.

We have also almost completed a first draft of two chapters of the main game itself, in which the player discovers and tries out the first spell from a mysterious book. We’re generally keeping it tight and not putting in pointless time-filler side-quests, with the aim being that players can actually expect to finish the game in a reasonable number of hours, and enjoy the art, narrative, investigation and tactical-combat joys that it has to offer (rather than getting bored and giving up while hunting for 10 wolf hides to help a local farmer).

As well as putting a lot of effort into level editing (putting a full medieval town together is quite some effort!) I’ve been busying myself with programming all of the core systems needed by an RPG.. inventory, combat, AI behaviours, save+load, crafting. Integrating the code with the structured narrative information exported by Articy was a bit of fun, which basically involved having a 4MB massively-nested JSON file land on my hard drive and figuring out what it meant. I have also put together a cutscene-editing system similar to what I did in Goblins & Grottos.

The image below shows some of the data for a cutscene in which the player meets up for beers with their childhood friend Diedrik. This system gives me low-level control of character movements and animations, as well as control of the camera and other objects in the world (e.g. here beer tankards are appearing more and more on the table as the evening progresses). These cutscenes are also synchronised with the narrative ‘flow’ coming from the Articy data – so, for example, the cutscene can pause until a certain point has been reached in the Articy narrative, and similarly the narrative can be paused until activities in the 3D game which are under control of the cutscene system have reached a required point.

Combat will be turn-based, with movement working on a hex-grid:

We also have some really good artists working part-time with us, working on character portraits, sketches for the prologue, and in-world character art and animations.

There’s more details here:
http://www.psychicsoftware.com/thenecromancer/

  Steam page now open for wishlists!

The Necromancer is a narrative-driven RPG that I’ve been working on part-time since late 2018. The story focuses on the disturbing experience of getting drawn into necromancy (initially to investigate your father’s suspicious demise).

The video above shows some early footage of the town, graveyard and the interiors of some of the buildings, including the player’s own mansion. The white boxes you see are part of the debugging I was doing while implementing pathfinding, and I decided to leave them in here. For now, we’re keeping the camera angle high, in order to avoid the camera being blocked by world geometry too much as it follows the player character. A common solution to the camera being blocked is to bring it closer, but this wouldn’t work well given the low-poly nature of our 3D models and low-res nature of the textures- so I’ve done it the other way; the camera pushes away from the player character, and when blocked the player is highlighed in red. This is the first ‘full’ RPG I’ve written so making the various code systems has been fun – the inventory, narrative, save/load system, crafting, etc. have all taken some careful design thinking. As you can probably see, the level design has been keeping me busy too!

The game will focus strongly on the social side of interactions with the other characters in the game, as you seek to decipher the arcane pages of a previous necromancer’s spellbook, and then to master its spells and rituals yourself. All of this you will need to do without getting caught and lynched by the townsfolk. Although there will be battles between your undead forces and those of the town, the game focuses even more on the process and mechanisms of magic and ritual – we want the obtaining and using of your powers to feel like they are central parts of the story, and to take some effort, rather than simply being like firearms that you have collected and then fire at will (which is how many games treat magic).

I had been knocking around with the basic idea of the player as a necromancer in a medieval town for a while – I think perhaps with a similar motivation to that behind my 2015/2016 game Goblins & Grottos – i.e. to focus on the player experience as an outsider, a character that is normally the enemy and normally a non-player character. However, I realised its potential as a narrative game when considering a funding application to the EU Creative Media fund. I wrote the draft story and ideas with my wife in 2018, and we were successfully funded in 2019.

Since then, we have been able to get assistance with some aspects of the artwork, and have taken on a *real* writer – Dave McCabe – whose previous games include The Darkside Detective. As Dave has nicely put it: “Unlike most RPGs, this game isn’t a hero’s journey as they rail against an evil lord. It is a person’s descent into madness as they plumb the depths of black magic in their search for revenge, the terrible things it asks of them and the uncomfortable choices they make in their search for power.”