Serpent in the Staglands: A Fool’s Banquest Free Standalone Expansion Announced, Will Use New Engine

The Whalenought Studios developers had promised an expansion for Serpent in the Staglands ever since its Kickstarter campaign, but only now they have announced some details about it with a Kickstarter update. Frankly, based on what they write in the update, “expansion” is an extremely reductive monicker, a misnomer even. We’re talking about a new short adventure set after the main title, that will feature a totally new ruleset, mechanics, and even engine, the same that will be powering their other upcoming project, Copper Dreams.

Among other things, we should expect a switch from 2D to 3D, which will give the developers a chance to implement height differences in the various maps, new stealth mechanics, and a new hybrid turn-based/real-time combat system that will replace the base game’s real-time with pause system:

As we began designing the campaign for A Fool’s Banquet, we had a ton of ideas that we wanted to implement for the expansion and for future games set in this world. While we could have shoehorned some of these into the Staglands engine, we decided to do something drastic and create an entire new engine that was set up to handle all of the new really neat mechanics and optimizations we wanted to ad in. Thus decided, we started designing and have been spending the last few months building a new and improved engine that will have much faster loading times, better performance, has taken user feedback into account and will be able to support a lot of fun new features like larger maps and stealth systems as well as utilize the height of a 3d world. We have a feature list with some highlights listed below. The mechanics will be using a new ruleset that we think you’ll love as well, but the atmosphere, lore, items, characters and, most importantly, your saved games will still be there.

A Fool’s Banquet began with one premise: authentic castles, and heists and infiltration within. Castles are fascinating, with mazes of corridors, intrigue, workers, gorgeous courtyards, and secrets waiting for a good crawl, and to adventure through all that the way we wanted, we’ve created a ton of new systems and put them in a neat package we’re calling the Burning Candle ruleset.

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Features

The Burning Ruleset includes the following features:

• A volumetric line of sight
• Light and shadow system with dynamic lights for sneaking movement
• Fully climbable and traversable height
• Isometric view with four direction camera
• AI with environmental tactics as well as last known position indicators
• Turn based combat with timed resolution
• Ailment based health system
• Multi-species companions
• Inventory items with a range of uses in and out of combat
• Global clock with time of day lighting

An update on the new ruleset’s health system is also available at Whalenought Studios’ official website. Instead of the classic Hit Points system used by the vast majority of videogames out there, The Burning Candle uses a stackable ailment system:

Instead of HP points, we’ll be using stackable ailments, which are the result of D8 die rolls that vary based on your weapon. The ailments fall into three categories, lesser, greater and mortal, each with its own cap that is increased or decreased by character creation stats. For example, a player might have 12 lesser ailment slots, 6 greater ailment slots, and 3 mortal ailment slots. If any of those three categories reach the cap, a player falls unconscious, and the next ailment in any category will result in death. NPCs have slightly different rules, dying immediately if a category is full instead of falling unconscious.

These ailments vary based on the weapon or projectile that is dealing damage, and require different kits to heal different types of damage. Burns from a grenade can’t be healed by the same kit that would clean up a puncture wound. Magic items can augment ailments with magical properties or roll an additional magic D8 with its own dynamic table of injuries a fire sword not only could cause various slash damages, but it could also scald to incinerate flesh and bone.

These ailments do not just inch you closer to death’s doorway, but also decrease your stats until heal, simulating the weakness that your player should feel if they are fighting with a few bullets in their legs, a broken kneecap and a minor concussion. Stat decreases will vary based on the ailment category and body location. Arm injuries will hurt aim while a head injury impacts logic and mental stability.

Most lesser ailments disappear at the end of a round of combat or after a certain number of actions, while greater ones can be healed and mortal ailments require the aid of resting station.

The developers still haven’t released any asset for this expansion/sequel nor have they announced a release window for it, so for now that’s all we have about it. We’ll make sure to let you know more as soon as we can.