Monday, March 9, 2009

Module Expansions

It's been a bit hectic recently, and it doesn't look like this coming weekend will offer much of a respite. My birthday is coming up, and my wife has a surprise for me that will wipe out Saturday and then there are other assorted birthday-related activities.

However, TMGS just got a pre-release expansion pack. This past weekend, I was going over the module again, and I decided it needed a bit extra. The investigation in Navatranaasu is pretty open-ended (at least it's supposed to be), but there are a few set events that have to be passed to progress the story. These events occur after the PC has accomplished a certain number of tasks in the village. Note that this is not a certain group of tasks, rather a certain number of them. For example, one task is arranging the altar in the VanGhaunt mansion so that it is useable. Others include searching through the town archives, talking with certain people in town, and investigating the mansion grounds as well as other much more spoilerific tasks. No matter which order these are done, each of which reveals certain clues about the enemy, after a set number are completed, new events are triggered.

So I was studying the layout of the module again, and I didn't like the number of possible tasks as compared to the number needed for the triggering of events. In essence, there were too few tasks, meaning that nearly all of them would need to be completed, although the order could be switched around. So I decided to add some new ones. Essentially, this means a new side quest got inserted, and I may add another one I've already devised. For the one already added, all required dialogs have been written and scripted, the blueprints have all been made, and the maps are well under way, though not completed. I hope to have the new quest entirely implemented by this weekend. Then I can return to the work in progress, assuming I don't add yet another minor quest... or two.

So yes, this means we have a bit of feature creep, but I think the adventure will be stronger because of it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday Tiberius!

nice update. "waits excitedly"

Regards
Liso