Dungeons of Aledorn Kickstarter Campaign Launched

A team of role-playing game enthusiasts from Prague, Czech Republic have launched a new Kickstarter campaign for Dungeons of Aledorn, an RPG “that brings back several time-tested principles of the classics into a single fantasy release.” In particular, the developers at Team21 call out Betrayal at Krondor, Realms of Arcania: Shadows over Riva, the Might & Magic series, the Fallout series, and other such notable classics as inspiration as they look to achieve a $60,000 funding goal:

For DoA, maximum emphasis is placed on realism (as far as it’s possible in a fantasy setting). Ideally, we would like to allow our players to do every logical thing they can think of, and we stick to this premise, especially in the case of combat encounters. Player should always have a wide selection of combat actions to choose from, but, at the same time there are usually a few optimal choices for each combat situation. This fact adds a significant amount of importance to every decision you make. We try to avoid unnecessary frustration caused by system restrictions – we rather challenge our players to come up with a solid solution plan from the vast options at their disposal.

Intentional stalling of combat or its end (as a means to regenerate hit points/mana, pick up treasures, etc.) has no place in our game, because we find it is contradictory to common sense and a poor mechanic to substitute low difficulty or shallow and unbalanced combat systems.

Our next step towards realism is DoA’s genuine character injury distribution system. Most RPG games use a hit-points system, where every enemy’s successful hit leads to lowering your HP value until it reaches zero, thus inevitably resulting in a character’s death/incapacitation. We, as developers with some actual fighting experience, tend to stick to a bit more realistic approach.

Each character will only have a few hit points, but each one´s loss comes with consequences to those injured and will be difficult to regain back. To display in combat how the character fares we’ve implemented a stamina points system in our game. The loss of stamina points doesn´t correspond to the actually received damage, but rather to the difficulty of effort to evade oncoming attacks and their effect. The characters will be wounded (lose HP) only when they get tired and too weak (lose SPs) to evade the next attack.

DoA will offer vast equipment customization options for each of the player’s characters. The amount of equipment slots varies. Many slots will appear only after you equip an appropriate item. For example, in the wrist slot you may place a magical armband to gain some extra stats, or a dagger sheath which adds three slots for additional daggers and enables swapping them during combat at a lowered action point cost. Some items may improve character´s stats or enable executing of item-based specific actions. But do consider that perhaps some items may only have a visual effect.

Management of such an enormous inventory might prove to be too challenging even for some hard-core gamers. Luckily, there´s a distinctive difficulty setting feature implemented into our game in order to relieve more casual players of such unwanted burdens.

Quests in DoA will keep players engaged. You´ll hardly find any “auto-completion” quest in our game. That said, there´s no way avoiding the good old classics such as “go and kill” quests. But In DoA “go” usually stands for: “explore, gather information, solve various mini-games” and eventually even the “kill” part may be surprisingly not as black and white as one would’ve expected. Especially cunning players may finish many quests even without spilling a single drop of blood!

The main story quest will be mostly linear with several parts where you have to make important plot decisions. These key-moment decisions will have visible consequences and thus will affect general gameplay.

We also plan to implement an “active achievements” feature. They work like classic achievements, but, unlike them, “active achievements” directly affect your gameplay. One example: Players may gamble in a dice throwing mini-game in every tavern in DoA. As you surely know, dices are based heavily on luck. If the player wins in various taverns throughout the known world, he´ll get an achievement called “Lucky” which slightly improves the critical hit strike chance for his party. These achievements are completely optional and won’t be necessary to accomplish in order to finish the game. That applies especially for the lower difficulty levels, which will be discussed later on.