(Warning: the following may contain spoilers for Sanctum of the Archmage I – The Sight.)
Continued from Balancing Romance Plots – Part I.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I had a ready-made solution to my problem: Orion, the character I’d had to remove from the saga to make room for the player to begin with. His personality was already well defined; all he needed was a new background and a way to add him to the story. His thoughtful personality made inventing a new background for him as a philosopher-scholar easy and natural. And there was also a ready-made place to insert him into the module: taking the place of Handol’s original companion, an elven ranger named Ferna Galen. Ferna was a relatively minor character who didn’t have an important role in the plot (although she might still make an appearance in the sequel). Replacing her with Orion tightened up and improved the story significantly, and enabled me to add back some of the plot and interpersonal dynamics that his character had originally made possible.
With this rework, I now I had both male and female romance characters and plots. And although they were written and designed as straight romances, I decided not to code gender checks on the PC to enable them — instead giving the player conversation options to choose which romance(s) interested him. Comfortable that I had now written a reasonably flexible romance plot for it, that was how I released Sanctum I.
After a while, though, I realized that I still wasn’t satisfied. By this time my thinking had fully evolved to the point where I had embraced writing a flexible and balanced romance as a module-building design goal. And while adding Orion to the story improved it in many ways, his romance plot was still a secondary one compared to Robin’s. Orion is encountered at the earliest halfway through the module, and by the end, the player has known him for a week or two at most. Although I have very ambitious plans for his romance in the sequels, in The Sight I had to limit it to flirting, since anything more would have been unconvincing.
This lack of balance in Sanctum’s romance plot became the subject of a very interesting correspondence that I had with one of the module’s players. We also discussed the fact that while there seemed to be a number of mods out there with “Romance the Princess” plots, that neither of us had ever seen a “Romance the Prince” mod. And perhaps not surprisingly, this got me to thinking about whether I could create a version of Sanctum I in which Robin was a romanceable male character — and whether I could sustain this option in the sequels.
After a lot of thought, I decided that I could. That decision led to my final update to The Sight in January 2007: version 2.1M. And with that update, I had finally balanced the romance plot in Chapter I to my satisfaction — while also setting the stage for an even more ambitious romance plot in Chapter II.
(To be continued)