GB Feature: Avadon: The Black Fortress Preview

Spiderweb Software was gracious enough to hook us up with a beta version of Avadon: The Black Fortress for the PC, and we’ve taken advantage of the opportunity by whipping up a three-page preview based on our initial 30+ hour play-through.

The character system is considerably different from anything Spiderweb Software has done before. Whereas Geneforge was a solo title and the Avernums saw the player create four characters for a party, Avadon emulates the BioWare tradition of having the player create a single character who then recruits several followers.

The game offers only four classes, and character creation consists of you picking one such class: male blademaster (warrior type), male shadowwalker (rogue type), female shaman (healer and summoner), or female sorceress. Early on in the game, you are presented with four followers, each of which matches one of the four options at character creation, which means that your character is always a duplicate of one of the early available followers.

Two things are customizable as far as the protagonist and his or her followers go: the attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, and endurance) and thirteen class-specific skills, the majority of which are combat skills. You start out at level one with all of your attributes at set values, and can add one point to an attribute of your choice per level-up. Likewise, you start out knowing only the most basic skills at level one, and get two skill points that can be allocated with each level-up. Increasing a skill costs only one point, while unlocking a previously unknown skill costs two points.